Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London (IMISCOE Research Series) 3031361857, 9783031361852

Citation preview

IMISCOE Research Series

Julius-Cezar MacQuarie

Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London

IMISCOE Research Series

This series is the official book series of IMISCOE, the largest network of excellence on migration and diversity in the world. It comprises publications which present empirical and theoretical research on different aspects of international migration. The authors are all specialists, and the publications a rich source of information for researchers and others involved in international migration studies. The series is published under the editorial supervision of the IMISCOE Editorial Committee which includes leading scholars from all over Europe. The series, which contains more than eighty titles already, is internationally peer reviewed which ensures that the book published in this series continue to present excellent academic standards and scholarly quality. Most of the books are available open access.

Julius-Cezar MacQuarie

Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London

Julius-Cezar MacQuarie Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21) University College Cork Cork, Ireland

ISSN 2364-4087     ISSN 2364-4095 (electronic) IMISCOE Research Series ISBN 978-3-031-36185-2    ISBN 978-3-031-36186-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Magda. And for all nightworkers.

Preface

Over five years ago, I defended my PhD thesis in front of the Doctoral Committee at Central European University, at the time based in Budapest, Hungary. But the idea of becoming a night researcher to reach out to nightworkers originated during night walks in London, in 2012. Yet, this nightnographic study had been carried out on the backdrop of displaced people who sought refuge from the Syrian war in Europe. During the 2015 ‘long summer of migration’1 that stretched into 2016, moving images swept the online and offline worlds with thousands of Syrian refugees crossing territorial borders to save or repair their lives ruined by war. From researching to writing up this book, hundreds of millions of people have been displaced. By May 2022, 100M people were forcibly displaced worldwide, of which 10.7M were victims of the war in Ukraine.2 This record level of displacement suggests that a large segment of those who find refuge will end up in rubbish jobs, with many working the nightshift and producing cheaply by putting their bodies under strains, practically breaking their backs, ruining their knees and hips to make a living in foreign countries. My experience as migrant nightworker in the late 1990s in Istanbul has influenced the choice of topic – hard, invisible labour done by migrants travelling abroad to work. My professional encounters as daytime assistant psychologist and night outreach worker with the UK National Health Service have influenced and often intersected with my multidisciplinary research pursuits. To gain (and share) unique insights into the combined emotional, psychophysical and social strands of the DNA that make up the experiences of transnational migrants means to move closer to an understanding of what makes the phenomenon of migrant bodies crossing

 Kasparek, B. and Speer, M. (2015). Of hope. Hungary and the long summer of migration (Translation: Elena Buck). Online at https://bordermonitoring.eu/ungarn/2015/09/of-hope-en/ Accessed 27.05.2021. 2  This figure amounts to more than the entire population of Germany. Reported by UNHCR, UN Refugee Agency. (2023). Ukraine Emergency. Online at: https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/ukraine/ and https://www.unrefugees.org/refugee-facts/statistics/ Accessed: 26.04.2023 1

vii

viii

Preface

borders so complex, and why it is so complicated to grasp, let alone predict its ebbs and flows. This unconventional research provides a meta-level perspective onto a mode of labouring that has so far been only sketched by previous scholarship in migration and the emerging fields of night studies. My hope is that, as an insider of a world that is invisible and hard to access for the ethnographers (usually daytime researchers), my study could contribute to these fields by adding the embodied dimension to an anthropology of nightwork. Notwithstanding the modest efforts that depict the nocturnal city, I am deeply appreciative of the previous studies that have guided my research to arrive at the point of drafting this book, like the seamen indebted to the lighthouse that directs their ships to safe shoring. Nightshift workers survive bodily precariousness because they are immune to co-workers’ needs, and not because they offer each other mutual support out of humanness. This finding is perhaps counter-intuitive to solidarity proponents in the scholarly literature. In this sense, I caution the reader, that I am deeply aware of (and for) transnational solidarity among people who need to cross borders because they experience inequalities (gender, social, economic), and between countries. This work is not a critique to international solidarity, but given the hostility, seething with xenophobic, nationalistic tendencies, I find myself less optimistic about the fragile possibilities for solidarity among precarious nightworkers, who vie against one another to keep their lowwaged jobs. The writing of this book happened in stages, with the resounding of Brexit (the UK leaving the EU), transiting period ending on 30 June 2021, while COVID-193 pandemic still held a grip on the world. I drafted the first version of the manuscript, three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. This final version was sent to the printers, as it were, at a time when the British Government plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, despite the ‘catastrophic mental and physical harm’ to these people seeking safety (Taylor 2023).4 Considering the background upon which I designed, carried out the research and have written this book, the world has become much more hostile towards migrants (but harsher for displaced people, refugees or asylum seekers, whichever the label). More, Freedom of Movement for workers in the EU has become, regrettably, less free since Brexit. This hostile and unwelcoming atmosphere amplified over the ‘long summer of migration’, and it has culminated in January 2021 with the new point-based immigration system that has come into force as a result of Brexit, which prevents many migrants on low income in the UK’s labour market to apply for work visa. Thus, support for integration of migrants into the host societies is needed more than ever, and in addition to the political efforts, we need to get involved in supporting organisations that uphold migrants’ rights. The world is in need of repair, and on my part, I have taken some steps to begin this process of reparation. As an intern with Migrants Organise (UK), I was  COVID-19 is shorthand for SARS-CoV-2, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2.  The Guardian. (2023). UK medical bodies ‘gravely concerned’ over Rwanda deportation scheme. Online at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/apr/24/uk-medical-bodies-gravely-concerned-over-rwanda-deportation-scheme. Accessed 26.04.2023. 3 4

Preface

ix

campaigning for migrants’ rights to London Living Wage rates for cleaners, in 2012. As Migrant Ambassador of Migrant Voice (UK), I committed myself to speak up and give faces to the invisible migrants in London. During the INTEGRIM Fellowship, I have upheld the promotion and implementation of social labour rights and integration policies for migrants in Europe. In this sense, I am sympathetic with the body of scholarship that is critical of humanitarian organisations portraying migrants and refugees as being lost and hopeless (Rajaram 2002; Massari 2021), and as such I developed a unique methodology to examine the night and enable researchers to foreground migrants to tell their real stories to mixed audiences on reel, as well as in audio or written formats, which has materialised in a book chapter published in the same IMISCOE Springer Research Series (Nikielska-Sekula and Desille (Eds.) 2021). This book fulfils the INTEGRIM Fellowship. In truth, the book is part of a project of committed ethnography that has begun somewhat unwarily with the co-production of the first short film in the trilogy (2013–20), Invisible Lives: Romanian Night Shift Workers in London, winner of 2013 Roundtable Projects, Romanian Cultural Centre, London (2013). Since finishing this research, I have also produced a podcast series (NightWorkPod Podcast, CEU Podcasts 2018–present) to reach out to mixed audiences and critical public. And to raise awareness and to engage the public with anthropological findings, I have contributed to podcasts and blogs advocating for reparations to migrant nightworkers’ rights to decent work conditions. More, I initiated discussions with the trade unions to develop a Nightworker Charter, which I included in the Coda of this book, in its final chapter. These core five principles for nightwork have grown out of my collaborations with two non-governmental organisations (NGO), Migrant Voice, UK, and Nighttime.org. The latter NGO advocates for nightlife industry workers in a post-COVID-19 world and has been proposing support models for nightlife industry workers, individuals and vulnerable populations under the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan: Sustaining Nightlife Scenes (2020). This committed ethnography project has visibilised the workers, even if in small ways and at least for the ethnographic eye, to the curious academic audience and the public. It is important to reflect on the role that we all play in repairing the damage that neoliberal or postcircadian capitalism has been inflicted on the lives of so many, in improving the future of work together, in pre-emptying arrivals of long summers of migration, and in preventing the spread of Rwanda-like regimes of deportations. Cork, Ireland 11 July 2023

Julius-Cezar MacQuarie

References MacQuarie, J-C. (2021). Researcher’s nightworkshop: A methodology of bodily and cyberethnographic representations in migration studies. In K. Nikielska-Sekula & A. Desille (Eds.), Visual methodology in migration studies – New possibilities, theoretical implications, and ethical questions (pp. 308–329). Springer. Accessed 4 June 2021.

x

Preface

Massari, A. (2021). Visual securitization (IMISCOE research series). Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-71143-6. Rajaram, P. K. (2002). Humanitarianism and representations of the refugee. Journal of Refugee Studies, 15(3): 247–264. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/15.3.247. Taylor, D. (2023, April 24). UK medical bodies ‘gravely concerned’ over Rwanda deportation scheme | Politics | The Guardian. The Guardian. Accessed 27 Apr 2023.

Acknowledgements

I take this occasion to express my deep gratitude to each and every one who gave me the practical and emotional support to see the closure of a ten-year long project that culminates with this book, born out of my doctoral thesis. Particularly, I thank migrant men and women for sharing their insights from working the nightshift and their life stories with me. I hope that my book is a true reflection of what they told me and that my analysis reflects the way they see and feel things that make up their nightwork world and migrant lives. My hope is that nightshift does not break their bodies or bend their determined minds. I expressly thank my PhD supervisors Professor Violetta Zentai and Professor Prem Kumar Rajaram who offered their support, guidance and friendly advice during my doctoral studies, encouragement, and practical help in the last five postdoctoral years. Under Professor Zentai’s leadership the wonderful team at the Centre for Policy Studies, Central European University (CEU), has given me the haven I needed to complete this PhD project. Her piercing insights have guided this work up to the point of writing this book, and I am deeply indebted for her advice. The CEU’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology has provided me with the adequate resources. Most importantly Professor Rajaram, the co-supervisor, shared very insightful comments, critique and advice which have been incorporated into the corporeal aspects of this book. I was lucky to have been given the opportunity to embark the International Training Network programme financed by the European Commission under the grant agreement № 316796, entitled Integration and International Migration: Pathways and Integration Policies (INTEGRIM). This generous Marie-Skłodowska Curie INTEGRIM Fellowship has enabled me to carry out one-year long anthropological fieldwork and to benefit from my six-month secondment at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR), University of Sussex, under the mentorship of Professor Mike Collyer. I am grateful for his time and kindness with which he hosted me at SCMR, and for his feedback and useful comments throughout my time with the INTEGRIM network and, specifically, while being part of the ‘labour and social integration’ working group that he coordinated.

xi

xii

Acknowledgements

I am also very grateful to Professor Ger Duijzings for inviting me to join his Nightlaboratory, when we were both associated with the School of East European and Slavonic Studies, University College London. As he would later write in his external examiner report on my PhD thesis, this rather impossible or incredible ethnographic practice begun with our night walks in London, while I was his graduate student. His invaluable support to make the step from a Research Masters graduate to PhD studies is only equalled by the valuable feedback and comments on two chapters, which were a good starting point to transform the thesis into a book. The list of people to whom I am indebted for their direct insights, comments and feedback during the several rounds of editing continues with Dr Sara Svenson, Dr Codruța Cuceu, Dr Valentin-Veron Toma, Dr César E.  Giraldo-Herrera, Dr Josh Fisher, Dr Marcel LaFlamme, Dr Magda Crăciun and Dr Caitríona Ní Laoire. While the world was gripped by the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, I had a haven, immense support and lots of motivation from my partner, Magda, to turn the thesis into a book. More importantly, despite her heavy schedule and intellectually hectic agenda, she put time aside for my book. Her countless suggestions, comments and feedback that she has given to me has sharpened this book and made it infinitely better. Magda’s encouragement was seconded by the success of other INTEGRIM colleagues who won previous book IMISCOE Competitive calls. I am, therefore, thankful to the IMISCOE-Springer Editorial committee for awarding me the second prize of the 2020 round of book proposals. My gratitude extends to the IMISCOE independent reviewers whose comments and feedback have made this book substantially better. And I hope that they will be proud to see this title published alongside others within the esteemed IMISCOE-Springer Research Series of publications. The CODA of this book embodies the Nightworker Charter, in Chap. 10. My work, including this chapter, has improved through exchanges and discussions at online events held by IMISCOE members, Nighttime.org, International Night Studies Network and Migrant Voice, UK. Special thanks for their contribution to Chap. 10 go to Professor Will Straw, Dr Andreina Seijas, Dr Michael Fichman and Tara Duvivier; thank you also to Nazek Ramadan, Anne Stoltennerg, Judith Vonberg and Daniel Nelson, for their input and being the perfect companions in laughter and support when social life has been restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, I thank my dear friend Dr Carmel Chiu Sutcliffe for exerting herself to proofread the manuscript and for her constant support and faith that this work would turn into a book one night. The writing of this book has been made possible with the financial support from PRECNIGHTS, a project that explores precarity in women migrant nightworkers in Ireland. Funded under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) 2022–2024. Grant No: 101063938.

Contents

1

Introduction: Invisible Migrants������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 On Route to New Spitalfields Night Market������������������������������������    1 1.2 New Spitalfields��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 1.3 Ethnicisation of Work at New Spitalfields����������������������������������������    4 1.4 Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers������������������������������    6 1.4.1 Who Is Called a ‘Migrant’ Worker? Who Is Not and Why Not? ����������������������������������������������������������������������    8 1.4.2 Half-Rejected Migrants��������������������������������������������������������   10 1.4.3 Half-Permitted����������������������������������������������������������������������   13 1.5 Researching Nightwork��������������������������������������������������������������������   17 1.6 Nightnography����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   20 1.7 The Nightnographer Explained��������������������������������������������������������   22 1.8 Post-circadian Capitalism ����������������������������������������������������������������   26 1.8.1 The Global City and the Problems with Work����������������������   28 1.8.2 Under-the-Skin Precarity������������������������������������������������������   31 1.8.3 Fragmentation vs. Cooperation��������������������������������������������   32 1.9 Chapter Overviews����������������������������������������������������������������������������   33 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   36

2

 Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures ��������������������������������������   45 2.1 Nightnography����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   47 2.2 Autoethnography: A Migrant, Apprentice and Nightnographer��������������������������������������������������������������������������   48 2.3 Multi-positionality����������������������������������������������������������������������������   50 2.3.1 The Migrant��������������������������������������������������������������������������   50 2.3.2 The Apprentice Loader ��������������������������������������������������������   52 2.3.3 The Nightnographer��������������������������������������������������������������   55 2.4 Nightnographer, Explained ��������������������������������������������������������������   57 2.5 Nightnographic Storytelling in Migration Studies����������������������������   61

xiii

xiv

Contents

2.6 Data Collection Using Embodied, Cyber-ethnographic and Visual Tools��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   65 2.6.1 Field Notes and Mental Notes����������������������������������������������   67 2.6.2 Body Notes���������������������������������������������������������������������������   67 2.6.3 Digital (Self)Tracking ����������������������������������������������������������   68 2.7 Returning from the Dark������������������������������������������������������������������   72 2.8 Final Act��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   73 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   74 3

Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers ��������������������������������   77 3.1 Migrant Workers ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 3.2 Migration Trends������������������������������������������������������������������������������   81 3.3 Half-Rejected Migrant Workers��������������������������������������������������������   83 3.4 Half-Permitted Migrant Workers������������������������������������������������������   87 3.5 Debating the Global City������������������������������������������������������������������   91 3.6 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   96

4

 Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork��������������������������������������������������  101 4.1 The Corporation of London��������������������������������������������������������������  103 4.2 The FruitVeg Company��������������������������������������������������������������������  105 4.2.1 Executives ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  106 4.2.2 The Workfloor Manager��������������������������������������������������������  108 4.2.3 Salespeople ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  110 4.2.4 The Foreman ������������������������������������������������������������������������  111 4.2.5 Checkmen ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  114 4.2.6 Loaders and Forklift Drivers������������������������������������������������  115 4.2.7 Women at the Market������������������������������������������������������������  117 4.3 Segmentation at the Night Market����������������������������������������������������  121 4.4 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  124 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  126

5

 The Normalisation of Nightwork������������������������������������������������������������  129 5.1 Transition from Circadian to Post-circadian, 24/7 Capitalism ��������  131 5.1.1 Neo-liberalisation������������������������������������������������������������������  131 5.1.2 Global Dispossession������������������������������������������������������������  132 5.1.3 The Intensification of Labour�����������������������������������������������  134 5.1.4 Alterations to Time Regimentation��������������������������������������  136 5.1.5 The Global City��������������������������������������������������������������������  138 5.2 Nightworkers������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  139 5.2.1 Lexa��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  141 5.2.2 Basrí��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  143 5.2.3 Gică ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  146 5.2.4 Logan������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  148 5.3 The Normalisation of Nightwork and Its Consequences������������������  151 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  152

Contents

xv

6

Habitus of Nightwork������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 6.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 6.2 Embodied Histories��������������������������������������������������������������������������  159 6.2.1 Lexa��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  159 6.2.2 Basrí��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  164 6.2.3 Gică ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  167 6.2.4 Logan������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  172 6.3 Habitus of Nightwork ����������������������������������������������������������������������  176 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  178

7

Embodied Precariousness�����������������������������������������������������������������������  181 7.1 Under My Skin����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  182 7.1.1 Becoming a Nightworker������������������������������������������������������  185 7.1.2 Becoming a Loader ��������������������������������������������������������������  188 7.1.3 Working as a Loader ������������������������������������������������������������  190 7.2 Debating Precarity and Precariousness��������������������������������������������  194 7.3 Embodied Precariousness ����������������������������������������������������������������  198 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  199

8

Fragmented Cooperation������������������������������������������������������������������������  201 8.1 Competition and Cooperation at New Spitalfields Market ��������������  201 8.2 Weakened Cooperation ��������������������������������������������������������������������  203 8.3 Short-Lived Cooperation������������������������������������������������������������������  208 8.4 Embodied Cooperation ��������������������������������������������������������������������  210 8.4.1 Rhythmic Practices ��������������������������������������������������������������  214 8.4.2 Bodily Gestures��������������������������������������������������������������������  218 8.4.3 Dealing with Resistance��������������������������������������������������������  221 8.4.4 Trivial Disruptions����������������������������������������������������������������  224 8.5 Sociability ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  225 8.6 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  227 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  228

9

 Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork������������������������������������������  231 9.1 Post-Circadian Capitalism����������������������������������������������������������������  231 9.2 The Glocturnal City��������������������������������������������������������������������������  232 9.3 Invisible Denizens����������������������������������������������������������������������������  233 9.4 Under-the-Skin Precarity������������������������������������������������������������������  234 9.5 Embodied Cooperation ��������������������������������������������������������������������  235 9.6 Researching Nightwork Communities����������������������������������������������  238 9.7 Towards an Embodied Anthropology of Nightwork in Migration Studies��������������������������������������������������������������������������  240 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  242

xvi

Contents

10 Coda–Essential  Yet Invisible, Pandemic or Not������������������������������������  245 10.1 Nightwork Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic��������������������������������  249 10.2 Nightworker Charter ����������������������������������������������������������������������  250 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  253 Correction to: Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London . . . . . . . .   C1 Appendices��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  255 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  261

Abbreviations

A2

2007 EU enlargement wave includes two countries: Bulgaria and Romania A8 2004 EU enlargement wave includes eight countries: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia BAME Black and Asian Minority Ethnic Brexit Negotiation process of Britain exiting the European Union CoL Corporation of London COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 EU European Union HMO Houses in Multiple Occupation ILO International Labour Organization LFS Labour Force Survey LLW London Living Wage NHS National Health Service NTE Night-Time Economy NYC New York City NGO Non-governmental Organisations ONS Office for National Statistics, UK SMTA Spitalfields Market Tenants’ Association SSEES School of Slavonic and East European Studies TfL Transport for London UCL University College London UK United Kingdom UKBA United Kingdom Border Agency US United States WHO World Health Organization

xvii

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 New Spitalfields market gatehouse. Source: Author http://bit.ly/blckbstr2 © Author����������������������������   51 Fig. 2.2 Author as apprentice sweeping the floor���������������������������������������   53 Fig. 2.3 The author hired as an apprentice loader by FruitVeg�������������������   53 Fig. 2.4 Photos with Canon displaying Gica looking at the photo camera display screen������������������������������������������������   62 Fig. 2.5 The author is showing to his co-workers the photos that he took that night��������������������������������������������������������������������   63 Fig. 2.6 Weight fluctuations. Whilst working at the New Spitalfields night market, I also used the self-tracking Pacer app™, a walking, weight loss and health application. I experimented with this method at the intersection between my body, my personal data and technology as a way of learning about embodied precarity among nightworkers. (Source: Author http://bit.ly/blckbstr2)�����������������������������������������   69 Fig. 2.7 Author walked 18.8 km in just over 6.5 hours������������������������������   70 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Spitalfields Market plan�����������������������������������������������������������������  102 City of London, the smallest ‘city’ in England�����������������������������  103

Fig. 6.1 Dabbawalas (lunch carrier) of Mumbai. Two workers carry a load of packed lunches on the train that links North with South of Mumbai. (Source: https://www.fourseasons.com/magazine/taste/ four-­seasons-­mumbai-­dabbawala-­experience/)�����������������������������  158 Fig. 7.1 Basrí carrying a load of mangoes��������������������������������������������������  183 Fig. 7.2 In this frame-by-frame sequence, Basrí, the loader, is shown executing repetitive, micro-­movements in manual handling: gripping and grabbing 5 kg onion sacks; lifting 7–10 kg crates; carrying a load of 11 boxes of mangoes; and lifting again 20 kg sack of potatoes. xix

xx

List of Figures

The two photos in the lower left corner shows him carrying a 70 kg load of mangoes by resting it on his right arm and shoulder as he balances the load with his left arm. I foreground Basrí to visually depict the dexterity required to undertake this sequence of actions. The visual arrangement (above) compiles a set of movements, steps, twists, and turns that a loader encounters in a repetitive manner throughout his nights of labour. Basrí ‘loading in action’ consists of sequences that include being handed out an order by the foreman; preparing the space for the pallet and carrying on from the stack to an area that the loaders decide; then the gestures of grabbing, picking, gripping, twisting, and moving several hundred of products follow in an unthinkable manner during incessant rhythms, the peak of the nightshift. Source: Author http://bit.ly/blckbstr2��������������������������������������������  184 Fig. 7.3 Descriptive data shows the active time vs total time (6h34m vs 13h43m), the distance covered (18.8 km), the average number of steps (12,713) and the total for the 4 days (88,992). On some nights I would be left without battery on my phone. And every Saturday the night market was closed�����������������������������������������������������������  189 Fig. 7.4 Loading sequences, pauses for break and interactions with co-workers�����������������������������������������������������������������������������  195 Fig. 8.1 Data analysis by source and analytical categories. Source: MacQuarie (2016) Night Shifts in the Nocturnal City of the Future. 2016 Euro Science Open Forum. Poster Exhibition, Marie-Curie Alumni Association. Manchester, United Kingdom��������������������������������������������������������  203

List of Tables

Table 4.1 Abstract diagram of intersecting hierarchies of nightwork at FruitVeg. The traffic light colour system indicates at the top, the green end of the arrow, the owners/executives ‘above’, and in red workers ‘below’. The employees at the top or ‘above’ had most control over their own and others’ sleep, work patterns, pay, bank holidays and annual leave, occasional time off, health and GP visits, respect from others, tea breaks and respite, and social mobility, in contrast to those at the bottom or ‘below’���������������������������������  106 Table 4.2 Labour organisation at FruitVeg firm. Continuous lines show direct command; interrupted lines indirect oversight. (*) The numerical values indicate the number of employees on that position. Traffic light colour system indicates in red the lowest position (with least control) and green, the highest position in the hierarchy, and most control over the ones below. Cashiers are mostly women. At FruitVeg this position was also given to men. Women café servers are employed by Café owners, not traders like FruitVeg firm. The café servers work across the five café shops located around the main market hall, which are independent businesses��������������  123 Table A.1 Definitions of nighttime/work and night worker in European countries © IARC Working Group (2010)����������������  256 Table A.2 Appendix 2 describes the sample of respondents who participated in this study��������������������������������������������������������  258

The original version of the book has been revised. A correction to this book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_11 xxi

Chapter 1

Introduction: Invisible Migrants

1.1 On Route to New Spitalfields Night Market At the beginning of 2015, I lived in rented accommodation in Surbiton, SouthWest London, in what is called a house of multiple occupation (HMO). This was a derelict, overcrowded, yet highly priced house in which 11 women and men (five Bulgarians, a Brazilian, an Iraqi, an Iranian, an Irish man and his English girlfriend, and me) lodged in six rooms. These first or second-generation migrants worked in manual, low-paying jobs on rates that paid less than the London Living Wage1—jobs that no local would take up. I shared a room with a British-Iranian who became a night bus driver that year. When he arrived from his days shift, I would be ready to leave the house for the nightshift. The landlords were secondgeneration Iranian migrants. My co-tenants often complained that the landlords had made no refurbishments since they took over from the previous English landlord. The place reeked of dirty dishes, unclean cupboards, and oil pans on the cooker. The floors would not see a broom or vacuum cleaner for weeks in a row, and the toilets were falling apart. Despite the poor condition of the building, lack of maintenance, and not having control over who was living there from one month to another, the landlords collected their full rent in cash, monthly. Tenants who could not stomach it would leave after 1  month without giving notice, leaving behind their deposit instead of paying the month’s rent. Many, however, stayed in this house for years, including my Iranian roommate.

 London Living Wage Foundation promotes real Living Wage based on the cost of living and is voluntarily paid by nearly 7000 U.K. employers who believe a hard day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay. Online at: https://www.livingwage.org.uk 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_1

1

2

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

Vignette №1 30th January 2015 Day Sleeping Time: 4.5 hour Night shift Duration: 0 hour–I missed the nightshift Commuting time: Trip cancelled due to abuse from a replacement bus driver As I was about to enter the Surbiton train station, I read this sign: ‘Due to rail works, replacement buses are in operation from Surbiton station’. I got nervous because this would mean delays in my commute. The departure time on the electronic board showed 23:00. I waited until my watch showed 23:03. The driver of the only coach parked gave no sign that he would soon stop his mobile phone conversation and move his vehicle towards us–the dozens of men waiting outside the back entrance to board the coach to Clapham Junction. After a couple more minutes, I got near the coach’s front window and while the driver was still talking, pointed at my watch and shouted that he was late. I hoped that he would hear me through the coach’s shut windows. He carried on with his phone conversation. I returned to the area where the temporary pick-up point was assigned. I saw the station’s warden approaching the group. I complained to him that the coach driver was late. He told me that I should wait because he would come soon. A few more minutes passed, and the coach slowly moved toward us would­be passengers. I was relieved, thinking that I should still be able to catch the last train from Clapham and then the last underground train on the Circle line from Stratford to arrive at Leyton, where I would continue walking for another 20 minutes to the market. I should arrive on time for my second nightshift, I calculated, despite the commute now being a two-hour journey one-way. The coach’s front door opened slowly. As I tried to board, the bus driver began to verbally abuse me, slurring his foul words faster than I could catch what he was saying. He was angry with me for pointing out to him earlier that he was late to depart and ‘How dare I do that to him!’ I turned to the other passengers who were already seated, mostly males of different ethnicities. The bus was silent except for the angry voice of the driver. Aggravated by his behaviour, I raised my voice to him, but sooner than I realised I stepped off the bus in anger. It was a mistake on my part. If I were to take a seat submissively, the driver would have probably stopped his rant and I could have reached the first leg of my journey. On the contrary, as soon as I stepped off the coach, he shut the door. I was left without transport because that was the last replacement coach to Clapham Junction. Following this event, I reported it in writing to both the transport provider and the police, but to no avail. So, I gave up. During the peak hours between 6:30 am and 9:30 am, on this exact route, the trains were full to the brim with daily commuters, mostly white people travelling to The City of London (CoL) to work in the financial

1.2  New Spitalfields

3

district and other service industries. In retrospect, I wondered if this event would go unnoticed and unresolved if it were to happen during the day commute. Would the driver behave in the same abusive manner against daytime commuters and get away with it like he had with me? How much or little of it is reported to authorities? Do authorities ever follow up and resolve cases recorded at night? In London, hundreds of thousands of people travel every night to work the ‘graveyard’ shift. Yet, the municipal government, local authorities or employers seem not to care or intervene in any way to improve their living and commuting conditions, as if these nightworkers did not exist.

1.2 New Spitalfields In the far east of London, not many ventured out at night unless they were approaching the New Spitalfields market. People like me, job seekers at the market or nightworkers heading for the big night market shed—their workplace, were the only ones walking in the shadows of the night. Except for the night buses that ran past every hour, the ghosted roads and walkways were dormant. As I approached the site on my first night, I left behind a large field used as a hockey and mini football stadium. Later I was to notice that they shut around 11 pm. A 10 minute walk away, the new 2012 London Olympic athletes’ village stretched all the way to Stratford, connecting with the Westfield shopping mall. But what lay beyond the marshes where New Spitalfields was located, seemed far from sight. On that first night and the many others that followed, the rest of London seemed a world away from the floodlit market hall. New Spitalfields occupies 31 acres of land that is colloquially called Hackney Marshes, where Huguenot refugees settled en masse in the seventeenth century. It is strategically placed with access to the M11 motorway linking through the north circular to East Anglia. This strategic location provides access to both grocers and catering businesses who distribute and supply produce to all of the 32 London boroughs and throughout the U.K. On each side of the main gate of New Spitalfields, there are signs lit in blue laser that read: ‘Corporation of London | Spitalfields’ and ‘New Spitalfields Market | The largest market in the U.K. Sourcing local produce’. Based on the number of 40-ton trucks that enter every day and night from Sunday through to Saturday, New Spitalfields Market traders from over 100 countries doing import-export of fruits and vegetables, must be trading around 700,000 tons of produce year round (Taylor, 2011). Just after midnight, six nights a week, the gates open to the public and wholesale grocers. The long queue of white vans parked near the main gate, starts moving slowly like a snake vanishing behind the other side of the entrance. As I passed through the main gate, the car park was lit and quiet, but the roar of the market hall could be heard in the distance. The lights were out in the buildings only occupied during daytime hours by the CoL administrative offices and staff. Behind them, another set of warehouses were alight and filled with workers packing sandwiches

4

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

and catering companies trading frozen produce. The main market hall is a giant metallic shed that hosts 105 stands and over 115 businesses. CoL divides large stands into two or three smaller ones to sublet them to new tenants or existing firms which decide to expand. Inside the main hall, 16 delivery lanes connect each of the 17 gates of the main market hall. Each delivery lane or main aisle is edged in by two narrow footpaths for pedestrians. Frequent customers and traders buy and sell from midnight until daybreak. Usually, the only customers walking through the market in the early hours of dawn were local residents buying small quantities of produce, whilst forklifts zoom by loading and off-loading from lorries or vans parked around the main hall of New Spitalfields. When I first entered the market, the main hall was alive and the beeping sounds of forklifts seemed to come from everywhere. I looked across the open plan workfloors and saw mounds of produce in crates stacked up to the roof and workers’ bodies swerving through and in between these high towers. The workers were picking up the crates and laying them onto customers’ pallets, which were arranged neatly in front of the shop floor. Forklifts were zooming up and down the main aisles with pallets of mangoes and pineapples from Peru, apples from New Zealand or the U.S., oranges and onions from Turkey or Germany, cassava from Brazil, yams from Africa, stacks of cucumbers from the Netherlands and strawberries from England. These pallets were being filled up in the nocturnal rhythm beats at an incessant pace as the night waned into dawn. I momentarily stepped off a footpath and felt an arm pulling me back and out of the way of a buzzing forklift that was reversing. I spent 4–5  hours, walking up and down the floodlit market hall and the surrounding units and into five cafés in search of a job. Numerous times, my legs called for respite after another lengthy round of mapping out the market and chatting with whomever stopped to speak with me. I retreated into one of the cafés to warm up with some Turkish pizza (lahmacun) and hot coffee and tea. After my first night, I returned everynight for 2 weeks in search of a job. During these nights I came to prefer Star Café. The café manager was Kurdish-Turkish and Eastern European women worked there, so it was a chance to chat with other Romanians or in Turkish with the manger. Star Café became the place where I regularly engaged in the art of small talk, over pizza and many glasses of Turkish tea. Eventually, after these nocturnal visits to the market, I did find a job at New Spitalfields.

