The Normalisation of Nightwork

It discusses the specific elements that determine the 24/7 post-circadian capitalist economy and the relationship between them. These are, the intensification of labour that expands the working day deep into the night, changes in how time is regimented to fit the demands of the global economy, which creates discrepancies and disconnects between daytime and nighttime labour regimes, and the importance of locality (glocturnal city), which increases as the global economy triumphs. The chapter points out that these aspects that led to the normalisation of nightwork remain underresearched. The chapter criticises then, in a Harveyan sense, the neoliberal-backed development of a ‘creative destruction’ that fosters the battleground for migrants who vie against one another for precarious jobs. In the rest of the chapter, the text introduces four ethnographic portraits of nightshift workers (one woman and three men): (1) a café server, (2) a loader and forklift driver (or porter), (3) a foreman and (4) an experienced loader and salesman. The empirical portraits provide the evidence to link a theoretical, abstract discussion to concrete life experiences of these nightworkers.