1.3 Ethnicisation of Work at New Spitalfields On cold February nights, I entered the main market hall through gate nine to get to my first workplace. Heart FM radio was on at the English-owned stall opposite the Two Peaches, a family-owned Bangladeshi store with five staff where I worked in my first month at New Spitalfields. My nightshifts started at 1 am. The commuting time from South to East London should have been a 3 hour and 20 minute return trip door to door—long but manageable, I thought at first. Yet, I missed my second nightshift. My employer, a Bangladeshi trader, gave me a second chance to continue

1.3  Ethnicisation of Work at New Spitalfields

5

my trial period. After that incident, I planned my long, night commute more carefully and began searching for accommodation in East London to be nearer to the night market. By late February, I was working at another company, FruitVeg, a company owned by a Turkish trader. At this firm, I worked the ‘graveyard’ shift for another 5 months. All over the market, loaders carried tons of produce on their bodies, forklift drivers transported thousands of pallets and women servers walked thousands of miles on foot between the café and market stands, lorries or customers’ vans parked throughout the market. Out of the 115 stands under the glass shed roof of the market, more than half of the tenants were foreign-born traders, as the director of City of London markets confirmed (Taylor, 2011). In turn, they hired migrants for the night by night running of their businesses. In the floodlit aisles of the market, porters from Bangladesh and Pakistan, salespeople from Cyprus and Turkey and café servers from Lithuania and Romania performed an exhausting, fruity labour, six nights per week, all year round. New Spitalfields is an ethnically diverse market, and each firm or trading company has rigid hierarchical structures. Firstly, men from Turkey, Cyprus, Pakistan or Bangladesh occupied the higher positions as executives, in most cases owning their businesses, but also as workfloor managers and salesmen. These traders were often migrants, some naturalised in Britain, and with many coming from Turkey, Pakistan and China. They frequently employed men of similar ethnicity as themselves for the higher end of the labour hierarchy. The men at the top of the hierarchy not only had control over other people, but also over their own time (e.g., work patterns, sleep patterns) and decent working conditions (e.g., profit shares and/or a high pay). One level down the hierarchy, the workfloor manager had most of the same liberties and advantages as the owner, i.e., less pressure to run the business, control over their own sleep and others. Two levels down from the top, were the salesmen, foreman, checkmen and stock controllers. They had very limited English language skills, but were proficient in the business language of the firm they worked at and most often it was the same as the mother tongue of the management staff. Again, these positions were offered on a regular basis to workers who were ethnically the same as the workfloor managers, and the owner or executive. There were exceptions whereby men not ethnically related occupied higher positions because they had built trust with their employers over the years (e.g., Romanian or Pakistani males could work as checkmen at Turkish-owned firms). These men could also enjoy the freedom of roaming in the market freely, eating at the market café and sitting comfortably in the warmth without the worries of running the business, but still reported to their workfloor manager and the owner. The foreman was a level beneath them, but was able to shift between the role of overseeing the manual workers below or being a checkman if the nightshift was very busy. Whilst he enjoyed some of the above liberties, he was the liaison between the management, reporting to the higher-ups on his nightly drill sergeant duties. And he experienced similarly poor working conditions as the ‘low-skilled’ loaders below him. The workers at the lowest level had the least control over their working hours, break times to rest and eat, sick pay (or lack thereof) and annual leave. Additionally, manual workers, such as loaders and forklift drivers, who did not have ethnic ties to management were systematically held

6

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

horizontally, so to say, on this hierarchy without the opportunity to climb the organisational ladder. The bulk of those on the lowest level of the hierarchy were made up of ‘low-skilled’ male workers from Romania, Turkey and the Indian subcontinent. The majority of the women at the market were from Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. They occupied the lowest positions in the auxiliary services as café servers. Across New Spitalfields, women ran up and down the aisles of the main market hall with hot drinks and food. They performed brain numbing duties, repeatedly having to deliver food and drinks to market workers who ordered by phone and then promptly return to the café to pick up the next order, all night long. Many of these women would be shouted and whistled at or ridiculed (men moved their hands in round circles, which was supposed to signal that the women had round bottoms). A few of the women worked as cashiers. Given that there were large amounts of cash involved in nightly transactions, cashier jobs were usually only given to direct family members of the business owners. Women who did become cashiers were hidden behind the small windows of porter cabins. On the whole, both unskilled female and male nightworkers at New Spitalfields stated that they lacked the skills that they needed (e.g., English language proficiency) to work for and with people of other ethnicities and nationalities. This also restricted how active they were in seeking work elsewhere.

1.4 Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers Migrant workers have long been a ‘regrettable necessity’ for the economic growth of modern capitalist societies (Berger & Mohr, 2010; Castles, 1984, p. 40; Ruhs, 2013; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010; Wallerstein, 1974). Those who have happened to settle permanently, like the ‘guestworkers’ in Germany or Switzerland who became the unwanted foreign workers regarded as ‘not very clean, rather untidy’ … but, on the other hand, ‘hardworking, and thrifty’ (Castles, 1984, p. 40) or the Irish navvy who built Britain, are nowadays largely ignored, despised or forgotten (Cowley, 2001). Thus, migrants turned ethnic minorities become further subject to ‘legal mechanisms (refusal of rights) … and informal practices (racism and discrimination)’ carried out by governments and the local population. These immigrants become half-rejected (for being a threat and denied access to social, cultural and political arenas) and half-tolerated (for supporting the economy) in the ‘recruiting countries’ (Castles, 1995, pp. 294–295). Put differently, to be disposable, yet indispensable is ‘the migrant’s paradox’ (Hall, 2021, pp. 1–217). Other scholars, inspired by Mezzadra and Nielson (2013), have expand the concept of differential inclusion (Segrave, 2019) to show how migrant workers use strategies that avoid the power that states and employers inflict onto them through exclusionary practices. This book subscribes to the understanding that rejection and tolerance happen concomitantly. For analytical purposes, this paradoxical situation is dissected and broken down to expose how migrants simultaneously are rejected and tolerated. In common narratives about the experiences of migrant workers, the focus is often on

1.4  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

7

three main points, which are departure, work and return. The focus in this book, however, is on how the experience of work is fundamental to that of being a migrant worker. In the European Union (E.U.) and the U.K., on political, social and economic grounds, migrants are expected to take on, in precarious terms, ‘unskilled labour’ that most highly skilled migrants and locals would not accept (Holmes, 2013a, b, p. 187; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016; Ruhs, 2013; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010). In terms of British and European politics, the aims are to protect their national labour markets. Labour migration researchers acknowledge that precarious migrant workers in the E.U. and the U.K. experience abuse and suffering because of the draconic immigration tactics and ‘the legal production of illegality’ (Nicholas de Genova & Roy, 2020, p.  353; Garcés-Mascareñas, 2010; Garcés-Mascareñas & Penninx, 2016a; Güell & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2020, 2021; Hall, 2021; Penninx & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2016; van Heelsum et al., 2013). In Britain, their supposed (un) deservingness is justified by indexing them as being first and foremost ‘law-­ breakers’ without inalienable rights or rights that might later be earnt (Hall, 2017; Ratzmann & Sahraoui, 2021, p. 436). Secondly, it ‘pre-emptively illegalise[s]’ them on a large scale (De Genova, 2018, p. 17) through a border logic that ‘distributes unfreedom through, illegality, sorting, and punishment’ (Hall, 2021, p. 158). This foul, colonialist logic ultimately renders them ‘invisible’ until proven worthy of E.U., British (or any other) citizenship, i.e., they are placed on an undetermined probationary period decided by a ‘racialised sorting’ (Nicolas de Genova, n.d.; Hall, 2021, p. 154). Racialisation is underpinned by rigid ‘border logics’ via nationalist and ‘whiteness’ tropes, whereby migrants are in-between being welcome insiders or rejected outsiders and are always being watched by the state apparatus (Hall, 2021). Put differently, in terms of the contemporary British (and European) immigration landscape, these people live the migrant’s paradox (Hall, 2021), in which they embody the tension of being ‘half-in, half-out’ in a society where their legal or residential status is under constant probation (Macarie, 2014). Thus, these migrants are ‘neither here, not there’ (Bojkov, 2004). This tension extends beyond migrant workers who have historically come to Britain from the former colonies (e.g., Caribbeaners, Pakistanis, Indians and the Irish), such as third-country nationals from Turkey (before the U.K. exited the E.U.2) who have a long history of accessing the U.K. labour market via business visas, as well as the citizens of the newly added A2 and A8 nations to the E.U.3

 Due to 2016 Brexit referendum, U.K. has exited the E.U. in 2020. Before that, Turkish migrants in the U.K. were classed as third-country nationals or not belonging to any of the 28 member states of the E.U. 3  In 2004, the fifth enlargement of E.U. included a new wave of eight Central and Eastern European states, plus Malta and Cyprus. This expansion included Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Hungary. In the scholarly literature and official documents these are often referred to as the A-8 countries (here A8). In the context of the 2007 E.U. accession process, Bulgaria and Romania are named A-2 countries (here A2). 2

8

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

1.4.1 Who Is Called a ‘Migrant’ Worker? Who Is Not and Why Not? There is no widely agreed definition of what a migrant is (McAuliffe & Triandafyllidou, 2021, p. 21). More specifically for the U.K., ‘migrant worker’ and its derivative ‘migrant labourer’ or ‘seasonal worker’ indicate a person migrating to another country whereby structural factors or limited opportunities pressures them to take up somewhat unfairly labelled ‘low-skilled’ work. Similarly, in the United States, ‘migrant’ or ‘farmworker’ is used to describe the Latin American workers doing ‘knee-low’ jobs i.e., harvesting on their knees, fruits for the American consumer (Holmes, 2013a, pp. 186–187). In this book, migrants are people from developing or lower income countries, within and outside of the E.U., who ‘often prefer to travel in the direction opposite the capital, making use of existing networks of labour movement into Europe rather than seeking rights and prosperity at home’ (Verstraete, 2010, p. 11). Seen in this light, freedom of movement for workers in Europe means that some move freely whilst others are ‘forced to move around as migrants’ (Verstraete, 2010, p. 94). These working migrants travel in response to the demand for low-skilled seasonal workers, and not for business or leisure. In other words, they practice a form of demand migration, whereby some kinds of labour are in higher demand than others. This question, ‘Who is a migrant?’ and by the same token, ‘Who is not and why not?’– only points at what a migrant is and not what it is like to be a migrant or take migrancy as a ‘state of being’ (King, 2020, p. 1; Verstraete, 2010). The co-workers in my study experience migration as this kind of forced movement in response to demands set by a complex system of transnational forces of globalisation, which involves movement of people and capital and not the opening opportunities for voluntary migration to all. Put differently, migrant workers migrate for survival, not leisure. For them, remittances sent to their families is the difference between sending children to school or not or being able to pay for complex surgeries or long-term health treatments in their home countries where education and healthcare systems have been brought to their knees by the neoliberal governments’ lack of investments in public services and welfare. Romanians travelling to provide cheap labour in wealthy E.U. member states, the U.K., France, or Italy are all perceived as Roma or Gypsy, a term with more pejorative undertones, or Eastern European migrants. Both terms are troubling – unsettling for the former and problematic for the latter. On the one hand, non-Roma Romanians dislike being associated with the Roma minority from Romania, the latter being negatively perceived by the former in their home country (Mădroane, 2012). Besides, Roma ethnics live all over Europe, not just in Romania, or Eastern Europe. But by clustering all ‘foreigners’ into one broad cluster as migrants, these wealthy states invalidate, for example, the differences and uniqueness of Roma, who for millennia have been migrating as part of life. Instead, they are amalgamated into confusing categories of lower-class Roma / Gypsy / Romanian / Eastern European ‘other’. As such, receiving states ‘ignor[e] intra-­ ethnic differences and contestations’ (Laoire, 2008, p. 1). Furthermore, locals–born

1.4  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

9

and bred in Cluj-Napoca–travelling during the COVID-19 pandemic to work on asparagus farms in Germany (Bejan, 2020) or fruit farms in the U.K. (O’Carroll, 2022),4 are represented as poor agricultural, seasonal workers, fruit pickers or farmworkers from Romania. These ethnic connotations are also embedded within the word ‘migrant’ and are used both in popular parlance as well as research language. In short, the meanings attached to ‘migrant’ have connotations of lower class and second-rate citizenship. They are gendered and race based. Regardless the terms, nomadic / Easter European migrants, the consensus among migration scholars is that such construction is made to serve racialised and nationalistic worldviews (Laoire, 2023, personal communication). The more problematic terms ‘immigrant’, ‘illegal migrant’, ‘foreigners’, ‘illegality’, and ‘irregularity’ will be discussed in Chapter Three, in the context of half-rejected, half-permitted migrant workers in global cities. By the same token, who is not a migrant? The consensus among scholars of various disciplines and across fields, is that it is privileged, white, propertied citizens travelling as cultural tourists, professionals, or businesspeople, whose ‘natural state of being’ is to travel freely (Holmes, 2013a; King, 2012, p. 6; Tyagi, 2017; Verstraete, 2010). Highly skilled, chief executives of international corporations, bankers or wealth management managers or Aihwa Ong’s rich businesspeople travelling to close deals on the other hemisphere are not named ‘migrants.’ In diaspora studies, a similar consensus has been reached, namely that a term like ‘diaspora’ in the past defined specific communities of people (Jews, Greeks, Armenians) living away from their homelands. Moreover, low-skilled workers who replaced the nineteenth century slaves on plantations were called ‘Indian indentured’ labourers and could also be categorised as refugees, immigrants and guestworkers. ‘Indians’ were traders or international business people (Tyagi, 2017). Other professionals are simply referred to as ‘diasporic people or by their job title and home town, such as architects from Mexico City’ (Holmes, 2013a, p. 187). If you work in London’s finance industry and travel on business to Romania, to train branch managers on how to spend European funds for local reconstruction and development, then you are represented in terms of ‘European experts’ with ‘know-how’. Moreover, a Canadian or U.S. Information and Technology (IT) developer or investor in a start-up business is called a ‘digital nomad’ based in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania (McElroy, 2020). As researchers, we must question these divisional language terminologies and dichotomies, as well as their hidden meanings. In line with this common use of the word ‘migrant’, we must interrogate who decides and for what purpose to classify migrants as poor and unskilled workers, for this classification reproduces inequalities. Equally, we must take into consideration that nighttime has long being associated with the grey or shadowy economy, and with those whose livelihoods depend on illicit activities (e.g., burglaries, sex work), or those who work irregularly in  Romanian fruit pickers flown to the U.K. despite the strict social distancing measures imposed in many countries around the world. Available at: https://bit.ly/Romanians_in_farming_sector_ Guardian. Accessed 29.12.2022. 4

10

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

shadowy jobs. All people who ‘operate’ at night have been deemed unlawful (Segrave, 2019). Many of these people are migrants, who try to escape the mechanisms (e.g., migration law and policy) that regulate who enters and in what sector of a labour market. These migrants have found a corner in the nocturnal landscape of work, despite being a precarious one. As a result of these dynamics, and in addition to a neoliberal system of capital [that] relies on underpaid and irregular (or unlawful, as termed in this research) labour’, these workers are ‘fundamentally more precarious’ than those without migrant-related concerns’ (Segrave, 2019, p. 196). Hence, whilst the wealthy states’ border practices ‘attempt to assert some control over globalized capitalism and global mobility’ (Anderson, 2010, apud Segrave, 2019, p. 196), they reproduce a precarious labour force that is underpaid, more exposed to precariousness and have few rights. Instead of being acknowledged for their skills, and the culture and language they bring, workers from lower income countries are treated as disposable bodies that provide cheap labour. It is as if they are being fished from ponds of cheap labour in certain countries and thrown into the hands of death or ill-health for the benefit of others living in wealthy countries. These are the half-rejected (politically) and half-permitted (economically) migrants.

1.4.2 Half-Rejected Migrants Who is that standing on the street corner or the underground exit? The generic Eastern European woman selling Big Issue, the older mother wearing a babushka or worse, a ‘gypsy’ beggar. Such imagery has become common place for Londoners, and Europeans more broadly. Yet, do we see past the façades? Who are the people behind the stereotypes and what are their lives like in the U.K.? In the migration literature, researchers have identified movements of recent waves of migrant workers to the U.K. as ‘moving in and out’ (Anderson, 2010; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010). In this sense, they either come for unknown periods of time or they shuttle between their countries of origin and the U.K. (Sumption & Somerville, 2010, p. 5). These trends may also indicate that this heterogeneous wave of migrants migrate for different reasons and time periods. The British tabloid media labels them as ‘the Eastern Europeans’ and portrays them as strategic decision-makers. In government discourses, they are the ‘health tourists’, ‘bogus self-employed’, and the ones who ‘undermine the terms and working conditions of British workers’ (John Reid, MP, in Home Office, 2007, 2; apud, Anderson, 2010, p.  302). They fall through the cracks of the traditional stream of push/pull or neoclassical economics of migration literature that focuses on the migrants’ rational decision to migrate, missing out on [The] historical relations, family and community dynamics, the role of intermediaries encouraging migration by arranging passage, and, of course, the role of states in recruiting labour, granting or withholding permits, establishing policies on refugees and asylum-­ seekers, and determining citizenship rights (O’Reilly, 2023, p. 4).

1.4  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

11

Push factors constrain migrants to cross borders, often due to poverty caused by conflicts or discrimination and more recently, environmental disasters. Pull factors, located in destination countries, include but are not limited to safety and better working conditions. These factors attract migrants hoping that they will prosper not only from the physical protection of their bodies and lives, but also in material terms, both them and the relatives left behind in their home countries. Minimised in this push-pull equation, are the structural factors and decisions taken by political leaders in the interest of protecting their national labour markets at the expense of the disposable bodies of ‘low-skilled’ migrants, constrained to leave their ‘home’ country due to economic consequences and emergencies (Fernández-Reino et al., 2020). Push-pull analyses have been well discredited by now because they see migrants solely as rational subjects, choosing freely or willing to engage in ‘risky behaviour’ to migrate to control their destinies. These theories fall short of considering the structural factors that constrain and limit individual choices to cross borders and access the labour markets in host societies (Holmes, 2013a, b). However, these outdated theories are integral to the current tabloid and political discourses around migration. A further limitation of this push-pull dichotomic paradigm results from minimising the negative effects of a layered political economy of displacements impacting on the migrants’ prolonged journeys to the U.K. (Hall, 2021). Despite being E.U. migrants, the migrants from the newly joined A2 countries experience precarity and exploitation of similar degrees to those arriving from territories once belonging to colonial Britain, or refugees and asylum seekers fleeing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria (and now Ukraine). More, the newly arrived European migrant workers from Bulgaria and Romania, and those from the older member states like Greece and Portugal migrating to Northern Europe following the 2008–2009 economic crisis, had no previous connection to the colonial or neo-­ colonial stages of capitalism in the U.K. This is especially the case for those who in the wake of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis made their difficult and multiple moves (Hall, 2021). Examples from the African continent to Europe are: West Africans who on their ‘fragmented journeys’ (Collyer, 2007; Collyer et al., 2012; Collyer & de Haas, 2012), took ‘intermediate steps …resulting in multiple moves between countries’ (Roberts, 2023, p. 142), and Somalians who migrated onwards to the U.K. and Nordic countries to reunite with established communities. These migrants have been ‘theorised through a variety of terms including … step-wise as well as serial, multiple and transit migration’ (Ahrens et  al., 2016; Paul, 2018; Roberts, 2023, p. 142; van Liempt, 2011). Ahrens and King (2023, p. 2) also recognise that migration trajectories are complex—‘fragmented, incomplete, open-ended and often unplanned’. More, migration scholars, in particular those focusing on labour migration from Eastern to Western Europe, have recorded movements from country to country within the ‘fortress Europe’ (Zentai, 2020). This case in point refers to the large numbers of Southern and Eastern European Roma, from ex-Yugoslav countries in the mid 1990s, and intensified movements of Bulgarian and Romanian Roma in the early 2000s, towards Western Europe. Roma people crossed several E.U. borders to seek protection from discrimination in their own countries,

12

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

only to be expelled by the French and Italian governments and objectified in the anti-Romani immigration rhetoric feeding the growing ‘right-wing populism in Europe (Sigona, 2010; Clough Marinaro & Sigona, 2011; Kóczé, 2017, p.  463). Whilst transiting countries like France and Italy, expelled Roma migrants as they were considered ‘irregular’, the U.K.’s ‘hostile environment’ set of policies, was in the making by Theresa May’s Government (some argue, as early as 20125 (Schweitzer, 2022)), which shows remarkable resemblances in terms of ‘racialized political debates that are conditioned by neoliberalism’ (Hepworth, 2012; Kóczé, 2017, p. 461; Schweitzer, 2020; Sigona et al., 2008). Worthy to note, that in this process of neoliberalisation of ‘irregularity’ and similarly problematic terms, the freedom of movement of workers in the E.U. was becoming less free, and racialisation of those with ethnic background was gaining terrain in the public domain and political discourses (Macarie, 2014). Therefore, in terms of the contemporary politics of displacements in British and European societies, these studies show that the negative effects inflicted on these vulnerable migrants have multiple causes, and that they are underpinned primarily by ‘racialized sorting’ (Hall, 2021, p. 154). There are further consequences faced by E.U. migrant workers from A2 countries at the periphery of globalisation for travelling to the U.K. For example, the decision of the British government to impose strict transitional controls against these Bulgarian and Romanian migrant workers between 2007 and 2014, rendered them more vulnerable. A very limited number were allowed to take self-employment, and many fell through the statistical gaps as they engaged in ‘hybrid work’, a spreading strategy to survive the growing social inequalities and precarious living in Europe (Armano et  al., 2017). The majority would become ‘illegal’, and therefore subject to deportation, house evictions, no access to welfare (housing or Universal Credit), limited healthcare, as well as barriers in building a credit history or taking out a student loan to pursue higher education goals in the U.K.  Additionally, in the past decade these migrants’ difficult experiences have been exacerbated in the U.K. by its hostile environment and the resulting immigration policies, enforced via the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts and followed by the 2016 Brexit referendum. In this context of ‘foul turbulence’ (Hall, 2021, p. 4), albeit being E.U. migrants, Romanians and Bulgarians suffered the consequences of the transitional controls imposed by E.U. seven-year long transitional controls that prevented their equal access to the E.U. labour market. For many across ‘fortress Europe’, it meant entering ‘underground’ (Broeders, 2007, p. 1598) or end up working the ‘graveyard shift’ (Norman, 2011a). This rendered their situation more vulnerable, and they therefore worked after dark to gain invisibility. Moreover, following the 2016 Brexit referendum, the U.K.’s exit from the E.U. in 2020 has rendered the E.U. migrant workers’ situation more vulnerable due

 May, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ program, cited in The Guardian, 10 October 2013. Online at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/10/immigration-bill-theresa-mayhostile-­­environment. Accessed 29.12.2022. 5

1.4  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

13

to tighter immigration policies targeting E.U. migrants without a Settled Status,6 therefore without permanent residence and working rights on the U.K.’s labour market. These restrictions limit their presence to the realms of nightwork even further because they have no other option or because they want to benefit from the darkness, quiet and lack of control and surveillance which the night offers Nightlaboratory research blog (nightlaboratory.wordpress.com). This group of E.U. migrant workers is especially interesting as they recently begun migrating to the U.K., contrary to, for example, manual Turkish migrants who have had access to the European labour market since the 1950s under the guestworker visas in Germany (Berger & Mohr, 2010; Castles, 1995), or Irish navvies on British civil engineering sites in the last century (Cowley, 2004). The U.K., a global player at the centre of globalisation, negatively impacts on bereft migrants from A2 countries at the margins of globalisation. While all migrants are half-rejected, half-­ permitted, the E.U. migrants from countries such as Romania and Bulgaria are even more rejected in the countries at the centre of globalisation, where they arrive from the periphery of global capitalism. They already face inequalities through racialisation and social-spatial marginalisation in their own country (Vincze et al., 2019). Thus, unlike what the pull-push model explains, migrants are forced to take precarious jobs–and not on voluntary terms, as rational agents. Some migrants, such as Eastern Europeans, end up even worse, for instance, by being trapped in night jobs and at the lowest level of precarity.

1.4.3 Half-Permitted Though statistics on nightshifters are inconclusive, there is an agreement among migration researchers that in post-industrial countries most of the people forced to take low paid jobs, on temporary basis, with no contracts and continuity, are migrants (Fernández-Reino et  al., 2020; Long, 2014; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010). Recent research shows that nightwork in the constantly expanding nighttime economy is somewhat over represented by marginalised groups—migrants and people with ethnic background (Author Year; Duijzings & Dušková, 2022; Shaw, 2022). There is no single definition of a ‘nightworker’ or ‘nightshift worker’. They include not only workers in fixed locations, such as call centres, factories, hospitals, markets, but also aircrews involved in transmeridian travels. Several E.U. countries have listed nightwork as part of shift work, operating outside of daytime shifts (the nine-to-five workday) and ‘occurs during the regular sleeping hours of the general population’ (IARC, 2020, p. 42). The International Agency for Research on Cancer (2020) defines ‘night shift work’ as occurring ‘during the regular sleeping hours of the general population, including transmeridian travel’ (IARC, 2020, p.  42). In  E.U. Settlement Scheme (E.U.SS) is issued by the Home Office, which grants the holder living rights in the U.K. Online at: https://www.gov.uk/settled-status-eu-citizens-families/applying-for-­ settled-status. Accessed 22.08.2022. 6

14

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

sectors where employees work at nighttime,7 this period generally covers the time between sunset and sunrise and includes the timeframe between 23:00 and 07:00 when most adults sleep, considering cultural and other differences (IARC, 2020). Definitions of ‘nighttime’ vary across countries and work sectors in the E.U. member states but take guidance from the International Labour Organisation (ILO, 1990). According to the European Commission Directive 2003/88/EC, Article 2 (4), a nightworker (a) works at least 3 hours of their daily working time during nighttime as a normal course; or (b) ‘it is likely to work during night time a certain proportion of his annual working time, as defined at the choice of the Member State concerned’ by national legislation, collective agreements or agreement between two sides of industry (Official Journal of the European Union, 2003 (see Sect. 1.4)). This directive is applied across the 27 member states in the E.U. (including the U.K. at the time when this research took place), with country differences in the prevalence of shift work that includes nightshifts, ranging from 11.8% in Netherlands and 24.6% in Finland (Kubo et al., 2013). In addition, in most of these countries, nightshifts must include the period between midnight and 5:00 am, and not less than 7 hours. Literary critic Antoine Paris (2022) scrutinises the ancient text First Epistle to the Thessalonians, the oldest book of the New Testament (Paul, Silvanus and Timotheus 50 AD), to unveil that among the independent workers craft activities referred to day- and night-work. Night archaeologist Nancy Gonlin (2022), also reveals that labouring craftsmen existed among ancient Maya people (600–900 CE) and were recorded in Classic Maya texts (AD 791). These studies strongly indicate that nightwork is far from a modern phenomenon, but rather part of a set of activities that could take place in daylight or after dark. Art critic and historian John Crary (2013), points out that in early capitalist era (beginning with 1668 Anglo-Dutch moment8), a nightwork regime was invented to control time to increase production of capital. In late capitalism, from late nineteenth century onwards, the expansion of nightwork comes as a temporal fix, that is, a response to the need to reproduce daywork and to make production and consumption happen around the clock (Harvey, 2007). Nightwork becomes part and parcel of many industries and services, such as transport, communication, fire brigades, police, the army, and hospitals. Moreover, some of these night jobs are more prestigious and better paid than others. However, in contemporary, post-industrial societies, most of the night jobs fall in the second category (Acuto et al., 2022; Duijzings & Dušková, 2022; Shaw, 2018, 2022). These societies, especially their global cities such as London, need armies of low-paid migrant nightworkers to function around-the-clock (Kreitzman, 1999; Melbin, 1987; Sharman & Sharman, 2008). Whilst others sleep, these essential nightworkers are awake and alert on production lines, in food processing and packing warehouses, loading fruit and vegetables, driving taxis, buses, trains and  ‘Staying awake at night and trying to sleep during the day is not a physiological condition for ‘diurnal’ creatures like humans’. (IARC, 2020, p. 42) 8  The Anglo-Dutch Moment reveals a Western paradigm of the world impact that the Glorious Revolution had for the English people and on the European diplomatic and military policies in the early modern era. Jonathan I. Israel. Ed. (1997) New York: Cambridge University Press. 7

1.4  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

15

subways, repairing roads, caring for the sick, cleaning streets, managing waste, stocking shelves, and answering emergency calls. Whilst they carry out essential work, as others did before, there is a racial element in how these migrants, by and large, end up in manual jobs sectors (Rajaram, 2015; Sahraoui, 2020). The most marginalised are racialised populations like migrant workers in Europe with low educational backgrounds–many of whom are of Roma ethnicity, and many more whom I encountered during my night workshops in various European cities, as well as at the New Spitalfields night market in London. The experiences of these nightshift workers have much in common with other migrants working in London’s nighttime economy, for example, with the Brazilian rickshaw drivers, Romanian night auditors and receptionists in hotels or the construction workers at Gatwick airport and the chefs in China Town. In many ways, they live in precariousness, growing more isolated from mainstream society and alienated from their families in their home countries. Despite that, working at night in London, as my co-workers reminded me, presented an attractive destination for a more lucrative venture than daytime jobs, especially for those who lacked English language skills, which in my co-workers’ cases meant almost every manual worker. This predicament places these marginalised workers in positions of disposability that may also lead them to becoming precarious workers, which is why I consider them an important group that highlights the conditions of migration in contemporary U.K. Although they have access to resources and support to defend their strategic role, various workers — from independent platform workers in Boston (Schor, 2020), New  York’s financial district cleaners (Sassen, 2017) and Toronto’s taxi drivers (Sharma, 2014) to workers in daytime cleaning, long-term care and private security in Europe — find their work devalued and their efforts unrecognised by these industries and society at large (Bergfeld et al., 2022, p. 21).Nightworkers in London’s New Spitalfields market, have neither the means (e.g., limited channels of participation) to engage in organising collective actions, nor access and necessary (day) time to participate in worker centres and community organising to receive advice and gain know-how to mobilise. Studies have shown that Union support and community organisers are a distinctive advantage in organising a ‘largely apolitical group of migrant workers’ to defend their rights on issues of pay and lack of decent working conditions (Lopes & Hall, 2015, p. 208). Combined with lack of research into nighttime labour sociabilities and work relationships between the lower and higher placed staff, nightworkers’ precariousness amplifies through marginalisation and invisibilisation. Saskia Sassen (2005) has theorised global cities as key locations in a geography of inequality that over-valorise capital and de-valorise human potential. Migrant nightworkers inhabit a peculiar location in this geography. They live in opposite rhythms to mainstream society. This makes them invisible to friends, unavailable for family dues and absent in the minds of those working in day organisations in charge of regulating other forms of work. Their hidden labour and the problems associated with nightwork are not newsworthy for the media, not eye and ear-catching enough for public interest, and rarely makes it onto the agendas of politicians,

16

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

local authorities, and labour organisations. Migrant nightworkers need to be differentiated from local people who may experience in-work poverty but can also afford to turn down the offers that they do not like or choose to sleep instead of working all night. Thus, migrants are more constrained than the locals in having to work on low wages and accept deskilled jobs on precarious working terms, such as contract-less work and unsociable hours, to put up with inadequate commuting conditions and vie with one another to keep these jobs. Moreover, migrant nightworkers need to be distinguished from the migrants who have ‘exiting options.’ The latter are educated people whose skills enable them to find better jobs or who have the possibility to refuse bad deals (e.g. exploitative working environments), choose another type of work or return to their country of origin, if they so wish. These better off migrants have the power to change their conditions because they have alternatives. The migrants that this book focuses on may initially perceive nightwork as a temporary window of opportunity—namely, they are better paid than in the kinds of daytime work for which they have the necessary skills—, and thus view nightwork as a lucrative way to make money fast before returning to their home countries. This perception is formed despite their engagement in a type of work that subjects them to embodied precarity, i.e., they need to stay alert during the hours when human bodies are supposed to rest. In reality, many never return home. They remain trapped in this kind of precarious work for years. They must deal with the negative impact that manual overnight work has on their health and their social lives, and with the issues of invisibilisation of migrant nightworkers. This book places at its centre the most invisible and vulnerable nightworkers. They can be somewhat loosely defined as less-skilled, manual nightworkers. They are mostly migrants, work in precarious conditions, which are below Living Wage levels, and experience embodied precarity insofar as they need to stay alert when the human body is supposed to rest according to physiological circadian rhythms. They cannot buy solutions to exit the entrapment of a modern capitalist system. Moreover, the book focuses on those migrants who are most likely to become manual nightworkers, that is, Eastern European migrants in the U.K. and those who, at the time of the fieldwork pre-Brexit, were categorised as third-country nationals in the U.K. (e.g., Turkish citizens). They have little or no previous connection to post-­ industrial, neo-colonial societies. They need to be distinguished from workers arriving from former colonies, who tap into long established networks and, thus, have more chances to avoid this entrapment. These manual migrant nightworkers are left without lucrative options but to occupy the lowest level of precarity in a multi-­ layered, unequal labour system, without the slightest chance of climbing onto middle or upper levels on the social hierarchy. Although politically rejected, economically these are the half-welcome migrants who keep twenty-four-seven cities on their back. In this book, their predicament of living through this paradox of being simultaneously rejected and welcome in 24/7 London is brought to the foreground.

1.5  Researching Nightwork

17

1.5 Researching Nightwork In 2010, I had been transiting disciplinary fields, from studying psychology to undertaking social science research. As I commenced the Research Masters in Area Studies at University College London (UCL), it seemed pertinent to study migrants’ lives in the U.K. I drew upon my own migration story to this country and sought to find answers to the broader problems faced by vulnerable groups, including but not limited to experiences of vulnerable Eastern European migrant women. Unaware of the challenges, I took on difficult ideas, attempting to put them into research practice–for instance, researching the impact of labels such as ‘trafficked’ that, according to Laura-Maria Agustín (2007), disempower those entering the sex industry. To my disappointment, recruiting at-street sex workers from Eastern Europe for my study proved too challenging given the time limitations for conducting the fieldwork and writing up the thesis. Nonetheless, whilst still grappling with the social and cultural paradigms in Area Studies, unwearyingly too, my formal training in anthropological fieldwork began. Alongside social anthropologist, Ger Duijzings, I took part in experimental night workshops in which we set out to learn about Eastern European migrants from Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, and Poland. During our nightwalks, we collected data on migrants who were up and working at night in London. We then published condensed observations of these night encounters on the fieldwork blog, Nightlaboratory research blog (nightlaboratory.wordpress.com). This first phase as a graduate apprentice in anthropology concluded with a thesis on the experiences of Romanian Nightworkers in London, the newly arrived A2 migrants on the U.K.’s labour market (Author Year). I also familiarised myself with the few studies available at that time on the night. Though written for the critical public readership, Sukhdev Sandhu’s (2007) journey through London at night was the first reference on nightworkers that I laid my hands on. I continued with Will Norman’s (2011) ethnographic study on ‘graveyard shifters’ in Britain, Michael Baldwin’s (2012) historical account of the night in the industrial core of the United States, and the undercover research on poverty in the United States by political activist for women workers’ rights, late Barbara Ehrenreich (Ehrenreich, 2011; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2004; Fuentes & Ehrenreich, 2000). Once graduated, I became an intern for 3 months with Migrants Organise and campaigned for migrant cleaners’ rights to London Living Wage rates. I also collected media accounts and reviewed reports and polls on migrant workers from Bulgaria and Romania. These diverse materials indicated a disparate focus in the media on immigration control and 2015 ‘migration crisis’ topics aimed at scaremongering migrants. There was almost nothing on nightworkers or the strategic role of migrants in the functioning of the 24/7 city of London (with the exception of the night tube strike for overnight shift pay9). Further to this, I embarked on a new path  London faces biggest tube strike in more than 10 years over night shift pay. The Guardian. Online at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/18/london-biggest-tube-strike-10-yearsnight-shift-pay. Accessed 01.08.2022. 9

18

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

as an outreach worker alongside dedicated professionals with Open Doors, National Health Service (NHS) that provided case management, as well as clinical and outreach services for sex workers in East London, who were predominately East European migrant women. This praxis has highlighted for me the intricate issues triggered by the U.K.’s immigration policies, transitional controls imposed against recently joined E.U. countries and the (lack of) access to healthcare for migrants. Given the contentious issues regarding the social and political right of migrants arriving in the U.K. to live and work, and their rights to access healthcare, I committed myself to reach out to nightworkers, those marginalised, pushed out of sight, or hidden because of the advantages offered by darkness, and the lack of surveillance by immigration or labour regulators. As I continued my academic path, in parallel to my doctoral studies, I co-organised night workshops for researchers in European capitals including Budapest, Istanbul, Milano, Prague and Sofia, where these critical issues were explored in different contexts, for example, formal and informal work, and small and large cities. Irrespective of the nightwalking paths treaded on the European continent, London is where I gained depth on these topics. There I looked for and mapped out an appropriate research site at night. Out of the six largest markets in London, I visited New Spitalfields at Leyton, East London and Convent Garden at London Victoria (fruit and vegetables), Billingsgate at Canary Wharf (fish) and Smithfields (meat) in the City of London. Upon reflection of these pre-doctoral fieldwork experiences, I have realised that they initiated me upon a path of studying capitalist 27/4 societies, and its hidden nightwork labourers. I decided on New Spitalfields as my research site. This was a market where migrants worked at night to make a living, survive, or operate, in one way or another. I began this project thinking that the food sector was part of an unequal labour system. The market could be seen as a micro-cosmos reflecting a reverse, hidden part of the traditionally set-up world of daytime work by and large hidden from daytime folk (the nine-to-fivers). This market could, thus, provide an almost ideal entry point to reach out to hidden populations. To do ethnography among the various ethnic groups who inhabited this nocturnal landscape (in this case Turkish, Kurdish, Turkish-speaking Bulgarians and Romanian nationals, as well as migrant workers from former British colonies such as West Indians and Pakistanis), meant to take ‘seriously the interconnections inherent in the contemporary world’ (Holmes, 2013a, p. 23). The market was an important node in food chain distribution as the largest wholesale market of its kind in Britain and providing the country’s food supply chains with fresh and frozen vegetables, flowers and exotic fruits round-the-­ clock, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The work carried out here was one of the most fundamental types of work. I hypothesised that the high expectations of the nightlife and leisure industries regarding food might be translated into both opportunities and constraints for migrant workers. The market was owned and managed by Corporation of London, but as I was to learn, the tenants (trading companies) located here did not need to report how many tons of fruits of vegetables they sold nor how little they

1.5  Researching Nightwork

19

paid the workers. The traders knowingly disrespected law-abiding working regulations and recommendations by the Labour Force Survey (LFS), U.K.  Office for National Statistics (ONS) and ILO. These national and international bodies recommended eight-hour nightshifts with breaks at regular intervals during any 24-hour period, and a maximum cycle of 17 nights in any month of the year. Instead, manual migrant workers at New Spitalfields worked on minimum 11-hour nightshifts, 360 nights a year, without a work contract and were not permitted to break the nightshift schedule. A great number worked on hourly rates below the national minimum wage including through bank holidays, and without sickness cover. These were a few of the traders’ tactics and mechanisms of destruction through labour extraction from bodies of migrants working at night. As my interest in New Spitalfields developed, I became acutely aware that an ethnography that explored the unarticulated experiences of embodied nightwork precarity would be incomplete without participant observation and embeddedness in what anthropologists call a ‘field site’. This required that I too used my body to load fruits and vegetables or serve food and hot drinks at night. I took a job as a loader and New Spitalfields became my workplace, both anthropologically and economically. Working at night at this market, I experienced what nightworkers suffered from all year round–social isolation, sleep deprivation and the physical aches and pains that come from lifting heavy loads and doing repetitive, monotonous tasks. In the early stages of this project, I anticipated possibilities for solidarity amongst in-group members and between-groups regardless of ethnicity of the market staff. I found instead an overwhelmingly strong atmosphere of competition due to fragmentation mechanisms being employed by lower-level management. Ultimately– notwithstanding the prominent place that the New Spitalfields market occupies in the food wholesale trade as Britain’s best wholesale market, and despite that its workers performed one of the most fundamental forms of work, that is, feeding a nation–they worked in conditions that disrespect the broken bodies of manual nightworkers for the benefit of capital gains around-the-clock to a degree that I had not imagined existing in a wealthy society. This nightnography, as a result, extended into a project of ‘committed ethnography’ that has continued since I left the field site. To visibilise nightworkers and raise awareness of the problems with nightwork, I have produced a podcast series, NightWorkPod (CE.U.  Podcasts 2018–present), and have contributed to various podcasts and blogs (Being Human Show, Royal Anthropological Institute Podcasts; Connected CityLab Podcast, University of Melbourne; Contrasens, Babeș-Bolyai University Podcasts; Work all day, work all night, Novara Media, and The Coronavirus and Mobility Forum, COMPAS, University of Oxford). In trying to engage the public with anthropological findings, I have also advocated for reparations to be made towards migrant nightworkers’ rights to decent working conditions. Additionally, I went on to initiate discussions with trade unions to develop a Nightworker Charter, which I include in the coda of this book. These core principles for nightwork have grown out of my collaborations with non-governmental

20

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

organisations, namely Migrant Voice,10 U.K. People’s Tribunal11 and UNI Global Union / UNI Europa,12 and Nighttime.org.13 Worthy to note that the advocates for nightlife industry workers in a post-COVID-19 world, have been proposing support models for nightlife industry workers, individuals and vulnerable populations under the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan: Sustaining Nightlife Scenes (Duvivier et al., 2020). This committed ethnographic project has visibilised the workers, even if only for those audiences with an ethnographic eye, to the curious academic audience or the critical public. The larger research community has thus far made rather modest efforts to address the theoretical implications, possibilities, and ethical questions of tackling the new puzzles due to nightwork communities being hard to access. It is, thus, important to reflect on the role that we all play in repairing the damage that post-circadian capitalism has inflicted on our lives, how to pre-empty future ‘long summers of migration,’14 as well as how we can improve the future of work. To gain and share unique insights into the combined emotional, psychophysical, and social strands of the DNA that make up the experiences of migrants, means moving closer to understanding of what makes the phenomenon of migrant bodies crossing borders so complex, and why it is so complicated to grasp, let alone predict its ebbs and flows.

1.6 Nightnography Nightnography is a portmanteau of ‘ethnography’ and ‘night’. Ethnography is in-­ person participant observation, and the method that anthropologists (and other scholars) use to learn about a group of people, their everyday lives and practices in a particular context. ‘By night’ means the hours after dark and beyond the early hours of dawn. I conducted nightnography over 14 months of nocturnal fieldwork between 2014 and 2015, followed by shorter visits at the market site between 2017 and 2020. I tested the limits of the daytime ethnography and experimented with my own body to engage and act upon what I saw and felt in and through my body as it was exposed to what was going on in the field. Whilst immersed in the co-workers’

  Migrant Voice U.K.  Available at https://www.migrantvoice.org/who-we-are. Accessed 23.01.2023. 11   Organising a People’s Tribunal is available at: https://bit.ly/Organising_PPT. Accessed 23.01.2023. 12  See latest report on Labour Shortages and Turnover in Industrial Cleaning, Long-term Care and Private Security by Bergfeld et  al., 2022. Available at https://bit.ly/UNIEuropa_Report2022. Accessed 23.01.2023. 13  The Global Nighttime Recovery Plan. Available at https://www.nighttime.org/recoveryplan/. Accessed 23.01.2023. 14  Kasparek, B. and Speer, M. (2015). Of hope. Hungary and the long summer of migration (Translation: Elena Buck). Online at https://bordermonitoring.eu/ungarn/2015/09/of-hope-en/. Accessed 27.05.2021. 10

1.6 Nightnography

21

nightly lives, I also wanted to experience for myself how low-paid workers suffer because of the physical demands of manual loading all night long with their only tools–their bodies. For 8 months, I was primarily a worker at this night market, and my life was engulfed by my research–I dedicated mind and body to produce fieldnotes mentally and bodily. Whilst my fieldwork trajectory overlapped with my co-­ workers for almost two thirds of 2015, I was up six nights per week sharing the same precarious conditions as them, be they regular E.U. or irregular migrant wo/ men manual workers. I observed the smallest details and documented the monotonous, demanding and–apart from brief moments of interaction–a largely lonely labour process. Irrespective of gender, most of my co-workers represent what Tania Li (2010) conceptualised as ‘disposable lives’ and Sarah Sharma (2014) as ‘expendable bodies’–exhausted by the physical labour and a regime of discipline that sought to extract as much use from the labouring body as possible, only to leave them used and spent. My co-workers resembled migrant fruit and vegetable pickers, not in bending and kneeling in the fields, but in their aching from the back breaking work of loading fruits and vegetables from stands onto pallets, as well as in the way they missed their families, far away in their native lands. As manual workers, their bodies were trapped between hard labour and the consuming experiences of surviving the nightshift on energising beverages, and thus their subjectivities and sociability were expressed less through discourse and more through bodily responses. During my fieldwork, I compiled a series of ethnographic vignettes, which I call ‘body notes’ to stress the role of the body in nightnography. I reproduce these body notes throughout the book, each including a set of details (location, time, daytime sleep hours, distance and duration of the nightshift) that provide the backdrop for the story. This should allow the reader to connect fluidly and smoothly the hyperreal observations to the setting. It is my hope that in this way the text will help transform the reader to become an involved, active participant in the process of analysis, and part of the narrative. Aside from the embodied participant observations and collection of body notes, I recorded conversations and interviews with audio-video tools, wrote field notes and drew sketches by hand every morning following a nightshift. I also used digital self-tracking applications that resulted in soundbites, visual notes for ethnographic films and cybernotes to track changes in my health as well as props in infographics. The digital tools captured micro-aspects of repetitive tasks and their impact on nightshifters’ corporeal experiences. Moreover, the visual methods aided me in engaging with my participants in an on-site photoshoot event. They allowed me to document their activities and participated in a discussion about being nightworkers hidden from mainstream societies. The broader theoretical advantage in using visual aids is to enrich the portfolio of methods to capture most pressing issues for European societies. In addition, between 2017 and 2020, I made a few short visits to the night market to follow-up on a couple of participants who appear in two short films, Nocturnal Lives and Nightshift Spitalfields, which I produced during and after the fieldwork. In this vein, this nightnography is not traditional. It developed through my suffering, about co-workers’ suffering, by which I mean it is predicated on the complex, human struggle of work, based on authentic human experience, no matter how

22

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

devalued and insignificant this labour is perceived to be. Migrant co-workers’ labour is an intimate act of hands passing food to the British consumer, as in the ‘intimate connections between the migrant farmworkers and the rest of the American public’ (Rothenberg, 2000, apud Holmes, 2013a, p. 59). The connection between passing of hands is made of the fruity labour of nightworkers. This ‘passing of food between hands’ becomes their blood and guts’ business to make the fruits and vegetables arrive in the hands of the British consumer (Holmes, 2013a, p. 59). How might we alleviate their social suffering, physical pains, and aches? How can we be more humane towards the last pair of migrant hands nourishing us with fresh fruits and vegetables? This nightnography is neither fully autoethnographic nor only an ethnographic retelling of the challenges of doing nightnography. Yet, it is not a pastiche. Furthermore, experimenting with the limits of nightnography was both insightful and puzzling, due to the scarcity of comparable ethnographic data available on the degrees of intensity between the physical toil of men working as loaders compared to the physical effort of women café servers working all night at this market (see exceptions: Allison, 1994; Basnyat & Schepens, 2001; Holmes, 2013a). The methods that engaged my bodily and cognitive functions (memory in recollecting events) to learn about embodied precarity, had at times worried me, until the morning I decided to end the participant observation phase before it ended me (psychologically, emotionally, physically, and socially). One April morning, after 3 months of being immersed in the lives of my New Spitalfields co-workers, I sat on a rock outside the market and cried, exhausted. By June–July, my body refused to get up and get going in the evenings, and I could anticipate how my lower back pain was going to either worsen or indefinitely injure me if I were to continue for the full year as a participant observer. A change of tactic was needed from me to explore other avenues, i.e., embodying the work of café servers and cashiers working at this market, and this way to prevent myself from collapsing entirely. Thus, I continued participant observation until August without feeling that my body was on the brink of collapse. Yet, the social isolation due to the lack of engagement with the world outside the market was affecting my moods, during and outside of the nightshifts. This book draws from my ‘under the skin’ nightnography to recast invisible migrant nightworkers as important members of the precariat in our contemporary, multi-­ layered, and unequal labour system. My hope throughout this nightnography was that it could somewhat de-invisibilise the sufferings of those entrapped in this post-­ circadian capitalist era.

1.7 The Nightnographer Explained Research in the night does not necessarily mean wiring non-sleepers’ bodies to machines in laboratories to collect sleep (problem) data or measuring melatonin levels to judge the likelihood of cancer risk. Whilst immersed in the field, a nightnographer tries to understand and validate what one’s co-field participants or

1.7  The Nightnographer Explained

23

co-workers say they do from what they actually do through informal conversations and by observing their nightly lives. This is gained via the nightnographer’s bodily interactions and from interactions and chats with others in a particular field site where the researcher is embedded for a length of time, and the research is undertaken at night rather than in the day. At night, an ethnographer collects seemingly useless bits of information, takes notes via a recorder and writes in a notebook. I inscribed notes in my body, deep under-the-skin, in that invaluable information was arrived at via sensorial channels. These included: skin and back pain; homeostasis processes that were triggered in the freezing cold when temperatures dropped and my knees felt dead cold–I shivered badly many hours before and after peak hours of the night shift (midnight to 3:00 am); my physical pains when the skin peeled along my nails; the swollen and white-as-snow colour of my feet from having not been able to breathe for 11 hours in capped boots; my sore legs and feeble knees which would drop at 4:00  am when I would reach the ‘nadir’–the lowest point in our 24 hour biological cycle when the body demands to lay down and mental activity plumets; and my reduced alertness from the increasing lack of sleep, night after night, including the shrinking hours of rest on my only night off each week– Saturdays to Sundays. The skin’s permeability (Molé, 2008) and this thick participant observation offered possibilities to register and sediment suffering deep into my body, i.e., below the skin, and into my bones to gain an intense physically understanding of the sheer suffering that loaders at New Spitalfields experience, some for 360 nights per year, one year after another. Sharing the same living conditions as my co-workers was another experiential way of soaking in the reality of other people’s experiences through the body. I illustrated this in the vignette at the beginning of this chapter. During that time, my body was collecting data via the environment where, for instance, there was a foul smell that lasted for weeks in the toilet, kitchens and other shared areas in the house; where my bed was made-up only of blankets layered on the floor; where there was no time for respite as a roommate was up in the evenings after arriving back from his day job; where the daylight speared through the window shutters; and my regular packing and unpacking of belongings, yet again to move into or out of other accommodation in order to save time travelling to the field site. Would I have not included my body as one of the tools to gather bodily, corporeal data, much of the valuable information on the nightly nightwork lives of migrant labourers would have been lost. This is what a nightnographer does and must feel in order to apprehend the complicated issues of labour migration and the social suffering of migrant bodies. Like many other researchers, I struggle to explain my research to various audiences. The co-participants at the night market have had difficulties in understanding what anthropology is and what an anthropologist does. My position, both as an apprentice anthropologist and as a person sharing Romanian citizenship with some, as well as language (Romanian, Turkish) with most co-workers, was somewhat compromising and complicated. It was compromising because there was an assumption that I would lean towards the Romanians due to our ethnic ties, which was not the case, and because many co-workers did not understand why I, as a doctoral

24

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

student, wanted to swap my life for a ‘[stray15] dog’s life’, as one male co-worker described it. In hindsight, it may explain why some were suspicious of me when telling them that I wanted to write a book about nightwork and consequently, refused to be interviewed. It was complicated because many did not understand what being a doctoral researcher meant. For them, writing up a doctoral thesis meant that I would make money from publishing a book. There were also those who enquired in other ways, wanting to know if I was a ‘man or woman’ doctor. But for much of the time spent among them, I was ‘Doktor’ (my own emphasis on the Turkish spelling of the word ‘doctor’), and all male workers shouted that instead of my name. Being referred to as ‘Doktor’ by my peers triggered certain responses from salespeople and management. Additionally, my presence was questioned and evaluated not only by co-workers, but also by customers, which offered insights into the relations of power, and the suffering that was either caused or spared by the power dynamics of social and workplace hierarchies. For instance, my white skin and multi-language skills attracted, I felt, some approval from the upper echelons in the hierarchy, as well as customers. Retrospectively, I gained access to the field site and later to participants, because I convinced the first employer of my physical strength and the second employer of my Turkish and English language skills–both kinds of assets made me employable as a ‘low-skilled’, manual worker. I was also a native Romanian speaker, which was seen as an asset in a market were a third of the employees were Romanian. Another qualifying criterion was that I was male. At this market, women were not employed to do hard physical labour, but to walk miles on end serving hot drinks and food. Eight months into the fieldwork, when I swapped loading produce for working in a café, third employer was a Kurdish- Turkish café owner. Through my weekly interactions, he was eventually convinced of both my Turkish languages skills and my ability to withstand the nightshift, as well as by the camaraderie that I had built with my co-workers over the previous months. Ultimately, I felt that my co-workers did not value my intellectual aptitudes but judged me upon and later respected me for my physical abilities, which ameliorated my position in the eyes of the 25 strong ‘macho’ male migrants who dominated the heavily masculinised landscape. I have also struggled to explain what I do as a night ethnographer to social scientists outside of the disciplines of anthropology and sociology. When I use terms like ‘racialised’, ‘ethnicised’ and ‘gendered’ labour in my talks to scholars working on migration or migrant health, I see them nodding in approval. Similarly, buzz words like ‘governmentality’ or ‘precarity’ make sense to human geographers and urbanists in the emerging field of night studies (and to researchers in many other disciplines). Nevertheless, when I mention the hard work of ‘schmoozing’, small talk (Driessen & Jansen, 2013) or ‘deep hanging out’, the responses from people outside of anthropology generally range between disagreement and disapproval to complete dismissal. At times, this makes explaining the anthropological approach difficult,  Added by author to emphasise the distinction between a well-fed, cared for house pet and street dog. The co-worker referred to the bereft nightworkers living a ‘dog’s life’, as in the meaning of a stray dog’s life without a carer or means of subsistence. 15

1.7  The Nightnographer Explained

25

though not impossible. To design my nightnography, I drew upon a tradition of bodily ethnography. I invoke this tradition when I explain what I do as a night ethnographer, too. I start with Bronislaw Malinowski’s (2002/1922) book Argonauts of the Western Pacific. It has had a resounding impact on generations of anthropologists and beyond for explaining how reality and experience needs to be observed over long periods of time and cannot be achieved through surveys or computations (2002[1922]: 1–19). While talking about what doing anthropology entails and what ethnographers do, it helps to understand who we are, as diurnals or nocturnal social beings. Further, it means to relativise cultural norms in a self-critical way, and to relay that ‘your own terms of analysis, understanding and judgement are not universal and cannot be taken for granted’ (Engelke, 2017, pp. 16–17). It should be emphasised that in such endeavours, to research human life in the City of London, for example, does not mean ignoring quantitative data or other scientific methods that inquire about the human condition in an objective manner. Rather, it is that such methods may fall short of explaining the deep, subjective experience of being spent, exhausted or how one becomes a disposable body (Li, 2010) from hard labour in a night market owned and managed by a corporation. The work of another pioneer, Marcel Mauss (1935/1973), has been central to my investigation of nightwork and precarious bodies. Mauss (1935/1973, p. 75) points out that the body is the ‘first and most natural tool of man.’ The body expresses individual and collective social actions through physical techniques. Whilst some techniques are acquired through imitating adults and peers and passed down through traditions, others are imposed through explicit social and educational training. For some time, anthropological literature did not extensively explore the theme of bodily knowledge. This changed when Scheper-­Hughes and Lock (1987, p. 29) reminded anthropologists that they possessed a resourceful ‘mindful body’, i.e., they produce data with their bodies–a central premise in their article, which pointed out that a connected mind and body means to have ‘a key to understanding the mindful body, as well as the self, social body, and body politic.’ A mindful body suffers and sediments knowledge accumulated whilst embedded in a field site (Bourdieu, 1990; Wacquant, 2015a). Additionally, Pierre Bourdieu’s work has been essential in my elaboration of this multi-modal approach nightnography—his notion of ‘habitus’ explains behaviour as the sum of past experiences, routinised through bodily actions that are ‘durable, but constantly changing in response to new experiences’ (Bourdieu 1980/1990, p.  113, 1997/2000, p.  161). Andrew Strathern (1996) too insisted that researchers should spare more Body Thoughts in their writings as a mindful approach to the bodies of the people being studied, as well as the body of the researcher. My former experience as a migrant nightworker in the late 1990s in Istanbul, may have influenced the choice of my research topic and may also explain why I resonated with the habitus of nightwork. I hope that the methodological chapter (Chap. 2) in this book will guide readers in critically engaging with different ethnographies that have impacted generations of early-career and senior researchers. Additionally, my experimental approach towards studying nightwork might be a part of a call for new, more advanced

26

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

methods at the intersection of work, ethnicity, and gender, to build a social theory that address vulnerable and marginalised populations inhabiting the night. There are very few monographs on nightwork and even fewer autoethnographic studies on embodied experiences of migration among manual labourers (with the exception of Allison, 1994; Holmes, 2013a). It is my hope that this book will contribute to the development of an anthropology of migrant labour that pays attention to the structural processes that inflict destruction and decay on migrants’ bodies.

1.8 Post-circadian Capitalism In much of the labour migration, migrant health and precarious work discourse, the focus remains on practices pursued in the daylight, and without reference to the embodied experiences of what happens to the bodies of people arriving to work at night in global cities.16 Nonetheless, in today’s capitalism or ‘post-circadian capitalist’ era, as I argue it should be called, 24/7 or round-the-clock work rhythms throb with the lives of migrant workers. Whatever the canvas, post-circadian capitalism dictates how working lives should be reorganised to fit its demands for 24/7 capital gains, especially for people moving across borders to work in global 24/7 cities that never sleep. Thus, nightworkers should act according to this 24/7 demand at their own expense for the triumph of the post-circadian economy. Such individualist view assumes that migrants should deserve their fate as bio-automatons (half-man, half-­ machine), because they chose to migrate for economic reasons, and more so, to work the nightshift. However, little has been contemplated in exploring the discrepancies and disconnects between daytime and nighttime working regimes. Specifically, how the current labour system is traditionally structured for ‘daytime’ work fails to recognise the essential nature of nighttime work to sustain the former, which magnifies the troubling precarity within nighttime work. As a result, this labour system provides an inadequate framework, whereby low paid nightworkers sacrifice their own biological clocks and must hack into their natural circadian rhythms to sustain ever-­ expanding nighttime economies in global cities. Nurses, doctors, pharmaceutical companies working the nightshift are among the precarious workers for the sheer fact that working at night when human bodies generally need to sleep ‘alters exposure to the natural light–dark schedule and disrupts circadian rhythms’ (IARC, 2020, p. 49). This disruption may lead to serious health concerns, such as heightening the risks in developing breast cancer in nightshift workers (IARC, 2020, p. 93). In addition to sharing these health concerns, the needs of those on low paid, precarious jobs with migration-related concerns are also different. This book looks closely at the lowest level of precarity in such a multi-layered, unequal labour system. To illuminate the entangled macro-processes through which this level of precarity gets

16

 See exception (Author Year) full discussions on the migrant health effects.

1.8  Post-circadian Capitalism

27

constituted, and concomitantly the micro-processes through which working lives unfold at this most precarious level of the labour system, the book draws upon different bodies of literature and constructs a unique conceptual apparatus. This is only briefly introduced here as its utilisation for the construction of the argument is outlined in subsequent chapters. As noted earlier, there is universal agreement among social science researchers (and migration scholars in particular) that the people with various ethnic background are forced to inhabit precarious working conditions (Fernández-Reino et al., 2020; Ruhs, 2013; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010), and that migrants in ‘low-skilled’ occupations do ‘knee low’ work as farmworkers in the U.S. (Holmes, 2013a; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016), pluck turkeys and harvest asparagus in Western Europe in normal times and during crisis (Bejan, 2020; Güell & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2020, 2021) and work in the service industries situated in the ‘Global South’ serving customers in the ‘Global North.’ This body of literature enables contextualisation for migrant nightwork, yet with the exception of Sahraoui (2020), Zentai (2020) and Aneesh (2021), most authors have only considered daywork. Of particular relevance are studies that emphasise the importance of ethnicity in accessing the labour market in the host societies, and those that focus on the political, cultural and social practices and gender aspects that shape the working lives of migrants (Garcés-­ Mascareñas & Penninx, 2016a, b; Lafleur & Stanek, 2017). Even the emerging field of night studies has obscured migrant nightwork, till very recently. Here, the exceptions are geographer Rob Shaw (2014, 2022) whose work points out how the U.K. infrastructure industry is heavily reliant on migrant labour; urban media studies scholar Will Straw (2022, p. 103) reels off four nightwork cinematic projections that reveal ‘the exclusion and exploitation to which an immigrant population is subject.’ Further, urban scholars agree that nightworkers are ‘spatially discriminated’ on the basis of night working schedules (Seijas Jaspe, 2020, p. 42), which makes them standalone as ‘invisible denizens’ without access to important daytime activities or nighttime leisure in global cities (Author Year). Rather recently too, nighttime governance and urban policy reports (Acuto et al., 2022; Kolioulis et al., 2021) provide design solutions that address the problems faced by nightworkers commuting, using the public transport and streets to travail at night (Smeds et al., 2020). ‘[F]rom the viewpoint of global labour history, night labour and the spread of 24/7 production and services should not be seen, only and exclusively, as an epiphenomenon of capitalist production, but rather as one of the outcomes of industrial modernity’ that has advanced across political regimes and geographical areas (Duijzings & Dušková, 2022, p. 29). Notwithstanding this important body of work, the lack of migrant nightworkers voices, and their first-hand accounts as the other 9-5ers (Bianchini, 1995) in 24/7 cities is a significant limitation in both migration and night studies, particularly because global cities demand a constant influx of migrant (night)workers (Baldwin, 2012; Kreitzman, 1999; Melbin, 1987; Sharman & Sharman, 2008).

28

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

1.8.1 The Global City and the Problems with Work Global cities never sleep. On the one hand, they have a vibrant nightlife (Schlör, 1998). From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards and on both sides of the Atlantic, electrification made possible the nocturnalisation of cities, i.e., the squeezing of labour and nightlife out of the offices, factories and houses onto lit working spaces and streets. Scholarly literature on the governance of global cities shows that the Evening and Night-Time Economy (ENTE) has been expanding in major cities around the world as an attempt to revitalise city centres after dark (M. Roberts, 2004). They have designated actors to take charge of planning the city at night and managing the nighttime economy and more specifically, the leisurely activities of partying and relaxing from dusk to dawn (Seijas & Gelders, 2020). Valuable insights for understanding the predicament of migrant nightworkers in global cities come from critical studies on the localised mechanisms of exploitation of vulnerable labour (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2004; Rajaram, 2015; Sahraoui, 2020; Uhde & Ezzeddine, 2019); as well as from migration and labour studies, which incorporate notions of discipline, exploitation, rights to decent work and precarity in their analyses (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2015; International Labour Office & Walk Free Foundation, 2017; Author Year; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010; Skrivankova, 2010). While these disciplines do not focus on nightwork, they still provide valuable relevant insights and concepts for examining nightwork. Similarly, it is useful to know that there are studies that help to correct the little debate seen on the centrality of the nighttime maintenance of cities. These scholars acknowledge, for example, how lack of night transport infrastructure negatively affects both hospitality workers as well as tourism at night (Plyushteva, 2018; Shaw, 2014, 2018, 2022; Smeds et  al., 2020). Other scholarly works argue thoroughly that fe/male nightworkers have important roles in connecting global cities or servicing customers across time zones. Yet, these scholars also agree that women in India and South-east Asia are, at the same time, stigmatised by own communities for going out at night to work (Aneesh, 2021; Patel, 2010; Shaw, 2022). On the other hand, global cities host service and nightlife industries that support the nightlife. In the early part of twentieth century, Britain’s industrialised capitalism regimented ‘graveyard’ shift workers in a two and three-shift rotating system for manning the machinery in factories and supporting services and nightlife industries (Author Year; Melbin, 1987; Norman, 2011). The reorganisation of Fordist to post-Fordist wage relations further blurred the boundaries between day and night production. The expansion of nightwork can be seen as a temporal fix, that is, a response to the need to make production and consumption happen 24/7 (Crary, 2013; Harvey, 2007). In global cities, these advancements have led to rapid, continuous multiplication of service and nightlife industries, well beyond the range of industries that have customarily relied on nighttime production, as was the case in the early phases of capitalism. In other words, concomitant with the night being

1.8  Post-circadian Capitalism

29

open for consumption and fun, the nocturnal spaces of production have multiplied, intensified and accelerated, but nightwork research has been eschewed in favour of night life (Shaw, 2022), with its sub-fragmented European-centric topics on developments in entertainment economy (Hollands & Chatterton, 2003), in various European night cultures (Koslofsky, 2011), and lighting strategies to improve nightscapes for night tourism in Europe (Giordano, 2018). Unlike in previous centuries, migrants are working the nightshift to make both day and night sectors of the economy possible. Whilst society sleeps, armies of migrant workers move in the night as a means of earning a meagre living. For Sassen (2005), global cities are key locations in a geography of inequality. These cities are the conjunction points of ‘economic and spatial polarization because of the disproportionate concentration of very high and very low-income jobs’ (Sassen, 2005, p. 31). The manual nightwork that this book focuses on, fall into the second category of ‘low-skilled’ workers in low-income occupations. In labour migration policies, skills are neatly defined into low and high categories and reflect the educational and experience level of average workers in any occupation, thus, depreciating those deemed low skill (Fernández-Reino et  al., 2020). Migrants, like my co-workers, who acquired three or four languages in their multiple migration stops but have no credentials to ‘prove’ this cultural capital, are but one example of inequality reproduced through racialisation and precarisation. Therefore, we must interrogate such categorisations and the purpose that they have been designed for. More, we must redefine these categories that (re-)produce inequalities when applied to selection between low-skilled/worse/undesirable and highly skilled/better/desired migrants, and the closed/opened opportunities they might be confronted with. Further, the criterion behind such taxonomy reflects the inequalities with regards to class and ethnicity. We need to ask, ‘Who decides what skills count?’ and in ‘What kind of occupations?’ As an apprentice loader, I tried very hard to emulate my colleagues, who were lifting five crates of tomatoes (25 kg) at a time and carrying them on one shoulder. I succumbed after several nights. It meant that for a while I only carried three crates (15 kg), which meant I slowed things down. I continued to intensely observe my co-workers’ every movement so that I could improve my performance. The more experienced co-workers lifted the crates without any redundant adjustments, and in less than 10 seconds per manoeuvre. Over the course of a few months of observation and practice, I embodied the repeated movements of grabbing, lifting and loading in a specific order, and respected certain bodily postures–facing the crates sideways, grabbing and lifting with my whole body, from the hips and not relying on arm muscle, moving the hip in line with the shoulders and keeping it under the weight of the load to give me some degree of efficiency and to spare me the unavoidable pains following the nightshift. Invariably, though, I would fall behind my experienced co-­ workers. In this context, the term ‘low-skilled’ is seen as unfairly applied to manual labourers whom I found to be highly skilled in comparison to an unskilled and inexperienced labourer like myself.

30

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

Insights into the types of occupations that require a high demand of migrants, can be found in studies of the nighttime infrastructure of global cities. These include Sassen (2005, 2016) on the strategic role of the janitors in the New York City’s finance district; Patel (2010) on Mumbai’s pink collar night workforce; Norman (2011) on ‘graveyard shifters’ as the backbone of Britain’s industries; Shaw (2014) on British city centre’s street cleaners; Sharma (2014) on night taxi drivers; and Aneesh (2012, 2021, p. 65) on India’s call centres and the work lives organised to fit global processes. Moreover, the internationalisation of capital, which is one of the fundamental aspects of globalisation, happens at the cost of dispossessed populations (Sassen, 2005, p. 83). Migrant nightworkers belong to this category of dispossessed populations, ‘pieces of a production process’ with an essential role in advancing global city economies (Sassen in interview with Aneesh, 2017, p. 132). ‘Invisible denizens’ are nightworkers marginalised by the daytime society and obscured by the darkness in a glocturnal that never sleeps (Author Year). Hence, they are rendered here as invisible or hidden migrants from the social, cultural, and political arenas. Also, to the concern of this book, their invisibility is tied to their denizenship status. These migrant nightworkers are ‘denizens’ who not unlike ‘aliens or strangers’ in the thirteenth-century capitalism have ‘more limited range of rights and weaker entitlement to them than the [local] citizen’ (Standing, 2012, p.  590). Not only that they lost their rights in their countries of birth to practice certain occupations or benefit from safety, but also their contribution is rendered insignificant by comparison to the native-like citizens with whom they share the cities where they live and work (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018). These ‘precarious range of rights’ pertains to denizens who can’t access the cultural space of cities, unable to vote (political), no access to social benefits and healthcare (social) and lack to decent work (Standing, 2012, p. 591). Thus, the advent of the post-circadian capitalism has meant that millions of migrant denizens have been denied their rights to the cities that they maintain 24/7. Finally, this book claims that the ‘glocturnal’ city is the key location of post-­ circadian capitalism. The term ‘glocturnal’ is a portmanteau of ‘global’ and ‘nocturnal’. The term ‘global’ indicates mechanisms, techniques and elements of capitalist development that enable concentration of wealth-power at the top, and the differential distribution of resources and rights among workers. The term ‘nocturnal’ refers to nighttime production, and the lives spent in nightwork so that night revellers and gourmands can enjoy the nightlife. Thus, the term glocturnal incorporates the globalisation dynamics underlined by, on the one hand, investments into infrastructure to support and expand nighttime activities of production and consumption and, on the other hand, disinvestment in the nocturnal experiences of the backstage workers that make the nighttime economy possible. London is the glocturnal city par excellence in Europe and Britain’s engine, the site where both global and nocturnal meet. It is, thus, the ideal location to study the experiences of migrant nightworkers who inhabit the lowest level of precarity of the multi-layered labour system.

1.8  Post-circadian Capitalism

31

1.8.2 Under-the-Skin Precarity In spite of the essential work that they carry out in global cities, nightworkers are subject to a particular kind of precarity insofar as they need to stay alert during the hours when human bodies are supposed to rest, according to physiological circadian rhythms (day/awake  – night/sleep). For many migrants, nightwork represents a more lucrative setting than daytime work, but the cost of their projected financial goals reveals itself in the bodily and social precariousness that they experience because of using their bodies for improved financial prospects. Nightworkers manage to balance income, expenses, and social life, but they pay a large price as nightwork negatively impacts on physical health. In the academia, there is a consensus that this work disrupts the 24-hour biological clock. These disruptions increase the risks for bodily illness and somatic maladjustments due to the lack of nighttime sleep, which is an integral part of the body’s functions (Archer et al., 2014; Arendt, 2010; Boivin & Boudreau, 2014; Costa, 2001, 2006; Roden et  al., 1993). Nightworkers spend long hours commuting at night, experience the lack of safety that darkness instils, endure sleepless days and nights, lack access to day services and suffer of social isolation from mainstream society, which normally functions in the daytime when nightworkers need to sleep. Nightworkers’ precarity is, thus, being amplified through the injustice created by the exclusion from temporal opportunities and social engagements that separate nocturnals from diurnals in a 24/7 society (Soja, 2010). Their precarity is better captured through its conceptualisation as an ontological condition (Butler, 2004, 2015; Lorey & Butler, 2015). Moreover, their precarity is better understood through attention to its embodied dimension. Nevertheless, though many studies recognise this dimension, they approach it in abstract terms, only getting ‘close to the skin’ of the subjects (Allison, 2013; Han, 2018; Molé, 2008, 2010). Apart from the work of Holmes (2013a, b) on the labouring bodies of migrant fruit pickers at the border between the U.S. and Mexico, in the literature the ‘actual presence of living bodies of flesh and blood’ is missing (Wacquant, 1995, p. 65). In contrast, this book builds on an artisan-like approach to fieldwork, as well as theoretical work that emphasises the centrality of the body. I worked nightshifts, sometimes for up to 16 hours, to understand nightworkers’ experiences of precarity through and with the body. As I advanced in my research, I acknowledged aspects of bodily practices that my co-workers learnt and perfected, but which they did not talk about in interviews or during our informal conversations. Additionally, in writing up this embodied experience, I bring into play a theoretical lineage that starts with Mauss’ (1935/1973) work on the body and continues with Bourdieu’s (2000) and Wacquant’s (2015b) work on habitus. Their work enables me to elaborate on the habitus of nightwork precarity. I find this work more useful for understanding the bodily knowledge embedded in workers’ bodies than the oft-­employed Foucauldian discussion of ‘biopower’ that disembodies the mind from the bodies at stake. More importantly, from a migration studies perspective, this work situates itself in conversation with Holmes’ (2013a, b) scholarly contribution in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

32

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

on physical toil, although this work focuses on daytime labour. Here, I take on a meta-level perspective on suffering and embodied anthropological writing in migration for suffering subjects, particularly those migrant bodies travelling for work in Europe.

1.8.3 Fragmentation vs. Cooperation The more I analysed my enacted ethnographic experience, the more I understood how the workers’ bodily capital was organised through repetitive learning processes into ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss, 1935/1973, p. 75). In the context of precarity, bodily capital refers to a set of physical labour skills and knowledge that is acquired through repetitive movements of rhythmic, physical tasks applied to social life (Bourdieu, 2000; Sennett, 2008a, 2012a). Although this bodily capital is constructed and accumulated through manual labour, any individual or collective also applies it to conduct their everyday life outside the workplace. This led to one discovery that I neither anticipated nor constructed, which was that, rather infrequently, workers who mastered physical labour skills engaged in interpersonal cooperation outside the market. I use Sennett’s work to illuminate this discovery. Sennett (1998, 2008b, 2012b) claims that artisans who master physical labour skills inside the workshop can apply them in social settings. The relevant aspects of embodied forms of socialisation investigated in this book are those that involve workers’ trajectories being disrupted from naturally cooperative to socially nurtured competition with one another. My point is that once we understand how the systematic learning and practising of cooperation through physical labour becomes embodied, it should be possible for us to explain the intricate work-based relations among manual labourers. This discovery also made me cautiously approach studies that take ethnicity as the key for understanding migrant working lives (Dahinden, 2016; King, 2020; Larson et al., 1995; Rogaly, 2015; Schinkel, 2018, 2019), as well as those which advise downplaying it (Çaglar & Schiller, 2018). At the beginning of my project, I expected that in-work precarity would unite workers to fight and improve their working conditions. At New Spitalfields, the largest ethnic groups were Turkish nationals (including Turkish-speaking Roma of Bulgarian and Romanian nationality). I planned to compare two (Romanian and Turkish) communities of nightshift workers at the New Spitalfields market to assess the possibilities for solidarity amongst in-group members and between-groups. By weaving in multi-disciplinary literature, this book shows that workers’ subjectivities and socialities can be understood only through attention to the intersection between migration, ethnicity, gender, (bodily) precarity and nightwork, and the ways in which each of these dimensions magnifies the lived experience of the other dimensions. The book captures empathetically what happens at the lowest level of precarity in the labour system by focusing on biographical trajectories, work situations and forms of labour abuse that rest on the vulnerable status of migrants. Moreover, it reveals that any possibilities for cooperation in the workplace between

1.9  Chapter Overviews

33

migrant nightworkers become fragile and secondary to their survival of the nightshift. Further, it elucidates the mechanisms that hinder cohesion between vulnerable groups that are placed on a different temporal axis to the day, that is, from mainstream societies. The book scales up the analysis, moving from the individual level to the structural mechanisms that perpetuate the disregard of nightworkers. These mechanisms are the production of disposability and the production of invisibility. The production of disposability refers to the depletion of bodily resources through physical labour for capital gains. The production of invisibility indicates that nightwork functions as a temporal axis of exclusion under late capitalism. This is not different from the spatial axis of exclusion that renders domestic labour invisible under capitalism (Weeks, 2011). This adds further to these people’s invisibilisation as migrants (Shaw, 2022). This book also argues that these mechanisms are essential to the functioning of post-circadian capitalism. Nocturnal consumption and production are parallel processes of colonising the night in order to create new possibilities for the accumulation of capital (Crary, 2013; Harvey, 2005). As these processes intensified, capitalism transited through the twentieth century from a circadian phase to the post-circadian capitalist rhythms of the twenty-first century. Yet, moving the night frontier further into the daylight has also meant colonising the bodies and lives of the workers of the 24/7 society. Post-circadian capitalism normalises nightwork, but disregards the physiological, social, psychological, and emotional needs of nightworkers. Bodily precarity becomes an essential aspect of the human condition that is subordinated to this new type of capitalism. This book points out that capitalism refuses to recognise, not to mention find solutions for, the problems that nightwork poses, from the lack of decent working conditions to the seizure of private time for self-­development and sociality. Furthermore, capitalism continues to downplay the essential nature of nightwork, cast nightworkers as expendable and force them to inhabit the lowest levels of precarity in the labour system.

1.9 Chapter Overviews The book is primarily organised in stand-alone chapters. My aim is to foreground migrant labourers’ experiences as precarious manual nightworkers in glocturnal cities of the post-circadian capitalist era. This approach is scaffolded on biographical trajectories, work situations and labour abuse of the New Spitalfields migrant co-­ workers. More, the approach opens a window into the ebbs and flows of a traditionally designed daytime labour system that reproduces precariousness of the lowest level when you happen to be a migrant, work at night and in precarious conditions. On the whole, the book demonstrates the migrants’ experiences—of courage, determination, joy, suffering and entrapment, and visibilises their hidden labour, under-­ the-­skin precarity and the bodily experiences of researching nightwork. Thick observations and mental and body notes transcribed in notebooks following each night shift, make the corpus of the conversations, interviews and visual recordings

34

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

used in the book. I am thankful to the co-workers who allowed me to enter their lives and put their real experiences onto the reel. Whilst I ensured to report stories and conversations as close to their actuality as possible, I made sure to change names and places so that I could protect the identity and confidentiality of those involved. Chapter 2 focuses on the experimental nature of nightnography, a method which focuses not only on the labouring bodies of workers, but also of the nightnographer. Nightnography, is a portmanteau of ‘night’ and ‘ethnography’, which I adapted from diurnal anthropology to research the bodily experiences of nightworkers who are otherwise hard to reach by daytime anthropologists. In doing so, I also subvert the dominant diurnal focus in anthropology and centre on the body of the anthropologist researching at night. This ‘situated’ approach is based on what I saw and felt in and through my body as I was exposed to hard labour to understand the deep, under-the-skin nature of migrant worker precarity. The audio-visual tools offer new possibilities for the inclusiveness of this group of migrant nightworkers. In Chap. 3 I elaborate upon how, structurally vulnerable migrants, like those arriving after 2000s from Eastern Europe, have been half-welcome and half-rejected. Their labour power was needed to cover difficult, unwanted night jobs. Yet, they have been derided, if not condemned, for ‘swamping’ the market, as well as the country, and for not quite being fellow humans. I explore the critical significance of understanding the E.U.—U.K. migration, through analysing the effects of racialisation, a form of colonialist logic that rigidly controls borders and impacts negatively on workers. I also focus on the processes by which hierarchies are reproduced and persist through normalisation and invisibility. In this chapter, I lay the theoretical foundation of this study and review literature on relevant topics in migration, such as ‘differential inclusion’, global inequalities, and debates on Saskia Sassen’s notion of the ‘global city’. The unseen (and undocumented) migrant workers within global city sites of polarised employment, have a strategic role in supporting the lives of the affluent corporate executives invested in maintaining a global infrastructure disproportionately located in London, a migrant city. For this reason migrants are half-permitted. Chapter 4 explores first hand, the significance of the intersecting hierarchies that segregate nightworkers at New Spitalfields night market. Corporation of London is at the top of this structural pyramid, as its overarching owner and manager. Analysing each level down, the chapter scrutinises the roles of tenants and trading companies, with its owners and executives on the highest level, and the loaders on the lowest level. These hierarchies are intersected by further hierarchies constituted along the lines of ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender. There are other hierarchies, too— those that oppose the individuals who are in control of their sleep and work time and the individuals who must tame their bodies’ in need for sleep and rest. In this chapter, therefore, I bring to the forefront the role that ethnicised labour has in dis-/forming the experiences of these migrant workers who converge on the grounds of New Spitalfields market as their workplace. I also zoom into the journeys of these migrant workers who internalise a kind of terror that prompts them to obediently execute the orders of the higher-ups, as well as constantly competing with others in the lower paid ranks. This terror results in obedient individualism. In labour migration terms,

1.9  Chapter Overviews

35

the chapter explains how migrant workers learn to tolerate such terror and their meagre existence in many sectors of the economy of global cities. Chapter 5 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 under-researched. 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 (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. Chapter 6 completes the theoretical framework by providing the intellectual premise for an embodied study of precarity and incorporating the empirical material to argue for an anthropology of work within migration studies. This chapter explains how despite the worker’s intuitive knowledge on their body’s limits and capabilities, the lack of decent working conditions and harsh labour discipline results in the kind of precarity that is sedimented deep within the body. Using Bourdieu’s concept of ‘somatic compliance’, the four nightworkers introduced in the previous chapter are analysed to peel back each layer of precarity that these ‘bio-automatons’ experience. The chapter analyses these processes through the notion of habitus of nightwork. Chapter 7 sheds unique light on to the embodied experiences of layered precarity, even if sometimes through agonisingly detailed depictions of the suffering, social dynamics and the unobservable night-by-night physical toil of nightwork. In this chapter, drawing upon my own experience of working in this market, I flesh out the differences between structural precarity and an embodied knowledge of precarity that is deeply ingrained under the skin. I thereby provide the scaffolding for an embodied anthropology in migration. This might influence not only debates in migration studies, but also public opinion and policies in regard to the integration of precarious migrants. Chapter 8 investigates how and what physical skills market workers learn to enact cooperation under the conditions of fierce competition and atomisation. The chapter adjusts Richard Sennett’s sociology on modernity, labour and subjectivity to post-circadian capitalism, urban conditions and migration patterns. Although weak and weakened signs of cooperation emerge during brief moments of disruptions in the labour processes, the chapter proposes a sobering account of how capitalism nurtures competition rather than cooperation. Labourers are so caught up in the physical demands of work that any form of cooperation becomes fragile and secondary to the purpose of surviving the workplace. In other words, migrant nightshift workers do something together, but not with one another.

36

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

Chapter 9 highlights the book’s key findings and its contribution to the debates on the demand for disposable migrants in post-industrial societies, from the glocturnal city as its exemplary site of investigation to the production of disposability and that of invisibility, which combined push nightworkers on the lowest level of precarity in the labour system. This throws light on post-circadian capitalism, foregrounding a temporal axis with which to think about the invisibilisation of certain forms of work, next to the spatial axis already employed to understand a similar process in the case of domestic labour. Chapter 10, the coda, points out that the COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated reflection upon what ‘essential’ work done by migrants means. Yet, the primary designation of frontline daytime labourers as essential, has implicitly cast those who work backstage and through the night as expendable. Thus, even as the pandemic has resulted in some public acknowledgement of the migrants’ contribution to their host societies, in the case of nightworkers, the darkness of night still leaves them out of sight. In this book, I breakdown an embodied tension by tackling the issues faced by half-rejected, half-permitted migrant workers travelling for work and to live in the E.U. This is a compelling issue to uncover, especially because the migrants that I focus on end up doing the most fundamental form of work – feeding a nation, for they travail in the food supply chain in the U.K. – and working at night. As such, they are a hidden population excluded even more than other migrants from the public debates and political agendas. I portray and analyse their lived experiences to understand better how the somatic compliance works in this (as well as in other) sector where these workers learn to tolerate and internalise the kind of terror that turns these bio-automatons (half-humans, half-machines) into obedient individuals. I hope that this book becomes part of the process of unbecoming of workers turned half-machines and written off from the predominant social structures. Equally, I expect that readers of this book will thereafter be more aware of the valuable contribution of such people to the modern capitalist societies. More, I desire that those in higher positions similar to the pecking order described in this book, will be moved in good ways and get motivated in improving or changing for the better working conditions and (immigration) policies that inflect negatively on the lives of those somewhat unfairly classed as unskilled workers. I have faith that the readers will join me for an encounter with workers who travail in the dark, night by night.

References Acuto, M., Seijas, A., McArthur, J., & Robin, E. (2022). Managing cities at night: A practitioner guide to the urban governance of the night-time economy (1st ed.). Bristol University Press. Agustín, L. M. (2007). Sex at the margins: Migration, labour markets and the rescue industry. Zed Books. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-­1425.2010.01274_15.x Ahrens, J., & King, R. (2023). Onward migration and transnationalism: What are the interconnections? In Onward migration and multi-sited transnationalism (pp.  1–22). https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­12503-­4_1

References

37

Ahrens, J., Kelly, M., & van Liempt, I. (2016). Free movement? The onward migration of EU citizens born in Somalia, Iran, and Nigeria. Population, Space and Place, 22(1), 84–98. https:// doi.org/10.1002/PSP.1869 Allison, A. (1994). Nightwork: Pleasure, sexuality and corporate masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. The University of Chicago. Allison, A. (2013). Precarious Japan. Duke University Press. https://studiesonasia.scholasticahq. com/article/14462.pdf. Accessed 31 May 2021. Anderson, B. (2010). Migration, immigration controls and the fashioning of precarious workers. Work, Employment and Society, 24(2), 300–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017010362141 Aneesh, A. (2012). Negotiating globalization: Men and women of India’s call centres. Journal of Social Issues, 68(3), 514–534. Aneesh, A. (2017). ‘Relocating global assemblages’: An interview with Saskia Sassen. Science, Technology and Society, 22(1), 128–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/0971721817694927 Aneesh, A. (2021). Nightly rhythms of global work. Contexts, 20(1), 64–65. https://doi. org/10.1177/1536504221997874 Archer, S.  N., Laing, E.  E., Moller-Levet, C.  S., van der Veen, D.  R., Bucca, G., Lazar, A.  S., et  al. (2014). Mistimed sleep disrupts circadian regulation of the human transcriptome. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(6), E682–E691. https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1316335111 Arendt, J. (2010). Shift work: Coping with the biological clock. Occupational Medicine. https:// doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqp162 Armano, E., Bove, A., & Murgia, A. (Eds.). (2017). Mapping precariousness, labour insecurity and uncertain livelihoods (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315593838 Baldwin, C. P. (2012). In the watches of the night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930. The University of Chicago Press. Accessed 11 Jan 2015. Basnyat, B., & Schepens, B. (2001). The burden of the Himalayan porter [2]. High Altitude Medicine and Biology, 2(2), 315–316. https://doi.org/10.1089/152702901750265431 Bejan, R. (2020). COVID-19 and disposable migrant workers. VerfBlog, 22(April), 1–4. https:// verfassungsblog.de/covid-­19-­and-­disposable-­migrant-­workers/ Berger, J., & Mohr, J. (2010). A seventh man. Verso Books. Bergfeld, M., Milos, J., & Hazeldine, J. (2022). UNI Europa literature review: RETAIN project  – Labour shortages and turnover in industrial cleaning, long-term care and private security. Brussels. https://www.uni-­europa.org/wp-­content/uploads/sites/3/2022/06/Literature-­ review_-­v3.pdf. Accessed 29 Dec 2022. Bianchini, F. (1995). Night cultures, night economies. Planning Practice & Research, 10(2), 121–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459550036667 Boivin, D.  B., & Boudreau, P. (2014). Impacts of shift work on sleep and circadian rhythms. Pathologie Biologie. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patbio.2014.08.001 Bojkov, V. (2004). Neither here, not there: Bulgaria and Romania in current European politics. online.ucpress.edu, 37(4), 509–522. https://online.ucpress.edu/cpcs/article-­abstract/37/ 4/509/715. Accessed 28 Dec 2022. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Standford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF00680104 Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Standford University Press. Broeders, D. (2007). The fight against illegal migration identification policies and immigrants’ counterstrategies. American Behavioral Scientist, 50, 1592–1609. https://doi. org/10.1177/0002764207302470 Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso Books. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press. Çağlar, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2018). Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372011 Caglar, A., & Schiller, N. G. (2018). Migrants & city-making. Duke University Press. Castles, S. (1984). Racism and politics in West Germany. Race & Class, 25(3), 37–51. https://doi. org/10.1177/030639688402500304

38

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

Castles, S. (1995). How nation-states respond to immigration and ethnic diversity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 21(3), 293–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.1995.9976493 Clough Marinaro, I., & Sigona, N. (2011). Anti-Gypsyism and the politics of exclusion: Roma and Sinti in contemporary Italy. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16(5), 583–589. https://doi. org/10.1080/1354571X.2011.622467 Collyer, M. (2007). In-between places: Trans-Saharan transit migrants in Morocco and the fragmented journey to Europe. Antipode, 39(4), 668–690. https://doi. org/10.1111/J.1467-­8330.2007.00546.X Collyer, M., & de Haas, H. (2012). Developing dynamic categorisations of transit migration. Population, Space and Place, 18(4), 468–481. https://doi.org/10.1002/PSP.635 Collyer, M., Düvell, F., & de Haas, H. (2012). Critical approaches to transit migration. Population, Space and Place, 18(4), 407–414. https://doi.org/10.1002/PSP.630 Costa, G. (2001). The 24-hour society between myth and reality. Journal of human ergology, 30(1–2), 15–20. Costa, G. (2006). Flexibility of working hours in the 24-hour society. Medicina del Lavoro, 97, 280–287. Cowley, U. (2001). The men who built Britain: A history of the Irish Navvy. Wolfhound Press. http://ultancowley.com/wp/the-­men-­who-­built-­britain-­a-­history-­of-­the-­irish-­navvy/. Accessed 22 Jan 2023. Cowley, U. (2004). The men who built Britain: A history of the Irish Navvy. Wolfhound Press. Accessed 22 Jan 2023. Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late capitalism and the end of sleep. Verso Books. Dahinden, J. (2016). A plea for the ‘de-migranticization’ of research on migration and integration. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(13), 2207–2225. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1124129 de Genova, N. (2018). The “migrant crisis” as racial crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(10), 1765–1782. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1361543 de Genova, N. (n.d.). Rebordering “the People” notes on theorizing populism. read.dukeupress. edu. https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-­atlantic-­quarterly/article-­abstract/117/2/357/134016. Accessed 28 Dec 2022. de Genova, N., & Roy, A. (2020). Practices of illegalisation. Antipode, 52(2), 352–364. https://doi. org/10.1111/ANTI.12602 Driessen, H., & Jansen, W. (2013). The Hard work of small talk. Journal of Anthropological Research, 69, 249–263. http://www.narcis.nl/publication/RecordID/oai%3Arepository.ubn. ru.nl%3A2066%2F84769 Duijzings, G., & Dušková, L. (Eds.). (2022). Working At Night. De Gruyter. https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110753592 Duvivier, T., Sithole, S., Poolman, M., Durio, K., & MacQuarie, J.-C. (2020). Sustaining our nightlife scenes: Support models for nightlife industry workers, individuals, and vulnerable populations. In M. Fichman, R. Foster, L. Leichsenring, M. Milan, D. Raiselis, A. Seijas, & J. Yuan (Eds.), Nighttime.org (1st ed.) www.nighttime.org/recoveryplan. Accessed 29 Dec 2022. Ehrenreich, B. (2011). Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America. Henry Holt. Ehrenreich, B., & Hochschild, A.  R. (2004). Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy. Macmillan. (A. R. Ehrenreich, & B., Hochschild, Eds.). Henry Holt and Company. Engelke, M. (2017). Think Like an Anthropologist. Pelican. Accessed 4 June 2021. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. (2015). Severe labour exploitation: Workers moving within or into the European Union. States’ Obligations and Victims’ Rights. Vienna. https://doi.org/10.2811/342416 Fernández-Reino, M., Sumption, M., & Vargas-Silva, C. (2020). From low-skilled to key workers: The implications of emergencies for immigration policy. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 36, 382–396. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/graa016 Fuentes, A., & Ehrenreich, B. (2000). Women in the global factory. In J. Spradley & D. W. McCurdy (Eds.), Conformity and conflict: Readings in cultural anthropology (pp.  164–171). Allyn & Bacon.

References

39

Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2010). Legal production of illegality in a comparative perspective. The cases of Malaysia and Spain. Asia Europe Journal, 8(1), 77–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10308-­010-­0249-­8 Garcés-Mascareñas, B., & Penninx, R. (2016a). Introduction: Integration as a three-way process approach? In Integration processes and policies in Europe, IMISCOE research series (pp. 1–9). Springer Science and Business Media B.V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21674-4_1 Garcés-Mascareñas, B., & Penninx, R. (2016b). Integration processes and policies in Europe: Contexts, level and actors. Springer Science and Business Media B.V.  https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-21674-4. Accessed 30 May 2021. Giordano, E. (2018). Outdoor lighting design as a tool for tourist development: The case of Valladolid. European Planning Studies, 26(1), 55–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/0965431 3.2017.1368457 Gonlin, N. (2022). Ancient maya nights. Anthropology News, 3–8. https://www.anthropology-­­ news.org. Accessed 29 Dec 2022. Güell, B., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2020). Agricultural seasonal workers in times of Covid-19 in Spain (No. 3.3). Barcelona. Güell, B., & Garcés-mascareñas, B. (2021). The advancing alternative migration governance agricultural seasonal workers in times of Covid-19 in Spain D3. 3 Paper country cases: Spain Berta Güell and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, (February). Hall, D. (2017). Introduction. On borders and fairness. In D. Hall (Ed.), Fair Borders? Migration policy in the twenty-first century (pp. 7–25). Bridget William Books. Hall, S. (2021). The migrant’s paradox: Street livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain (1st ed.). University of Minnesota Press. Accessed 28 Dec 2022. Han, C. (2018). Precarity, precariousness, and vulnerability. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47(1), 331–343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-­anthro-­102116-­041644 Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2007). Neo-liberalism as creative destruction. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(21), 22–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-­3684.2006.00211.x Hepworth, K. (2012). Abject citizens: Italian ‘Nomad Emergencies’ and the deportability of Romanian Roma. Citizenship Studies, 16(3–4), 431–449. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362102 5.2012.683256 Hollands, R., & Chatterton, P. (2003). Producing nightlife in the new urban entertainment economy: corporatization, branding and market segmentation. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(2), 361–385. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-­2427.00453 Holmes, S. M. (2013a). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States (1st ed.). University of California Press. Holmes, S.  M. (2013b). “Is it worth risking your life?”: Ethnography, risk and death on the U.S.-Mexico border. Social Science and Medicine, 99, 153–161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2013.05.029 Holmes, S. M., & Castañeda, H. (2016). Representing the “European refugee crisis” in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death. American Ethnologist, 43(1), 12–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12259 IARC, Monographs 124. (2020). Night shift work. Lyon. https://publications.iarc.fr/593. Accessed 23 Jan 2023. ILO. (1990). Night work convention, No. 171(C171). https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=N ORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312316. Accessed 23 Jan 2023. International Labour Office, & Walk Free Foundation. (2017). Global estimates of modern slavery. Geneva. Israel, J. (1997). Conflicts of empires Spain: The low countries and the struggle for world supremacy (1585–1713). (J. Israel, Ed.). The Hambledon Press. King, R. (2012). Theories and typologies of migration: An overview and a primer. Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, 3(12), 3–43. www. bit.mah.se/MUEP

40

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

King, R. (2020). On migration, geography, and epistemic communities. Comparative Migration Studies, 8(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-­020-­00193-­2 Kóczé, A. (2017). Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race. Nation and Culture Race, migration and neoliberalism: distorted notions of Romani migration in European public discourses. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1335827 Kolioulis, A., Siravo, J., Apostolidis, P., Kummer-Buléon, C., Matheou, L., & Campani, C. (2021). Working nights: Municipal strategies for nocturnal workers. London. https://autonomy.work/ portfolio/workingnights/. Accessed 29 Dec 2022. Koslofsky, C. (2011). Evening’s empire: A history of the night in early modern Europe. Cambridge University Press. Accessed 31 May 2021. Kreitzman, L. (1999). The 24-hour society. Profile Books. Kubo, T., Muramatsu, K., Fujino, Y., Hayashida, K., & Matsuda, S. (2013). International comparison of the definition of night work – promoting health care of shift workers. Journal of University of Occupational and Environmental Health, 35, 163–168. https://doi.org/10.7888/ juoeh.35.163 Lafleur, J.-M., & Stanek, M. (2017). EU migration and the economic crisis: Concepts and issues (pp. 1–14). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­39763-­4_1 Laoire, C.  N. (2008). Complicating host-newcomer dualisms: Irish return migrants as home-­ comers or newcomers? Translocations: Migration and Social Change, 4(1), 35–50. http://hdl. handle.net/10468/5527. Accessed 22 Jan 2023. Larson, B., Harris, O., & Tandeter, E. (Eds.). (1995). Ethnicity, markets and migration in the andes: At the crossroads of history and anthropology (1st ed.). Duke University PRess. Li, T. M. (2010). To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations. Antipode, 41, 66–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­8330.2009.00717.x Long, K. (2014). The huddled masses: Immigration and inequality (Kindle Single.). Thistle Publishing. https://www.amazon.com/Huddled-­Masses-­Immigration-­Inequality-­Kindle-­ ebook/dp/B00QKG351Y. Accessed 1 June 2021. Lopes, A., & Hall, T. (2015). Organising migrant workers: The living wage campaign at the University of East London. Industrial Relations Journal, 46(3), 208–221. Lorey, I., & Butler, J. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Verso Books. Accessed 31 May 2021. Mădroane, I. D. (2012). Roma, Romanian, European: A media framed battle over identity. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, 5(2). Macarie, I. D. (2014). Half-In, Half-Out: Roma and Non-Roma Romanians with Limited Rights Working and Travelling in the European Union. INTEGRIM Online Papers 8. https://bit. ly/1fzVoFu. Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88. https://doi. org/10.1080/03085147300000003 McAuliffe, M., & Triandafyllidou, A. (2021). World migration report 2022. United Nations. McElroy, E. (2020). Digital nomads in siliconising Cluj: Material and allegorical double dispossession. Urban Studies, 57(15), 3078–3094. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019847448 Melbin, M. (1987). Night as frontier: Colonizing the world after dark. Free Press. Mezzadra, S., & Nielson, B. (2013). Border as method or the multiplication of labor. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13398-­014-­0173-­7.2 Molé, N. J. (2008). Living it on the skin: Italian states, working illness. American Ethnologist, 35(2), 189–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2008.1548-­1425.00030.x Molé, N. J. (2010). Precarious subjects: Anticipating neoliberalism in northern Italy’s workplace. American Anthropologist, 112(1), 38–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-­1433.2009.01195.x Norman, W. (2011). Rough nights. The Young Foundation, March, 1–34. O’Carroll, L. (2022). Romanian fruit pickers flown to UK amid crisis in farming sector. The Guardian. Online at: https://bit.ly/Romanians_in_farming_sector_Guardian. Accessed 2 Aug 2023.

References

41

O’Reilly, K. (2023). Migration theories. In A.  Triandafyllidou (Ed.), Routledge handbook of immigration and refugee studies (2nd ed., pp.  3–12). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.432 4/9781003194316-­2 Official Journal of the European Union. (2003). Directive 2003/88/EC: Organisation of working time. Brussels. Paris, A. (2022). 2 “… working night and day” working at night as a Metaphor in Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians. In Working at night (pp.  23–42). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/1 0.1515/9783110753592-­002 Patel, R. (2010). Working the night shift: Women’s employment in the transnational call center industry. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (1st ed.). Stanford University Press. Paul, A.  M. (2018). Stepwise international migration: A multistage migration pattern for the aspiring migrant. American Journal of Sociology, 116(6), 1842–1886. https://doi.org/ 10.1086/659641 Penninx, R., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2016). Integration policies of European cities in comparative perspective: structural convergence and substantial differentiation. Migracijske i etničke teme / Migration and Ethnic Themes, 32(2), 155–189. https://doi.org/10.11567/met.32.2.1 Plyushteva, A. (2018). Commuting and the urban night: Nocturnal mobilities in tourism and hospitality work. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, 11(3), 407–421. https:// doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2018.1556673 Rajaram, P.  K. (2015). Common marginalizations: Neoliberalism, undocumented migrants and other surplus populations. Migration, Mobility, & Displacement, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.18357/ mmd11201513288 Ratzmann, N., & Sahraoui, N. (2021). Introduction: The (un)deserving migrant? Street-level bordering practices and deservingness in access to social services. Social Policy and Society, 20(3), 436–439. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746421000129 Roberts, M. (2004). Good practice in managing the evening and late night economy: A literature review from an environmental perspective. Policy, (September). Roberts, R. (2023). ‘Somehow I’m an expat and he’s a migrant’: Intersectional identities, multiple migrations and family decision-making amongst middling migrant couples. In IMISCOE research series (pp. 139–157). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­12503-­4_7 Roden, M., Koller, M., Pirich, K., Vierhapper, H., & Waldhauser, F. (1993). The circadian melatonin and cortisol secretion pattern in permanent night shift workers. The American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, 265(1), R261–R267. Rogaly, B. (2015). Disrupting migration stories: Reading life histories through the lens of mobility and fixity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(3), 528–544. https://doi. org/10.1068/d13171p Rothenberg, D. (2000). With these hands: The hidden world of migrant farmworkers today. University of California Press. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520227347/with-thesehands. Accessed 23 January 2023 Ruhs, M. (2013). The price of rights: Regulating international labor migration. Princeton University Press. Accessed 1 June 2021. Ruhs, M., & Anderson, B. (2010). Migrant workers: Who needs them? A framework for the analysis of staff shortages, immigration, and public policy. In Who needs migrant workers?: Labour shortages, immigration, and public policy (pp. 15–53). Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580590.003.0002 Sahraoui, N. (2020). From everyday racist incidents at work to institutional racism: Migrant and minority-ethnic workers’ experiences in older-age care. In IMISCOE research series (pp. 81–99). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­25089-­8_5 Sandhu, S. (2007). Night haunts: A journey through the London night. http://resque.favstar.fm/3ejmk4f1arpx/19-­melyssa-­johnston/night-­haunts-­a-­journey-­through-­the-­london-­ night-­9781844676552-­n.pdf. Accessed 30 Dec 2022. Sassen, S. (2005). The global city: Introducing a concept. The Brown Journal of World Affairs, XI(2), 27–40. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/16787/

42

1  Introduction: Invisible Migrants

Sassen, S. (2016). The global city: Enabling economic intermediation and bearing its costs. City and Community, 15(2), 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12175 Sassen, S. (2017). Predatory formations dressed in wall street suits and algorithmic math. Science, Technology and Society, 1(2017), 0971721816682783. https://doi. org/10.1177/0971721816682783 Scheper-Hughes, A. N., & Lock, M. M. (1987). The mindful body: A prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology. Medical Anthropological Quarterly, 1(1), 6–41. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/648769 Schinkel, W. (2018). Against ‘immigrant integration’: For an end to neocolonial knowledge production. Comparative Migration Studies, 6(1), 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-­018-­0095-­1 Schinkel, W. (2019). Migration studies: An imposition. Comparative Migration Studies, 7(1), 32. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-­019-­0136-­4 Schlör, J. (1998). Nights in the big city: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930 (Topographics). Reaktion Books. Schor, J. (2020). After the gig. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520 974227 Schweitzer, R. (2020). How inclusive institutions enforce exclusive immigration rules: Mainstream public service provision and the implementation of a hostile environment for irregular migrants living in Britain. In IMISCOE research series (pp. 121–140). Springer Science and Business Media B.V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­25089-­8_7 Schweitzer, R. (2022). Micro-management of irregular migration. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­91731-­9 Segrave, M. (2019). Theorizing sites and strategies of differential inclusion: Unlawful migrant workers in Australia. Theoretical Criminology, 23(2), 194–210. https://doi. org/10.1177/1362480619827527 Seijas, A., & Gelders, M.  M. (2020). Governing the night-time city: The rise of night mayors as a new form of urban governance after dark. Urban Studies, 58(2), 316–334. https://doi. org/10.1177/0042098019895224 Seijas Jaspe, A. (2020). Governing the urban night: Understanding the shifting dynamics of night-­ time governance in three global cities. (Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Design). Available in https://www.proquest.com/ docview/2477871266/ Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism (1st ed.). W.W. Norton & Co. Accessed 9 June 2021. Sennett, R. (2008a). The craftsman. Allen Lane. Yale University Press. Sennett, R. (2008b). The craftsman. Allen Lane. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&btnG= Search&q=intitle:The+Craftsman#2 Sennett, R. (2012a). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation (1st ed.). Yale University Press. Accessed 9 June 2021. Sennett, R. (2012b). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of co-operation. Aging (Vol. 7). Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke Universtiy Press. Sharman, R. L., & Sharman, C. H. (2008). Nightshift NYC. University of California Press. Shaw, R. (2014). Cleaning up the streets: Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s night-time neighbourhood services team. In S. Graham & C. McFarlane (Eds.), Infrastructural lives: Urban infrastructure in context (pp. 174–196). Routledge. http://www.routledge.com/9780415748537. Accessed 30 May 2021. Shaw, R. (2018). The nocturnal city. Routledge. Shaw, R. (2022). Geographies of night work. Progress in Human Geography, 46(5), 1149–1164. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325221107638 Sigona, N. (2010). “Gypsies out of italy!” social exclusion and racial discrimination of roma and sinti in Italy. Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe, 143–157. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203859636­24/GYPSIES-­ITALY-­SOCIAL-­EXCLUSION-­RACIAL-­DISCRIMINATION-­ROMA-­SINTI-­ ITALY-­NANDO-­SIGONA

References

43

Sigona, N., Brembilla, L., Colacicchi, P., Daniele, U., Monasta, L., Pierro, B., et  al. (2008). The “latest” public enemy: Romanian Roma in Italy. www.osservazione.org. Accessed 29 Dec 2022. Skrivankova, K. (2010). Between decent work and forced labour: Examining the continuum of exploitation. London. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHOM-­09-­2016-­0165 Smeds, E., Robin, E., & McArthur, J. (2020). Night-time mobilities and (in)justice in London: Constructing mobile subjects and the politics of difference in policy-making. Journal of Transport Geography, 82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2019.102569 Soja, E. W. (2010). Seeking spatial justice. University of Minnesota Press. Accessed 31 May 2021. Standing, G. (2012). The precariat: From denizens to citizens? Polity, 44(4), 588–608. https://doi. org/10.1057/pol.2012.15 Strathern, A.. (1996). Body thoughts. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Straw, W. (2022). Urban labor and the cinematic nocturne. In The Routledge companion to media and the city (pp. 100–108). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003007678-­11 Sumption, M., & Somerville, W. (2010). The UK’s new europeans: Progress and challenges five after accession. Manchester. Taylor, C. (2011). Londoners: The days and nights of London now-as told by those who love it, hate it, live it, left it and long for it. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=NqcNoAl jD8AC&oi=fnd&pg=PT5&dq=craig+taylor+2011+londoners&ots=e2ew6ijpno&sig=iH68Bd cFl2StZ2-­ryNkk0WH-­C6Q. Accessed 30 Dec 2022. Tyagi, M. (2017). Theory of Indian diaspora: Dynamics of global migration. Horizon Books. https://horizonbooks.asia/buy-­b ooks/theory-­o f-­i ndian-­d iaspora-­d ynamics-­o f-­g lobal-­ migration/. Accessed 29 Dec 2022. Uhde, Z., & Ezzeddine, P. (2019). Transnational migration: Borders, gender and global justice challenges. ceeol.com, 20(1), 3–17. https://www.ceeol.com/content-­files/document-­812192. pdf. Accessed 30 May 2021. van Heelsum, A., Garcés-Mascareñas, B., van Heelsum, A., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2013). Migration and integration research: Filling in Penninx’s Heuristic Model. Amsterdam University Press. http://dare.uva.nl/aup/en/record/448168 van Liempt, I. (2011). ‘And then one day they all moved to Leicester’: The relocation of Somalis from the Netherlands to the UK explained. Population, Space and Place, 17(3), 254–266. https://doi.org/10.1002/PSP.605 Verstraete, G. (2010). Tracking Europe: Mobility, diaspora, and the politics of location. Duke University Press. Accessed 1 June 2021. Vincze, E., Petrovici, N., Raț, C., & Picker, G. (Eds.). (2019). Racialized labour in Romania. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­76273-­9 Wacquant, L. (1995). Pugs at work: Bodily capital and bodily labour among proffesional boxers. Body & Society, 1(1), 65–93. Wacquant, L. J. D. (2015a). For a sociology of flesh and blood. Qualitative Sociology, 38(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-­014-­9291-­y Wacquant, L. (2015b). For a sociology of flesh and blood. Qualitative Sociology, 38(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-­014-­9291-­y Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world-system: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/j. ctt1pnrj9.16.pdf. Accessed 28 Dec 2022. Weeks, K. (2011). The problem with work: Feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-­problem-­with-­work. Accessed 31 May 2021. Zentai, V. (2020). Conclusions: perspectives and puzzles in researching politics of (dis)integration. In R. Schweitzer, & S. Hinger (Eds.), (pp. 201–217). Springer International Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­25089-­8_11

Chapter 2

Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

The 16 gates of the New Spitalfields main market hall are widely open in the night. The cold wind ebbs and flows through these gigantic metal gates, leaving nightworkers with few options to escape the chill. Male loaders carry tonnes of produce on their bodies, forklift drivers transport thousands of pallets, and women servers walk thousands of miles on foot between the café and market stands and lorries or customers’ vans parked throughout the market. Some nightshifts at New Spitalfields fruit and vegetables warehouse are quiet. In these moments, whilst waiting for customers’ orders to arrive, workers shelter between the aisles, climb on banana, ginger or garlic boxes warm with the heat produced during fermentation, place their hands on the heated metal frame of the forklift engine or sip warm coffee and ‘special mix’ (Redbull mixed with whiskey). The silence of the usually clangourous space is heightened by fear and seething anger. Loaders wait, expecting orders that do not come because of some slowdown in the delivery chain. Business owners suffer losses and this is enough to amplify worries among workers acutely aware of their expendable existence. Workers are summoned at the end of their extensive hours long shifts. ‘Arkadaşlar’ (‘friends’ in Turkish), the manager addresses us, ‘If you do not change into faster workers, I will replace you! You are out! I can replace you very easily because every night men with forklift driving and manual skills alike are coming to ask for work, every evening!’ On other nights, business is brisk. The dark becomes floodlit as the hustle and bustle of daytime worries dims beneath humming voices and the rumble of forklift engines. Thursday nights, for instance, are always frantic because hundreds of grocers descend on the market to stock up on produce to cover the weekend trade. The orders come in thick and fast, the rhythms intensify and people shout at one another, swearing loudly. Forklift drivers honk their horns and the screech of brakes punctuates the nightshift soundscape. On these occasions, New Spitalfields resembles pandemonium as people rush about, bumping into one another. Loaders and drivers sweat heavily, discarding a couple of layers of clothes even before the gates open. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_2

45

46

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

At midnight, when the wholesale customers and public rush through the gates, a long trail of forklifts and vans begin to zoom in and out of the market. As customers park their vehicles and quickly walk to their preferred grocery stands, the loaders bend and lift boxes, constantly on the move. Workers learn to rapidly respond to the intensity of requests rushing around them. With bodily movements−walking faster or running, to think of shortcuts to reach the produce and ways of placing them onto pallets. The loaders learn techniques to enable them to lift more crates and more sacks at a time. For example, tomatoes are sold in 5 kg crates and sell very fast. On a nightly basis, loaders carry thousands of crates of tomatoes – one customer could order up to 128 crates in addition to more than 200 other items. Thus, loaders need to move quickly. At 9 am their night(mare) ends. Bodies trickle out of the 31-acre site of the New Spitalfields market. They disappear inside cars, buses and into underground carriages. As the nadir point approaches  – the lowest point in the biological, circadian rhythms  – bodies are exhausted and spent. Yet, these workers need these jobs to survive and so refuel their minds and bodies with energizing drinks to keep themselves going. Male loaders continue to grab, lift, turn and throw pallets to the ground. They jostle paper potato sacks on their backs, carry cardboard boxes of cassava, crates of apples and bags of red onions, which male traders spend the entire night selling. Female café servers hand out ‘special mix’ and hot food to their male colleagues, collect the empty glass mugs lying on the floor and briskly walk back to the café. Imran, one of the workers, refers to the men and women who work at this market as ‘dead’, yet continuing to work and move. Loaders toil and sweat night in, night out as they as they transport, coordinate and examine produce. The nightly exhaustion intrudes upon their social lives and permeates their private existence. Like a double-edge sword, for many, nighttime work represents the most lucrative way to support their families, however, the price nightworkers pay is felt in their bodies and culminates in being spent and used up. Without access to equal opportunity, which would allow them to demonstrate their skills in other ways and towards other forms of work, the fate of these migrant nightworkers has to some degree been decided. Having to accept this, they adjust to the aches, pains and blisters of this nightwork, only to become within a few years what Imran calls, ‘dead women and men walking’. I became a night researcher to reach out to nightworkers. I found out that we are not night creatures, yet that some of us must do the ‘graveyard shift’. The fieldwork was my level playing field, and although it overlapped with the loaders and café server’s nighttime work for only a brief time, it gave me the opportunity to understand why (i.e., forces of globalisation, global city, nighttime) and how (i.e., extraction of capital from the labouring bodies) migrants forced to enter nighttime work become bio-automatons  – half-machines, half-humans. I also sought to further understand the economic and social facets of migrant labour and bodily precarity through what anthropologists call being ‘immersed in the field’. My co-workers at New Spitalfields offered me the opportunity to enter their lives at work, and some invited me to into their lives outside of work – to meet their families and celebrate important milestones that they have achieved. I am grateful to my co-workers for

2.1 Nightnography

47

sharing their lived experiences as precarious migrant labourers. To be able to step into their shoes on the treacherous frontier between night and day, I needed to forgo my familiar diurnal rhythms and routines and dedicate my ‘mindful body’ (Scheper-­ Hughes & Lock, 1987) to doing nocturnal fieldwork – the distinct characteristic of nightnography. This unconventional ethnography provides a meta-level perspective into a mode of labouring that has so far only been sketched by previous scholarship in migration and emerging fields of night studies. My hope is that, as an insider of a world that is invisible and hard to access for ethnographers (whom usually research by day), my study will contribute to these fields by adding an embodied dimension to an anthropology of migrant labour.

2.1 Nightnography The night people are those that dig what’s happening and are not afraid to show their enthusiasm… welcome aboard!1

Ethnography is in-person observation and participation. Traditionally, anthropologists have conducted ethnography during the daytime, retired at night to sleep or process information and continued fieldwork the next morning. In contrast, nightnography means to research an antithetic mode of life and the activities associated with it that are not accessible by day, requiring from the anthropologist a denser, deeper mode of engagement. As a nightnographer, I also made ‘shifts of perspective’ that enabled me to contribute to an Anthropology of the Night (Galinier et al., 2010). Instead of the more familiar characters of night revellers, I looked at less visible individuals who spend their nights at work, involved in repetitive, lonely labour processes. I chose to study the less romanticised nightlife aspects and peer into the hidden corners of ‘legitimate lives’ kept in the dark (Galinier et al. 2010, p. 838). Further, instead of more commonly investigated events such as rituals and festivals, which happen within a particular period of the night (Galinier et al. 2010), I focused on a continuous activity, that of food provisioning. Food production, processing, distribution and consumption is a 24/7 activity, but the loading and delivery of food to supermarkets happens mostly during the night. Consequently, the processes and the people involved in loading and delivering food at night remain invisible from the eyes and minds of those simply purchasing or consuming food products. As a nightnographer researching food provisioning, I was up and working all night, immersing myself in this reality when most of society sleeps. Yet, this nightnography does not replace, but complements, the past and present legacies of diurnal ethnography that are the dominant points of reference in anthropological research.

 Personal letter to Prof Will Straw, McGill University, author of Media and the Night: Routledge Companion, written by the ‘leader of the night people in Buffalo’, Kevin O’Connell, WYSL AM/ FM Radio Buffalo, The McLendon Stations, February 1970. 1

48

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

In the process of making sense of a nocturnal landscape as a researcher, I often shifted from being a ‘participant observer’ to being an ‘observant participant’. I use these terms to indicate degrees of proximity to a world in which one is witnessing either by actively participating as a detached observer (participant observer) or by being an involved observer whilst participating less (or not at all) in activities (observant participant). The level and depth of engagement in the field indicates the degrees to which one is more of a participant than an observer (and conversely). The shift between the two required not only that I switched from the mode of day to night to research this community of workers, but that I also used my bodily knowledge and the mind’s ability to make an ‘epistemic shift’ beyond the ‘front stage’ that respondents, at first, use to protect their nightly lives from ‘day outsiders’ like me (Goffman, 1956). However, when immersed in an empirical reality, clear separations are hard to draw. Hence, the shifts between participant observer and observant participant indicate only degrees of the tension between being a deep and thickly immersed participant sharing the experiences and that of an involved, yet uncommitted observer. This tension is negotiated by the ethnographer when moving closer to conduct an interview, witness intimate activities or wait for a window of opportunity to open a sensitive topic for deep discussion. In real case scenarios, the ethnographer decides the best course of action depending on their fieldwork experience and what is permissible and consented to by participants Ultimately, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1987, p. 419) argues, the ‘witnesses are accountable for what they see and fail to see, how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations’.

2.2 Autoethnography: A Migrant, Apprentice and Nightnographer Autoethnography is not autobiography, though it involves biographical milestones and trajectories. Autoethnography originates at the junction between ethnographer’s encountering of others’ lived experiences as they are encountered during fieldwork. In the space between the personal and the ‘other’, experience-led knowledge is born and then laced into the ethnographic writing, film or audio-waves, which the ethnographic researcher crafts and produces. Unlike more objectively narrated accounts, autoethnographic writing invites its readers ‘to feel the truth of their stories and to become coparticipants, engaging the storyline, morally, emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 745). The autoethnography presented in this book integrates my own experiences of being emplaced in the nocturnal landscape of the New Spitalfields market in London along with the experiences of the full-time migrant nightworkers at this market, and also draws upon some of my former experiences as a migrant worker in Istanbul in the 1990s. I now write this autoethnographic account in order to make a contribution to a better understanding of the researchers’ role when portraying the lives of migrants in writing, film or through digital means  – that is, away from a more dichotomous dynamic (e.g.,

2.2  Autoethnography: A Migrant, Apprentice and Nightnographer

49

‘villain’ or ‘hero’), and towards integrative portrayals that more accurately depict the lived reality that migrant labourers face on a day-to-day or night-by-night basis. Although I trained as an anthropologist and gained much practical experience under supervision, I still faced difficulties in the fieldwork that I present in this book. Despite my best preparation, there were specific challenges in researching the nightwork of migrants living in precarity that I did not entirely anticipate. This autoethnography was undertaken through bodily participation and the challenges came from directly experiencing myself the the lived physicality of the nightworkers lives. The sheer difficulty of both the work and the work environment required me to have a reflexive awareness in order to not only viscerally learn what my co-­ workers and I were required to undertake in this work, but then to somehow also accurately express this in writing. Additionally, practicing this autoethnography significantly required my ‘emotional participation’ (Hage, 2009, p.  71), as I often shared both the anger and disdain felt by my co-workers with them. Our experiences were strengthened by this and frequently blurred the boundaries between them and me. At times, this ‘emotional participation’ is preserved in the text. In the words of Hage (2009, p. 76), these are ‘emotions that I captured analytically’, which refers to the negotiation required between keeping the emotions raw whilst also identifying ways to categorise them according to an emerging analytical theme. Negotiating between what one feels and what one must do for the analysis does not need involve suppressing emotions, but instead a delicate balancing of what one observes with the emotional heart with the analytical mind. For this, I was able to draw upon what I learnt and practiced as a former trainee in Psychodynamics of Human Development at Birkbeck College, London, as well as my practice as a graduate mental health worker2 (e.g., develop a non-judgmental approach, paraphrase to clarify participants’ statements, and synthesise). This emotional participation transpires best in Chaps. 5, 6, and 7, through the interactions documented from the working group between the foreman, other co-workers and myself. Through the analysis, my aim is to bridge emotions and sensations with analytical categories. It has also been to illuminate the research topic of migrant nightworkers’ experiences through demonstrating the lived components of the ethnography undertaken for it (e.g., the site, people, interpersonal connections, emotional transactions and physical actions). One of my objectives through the ethnographic writing of this book, is to help mediate between the world of precarious migrant nightworkers and that of various audiences outside of and perhaps unfamiliar with this world. This in-betweenness is the central focus of my autoethnography, and not the suffering of doing the nightnography. I have undertaken this autoethnography, too, sharing the views of Khosravi (2016, p. 56), who writes that:

 Experience gained whilst a part of psychological services and case management of patients in the National Health Service (NHS), U.K.. 2

50

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures There is potentiality for democratisation of knowledge, partly by making the knowledge accessible to non-experts, and partly by challenging the hierarchy of knowledge in which objective analytical expertise is valued higher than the knowledge arising from experiences and emotional responses, which excludes the position of the marginalised who are in constant negotiation of subject-object boundaries.

I sympathise also with the criticisms of humanitarian organisations who portray migrants and refugees as being lost and hopeless (Massari, 2021; Rajaram, 2002). When depicted in this way, as Rancieré’s (2012) writes, they cannot tell their own stories and are further invisibilised and silenced. As such, this autoethnography invited precarious migrant nightworkers to tell their own versions of their stories. I saw that I was merely providing an opportunity so that they may ‘resist being invented and consumed, just as many so-called informants have been, by anthropologists’ (Hastrup, 1992; Khosravi, 2016, 2017, p. 56).

2.3 Multi-positionality 2.3.1 The Migrant I have understood the language of the migrant through my own migration, in Romania, where I was born and spent the first two decades of my life, I belonged to a small ethnic minority, the Lipoveni or ‘Old believers’. Lipoveni had fled seventeenth century Russia due to religious persecution, migrating along the north-­eastern borders of Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine. Except the locals of northern region of Romania (Moldavia), many Romanians in other parts of the country are not even aware of this almost invisible group. Most are, nonetheless, aware that this (same) ethnic group lives in the southern region, situated on the Danube Delta,3 in part due to researchers, artists and tourists interested in this UNESCO protected ecosystem. As a child of an ethnic minority, I lived through precarity, inequities and injustices that communists inflicted through persecution for not willing to join the Communist Party, and through made up accusations against my mother. Outside of post-­socialist Romania, I was labelled  – first as an ‘economic’ immigrant in Istanbul, Turkey, where I worked as a garage driver, and then as an ‘immigrant’ in the U.K., where I have studied, worked and lived for the past 16 years. When I was in Istanbul just over 25  years ago, I had the determination, but no theoretical or methodological tools then to turn my experience into an autoethnography of the poor garage drivers of the wealthy strata (Wacquant, 2015, p. 1). I ‘performed precarity’ as my Istanbulite co-workers did, exploited and underpaid without any social security or work contract (Glick Schiller, 2016). There I learnt about abstract concepts such as

 Danube Delta has been inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. This natural reservation, situated between Romania and Ukraine, has massive ecological importance due to its rich biodiversity. 3

2.3 Multi-positionality

51

Fig. 2.1  New Spitalfields market gatehouse. Source: Author http://bit.ly/ blckbstr2 © Author

‘precarious work’, ‘indecent working conditions’, ‘migrant labour’ and the attitude of ‘make live or let die’ (Li, 2010) – through my skin, as it were (Fig. 2.1). In London, between 2010 and 2012, when I was associated with University College London (UCL) and supervised by Professor Ger Duijzings, an anthropologist at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, I began researching vulnerable and marginalised Romanian migrants working in the nighttime economy and later, expanded my research to include the lives of other workers whose languages I could also speak, those being of Turkish and Bulgarians workers. I had learnt to do my research by hanging out and schmoozing with everyone in order to create contacts, and by being deeply immersed in the fieldwork as a participant observer, prepared at any moment to record audio or images if the situation permitted and when respondents allowed me to document our audio-video interviews or take photographs of them. In 2015, I worked at night and lived during the day with poorly paid migrants in a neglectfully maintained, yet highly priced house of multiple occupation. These mixed experiences of migrant-hood, of being seen as an ‘economic’ migrant with ‘settled’ status and living a kind of academic nomadism, constitute my alternative status. In the sedentary order of things, this makes me a migrant or nomad deemed unfit and who challenges the norms (Khosravi, 2016, 2017). As one of the 3.5% of the world’s 272 million international migrants (IOM, 2020), my life has been a constant (and tiring) navigation through the invisible borders set between minority groups and the majority, between being a migrant (poor) and an expat (white professional) and between academic institutions. I have tried to barter for

52

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

myself, a place in mainstream societies for whom I was and continue to remain, an invisible contributor. My own migratory experience has not only shaped my interests in migration-­ related topics, but also my nightnography methodology, what I call the ‘Researcher’s Nightworkshop’ methodology (MacQuarie, 2021). In a world where millions of migrants travel to work abroad and contribute to societies where they settle, I began questioning the anti-nomad/migrant sentiments by locals and the U.K. government. Besides being curious how items in the ‘national order of things’ reaches the immigration agenda in countries like Britain (Malkki, 1995), I have been asking why migrants, otherwise invisible to the public eye, are represented either as ‘villains’ or ‘thieves’ (an exception being the COVID-19 crisis, during which migrant essential workers became ‘hero/ines’ for a brief period). This question lead me into anthropology and has been the motivation for delving more deeply into this topic with those at the bottom of the labour market with whom I relate to in several ways. This is how I ended up becoming one of the migrant Londoners who sought to work the nightshift.

2.3.2 The Apprentice Loader Upon entering the research site for the first time, whether it be day or night, the researcher carries a degree of doubt as to what the fieldwork will uncover and where the discoveries might lead. Yet, when entering the realm of nightnography for this study, my body went through shock. The site itself, the nightly rhythms, the isolation and the seemingly interminable nightshifts, all greatly affected my being. For this fieldwork, I first enacted the life of a migrant seeking work at a night market in London. From November 2014 and until mid-January 2015, I journeyed at night from South-West London to East London to seek employment at New Spitalfields night market. Prior to entering the field, I was theoretically prepared to inquire about forms of solidarity and competition among migrant nightshift workers. I suspected these to exist in some form of sociability drawn along ethnic lines, for example, between Romanian, Turkish and Roma migrants. I, therefore, primarily sought employment at Turkish owned companies who employed Romanian nationals with a Turkish background, and where the business language was Turkish. I had a good command of languages, which I thought could help me, being a native speaker of Romanian, having learnt Turkish whilst living in Istanbul and furthered through classes at the Central European University in Budapest, and excellent English language skills – although the latter was of very little use, as I came to find out a few months later (Fig. 2.2). Either by some coincidence or through perseverance, at the end of January 2015 I was hired by a Bangladeshi owner and began training as an apprentice manual worker, loading fruits and vegetables and carrying out numbing chores as instructed. One month later, I left, eager to work for my new Turkish employer, FruitVeg (Fig. 2.3), another fruit and vegetable wholesaler. For 5 months I worked alongside men of various religious faiths, ethnicities (e.g., Turkish-Bulgarian, Bangladeshi,

2.3 Multi-positionality Fig. 2.2  Author as apprentice sweeping the floor

Fig. 2.3  The author hired as an apprentice loader by FruitVeg

53

54

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

Roma and non-Roma Romanian-Turks, Kurdish-Turks and Pakistanis from Europe and Asia – see Appendix 2), and some of mixed nationality (e.g., British Pakistanis and British Turks). Their ages ranged from their late 20 s to mid 40 s. No women were hired where I worked as a loader. Six months later, I changed employer again to work in an on-site café. I shared the duties with a small team consisting of three female café servers and two men, the chef and the co-owner, who juggled tasks between the kitchen and the front counter. I was employed alongside and shared the fate of these nightworkers at the New Spitalfields market for 8 months. At 5′7’ (1.75  m) and with over a decade of physical martial arts training, my body endured the physical toil that an apprentice loader needs to cope with at night, reasonably well. I was less capable, however, at staying awake all night. Whilst on nightshifts, the nocturnal rhythm required me to be alert and active at night and to begin sleeping during the day. As a result, my usual 7–8 hour nightly sleep was replaced with a 4–5 hour daytime sleep. I woke up in the evenings rather than in the mornings, and I worked at night. My mealtimes also reversed and my appetite decreased. I started having my first meal at around midnight, then if the fast-­working pace permitted, I would have a snack between 2–3 am. Many a time, I ate on the go or more accurately, ate whilst running because the place was crowded and the company I worked for had neither a designated space for loaders to eat nor clearly defined breaks for workers. Given the 1–2 hour commute back home (sometimes due to long transport delays), I would have my first meal at around noon, unsure any longer whether it was breakfast or lunch. Each week I had one night off on Saturday when I would sometimes sleep all through until Sunday afternoon in order to recover. This sleeping pattern and long hours was very rare for me, before changing my circadian rhythms. Every night at the market, I lifted and loaded crates and sacks of fruits and vegetables weighing four to five times more than my body weight. I also handled and pushed a manual forklift loaded with pallets weighing one to two tonnes of products. Measurements taken with a Pacer Pedometer digital application, as well as video recordings and field notes that I recorded, documented how I began to feel the effects of these changes both physically and mentally from the first month of nightwork. Over the course of the fieldwork, I lost a total of 14 kg and my body has since only partially recovered. Nightwork was a physiological shock to my system. I not only reversed my usual behavioural patterns and daily habits, but my body was also placed under enormous strain every night. I remember the pain I felt when I overloaded my body with produce, and still vividly recall the way my palms and fingers became swollen and bruised from repeatedly grabbing, twisting and lifting packages and crates, and how the skin on my hands became dry and peeled around my cuticles because I was handling the packages without gloves. Wearing gloves in this masculine culture would have been a sign of weakness, something I tried to hide despite the constant inconveniences. But admittedly, I felt the physical pain of the work mentally. I was afraid of taking breaks although I so desperately needed them, as during a 15–20  minute break, my body would relax and afterwards refuse to return to the hyper alert state required to keep up with the rhythms of the job. Resuming work after a break was always very painful, even more painful than if I

2.3 Multi-positionality

55

had worked continuously. I experienced this also when I took a week off to pass a forklift driving course. On one hand, I felt rested, but on the other hand, when I returned to the rhythms and routines of the loading work, I felt the physical toil of carrying the fruits and vegetables nightly as an overwhelming burden. Apart from this corporeal shock, there was the social isolation. I often felt isolated from the people I had regularly associated with before beginning the nightnography. When they were having their dinner, I was preparing my lunch. When they were going out, I was going to work. On Sunday’s, when they were having a barbecue, I was asleep recovering from the previous week and trying to prepare physically and mentally for the next. If I did join people I knew for dinner, I had to constantly try to stop myself from falling asleep in the middle of a conversation. When I did try to participate in a social or cultural event, I always ended up being on the run for lack of time. That year in London during when I undertook the nightnography, seemed to pass by me. I felt disengaged with life beyond the market and can barely recall other events that occurred that year. I noticed too how my colleagues would return to work every week on Sunday night still tired as though they had not rested at all. Those who spent their only day off on Sunday’s with their families during the day seemed to pay a price, as they would return to work physically exhausted. As a colleague expressed to me one time, ‘night work eats your life, without knowing or really living, the years pass by you. Nightwork breaks you’. After a year spent in New Spitalfields, I understood in own my body the bodily effects that precarity takes. All of my energy was used up in trying to keep up with the frantic pace imposed by management and traders in the market. Entire nights were spent walking and sometimes running at a fast pace. I averaged 8.2 km per night inside the market, and covered a total of 1600 miles (2310 km) during the year of my nightnography working nightshifts at the New Spitalfields market. Like all the other workers in the market, I drank many energy drinks. Each week, I worked an average of 63 hours in total, and spent 77 hours away from home with the inclusion of my nightly commutes, which averaged 2.4 hours for each nightly return trip. In contrast, a full-time, daytime manual labourer can legally only work eight-hour shifts totalling a maximum of 40 hours per week, and only on weekdays.

2.3.3 The Nightnographer (Fig. 2.3) Throughout my fieldwork, I was far from being a seasoned nightshift worker, though I was a migrant and a nightworker. I committed myself to the aims and objectives of my study and theoretically prepared for it, but was unprepared for the methodological challenges of doing nightnography. Anthropologists are trained to observe, think, interpret and disseminate their findings according to agreed methods, standards and outlets, even when the practice of being a participant observer becomes intensely corporeal. It was my experience that the more I immersed myself in the field at night, the more body-and-mind-provoking my engagement became (e.g.,

56

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

loss of of weight, emotional upset from isolation, lack of sleep). I entered the nightshift workers’ world to understand how they function and how they structure their social relations in the precarious landscape of the market. This has been the most thought-provoking experience, and several insights were gained from this. As the research progressed, I was able to notice aspects of bodily practices that my co-­ workers learnt and perfected, but which they did not talk about in interviews or during our informal conversations. Following the fieldwork, it was through my analysis of the ethnographic data I had collected, that I was better able to reflect upon the learning processes behind their bodily capital. These reflections are fully fleshed out in Chap. 6 (Sect. 6.1). Such aspects led to a discovery that I neither anticipated nor constructed, which is that workers hold mastery over their physical labour skills to the extent that they can transform it into bodily capital in socialised encounters. I also came to understand how they enacted sociabilities off-site, and the relationality of these embodied experiences of sociability are analysed in Chap. 8. When researching the nightshift through immersive ethnography, one’s daily life becomes very different by living at rhythms opposite to the society that functions in the daytime. As an apprentice loader doing anthropology, I learnt directly about the effects of the physical toil of the work on the body – not only on my own, but also of hundreds of other manual nightworkers. I recollect the bodily pain and muscle cramps I experienced resulting from overloading my body just so I could keep pace with my experienced co-workers. I remember the dizziness I felt in the early hours of the morning when the human body reaches its nadir point – the lowest level of activity of the human body during the 24-hour physiological and circadian cycle. The response varies according to individuals, but I reached the lowest point between four and six in the morning. During that period, I often felt like I was losing my balance and that my whole body was tired. It was a strange sensation both physically and mentally, which felt as though the ground was running from underneath my feet; like I could ‘hear’ my body ‘screaming’ that it wanted to lie down, refusing any further walking, let alone to rushing around whilst loaded with groceries. Yet, I could not obey how I felt since stopping was not permitted, and so had to carry on lifting crates and bags, very often in the shadow of a client watching over me. During the last part of the fieldwork, from August to December 2015, I was able to cease working, at which time I became an involved observer and focused on undertaking interviews with co-workers, shop floor managers, wholesale customers and the odd market visitor, which were conducted in Turkish, Romanian and English. I had gained a good degree of an insider’s familiarity of the work ethics, i.e., the ethical or unethical practices between Kurdish-Turkish owners and Bangladeshi, Bulgarian, Pakistani, Romanian and Turkish manual workers. I had not been employed by any British-owned companies but had interacted with English traders whilst serving food and drinks over the counter at the café. I aimed to collect information that I could not find in the existing public debates, policy agendas and scholarly literature on migrant forms of sociability, embodied precarity and the invisibility of nightworkers in this 24/7 society. The length of the fieldwork stretched over 14 months.

2.4  Nightnographer, Explained

57

As a nightnographer, I left the market before it completely depleted my bodily and mental resources. This is a luxury that precarious nightworkers, such as those whom I met at New Spitalfields, rarely have. It took me months to recover physically and psychologically from this brutal experience. Reporting on these important existential issues is part of the contribution I hope to make in presenting a focused study about precarity and the conditions of manual labour. I have tried to articulate in my writing, the experience of bodily pain and exhaustion, as well as the isolation and alienation experienced by workers – which was not only from society, but also from their families. I point out that some migrants experience precarity year in and year out because they have no economic, social or cultural capital that might help them exit the trap of the nightshift. These experiences are produced by the contemporary capitalist system, which knowingly undoes the rhythms of the 24 hour human circadian cycle, and which squeezes the last drop of energy from these exhausted bodies for the sake of capital accumulation. These experiences remain unknown and nightworkers themselves remain invisible. Our society unthinkingly accepts this reality in its expectation of and desire for ceaseless consumption. Nocturnal workers are indispensable in our 24/7 society and yet, they remain invisible to the majority of people who live according to natural circadian rhythms. Migrant nightworkers are dignified workers wrecked by undignified working conditions, though their cases continue to hardly ever be included in public and political debates.

2.4 Nightnographer, Explained When we anthropologists engage with others in the field, we do so because we want to step beyond the corridors of the university department to reach out to others. Although this is well understood among social or cultural anthropologists, it often receives mixed responses from other social scientists. Like most researchers, nonetheless, I have had to overcome obstacles in reaching out beyond academic audiences, and have felt the need to explain that as these ‘others’ are so fundamentally different that we need to make an epistemic turn to enter that world, and later to ‘make sense of’ the diverse cultural, social, and behavioural practices that we have witnessed during fieldwork (Bringa & Bendixsen, 2016a, b). Conversely, to invite people in the field to participate in the research is to ask people to voluntarily share their world with you. At times, I was successful in getting access to certain activities, people’s intimate space or information. At others, I have had to wait for a window of opportunity to move closer to the people I worked with. And this could be because anthropology, at times, appears difficult to explain to people outside of the discipline, and more so to those outside of social sciences. My position was difficult to explain even to myself. Do I position myself in the field or do co-workers place me according to what I tell them? From day one, I told everyone that I was a doctoral researcher and that I would like to publish a book on invisible nightshift workers. This was met with disbelief. ‘What do you mean?’, asked one co-worker. ‘Are we invisible to you?’. Another co-worker could not

58

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

fathom my interest and asked me, ‘What is so special about nightshift work?’ Another person wanted to know if, as a medical doctor, I could treat both men and women. To my co-workers, I became known as Doktor (‘Doctor’ in Turkish). I tried to explain my complicated presence in the field by saying that I was interested in the health problems that occurred as a result of working at night, as well as the ethnic and social relations among migrant workers. This appeared to have been more clear and understandable than my first attempt, although I could still not convince any of my co-workers why I would take on ‘a dog’s life’ to publish a book. So, for many, I was the crazy student, photographer, filmmaker and translator. Others told me that they could not understand if I was a student, a teacher or a spy. Romanians, specifically, thought that I was spying on them. Moreover, apart from a few co-workers with whom I formed a friendship, nobody ever called me by my real name. Most twisted my name with a Turkish accent, calling me ‘Sezar’. Time is a crucial factor when trying to progress from being an ‘outsider’ to being an ‘insider’. During the first couple of months, my co-workers would only greet me when I entered the stand, but then standing in small groups throughout the store, most male co-workers, if they did not completely ignore me for the rest of the nightshift, certainly did not help me in finding the produce needed to complete orders. It took me several months to move beyond the pleasantries and politeness that coworkers showed to an ‘outsider’ to be accepted as an ‘insider’, and to be invited to witness their world both at work, as well as outside of it. Performance is another crucial factor. I needed to prove that I was capable of navigating the hardships of the nightshift for months in a row, that was, to ‘do your job’ – enduring the physical labour as other workers did, be a docile employee for the foreman and shop floor management and to show allegiance to the company by not socialising or even briefly speaking to workers from the competitive stands in the market. Gică, a Romanian-Turkish and the foreman of the FruitVeg, explained 1 day that he did not think I would last there long. He emphasised that, ‘We had once a lawyer working with us, but he only lasted three months’. Basrí a loader turned porter, said in a video interview that, ‘This work, working at the night market is not for everyone. Thank God that I have the strength to do it. But we will see for how long’. At that time, neither he nor I knew that he would end up continuing to work as a porter for another 5 years. Whilst I was immersed in performing this work, I ‘dived-in deep into the stream of action’ alongside my co-workers (Wacquant, 2015, p. 5). The result was integration and, at the same time, an investigation into workers’ bodies and subjectivities from ‘under-the-skin’. This expression, ‘under-th-skin’, refers on the one hand to learning how regimes of discipline make nightshift workers travail unceasingly for fear of the unbearable pain that enters their bodies when they take a pause from the physical labour. On the other hand, the expression indicates how these regimes morph precarious nightworkers into obedient bio-machines, frozen by the knowledge that they are expendable and disposable. Having grasped these prerequisites earned me an insider’s place. Another indication that I had shifted from being a ‘participant observer’ to an ‘observant participant’ came when customers of FruitVeg (the company where I worked) trusted me to carry and load their produce onto pallets. My co-workers noticed this and began to warm to me.

2.4  Nightnographer, Explained

59

From barely acknowledging my presence when I entered the stand, they began to open up to me and, for instance, began freely cursing customers in my presence, which would of been unheard of until now. Sharing similar hardships with co-workers, as well as building increasing rapport with customers, contributed to me earning a place as an insider. Though being willing to take the toll of a ‘dog’s life’ to write a book did not make sense to my co-workers, sharing in their hardships in order to understand their lives was met with approval. I noticed how it allowed my co-workers to put down their masks, as well as to stop asking why someone with a different status (education, social class and British citizenship) would work in a night market. This was also noticeable, as some told me, to workers from other stands at New Spitalfields whom I would meet on Saturday mornings in the café where my co-workers would have a drink or two before going home for a well-deserved night’s sleep. Whilst some drank alcohol and ate Turkish pizza and others played cards, loud conversations would bounce back and forth over the heads of many present at the café. Eray, a Romanian-Turkish co-worker from another firm asked Gică, my foreman, why they called me ‘Doctor.’ In a roar of laughter, the foreman shouted loudly over my head that, ‘He took a dog’s life to experience our misery, write a book and make millions of pounds from selling it afterwards!’. It suddenly occurred to me that I was there to understand the ‘misery’ of being a night market worker. Gică’s explanation of what I was doing at the market made sense to Eray, as well as to me, although I had not put it into these words prior to now. We all cheered to that and before I knew it, the whole café became solely interested in how much money I would make from selling this book. By being explained from an insider’s viewpoint, the nightnography that I enacted for this book was as succinct as it could be about the embodied aspects of the anthropology of labour that I was there to perform. This ‘misery’ was a combination of factors from a lack of opportunities to poverty and debt escalation, as well as the physical and emotional suffering. These experiences overlap in many of my co-workers’ lives and as such, are primary topics throughout this book. This ‘fleshy companionship’ (Wacquant, 2005, p. 450) between my co-workers and I also grew in the endless hours of small talk we shared during our nights together as we carried produce with our bodies, gripping, grabbing and pulling packages, crates and wrappers with our sore fingers. Pétonnet (1982) described ‘small talk’ as ‘floating conversation’ – not over precise details, but as a tool for ‘being receptive by hanging around in specific places and developing sensitivity to chance-encounters in which people reveal their local or inside knowledge’ (quoted in Driessen & Jansen, 2013, p. 251). At the market, I spoke Romanian and Turkish with workers from Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, and English with my Pakistani co-workers. I did not made use of my English language skills nor my professional qualifications to obtain preferential treatment from the management. In the first instance, it was verbal communication that was required for taking instructions from the supervisor and manager, as well as engaging in small talk, which later expanded into in-depth discussions. Additionally, verbal communication was a tool for maintaining and expanding the network of interlocutors. Nonetheless, for over 6 months, I could not move beyond

60

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

the FruitVeg company where I worked. I could stand, walk and carry produce and talk in snippets with my co-workers, but was not permitted not move out of the stand or leave it except when I needed to use the bathroom. As such, many conversations floated between the pallets, and the general content was gossip against customers. Spatially and temporally, the rhythm of the nightshift work dictated our conversations and depended on my co-workers’ availability or willingness to contribute to or dismiss any opportunity to have more than just a chat. Most times, small talk would happen in snippets as we were sitting on a stack of pallets, which served as the loaders’ table for eating or for rolling a cigarette. The manager, however, surveyed his workers via CCTV cameras installed throughout the stand and upon seeing us resting would call his supervisor to disperse us. Nevertheless, the snippets of information I gathered from these brief conversations were important because they elicited small pieces of ‘inside’ information otherwise difficult to collect. As a rule, I seized any opportunity that arose to have conversations about situations relating to work. These early conversations formed the bottom-up processes that led to the formation of questions asked in the semi-­structured interviews. I was continually challenged in the fieldwork in regard to initiating conversations with my co-workers. Months into my fieldwork, for example, I was frustrated at being rejected by the people that I least expected. I respected the fact that regardless of whether or not I shared my co-workers’ fates as a participant observer or observant participant, that some did not wish to be interviewed. My Romanian-Turkish coworkers were the one’s refusing to engage in further structured, formal interviews. I was mistaken in anticipating prior to the fieldwork, that Romanian nationals (although of a different ethnicity to me), would be easier to convince than co-workers of other nationalities, given that we shared the same mother tongue. I tackled this challenge by relying heavily on the small chats we had on the work floor, as well as observations. I also became more cautious in what I disclosed to my co-workers in the early stages of our interactions. Upon reflection, I now understand that acting cautiously when providing information about oneself may prevent getting into awkward situations. For example, having disclosed to one co-worker that I practised martial arts, it attracted provocations to fight with him. Although I successfully defused and de-­ escalated the provocations on three occasions, I became more aware of how certain self-disclosures early on in the field could be detrimental in the long term and prevent open discussions. Nonetheless, disclosing one’s actual intentions about the aims of the research from day one is utterly recommended, regardless of the length of time spent in the field to build trust with research participants. As in daily life, the informal conversations between co-workers and myself went through stages of transition from initially being strangers to increasingly becoming familiar with one another as we learnt more about each another. On this basis, building rapport through small talk became the first and most crucial phase in this ethnographic study. This small talk positively influenced my research by being the gradual way through which connectedness with co-workers and preparedness for the later stages of the research developed. This was inclusive of, but not limited to my co-­ workers’ willingness to participate in interviews following the first participant observation phase of my research. This changed my research approach from what I

2.5  Nightnographic Storytelling in Migration Studies

61

initially imagined, and opened up opportunities for interacting outside of the work that I have completed as a participant observer. Although it was difficult to move across the invisible line between small talk during participant observation to becoming an observant participant, once I entered their homes, it became easier to gain insight into how they managed precarity and by what rules (e.g., helping out with paying their gas bills or parking fines gave me insights into how they deal with lack of English language). Driessen and Jansen (2013, p. 256) have found that small talk provides ‘ample space for serendipity, may lead to quicker access to taboo subjects, lubricates access to cultural meanings, [and] maintains and enlarges the network’. Most importantly, when coupled with other techniques, small talk can ‘[lead] to theoretical considerations’, although this tends to be an undervalued technique in the academic community. There are dangers, however, in over-practising this technique, especially if used on its own. In the early phase of initiating small talk, one may lose a certain naturalness in communication in needing to first learn and the practice the vernacular, and therefore fail to be convincing. Uncomfortably, this type of ‘close communion may involve the researcher in a certain degree of prejudice and gossip’ (Driessen & Jansen, 2013, p.  257). Practices to counter or prevent such dangers include personal variation and inventiveness, though these may also be undertaken with some tensions.

2.5 Nightnographic Storytelling in Migration Studies The aim to visibilise manual migrant nightworkers and their predicaments guided the nightnography of this study. Inherent in this nightnographic design is a set of strategies and tools that may enable researchers to make visible the nightly issues that invisible migrant nightworkers experience. Among them, visual methods are of particular importance in migration (Martiniello, 2017; Nikielska-Sekula & Desille, 2021). Migration scholars turn to visual methods because ‘images have always accompanied humans as means of interpreting and representing reality’ (Desille & Nikielska-Sekula, 2021, p. 1). Moxey (2008, p. 132) argues that images can transmit their own ‘message’ and have their own representation independent of the meanings created in certain languages (Anglo-Saxon). At a time when masses of data and information via digital mediums have become salient in the study of human lives, new types of media, social media, and still and moving images provide a means to engage with and address concerns in migration studies. Such an approach offers new possibilities of presenting audiences with perspectives in a more accessible, non-prescriptive manner and also invites multiple interpretations by a wider, critical public, which has the potential to result in greater impacts for scholarly research. For this study, I used visual research methods both to collect and disseminate the research findings. To engage participants with the research topic, I made use of any

62

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

Fig. 2.4  Photos with Canon displaying Gica looking at the photo camera display screen

opportunity for photography and video sessions. It was through my body that I could feel the depths of precariousness and how it invaded migrant nightworkers bodily and emotionally and the ways it affected their cognitive functioning. When co-workers could not clearly articulate their experiences, my own ‘body notes’ helped to prompt and reveal the depths and nuances. Without my camera, however, I could not have framed and portrayed my co-workers or even engaged them as I did, by inviting them to look at the photos that I was taking during the photos shoot (Fig. 2.4). Interestingly, co-workers like Gica did not wish to be interviewed, but he consented to appearing on camera. Out of 55 research participants, 30 agreed to a traditional interview, but all accepted to be included in the photo montages and films that I produced during or after the fieldwork concluded. As such, in this study the use of audio-visual methods presented an advantage over interviewing alone for knowledge production. The participants’ consent to appear in the photos and film recordings was also a good indication to me that we had established a good level of trust between us and that I had been accepted as an insider (see the photoshoot illustrated in Fig. 2.5). I felt that this also reflects what Maurice Bloch (2008, p. 29) concludes when writing that, in most societies people ‘ascribe more reliability to sight over the spoken because language introduces intentionality and fallibility’. Apart from the use of visual research methods, I depart from other migration scholars in the way I place emphasis on experimentation. Desille and Nikielska-­ Sekula (2021, p.  18) point out that by ‘crosscutting one’s findings with existing theories and concepts … with a certain degree of dramatisation’ ethnographers produce visual stories that add to the participants’ realities, complexities and dimensions without compromising the scientific weight in favour of fictional aspects’. Whilst others argue that the ‘process of storytelling involves the creation of a ‘character’’ (Desille & Nikielska-Sekula, 2021, p. 18), I favour the production of a visual story made with and about factual people. As part of this nightnography study, I produced a trilogy of three short films.

2.5  Nightnographic Storytelling in Migration Studies

63

Fig. 2.5  The author is showing to his co-workers the photos that he took that night

The trilogy consists of three short films titled, Invisible Lives (2013), Nocturnal Lives (2015) and Nightshift Spitalfields (2020). This visual ethnography is about the ‘other’ workers, and visually documents migrant nightworkers in 24/7 London. Each film, respectively, marks a different time politically  – before and after E.U. transitional controls for A2 migrant workers ended in January first, 2014, before and after the Brexit referendum on June 24th, 2016; different research stages and skills levels of the researcher/filmmaker−before, during and after my doctoral studies in April 26th, 2018, and a different focus−four Romanian migrant night workers in London (Invisible Lives); the researcher and three migrant co-workers (Nocturnal Lives); and one Bulgarian-Turkish co-worker and his family (Nightshift Spitalfields). In this trilogy that I produced during and after completing this nightnography, the protagonists were nightworkers who had never been recorded for a film before. Each film portrays how workers experience severe shortages of rights to decent work. The themes highlighted in the films include invisibility, nocturnal versus diurnal work and sleeplessness, and are as important as the period in which they were recorded, that was, during a time when British politics was charged with immigration debates, and when both British and European media were portraying self-­ employed Romanian and Bulgarian (A2) migrant workers as ‘health tourists’ and ‘benefit frauds’. Invisible Lives was shot in 2013, the same year that rights came into force allowing migrant workers from A2 countries access to the labour markets in the 27 E.U. member states (except in Britain). Nocturnal Lives was completed in 2015, which was after the transitional controls and before the Brexit referendum in

64

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

2016. Nightshift Spitalfields was shot mostly during 2015, the year when Ali, the film’s protagonist, and I worked at New Spitalfields together, and later over two brief visits that I made to the U.K. in 2017 and 2019. A lack of funding hampered its completion but was made possible following a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo in 2020. Since 2013, I have presented all three of the films in various academic settings, have used them as a tool in teaching, and for communication purposes to diverse audiences. As noted, a primary objective of this research was to make the lives of nightworkers more visible and palpable. If the distinctly sensorial aspects involved in their experiences were not conveyed by the migrant nightworkers themselves, one would need to call upon all kinds of cinematic kits and skills in order to portray them. Therefore, I stress here the advantages of a participatory approach. For example, in Nightshift Spitalfields, the main protagonist’s perspective is central. As the researcher, I am hidden off-camera. To allow his participation without my interference, I installed a GoPro camera on the roof of the forklift so that he could direct the filming as he saw fit whilst driving around the night market. From the start of the film, we see Ali adjusting the camera’s shooting angle from front to rear depending on how he was driving the forklift when either using the back or front wheels. During the entire shooting of Nightshift Spitalfields, Ali decided what and whom to capture as he drove at night through the market. For instance, among the long hours of travail in the night market, there is a moment of respite captured by Ali when he surprises one of his co-workers who was dozing off on the forklift seat whilst waiting for a customer, live on camera. This incident sparks a short conversation between the two men. Ali captures the spontaneous reaction of his co-worker asking him, ‘Is the camera working?’, as in, ‘Are you filming me?’. Such a moment of truth is framed spontaneously and marks the participation between the director and the protagonist, as well as gives evidence to the reality of nightwork. This kind of testimony is ‘what gives us the subjective voice of the historical person, yet we are implicated in the destiny of others through narrative; and the mythic potential of social actors is heightened through the distancing created by exposition’ (MacDougall, 1998). Ali as the main protagonist in Ali, turned-filmmaker, experiments with the visual tools in a Vardarian non-traditional documentary style, where non-­professional actors cast in the film. With his 1-person story, Ali opened the back door to an intimate area of his life that includes his children and wife. He does it with generosity, emotion, sometimes in a mysterious way and other times with silence that adds grace. This osmosis was in the eyes of late Agnes Varda (1928–2019), what made relationships with non-actors so special. What makes Interested readers can learn more about the experimental approach to visual methods applied in this trilogy via the open access text in the Researcher’s Nightworkshop (MacQuarie, 2021). They can also watch the short films, which are available to green access subscribers on Vimeo. To turn real lives into reel stories is a quest. Some real lives fail to become reel stories. Despite living and working in a global city in high demand of migrant workers, these ‘other’ workers have no guarantees apart from remaining faceless,

2.6  Data Collection Using Embodied, Cyber-ethnographic and Visual Tools

65

voiceless and vulnerable. Consequently, researchers need to find methods that allow research participants to speak through images to a variety of audiences. Although the exploration of the invisible, nocturnal and sleepless migrants in this trilogy is not an exhaustive account, the three short films illustrate how ethnography that is accompanied by visual methods can provide insights into the lived aspects of a nebulous contemporary society that operates 24/7. In addition to the video methods used to visualise these migrants, I also incorporated infographics and photo montages in these films as they enabled an inclusion of other specific characteristics that are currently missing from scholarship and public imaginary on nightwork (such as being overrepresented by ethnic migrant groups of many creeds). In doing so, I attempted to show that the invisibility of migrant workers is symptomatic of a capitalist system that causes the crisis in itself, as well as the exclusion of the ‘other’ – the immigrant anti-hero. The use of visual methods in migration studies also raises ethical research issues. Nikielska-Sekula (2021) points out that photography offers two key aspects to the researcher as a process that can initiate social relations and that can powerfully capture the sensory experience of fieldwork through images. Nonetheless, once in front of the camera, participants are on record and their identity can be compromised. Visual storytelling aims to bring representations of nightworkers into the public eye. It is, thus, important to consider the ethical implications of visual methods on the privacy of those participating in our research. How then can we use visual methods to raise awareness of social issues whilst still ensuring people’s confidentiality? To prevent revealing participants’ identities, researchers must carefully follow and uphold the instructions of their participants regarding what parts of their experience can or cannot appear in written, audio and visual forms, as well as their rights to be represented on their own terms or to not be portrayed at all (PrietoBlanco, 2021, p. 333). In this study, I have concealed the identities of all participants and have anonymised their names. Yet, there remains a degree to which confidentiality cannot be entirely guaranteed in the use of audio-visual methods. The power of the image in the hands of researchers-­turned-filmmakers can change that by documenting the lives of migrants at home, away from home by giving interlocutors the right to disappear, as it has been the case all along in this study. For example, a specific person requested total anonymity, I removed his voice in the backdrop and I applied special effects so his face was not recognisable.

2.6 Data Collection Using Embodied, Cyber-ethnographic and Visual Tools This section outlines the methodological process undertaken in collecting the data. It contains the bodily ethnography that was used to research migrant nightworkers, as well as the cyber tools used to measure their sensorial experiences to quantify

66

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

effort and qualify suffering, as well as collate it to present it visually via infographics, photo montages and films on night workers. Just as nightworkers cannot be compared with any other group of migrant workers, in the same way, the dominant, diurnal research cannot capture with classical methodology the layers of precarity that nightworkers inhabit. Next to observations, informal conversations and semi-­ structured interviews, I used tools such as night walking, observations and schmoozing (Driessen & Jansen, 2013), as well as recording audio-visual interviews and collecting soundbites, visual notes and cybernotes. I engaged with my body to feel the physical and sensorial experiences at night. Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu, 1998; Bourdieu, 2000) notion of ‘embodied knowledge’ best captures the way my own body became my tool and gave me a feel for the field. My body became a finely tuned instrument, recording data, that is, incorporating and situating data whilst fully immersed in this participatory observation experience. Yet, putting this abstract notion into the reality of my research necessitated existential and methodological choices. First, the kind of nightnography that I practiced required high levels of endurance to withstand the tiredness, pain and the physical effort demanded from manual labourers, plus the additional energy invested in the observation and taking of mental notes of the small talk with strangers and co-workers. Consequently, my body became my ‘stock-in-­ trade’ and I had to rigorously manage its limited resources for labour (Wacquant, 2004, pp. 128–129). I also employed digital technology to quantify bodily experience, more specifically an application called Pacer Pedometer & Step Tracker™ (Pacer app™, from hereon).4 I had it installed on my phone and it quantified physical effort and physiological changes in my body in real time (e.g., heart rate between periods of activity or inactivity). This multi-modal approach contributed to better understanding the multi-layered kind of precarity that involves not only poor working contracts and pay rates, but also a subjective experience of precarity that makes one anomic in the face bodily exhaustion and suffering those wears workers down due to lack of night sleep and for being under the weight of produce, so to speak, for interminable hours of the ‘graveyard’ shift. In this way, what was hidden before (e.g., bodily precarity and suffering) became both visible and qualifiable. Researchers of ‘hybrid work’ emphasise that this multilayered precariousness affects similarly precarious self-employed workers enveloping their entire lives in ‘subjective, existential’ ways (Armano & Murgia, 2017, pp. 48, 56). I focus in my methods on how to better extract from the experimental nature of my fieldwork, the work-related bodily suffering caused by this kind of layered, subjective precariousness (Lorey & Butler, 2015; Pulignano et al., 2021) (Fig. 2.5).

 Pacer Pedometer & Step Tracker™ Application available for Apple iOS devices. Pacer Pedometer & Step Tracker 4+ Walking, Weight Loss & Health. Online at: http://bit.ly/pacerapp. Accessed: 03.01.2023. 4

2.6  Data Collection Using Embodied, Cyber-ethnographic and Visual Tools

67

2.6.1 Field Notes and Mental Notes For a nightnographer, the most common anthropological activity of writing field notes can be challenging. Each morning throughout my fieldwork at New Spitalfields, after having done anywhere between an exhausting 10–16 hour nightshift, I wrote my field notes. Six nights a week I was up and working and after each shift I would leave the market, travel to a retail park to sit in a café and write the field notes. These notes included a range of details from the market’s flow, the composition of the team to the observations of people I encountered and our interactions during the informal conversations we had. These notes were based on my experiences whilst working at night and as I gradually accessed the backstage of the night by night lived experiences of co-workers. The writing helped me overcome my anxieties, which lasted throughout the research, to clarify specific conversations and to pinpoint gaps in the information, which I would then tried to cover in the following nights. Writing could take up hours for there were many obstacles to surmount, from the mental ones such as memory loss due to fatigue to the physical difficulties such as cramps in my tired legs whilst sitting to write. Sometimes the fatigue and sheer lack of sleep interfered, and I would fall asleep whilst writing. Many times, I feared that my mind was playing tricks on me because my short-term memory was noticeably affecting me as I continued with nightwork. I was also worried that some of the field notes were not structured adequately and that I might need to revisit the experience, activity or conversation that I felt was muddled in my head at the time of recollecting it after an exhausting night. I found comfort in there being a distinction between fieldnotes, mental notes acquired through my ‘mindful-body’ (Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987). Whilst field notes tend to involve material that is well-documented, mental notes linger in our minds and we can return to them, enhance, reflect or change them. I also made efforts to supplement the field notes with data I collected through other methods that emphasise the engagement of the body more than of the human brain.

2.6.2 Body Notes Throughout my fieldwork, I took what I call ‘body notes’, at first, these body notes were not intentionally recorded. These were movements incorporated and sedimented ‘under-the-skin’ through the repetitive, practical tasks of loading with its sub-movements of carrying, gripping, twisting and lifting. Other scholars have experienced the bodily dimension of skin-deep ethnography (Desille & Nikielska-Sekuła, 2023). Retrieving the knowledge that I incorporated in my body and turning it into written notes was not always an easy thing to do. One particularly effective strategy was to have another ethnographer interview me so that I could accurately explain how precarity was born into my body, which was an experience that my co-workers did not speak about. I came up with this strategy after I had exhausted the Socratic self-questioning technique, which proved inadequate to elicit the desired descriptions and to overcome what I felt to be a resistance in verbally retrieving and putting into writing, the ethnographic material that I was embodying. These interviews enabled me to better

68

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

recollect, retrieve and articulate my nightshift work experiences. It is worth noting that it was helpful to verbally articulate these physical practices when I gesticulated them to this ethnographer, such as when I moved my arms in various positions to illustrate either my strategy in dealing with the back-breaking pain, the action of picking up heavy loads of produce or the way I moved my hips forward – something I devised so that I could tackle the pressure of the weight on my lower back. In other words, I increasingly gained a fluency in being able to verbally describe these movements whilst demonstrating them to him. It did became troublesome, however, because of my own emic positioning, i.e., being able or not to sufficiently detach from my body as an object of knowledge. Body notes might not be easily verbalised in the field notes, but they allow the anthropologist, through their own body as an epistemological tool, to access the subjectivities of their research participants. Despite these difficulties, I turned these body notes into ‘corporeal vignettes’, which are transpositions of the embodied knowledge gained during the participant observation period of my fieldwork.

2.6.3 Digital (Self)Tracking The application collates data based on step length, height, weight, blood pressure and pulse rate entered by the user from which it produces a series of charts. These are given as descriptive categories that show (a) the level of activity by the user during a set time or throughout a day; (b) the distance travelled in kilometres or miles of the total number of steps taken; (c) the number of calories burnt during exercise; (d) the fluctuation in weight; and (e) the blood pressure (Systolic/Diastolic) reading, all which are optional features in the app – I updated mine at the local chemist each week. I complemented these data with field notes to create ‘hyper-real’ vignettes, as in the following example: Vignette №1 April 2nd, 2015 Night walking distance: 18.8 km Nightshift duration: 12.5 hours [10:00 pm – 10:30 am] Commuting time: 1 hour each way. That nightshift I walked nearly 18.8 km5 or took 35,278 steps within 6.5 hours of activity. It is the second longest distance I ever walked during any travail, at night or in the day. The longest has been 25 km. The pedometer data places me 50 % above any fit walker – that is, active users taking 25,000 – 30,000 steps daily. The limitation here is that the pedometer does not record the weight of the fruit and vegetable crates or sacks that I carry on my body during this window of fast-paced activity.  See Figure 9 On this nightshift, the pedometer monitored each step during the 13h43’ period. The total of 6h34’ active time sums up to 18.8km. As shown, the peaks of the activity are between 3am and 8am reaching on average 1,000 steps. 5

2.6  Data Collection Using Embodied, Cyber-ethnographic and Visual Tools

69

Fig. 2.6  Weight fluctuations. Whilst working at the New Spitalfields night market, I also used the self-tracking Pacer app™, a walking, weight loss and health application. I experimented with this method at the intersection between my body, my personal data and technology as a way of learning about embodied precarity among nightworkers. (Source: Author http://bit.ly/blckbstr2)

The Pacer app™ quantified my bodily experience, the pains, gains and losses from sleepless hours and endless nightshifts and helped me to better understand the physical labour that I was putting in each nightshift. Once quantified, exhaustive bodily labour could be interpreted as depreciating bodily capital (e.g., ankle injuries and rapid weight loss caused by long walking distances,6 see Fig. 2.6). The descriptive statistics show a cumulus of physiological stages and changes that I associated with exhaustion, sleep disturbances and mood swings, most of which I experienced throughout fieldwork, but which became acute in the first month after I exited the field, due to readjusting to the daytime circadian rhythms (see Fig. 2.7).7

 Figure 3. It shows the number of steps converted to kilometres and accumulated by foot during the 11 months of fieldwork. The 2,310km are an equivalent of the distance between New York and Lafayette in the United States or nearly the same as between London, U.K. and Sibiu, Romania. 7  Figures 3: The lowest weight was registered in June 2015 with a slight increase during mid-June when I took one week off to fulfil INTEGRIM project duties. I regained weight when the activity rhythms and intensity decreased, indicating that intensive bodily labour affects weight loss, and conversely. Caution is needed to read the indicators’ values (BMI/SBMI) as they offer different range values. Source: Author http://bit.ly/blckbstr2. Also, on the left the BMI* value, according to the World Health Organization, BMI is based on ‘normal weight’ class (good); (Right) SMBI** Smart Body Mass Index’s represents a health-risk system weight-class definition. However, for an ethnographer to manage his bodily capital based solely on S/BMI indicators is not sufficient. Combined they may aid awareness of wellbeing in the field. Sources: Kromeyer-Hauschild K, Wabitsch M, Kunze D et al. Monatsschr Kinderheilkd 2001, 149:807; The Global BMI Mortality Collaboration, Lancet 2016; 388:776-86 (adults 40 – 80 years). 6

70

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

Fig. 2.7  Author walked 18.8 km in just over 6.5 hours

The application also allowed me to compare my sensorial experiences with those of my-co-workers and thus, ascertain the intensity of our physical effort and how that ‘shape[d] every[night] situations’ (Vaike et al., 2020, p. 29). I quantified the intensity with which the workers covered a particular distance, whether the activity be carrying heavy produce or trays with coffees, to appreciate the effort they were exposed to. Arguably, men carrying heavy loads would feel more exhausted by the effort of constantly walking with the heavy weights they carried on their shoulders than women would in constantly carrying drinks on trays. The app could not

2.6  Data Collection Using Embodied, Cyber-ethnographic and Visual Tools

71

differentiate between the amount in weight, but it could measure the number of steps and the distances. When compared at the end of the nightshift, the apps revealed similar digits (e.g., 16 km in one nightshift). Combined, the data collected by the pedometer complemented and supported the text interpretations and the visual analysis. In short, it objectifies the physical effort by giving accurate spatialtemporal dimensions, later used for data visualisation or alerting users of any health concerns. Further research could tackle the limitation of this method by using more performance focused applications than Pacer app™ to record the weight that night workers carry on their bodies as they walk throughout the nightshift and whilst picking up, moving, placing and replacing crates or sacks of packed produce. The intensity of the bodily labour could not be captured by the pedometer app. Strikingly, medical studies from Nepal and Belgium have been able to clarify the effects of the ‘prodigious loads’ that Nepalese porters carry on their bodies (Basnyat & Schepens, 2001, p. 316). Nepalese porters of Rai, Sherpa and Tamang ethnicities, are hired by merchants to carry loads onto their heads at altitudes of 3500  m and higher. Methodologically, these researchers employed advanced self-tracking technology to determine distances, as well as how the load weight affected the Nepalese porters’ performance over the course of the route that the women and men trekked by foot, which totalled approximatively 100 km over mountain paths and river crossings that involved ascending (8  km) and descending (6.3  km) off-road terrain (Bastien, 2005). They found greater variation in the age of the porters (this time including children aged 11 and older males aged 68), and weights carried by porters, some carrying up to >183% greater than their body mass. This and another case study of the dabbawalas (‘lunch carriers’) of Mumbai are discussed later in detail in Chap. 6. I tested the data in my research for validity and reliability by triangulating the combined methods of field notes, respondents’ accounts, and photographs and film, and this confirmed that fluctuations in weight and sleep patterns disruptions were not so dissimilar across the board. Some workers continued to have disrupted nighttime sleep whilst their daytime sleeping pattern was somewhat regulated. After watching how my weight dropped a staggering 13 kg during the 8 months of nightwork, I was relieved to see my weight increase again in September soon after I had stopped working the nightshift and had continued with just the non-participatory observation and ‘schmoozing’. In line with Wacquant’s encouragement (Wacquant, 2005, p. 469) to ‘[wed] analytical precision with experimental acuity’, I also used visual vignettes to make what was abstract concrete. Specifically, I quantified sensorial experiences collected through the Pacer Pedometer technology and corroborated this data with the visual material collected with the digital SLR camera and action film camera (i.e., GoPro) attached either on my body, my co-workers’ bodies or to a mobile unit, as it had been the case with Ali, who filmed the market whilst driving his forklift. I could thus better scrutinise the micro-movements involved in the action of loading and carrying produce to ascertain and support the description of bodily practices and skills that my co-workers had not or could not verbalise in minute and ordinary details. Ultimately, the purpose of using the anthropologist’s

72

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

body and these complementary, visual and digital methods has been to track the hidden and unspoken connections between the habitus of precarity and the market as a ‘field’ in Bourdieu’s sense, endowing nightworkers with symbolic bodily capital. This is the tacit, practical bodily knowledge needed to navigate, negotiate or merely survive the mechanisms of a post-circadian capitalist era that manipulates and realigns people’s 24 hour bodily rhythms to meet capital demands.

2.7 Returning from the Dark At the end of 2015, I exhaustedly exited the field and gradually readjusted to diurnal rhythms. I felt privileged that I could leave the night market behind, but I never stopped being concerned about the fate of my co-workers. Migrant nightworkers cannot afford to exit precarious labour due to many constraining, structural and individual factors, as discussed in the different chapters of this book, that is, they cannot simply escape the entrapment of nightwork. In a follow-up interview with one co-worker, Basrí, conducted in May 2017 two years after we had first met, he told me that he had just returned to FruitVeg after a month’s break. He confessed that he had stopped working nights for a while as he could no longer cope as well as he used to, but that as the sole bread winner of his family of five, he had had to return to working nights since his family had eventually run out of savings. The nocturnal existence, stressful rhythms, frugal sleep and lack of time during the day are what preoccupied Basrí’s thoughts as he considered repeatedly over a decade to make a change from working nights to daytime work. Yet, every year he found himself still working at the market. As he told me, ‘I think of changing to days, every month. I cannot carry on working nights for long because it does not help my health. Hopefully, this year it will happen for real! … I will work here for a maximum of one more year’ (in 2020 Basrí was still working at the New Spitalfields market). My fieldwork has been a personal, subjective affair where as a researcher I immersed in situ in the actual conditions where manual migrant nightworkers exist and operate daily and nightly. In this night market, I was one of the bodies-turned-­ machines, another post-Fordist worker whose labour power was both disposable and expendable. I sedimented in my body with blood, sweat and tears, a world of precarity layered at the junction with migration and nightwork. I accumulated a bodily capital that was useful in performing precarity. I then began another ethnographic journey. I turned my body into the ‘means of production’ as an epistemological tool with which I could begin making sense of this nocturnal world. Had I not engaged in the difficult task of lacing this experience into words, my bodily knowledge would have remained as instrumental as floor washing  – an unpaid, overtime task that I completed during fieldwork after an exhausting 16-to-17-hour nightshift. Such fieldwork method that emphasises the immersion and use of the body to collect data (aside the classical tools, e.g., interviews and observations) provides the researcher with outcomes overcome the challenges. Despite the bodily pains and aches, emotional unrest, social isolation and

2.8 Final Act

73

low mood that I experienced, this exploratory journey and experimental research has rewarded me with insights that I lacked when I performed precarity as a labour migrant in Turkey or as a novice researcher upon entering this academically uncharted territory beyond the frontier of the night. I brought to surface, stories that include, but are not limited to vulnerability, marginalisation and the exploitation of im/migrant nightworkers – stories that remain unchallenged in today’s non-­inclusive societies. In this chapter, I outlined the steps and core methods involved in doing nightnography for the purpose of understanding the reality of migrant nightworkers seen as ‘others’  – migrants perceived by mainstream society as foreign, alien, strange and unfit.

2.8 Final Act Patience and persistence in ‘small talk’, as well as using visual tools in the research paid off in the long term. I forged a degree of friendship and intimacy with some co-workers in this way. Other co-workers gradually opened the door to me and accepted me a part of their inner circle. It felt like a break-through whenever co-­ workers invited me to join underground parties after ‘lock out’ hours, asked me to say their names in English in our phone conversations, requested my help with their unpaid fines and gas bills or to act as a translator or support worker in their interactions with others. When research participants remove their persona, i.e., they no longer hide real meanings from strangers behind a mask, it is said that the researcher has managed to cross the ‘invisible line’ between the front and the back of the house (Moeran, 2007). In short, s/he has reached to the ‘inner circle’ or entered the backstage to join the insiders, from whom to learn if they do what they say they act when in the frontstage. From a methodological standpoint, those who ‘perform the phenomenon’ become insiders, i.e., they capture aspects and moments of dynamics that go unnoticed to outsiders. I too became an insider, no longer a ‘non-native anthropologist, who can never transcend difference’ (Stoller, 2005, p. 197). Wright Mills (2000, p. 215) explains that emerging researchers best hone their ‘intellectual craftsmanship’ through transparently and openly exchanging their ‘actual ways of working’ with other researchers. In this spirit, the final discussion presents the outcomes from this study of employing methods to build ethnographic theory for an embodied anthropology of migration. Firstly, the sensorial experiences (senses, suffering and skills) and the visual and cyber-ethnographic tools used here, bridge mind and body to restore lacunas in a social science, and to include visual methods in migration research, specifically (Wacquant, 2015). Secondly, as I reflected on my migratory experience and the lessons learnt during this nightnographic research, I found two key hallmarks: a bodily method that works in many contexts, which were, away from and at home, with migrants and with locals, and in the day and at night, as well as a mode of approaching the field. To directly experience and observe, I entered the field of nightwork armed with sociological constructs to objectify workers’ bodily labour using cyber-­ethnographic tools that

74

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

capture, measure and monitor sensorial experiences, and to visually tell the stories of migrants. Thirdly, visual nightnography is multi-layered. I was able to ‘see’ what I could not have without the camera. This led me to create more real and unique ‘representations’ of migrants in the nocturnal landscape. The core message here is that we experience the world that surrounds us with our bodies and through the senses, whilst at the same time we use our eyes to receive and transmit messages. The ‘message’ is a window into a reality documented through research, before the camera captures it, that lives outside of film that represents it to an audience and lives long after the researcher has left the field site. Finally, I have learnt about the different kinds of cooperation involved in working with filmmakers and my co-workers in order to create and produce the trilogy of short films. Ali, the co-worker turned filmmaker in Nightshift Spitalfields, has taught me invaluable, practical and theoretical insights about standing back to let participants give their views and impressions, as they see fit about their own social message, and also that images are ubiquitously present (Wacquant, 2005; Pink et al., 2010) and about the power the image offers the mind-space for interpretation with multiple meanings and fascinating endings. This nightnographic method, thus, contributes to migration studies with an innovative portfolio of tools that reveal hidden experiences of nightworkers, narrows the gap between the visual and touch senses in research and conveys the significance of the body in experiencing and grasping a hidden world. My sincere hope is that this strategy resonates with both novice and experienced researchers alike, to the extent where it demonstrates that the joys and sorrows experienced in migrating for work reveal mechanisms that entrap certain groups in precarious, hidden environments. To bring these workers out of the dungeons of the dark needs collaborative efforts from all social scientists to change the public’s lack of awareness and the political lack of will in recognising and addressing the inherent problems with nightwork in the current, traditionally designed daytime labour system.

References Armano, E., & Murgia, A. (2017). Hybrid areas of work in Italy. Hypotheses to interpret the transformations of precariousness and subjectivity mapping precariousness view project fathers in organizations view project. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316958621 Basnyat, B., & Schepens, B. (2001). The burden of the Himalayan porter [2]. High Altitude Medicine and Biology, 2(2), 315–316. https://doi.org/10.1089/152702901750265431 Bastien, G.  J. (2005). Energetics of load carrying in Nepalese porters. Science, 308(5729), 1755–1755. https://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1111513. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.1111513 Bloch, M. (2008). Truth and sight: Generalizing without universalizing. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14(SUPPL. 1). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00490.x Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason: On the theory of action. On the theory of action. Standford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Standford University Press.

References

75

Bringa, T., & Bendixsen, S. K. N. (2016a). Engaged anthropology. In T. Bringa & S. K. N. Bendixsen (Eds.), Engaged anthropology. Springer International Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40484-4 Bringa, T., & Bendixsen, S.  K. N. (2016b). Introduction. In Engaged anthropology (pp. 1–22). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40484-4_1 Desille, A., & Nikielska-Sekula, K. (2021). Introduction. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer Science and Business Media B.V., 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67608-7_1 Desille, A., & Nikielska-Sekuła, K. (2023). Multisensory approaches in migration research: reflections and pathways. Visual Studies. Routledge. https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInf ormation?journalCode=rvst20. doi: 10.1080/1472586X.2023.2234874. Accessed 11 Aug 2023. Driessen, H., & Jansen, W. (2013). The Hard work of small talk. Journal of Anthropological Research, 69, 249–263. http://www.narcis.nl/publication/RecordID/oai%3Arepository.ubn. ru.nl%3A2066%2F84769 Ellis, C., & Arthur Bochner, P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 733–768). Sage. Accessed 4 June 2021. Galinier, J., Becquelin, A. M., Bordin, G., Fontaine, L., Fourmaux, F., Ponce, J. R., Salzarulo, P., Simonnot, P., Therrien, M., & Zilli, I. (2010). Anthropology of the night: Cross-disciplinary investigations. Current Anthropology, 51(6), 819–847. University of Chicago Press. https://doi. org/10.1086/653691 Glick Schiller, N. (2016). The question of solidarity and society: Comment on Will Kymlicka’s article: “Solidarity in diverse societies”. Comparative Migration Studies, 4(1), 6. https://doi. org/10.1186/s40878-­016-­0027-­x Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life. University of Edinburgh and Social Sciences Research Centre. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089106 Hage, G. (2009). Hating Israel in the field: On ethnography and political emotions. Anthropological Theory, 9(1), 59–79. SAGE Publications Sage. http://ant.sagepub.com; https://doi. org/10.1177/1463499609103547. Accessed 4 June 2021. Hastrup, K. (1992). Out of anthropology: The anthropologist as an object of dramatic representation. Cultural Anthropology, 7(3), 327–345. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1992.7.3.02a00030 IOM. (2020). In M. McAuliffe & B. Khadria (Eds.), World migration report 2020 (Vol. 54). Khosravi, S. (2016). Engaging anthropology: An auto-ethnographic approach. In Engaged anthropology (pp.  41–60). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-­3-­319-­40484-­4_3 Khosravi, S. (2017). Precarious lives: Waiting and hope in Iran. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2t4cjb. Accessed 4 June 2021 Li, T. M. (2010). To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations. Antipode, 41, 66–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­8330.2009.00717.x Lorey, I., & Butler, J. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Verso Books. Accessed 31 May 2021. MacDougall, D. (1998). Transcultural cinema. Edited and with an Introduction by Lucien Taylor: 318. http://melvyl.worldcat.org/title/transcultural-cinema/oclc/38989847&referer=brief_ results. Accessed 11 August 2023. MacQuarie, J. C. (2021). The researcher’s nightworkshop: A methodology of bodily and cyberethnographic representations in migration studies (IMISCOE research series) (pp. 293–313). Springer Science and Business Media B.V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67608-7_16 Malkki, L. H. (1995). Refugees and exile: From ‘refugee studies’ to the national order of things. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 495–523. Martiniello, M. (2017). Visual sociology approaches in migration, ethnic and racial studies. Ethnic and Racial Studies. Routledge. https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journ alCode=rers20. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1295163. Accessed 4 June 2021. Massari, A. (2021). Visual securitization (IMISCOE research series). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71143-6 Mills, C. W. (2000). The sociological imagination. Oxford University Press. Accessed 14 July 2023.

76

2  Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

Moeran, B. (2007, July). Creativity at work: From participant observation to observant participation: Anthropology, fieldwork and organizational ethnography keywords. Creative Encounters: Copenhagen Business School, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fertnstert.2010.01.046 Moxey, K. (2008). Visual studies and the iconic turn. Journal of Visual Culture, 7(2), 131–146. SAGE Publications Ltd. http://vcu.sagepub.com. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412908091934. Accessed 11 August 2023. Nikielska-Sekula, K. (2021). “Have you just taken a picture of me?”: Theoretical and ethical implications of the use of researcher-produced photography in studying migrant minorities. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer Science and Business Media B.V., 31–49. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-67608-7_2 Nikielska-Sekula, K., & Desille, A. (Eds.). (2021). Visual methodology in migration studies (IMISCOE research series). Springer International Publishing. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-67608-7 Pétonnet, C. (1982). L’Observation flottante. L’exemple d’un cimetière parisien. L’Homme, 22(4), 37–47. https://www.persee.fr/doc/hom_0439-4216_1982_num_22_4_368323; https://doi. org/10.3406/hom.1982.368323 Pink, S., Tutt, D., Dainty, A., & Gibb, A. (2010). Ethnographic methodologies for construction research: Knowing, practice and interventions. Building Research & Information, 38(6), 647–659. Prieto-Blanco, P. (2021). Afterword: Visual research in migration. (In)visibilities, participation, discourses. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer Science and Business Media B.V., 327–343. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-67608-7_18. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-67608-7_18/FIGURES/4. Accessed 11 August 2023. Pulignano, V., Murgia, A., Armano, E., & Briziarelli, M. (2021). Editorial: Non-standard work, self-employment and precariousness. Frontiers in Sociology, 5(March), 2020–2021. https://doi. org/10.3389/fsoc.2020.00063 Rajaram, P. K. (2002). Humanitarianism and representations of the refugee. Journal of Refugee Studies, 15(3), 247–264. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/15.3.247 Rancière, J. (2012). Proletarian nights: The workers’ dream in nineteenth-century France. Accessed 3 January 2023. Scheper-Hughes, A. N., & Lock, M. M. (1987). The mindful body: A prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology. Medical Anthropological Quarterly, 1(1), 6–41. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/648769 Stoller, P. (2005). The presence of the ethnographic present: Some brief comments on Loïc Wacquant’s body and soul. Qualitative Sociology, 28(2), 197–199. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11133-005-4217-3 Vaike, F., Pink, S., Berg, M., & O’Dell, T. (2020). Imagining personal data. In Imagining personal data. Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350051416.ch-001 Wacquant, L. (2004). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/425391 Wacquant, L. (2005). Carnal connections: On embodiment, apprenticeship, and membership. Qualitative Sociology, 28(4), 445–474. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-005-8367-0 Wacquant, L. (2015). For a sociology of flesh and blood. Qualitative Sociology, 38(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-­014-­9291-­y

Chapter 3

Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

3.1 Migrant Workers Migration studies has had an uneven, yet rapid development as a field of research (Levy et al., 2020; Pisarevskaya et al., 2020), exploring ‘all types of international and internal migration, migrants, and migration-related diversities’ (King, 2020, p. 2). Yet, in this ever-expanding field of research, there is no widely agreed definition of migration and what a migrant is (McAuliffe & Triandafyllidou, 2021, p. 21). Whilst migration is generally understood as movement from one place to another to live, it can be internal to one country (e.g., rural-urban migration in China), as well as international. It can be relatively freely chosen or completely forced. Either way, it still is migration. In this book, migration does not refer to mobility. Mobile citizens, have the available means, i.e., access, visa rights to freely travel for leisurely purposes in order to explore places, do business or meet other ends in any part of the world. None of these activities apply here. To be precise, for the migrant co-workers in this book, the ‘voluntary’ decision to move to another country for work was made on the backdrop of adversities (e.g., poverty, discrimination, job loss, dependant family members, lack of educational resources), which have forced them to take the ‘road of a migrant’. In short, their migration experience is all but a voluntary one. Some would have chosen to stay in their country, rather than face fear of migrating illegally or insecurities while transiting several European countries till arriving in the host country and working in the shadowy sectors (Segrave, 2019; Segrave & Wonders, 2019). Some of these migrants have been driven out by global policies from countries on the periphery of globalisation and from gentrified cities in which the prices were artificially inflated by the arrival of ‘digital nomads’ (McElroy, 2020a, b; McElroy et  al., 2021). Migrants should be, thus, understood as those forced to move out of their country where they faced social inequalities to find more viable ways of life. More specifically, in this chapter, migration meets inequalities

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_3

77

78

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

(economic or gendered), and migrant workers meet precarious (insecure or seasonal) working conditions. Nonetheless, whilst migration is not the same as mobility, herein, the terms ‘migrant’ and ‘immigrant’ are used interchangeably for lack of a precise definition for im-/migrant (Samers, 2002). Some nuances need to be explicit from the outset in order to delineate between migrants referred to throughout this chapter, who have either illegally entered or illegally overstayed, such as several Asian people from Pakistan or Bangladesh, and Turkish migrant workers whose U.K. visas expired and could not be renewed. Regardless, they continued to work without papers (‘sans papiers’) and as such became ‘undocumented’. These people would be called ‘illegal immigrants’ in tabloids, government statements and immigration policy papers. It is important to stress how these immigrants were potentially more exposed to abuse and exploitation than Eastern European migrants, who at least had the rights to reside in the U.K. from 2004 onwards with the first wave of E.U. enlargement. Thus, when attempting to define the kinds of migrant workers who travailed at New Spitalfields, a wide range of related concepts and definitions may be conflated. For example, as a migration event, if the duration of stay was invoked, then the terms ‘shuttling’ or ‘circular’ would apply to southern and eastern European migrants who travelled to work at New Spitalfields for short periods when trading was up (during the crop-dependent months of September to April/May). In many cases, these E.U. transmigrants from Bulgaria and Romania arrived in the U.K. after the second wave of E.U. enlargement in 2007, but they worked irregularly at night in the New Spitalfields market until January 2014, when the transitional period ended, and the controls were lifted. They were irregular because they had the rights to reside, but not to work unless self-employed. Many manual workers in this category told me they were not legally allowed to work, but since there were no labour controls, ‘they risked it’ without registering as self-employed. After 2014, many continued to work in this way because they did not have to declare income tax, thus another kind of irregularity. Some, nonetheless, registered as self-employed whilst also working for an employer, but only declared part-time earnings although they worked full-time hours. They justified this attitude to themselves and others as a necessity to look after their families and make ends meet–most were the sole bread winner in their families, which included relatives in the U.K., as well as in their countries of birth. Whilst living on their terms, migrant nightworkers at New Spitalfields also lived in short-term lets offered by friends or their migrant families without registering their place of residence in London. This had its disadvantages, such as the instability and vulnerabilities that came from a lack of access to healthcare, exclusion from emergency housing or having no ability to hold tenancy rights. For example, they moved often, living from 1 month to the next and from one place to another, in Houses of Multiple Occupancies (HMOs) nearby Leyton or Stratford in the Newham borough without tenancy agreements. In addition to the above terms referring to migrants, two other terms are essential for the argument this chapter puts forward. These are ‘half-rejected’ and ‘half-­ permitted’. Both of these terms are used here to refer to the paradox and tension of

3.1  Migrant Workers

79

being at once denied and allowed entry, right of stay and to work in a country other than the one of birth. Thus, half-rejected migrant workers are not entirely permitted to live and work in developed societies. Yet, despite being half-rejected, migrants are half-permitted to work in low-paid manual jobs as they meet the high demands of these wealthy societies. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the tension of being half-rejected, half-permitted. In their daily and nightly lives, this paradoxical state of being both rejected and permitted happens concomitantly and are intertwined. However, for analytical purposes, this chapter is divided into two parts. The ‘half-rejected’ part begins from the premise that migrants are rejected by default as they are a ‘problem’. The ‘half-permitted’ part is based on the premise that migrants are permitted for they provide the needed manual labour that native-like citizens do not accept. The challenge is to expose this tension, namely: manual migrant workers are only permitted because the wealthy economy needs their labour in low-paid and undesirable job sectors where there are shortages. Otherwise, they would not be permitted to enter. In other words, this chapter focuses on presenting how neoliberal conditions, global inequalities and politics of immigration produce situations of precarity and marginalisation for migrant nightworkers despite and because they are needed for today’s capitalism. The purpose here is to engage with the literature relating to global cities and global uneven development, which challenge those forms of methodological nationalism that still influence labour migration scholars through the lens of ‘Fordism’ (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015, p. 7). The contemporary, global aspect of migration is more compelling as it qualifies the ‘geographically heterogeneous experiences of migration’ and allows for the ‘multiplication of statuses, subjective positions and experiences within citizenship regimes and labour markets’ (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015, p. 8). Thus, building on the work of scholars and activists who challenge pre-established boundaries in migration (Mezzadra & Nunes, 2010, p. 122), the argument of this chapter, and throughout the book, is that the embodied precarity that migrant manual nightworkers experience has a revelatory potential. This enables us to understand that ‘post-circadian’ is a more appropriate qualifier than ‘post-Fordist’ terms for today’s capitalism. In other words, the post-circadian term reveals an understanding into ‘the “subjective” dimensions of migration, on the structural excess that characterizes it with regard both to the order of citizenship and the interplay of supply and demand on the “labor market”’ (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015, p. 8). From this ‘perspective of the production of subjectivity under capitalism’ and its wider structural global processes, that ‘differentially include’ the ‘half-rejected’ and ‘half-permitted’ migrants, this ‘half-, half-’ concept embedded in this chapter, thus, provides a different gaze into the local inclusion/exclusion mechanisms inflicted on migrants’ every day and every night embodied experiences, and how these play out in micro-contexts of workplaces within an unequal labour system (Mezzadra & Nunes, 2010, p. 122). Moreover, in the field of migration studies, the turn towards transnational migration has been a response to the challenges faced by vulnerable categories of migrant workers. This chapter acknowledges the importance of such studies, and the attention these scholars pay to locality, whereby global forces, processes and structures

80

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

enable or disable the integration of migrants within these settings (Glick Schiller et al., 2011; Glick Schiller, 2012; Glick Schiller & Caglar, 2008; Nina Glick Schiller & Linda Basch, 1992; Schiller, 2009). These scholars write about how an equitable city exists only when all of its inhabitants have equal rights to access spaces (day and night) and neighbourhoods where migrants arrive and could thrive (though unfortunately, many do not). Nonetheless, the theories of Saskia Sassen, and more broadly the structuralist perspectives on migration and inequalities in the global city (Samers, 2002) provide a solid framework for this chapter. They have sharpened this chapter’s focus on the wider structural global processes (e.g., neoliberal conditions, politics of immigration), and on how these processes play out in micro-contexts of workplaces. Other social scientists argue that migration does not happen only through interactions between structures and ‘practical-evaluative and projective agentic dimensions’ (Morawska, 2007, p. 20). In other words, not all migrants have the choice, time or possibilities to reflect on their migratory experiences, but social scientists can and have facilitated these processes of transformation by highlighting how social transformation happens through multi-ethnic and multi-racial neighbourhoods in cities like London, ‘a city of migrants [and] a place of stark contrasts’ (Back et  al., 2018, p. 14). Early European migration waves of economic ‘voluntary’ migrants from regions behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ have been accounted for by anthropologists of global inequalities (Kaneff & Pine, 2011, p. 13), human geographers and artists documenting guestworkers from Southern to Northern Europe (Berger & Mohr, 2010; Castles, 1984, 1995, 2005), and migration experts on the newer South-North migration trends resulting from the 2008 economic collapse, considered more ‘controversial than previous ones’ (Lafleur & Stanek, 2017b, p.  7). The movements of miners recruited to work in the eastern U.S. or Ukrainian and Scandinavian farmers to settle in western Canada, and the Irish navvies on British construction sites (Cowley, 2004), have also been very well documented. These twenty-century movements of people have their routes in the nineteenth century and earlier (Kaneff & Pine, 2011; Lafleur & Stanek, 2017a). Other kinds of migrations, include those of political activists from territories in Central and Eastern Europe controlled by Russia in the nineteen century who were forced to move and live in exile in Siberia (Kaneff & Pine, 2011), as well as ‘the unruly dislocation, enclosure, and dispossession of the rural poor [that] populated the cities and fuelled the booming labor needs of industry in England and other European countries’ (CasasCortes et al., 2015, p. 7). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve into details of these migrations, it is important to note that ‘migration’ statuses of migrants in this study, trace back to much earlier movements and grew out of past politics of migration. More, the chapter does not provide a history of world migration history. Rather its focus is on deconstructing the ‘codes, institutions, and practices that continue to shape migratory policies and experiences across a wide range of geographical settings and scales’ (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015, p. 7).

3.2  Migration Trends

81

3.2 Migration Trends The 2022 World Migration Report estimates that almost 281 million people or 3.6% of the world’s population have migrated between and across domestic or international regions for numerous causes (McAuliffe & Triandafyllidou, 2021). Further, 87 million (or 30.9% of the international migration population) migrated to Europe, which remains the top region for international migrants. Notwithstanding the global economic downturn, and environmental and health crises, these hundreds of millions of international migrants flow across national borders to settle primarily in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. If the migrant population were a country, it would place fourth after China, India and the U.S., with Indonesia (with a population of 273,523,615) in fifth place. More than half of world’s migrant workers (162.9 million or 86.9%) were absorbed by the top ten OECD high-income and upper-middle income countries (ibid). Further breakdowns of the International Migration Outlook data estimate that in 2018 alone, 5.3 million people migrated into the top OECD countries. Additionally, 3.5 million migrated for education and another 4.9 million (an 11% increase over 2016 and 5% increase over 2017) migrated to find temporary work within the OECD area. Moreover, 68.3% were employed, of which women and elderly people (aged 55–64) fared better at finding employment than men–Poland absorbed most of these labourers and was followed by the U.S. The 2022 World Migration shows more accurately that the distribution of international migrant labourers falls into three large geographical subregions, absorbing the 102.4 million (or 61%) of all migrant labourers: (1) North Americas, (2) the Arab countries and (3) Northern, Southern and Western Europe. However, the numbers of international migrants shrank considerably due to the impact of COVID-19. The same Migration Report estimates that the number of people migrating and living in a country other than their country of birth would have increased by another 283 million were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Thus, due to the unavailability of data for this period, the figures and facts published do not reflect the year-on-year reality for migrants in 2020, but can be used to assess the trends after the second half of that year (ibid). For this reason, the decrease in the number of people reported to have migrated is partly due to how COVID-19 impacted migration and other forms of mobility (e.g., for tourism, study or business), and how it drastically reduced the possibilities for people to travel on or return to their countries of birth. Among the three million stranded migrants, many were students and workers left without support (financial or consular) or even food and shelter–the latter being exposed to extreme poverty as no support was offered by governments during the pandemic (ibid, p.  35). Notwithstanding the unusual

 OECD 2020 reported that notwithstanding the unusual patterns of migration during the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted the world’s need to migrate, the reality for labour migrants continued as they knew it, to provide their essential skills in pandemic times (Fasani and Mazza 2020). For facts and figures on migration patterns in 2020 please see infographic: https://bit.ly/3x17Zkv. Accessed 01.06.2021. 1

82

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

experience that the pandemic has forced upon us all, labour migrants in the E.U. have continued to migrate as key workers to ensure that basic services run during this pandemic (European Migration Network, 2020; Fasani & Mazza, 2020), as well as seasonal workers to harvest asparagus or pluck turkeys to feed OECD nations such as Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the U.K. (Bejan, 2020; Doomernik et  al., 2020; Fana et  al., 2020; Güell & Garcés-mascareñas, 2021; Matusz & Aivaliotou, 2020). Before COVID-19 (and up to the middle of 2020), estimates show that nearly two thirds (62.2%) of the total number of migrants or 169 million were migrant workers, and that male migrant workers outnumbered female migrant workers by 28.8 million (or 17%). Assuming that migration is an advantage, i.e., provides more lucrative avenues to live elsewhere than staying behind, in the home country, these gendered trends show an increasing gap disfavouring women migrant workers (compared to the year of 2013 when this gap was 11.4%). In the European Union2 or ‘fortress Europe’ (Verstraete, 2010), labour migrants are forced to seek work in response to the growing inequalities in their countries of origin (Kaneff & Pine, 2011; Morawska, 2007, p. 13). Moreover, literature inspired by Favell (2014) points out that since the 1980s, labour migrants have come from all over the world to Europe (Zentai, 2020). Yet, in parallel, the Freedom of Movement for workers in Europe has increasingly become less free. This has been influenced by the two E.U. enlargements (in 2004–A8 countries; in 2007–A2 countries) which impacted negatively on the working rights of E.U. citizens in the U.K. and elsewhere in the E.U., and were contested in the media and in political debates.3 For example, the United Kingdom Border Agency (U.K.BA; replaced by U.K.  Visas and Immigration in 2013)implemented a set of immigration policies and practices, that generated waiting lists of thousands of migrants including for students waiting to begin their internships, which never received their work permits. Similarly, adjustments made by the U.K. Job Centres to the issuing system of self-­employment licenses prevented those E.U. citizens already settled in the U.K. to enter its labour market. Predominately, it was Bulgarians and Romanians who faced legal restrictions to work in the U.K. (and in most E.U. countries) following their accession to the E.U. in 2007. During the seven-year transition, the U.K.’s implementation of immigration policies has influenced migrant workers’ statuses, and to different degrees worsened their precarious position in the U.K.’s labour market. Particularly noteworthy, is the period that occurred towards the end of 2013 when anti-immigrant sentiments were amplified and used in prevailing political discourses against Romanians–and to a lesser extent against Bulgarian citizens living in the U.K., which vilified them as health tourists, job thieves and welfare scrounges (Anderson,  This ethnography was conducted in 2015 when the U.K. was still one of the 28 member states of the E.U. Hence, this book considers the U.K.’s as a E.U. member state up to 2020 when this country exited the E.U. 3  The following A8 countries entered the European Union (E.U.) in 2004: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia; whilst the A2 countries – Bulgaria and Romania – joined the E.U. in 2007. 2

3.3  Half-Rejected Migrant Workers

83

2010; Long, 2014; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010). The new policies, supported by law and through preventative practices that limited E.U. workers accessing the U.K. labour market during this transition, caused E.U. migrant communities to feel insecure, both throughout the seven-year transition and after restrictions ended. Yet, these migrants were caught between ‘a rock and a hard place’ since, as Ruhs and Anderson (Ruhs & Anderson, 2010, p. 15) explain, factors such as the British labour market’s ‘growing dependence on migrant workers’ and the global economic deterioration resulted in fewer incentives for migrants to return to their worse-off situations in their countries of origin. Moreover, the ‘hostile environment’ rose to the top of the U.K.’s political agenda from 2014.4 This was substantiated by the two Immigration Acts (2014, 2016), which targeted migrants in Britain and specifically, the nationals who recently joined the E.U. e.g., Romanians and Bulgarians. In particular, the U.K.’s neoliberal reforms intensified the austerity programmes and created a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants travelling to the U.K. for work (Collyer et al., 2019; Travis, 2013), with some researchers rightly argue that plans for this kind of ‘reception to welcome’ migrants were underway since 20125 (Schweitzer, 2022). This has not, however, stopped many migrants to head for the U.K. (a top 10 OECD country), where manual migrant workers are in high demand (Ruhs & Anderson, 2010), forced to work in unskilled occupations at the bottom end of the labour market (Ruhs, 2013), as well as over represented in vulnerable work (Lopes & Hall, 2015, p. 209): More likely to suffer problems at work and summary dismissal; less likely to be members of trade unions and therefore be in a position to have their rights and conditions covered by collective bargaining; less likely to know their employment rights; and more likely to be subject to routine bullying in the workplace.

3.3 Half-Rejected Migrant Workers Migrants who travel for work to meet the ‘need for cheap labour in mature economies’ (King, 2012, p. 4) are depicted as a threat for driving down locals’ wages or are accused of being welfare benefit tourists. Migrants get blamed for things that go wrong in a society, because ‘it is easy to blame immigrants for everything’ (Sassen interviewed by Stanoeva, 2012, p. 125). Yet, the same migrants are permitted purely for the economic advantages that they provide as cheap, but essential labour. In this section, I therefore, deal with realities of being half-rejected. During the fall of 2015, when I was undertaking the nightnography at New Spitalfields, Syrian refugees continued to reach the U.K. shores, but as in 2014,6  See for instance, Collyer et al. (2019) Politics of (Dis-)Integration, who argue that this was in the making as early as 2012. 5  See Schweitzer (2022, p. 3 Footnote 2). 6  Stevenson, A., ‘Dismay as Britain Accepts Just 50 Syrian Refugees’, 27 June 2014, http://www. politics.co.uk/news/2014/06/27/dismay-as-britain-accepts-just-50-syrian-refugees. 4

84

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

only a few dozen were accepted and many died whilst crossing the channel, powerless to save their lives. The front covers of major U.K. tabloids spread discontent and sparked public debates filled with anti-migrant sentiments through ethnocentric story headlines, such as: ‘Fruit and veg prices to soar: French migrant crisis is causing chaos to Britain’s food supply.’7 Given the spread of misinformation by tabloids like the Daily Express, fault was placed on the displaced migrants and refugees with their small children who were forced to camp in tents at Calais on the French side of the border between the U.K. and France. Along with many other news headlines, the politicisation of the issues around the arrivals– who were only a fraction of the number of displaced European migrants seeking safety in the U.K.–exacerbated the nature of the problem to alarming levels. This time, immigrants were blamed for the alleged rise of fruit and vegetables prices. This is just one example where ‘migration [as] a complex issue … is exacerbated … to alarming degrees’, regardless of the kind of ‘humanitarian assistance [provided] to people who have been displaced, including by weather events, conflict, and persecution, or those who have been stranded during crises, such as COVID-19’ (McAuliffe & Triandafyllidou, 2021, p. xiii). Over the course of my fieldwork, I collected and digitalised more than a hundred media articles and reports of front-page cover stories that scare mongered and blamed displaced migrants and refugees. The rhetoric that misrepresents migrants and migration twists our reality. In regard to this, I concur with Long (2014) that the problem caused by immigration policy rhetorics, to ‘curb’ or ‘manage’ migration lies with the U.K.’s immigration system, and not with migration itself. Moreover, migrants are portrayed as not being in crisis nor as fleeing their home countries because of it, but as contributing to a crisis in the modern capitalist societies where they arrive or pass through and that, hence, they are seen as a ‘problem’ (Nyers, 2006). Some of the common stereotypes in the London’s media (Mădroane, 2012), would portray someone begging on the street corner or at the underground exit as the generic Eastern European man or the mother wearing a headscarf as a Roma woman. The hostile and unwelcoming atmosphere amplified over the ‘long summer of migration’ that stretched into 2016, is perhaps what prompted Nando Sigona, an Italian-born academic in the U.K. and Professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement, to entitle one of his blog posts: ‘There is no refugee crisis in the U.K.,’8 and to confess that: There are days [when] I can’t stand British tabloids and their relentless scaremongering about asylum seekers, refugees, migrants etc., etc. Imagine you were locked in a room and only relying on them to understand the refugee crisis, the U.K. would look like a country invaded, ‘swamped’ by ‘swarms’ and ‘hordes’ of refugees after the ‘generous’ U.K. welfare system.

 Daily Express. Thursday June 4, 2015. Front cover story: Fruit and veg prices to soar: French migrant crisis is causing chaos to Britain’s food supply. In author’s collection. 8  Sigona, N. (2016). There is no refugee crisis in the U.K.  Online at https://nandosigona. info/2016/04/12/there-is-no-refugee-crisis-in-the-uk/ Accessed 27.05.21 7

3.3  Half-Rejected Migrant Workers

85

I agree with Sigona’s (2016) comment that this imagery is projected and amplified through contested terms such as ‘crisis’. Farah Atoui (2020, p. 212) also points out that ‘crisis’ has become a standardised term used by ‘progressive’ politicians’ to describe immigration ‘in overwhelming terms’ (Long, 2014, pp. 12, 32) and in the media to manipulate the public perception of migrants, the ones threatening British values. Other scholars have pointed to the ‘dehumanizing and dehistoricising’ characteristics of today’s representation of immigrants in the media (Mannik, 2012, p. 262), such as in the case of the displaced migrants living in the camps at Calais who were described as if they were unauthorized to cross the borders of European states even when seeking safety (Berger & Mohr, 2010 [1975]; Malkki, 1997; Mannik, 2012; Nyers, 2006). Furthermore, the gap between the misrepresentations of migrants (what gets shown on screens or tabloid media in the U.K.) and reality (the real, hidden lives of migrant workers) has more likely widened, especially since the 2016 Brexit referendum. This is one reason among many others for which migrants are half-rejected in the countries where they arrive. It is worth noting that the ‘summer of migration’ is but one reference point in the history of migration. Hence, King’s (2012, 2020) invitation to ponder on the migrancy experience rather than ask, ‘Who is a migrant?’–and by the same token, ‘Who is not and why not’? –is useful here. In this vein, I pose the following questions: ‘What it is like to be a migrant or to live with ‘migrancy’ as a state of being?’ And, more specifically, ‘What is it like to live the paradox of being a half-rejected, half-permitted migrant?’ As others have noted before, living the ‘migrant’s paradox’ means to embody this tension of being half-rejected, half-permitted. Hall’s (2021) migrant entrepreneurs in Britain feel that they live marginal citizenships on an undetermined probation period. Author’s (Year) day labourers in North London endure being ‘half-in, half-out’ of the British society, for being from the E.U. (at the time of writing) did not mean full rights in accessing the U.K.’s labour market. Bojkov (2004) extends this tension to all citizens of the newly joined nations to the E.U.,9 highlighting that Bulgarians and Romanians are ‘neither here, not there’ in terms of being forced to leave their countries of birth and to work in wealthy countries like the U.K., knowing that they will not be accepted in British or E.U. societies. I position this discussion within the stream of migration literature that considers the ‘shrinking opportunities for inclusion for marked groups of migrants’ (Zentai, 2020, p.  203), as a reflection of the current ‘social struggles around capital and migration’ (Mezzadra & Nunes, 2010, p. 122). This enables me to show that the root causes of migrants ‘becoming a problem’ and, thus, being negatively perceived and badly treated, does not only lie in racialisation (e.g., the British government’s ‘hostile environment’ or the tabloids’ scaremongering). It is vital to understand that being half-rejected as migrants arises also from the structural causes that forced  Bulgaria and Romania joined the European Union in 2007, when the U.K. was a part of the bloc. See Macarie (2014) for an analysis concerning the seven-year long transition that followed Romania’s accession to the E.U., and how the integration of Romanian nationals traveling to work with limited rights took place in the unequally labour markets of existing member states. 9

86

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

them to migrate–and for some to migrate to multiple countries, moving away from inequalities, persecution, discrimination, suffering and poverty in their country of birth. These same issues that they ran away from, become the reasons for which they are half-rejected in the countries where they settle and work. This is to say that the locals or native-like people and by political forces often blame migrants for the causes that forced them to migrate in the first place. Migrants are portrayed as if they brought their ‘own’ economic and social problems into the countries where they sought safety, security or a viable way of life or even prosperity, merely, it seems, because they migrated. By this, I do not imply that international migration can address such large issues faced by labour migrants through ‘push-pull’ dynamics, but rather the opposite. In a similar vein to other critiques to the push-pull paradigm, this study concurs to explain that the ‘structural forces constrain and inflect individual choices and direct the options available for people to migrate’ (Holmes, 2013a, p. 36). Golmes argues that this lack of recognition of structural context (e.g., globalisation-led forces and mechanisms) denies the constant demands for cheap migrant labour (Ruhs & Anderson, 2010), and that, in the interest of protecting their own popularity with the electorate, political leaders blame ‘immigrants’ for the high levels of unemployment in the national labour markets. Hall (2021) argues that what we see nowadays are the results of minimising the negative effects of a layered political economy of displacement and the impacts on migrants’ prolonged journeys to the U.K. Unlike those forced to flee in response to emergencies such as war or natural disasters and who are accepted as refugees in ‘pull’ countries and conferred political and social rights, ‘economic migrants’ are unwanted and politically rejected. Moreover, at the expense of the disposable bodies of ‘low-skilled’ workers, ‘economic migrants’ are also constrained in leaving their countries, i.e., not by choice, but due to poverty in countries affected by forces of globalisation, and the draconic immigration policies implemented strip migrants of their political and social rights (Fernández-Reino et al., 2020; Holmes, 2013b). Entrapped by globalisation and rejected in receiving countries, migrants seek invisible routes to access work even if that means becoming disposable and receiving very little benefits in return. It means that poverty in one place, affords wealth elsewhere. It also means that the half-rejected migrants experience anything but voluntary migration; they leave their homes under forced necessity to feed and educate their families and children or risk living in poverty, malnourished and uneducated. In wealthy societies, where there is demand for 24/7 labour and services, this is possible because of the ‘positive values provided to society at large’ by migrants generally (Krase & Shortell, 2021, p. 142), and specifically by migrant nightworkers (Duijzings & Dušková, 2022; MacQuarie, 2020; Shaw, 2022). Migrant workers are forced to leave their country of birth to seek work and find a viable way of life, and this experience is anything but voluntary. For example, Eastern European migrants left Bulgaria or Romania not because the E.U. granted them access to a labour market in wealthy states, but because they were forced to find solutions to rising unemployment, inequalities and poverty, especially due to the 2007–2008 economic downturn. Yet, when they arrived in the older E.U.

3.4  Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

87

member states to live and work, they were seen as a ‘problem’. Whilst all migrants are half-rejected and half-permitted, E.U. migrants from countries on the semi-­ periphery of globalisation, who otherwise have little to bargain with in the face of the negative forces of globalisation, are further rejected in the countries at the centre of globalisation where they arrive. Mass media misinforms, and populist politics exacerbate the issues around the arrivals of migrant workers. This has contributed to the way in which labour migrants are perceived as free agents who choose to leave their countries for economic pursuits, which is disadvantageous to them because they are treated as if they brought problems with them, rather than solutions to solve a local labour market in a global city. Unlike the responses towards people who have been displaced by wars and environmental disasters, migrant workers are halfrejected. The receiving states and national media permit their arrival, although selectively and on a temporary basis, and offers them some assistance. The halfpermitted migrant workers are accepted only so long as they provide the manual labour needed. I next explore this tension by showing how migrant workers in 24/7 London–in particular, Eastern Europeans and third country nationals–end up worse-­ off, e.g., they may end up being trapped in night jobs, on the lowest level of precarity and can experience migration as anything, but voluntary. Like a revolving door, they are migrants who are rejected by day, but permitted at night.

3.4 Half-Permitted Migrant Workers In 2015, there were two major events that affected the presence and then absence of undocumented workers at New Spitalfields and disturbed the normal flow of work for many others. The first event was a hidden, little-known practice to the world outside of the New Spitalfields market, that is, an immigration raid. One worker, Ervan, contested that such practices affected him (an E.U. migrant worker) in different ways than it did for undocumented workers. During the interview I conducted with him, Ervan said that what ‘was needed, but it never happened, were labour regulators’ to do impromptu inspections of businesses, employers and our working conditions, rather than immigration raids targeting undocumented migrants. Often, these raids were ineffective because the news of an upcoming immigration raid arrived much earlier than the vans filled with immigration officers and their dogs. During a raid that I witnessed, the undocumented migrants hid or ran away from the site. Some, like Rani, a Pakistani checkman at FruitVeg, disappeared and only returned after months of living in a hideaway provided by his extended family in the North of England. Additionally, as I was connected to a couple of workers through their social media accounts, I saw there, posts and updates about their journeys in other cities and countries. Since I never saw them again at the market after that raid, this indicated to me that many may have left London or fled the U.K. altogether. The second major event was the mass migration of people from Syria across the European continent that occurred throughout 2015 and well into 2016. The U.K. tabloid media framed this world news event as the ‘Calais crisis’. Everywhere in the

88

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

world, the war in Syria was on everyone’s lips. In other words, this was not just an isolated event happening in the small geographical area of Calais, where mostly displaced Syrians were seeking refuge on the U.K. shores. The ‘long summer of migration’10 refers to the events that took place in Europe in 2015–2016 when moving images swept across the online and offline worlds, showing Syrian refugees fleeing the war in their thousands at any one time (Ahrens & King, 2023). These refugees crossed through Turkey and the non-E.U. states of Macedonia and Serbia and transited through Hungary to reach Austria and Germany. Kasparek and Speer (2015) reported that refugees camped at Budapest Keleti Station were fed and catered for by Hungarian civilians (not by the Hungarian government) until the night of Friday 4th September 2015. Shortly after midnight, thousands of refugees boarded the transit buses, which transported them to the Austrian border. Thousands more followed that night numbers of refugees continued to increase over that summer across Europe.11 The past 11 years of the Syrian civil war has resulted in a total death toll of 610,000 people and out of the total number of deaths, an estimated 499,657 of the deceased have been identified in the 2021 SOHR (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights) Reports.12 Many fled Syria to survive the war by crossing the Mediterranean Sea, but failed to enter the European fortress fenced at its borders (Glick Schiller, 2016). Very few made it close to the U.K. border. In most cases, those who were able to cross the English Channel13 were immediately treated as guilty, rather than presumed innocent, of having illegally crossed the border. Without a doubt, a percentage would find their routes through darkness and end up at New Spitalfields to work the ‘graveyard shift’, just like others whose lives were also shaken by this event. Some even left the nightmarket for good, although they had the rights to work in the U.K. For those who stayed, and although somewhat protected by being hidden at night, it was difficult to escape the daily flood of tabloid-led anti-migrant sentiments. I also learnt from these nightworkers, as well as regular wholesale customers, that the trade at New Spitalfields was undoubtedly affected. They claimed that there were disruptions that ensued following the events around the migrant camps of Calais, which prevented goods crossing the English Channel to and from the mainland of the European continent. In these migrants’ views, the people stranded at Calais were to blame for the lack of business at New Spitalfields. They feared that this would affect their incomes, as their employers were threatening them with job cuts–a regular practice enacted

 Kasparek, B. and Speer, M. (2015). Of hope. Hungary and the long summer of migration (Translation: Elena Buck). Online at https://bordermonitoring.eu/ungarn/2015/09/of-hope-en/ Accessed 27.05.2021. 11  See Kasparek and Speer (2015) for full analysis of the events and the significance to the European migration and border regime. Online at: https://bordermonitoring.eu/ungarn/2015/09/of-hope-en/ Accessed 02.12.2023. 12  Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (2021). Syrian Revolution 120 months on: 594,000 persons killed, and millions of Syrians displaced and injured. Online at: https://www.syriahr.com/ en/243125/ Accessed 26.12.2022. 13  French: La Manche 10

3.4  Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

89

without notice. Sadly, although the migrants already working at night in London’s New Spitalfields market were once irregular or illegal themselves, they were now blaming the migrants stranded in Calais who needed help. This was not so much because they were heartless vis-à-vis refugees of the Syrian war, but more a reaction to the anxiety that their bosses, who feared losses in trading, passed down onto these manual workers who were already concerned about supporting their families abroad and in the U.K. Namely, the effects of the Syrian war rippled into and shook the lives of those migrants already working at New Spitalfields. Such challenges expose the academic community to the question of ‘solidarity in diverse [multicultural] societies’ (Glick Schiller, 2016, p. 1). Glick-Schiller (2016) further warns us that perhaps refugees being welcome by some European state leaders, like Angela Merkel, was a world event that has shown us (migrants in Europe, Europeans at home, African Americans and Latinx in the U.S.) that we too seek refuge from the neoliberal war through accumulation by dispossession of the poor for the benefit of the rich. The factors of the neoliberal economic war on the poor, geographical or political turmoil and physical war conflicts–when combined, influence migration. It is important to understand how these structural conditions affect the lives of vulnerable migrant workers, regardless of how they are defined (McAuliffe & Triandafyllidou, 2021). As such, in this section I look at the other side of the coin by discussing the other half of the argument on how living a migrant’s paradox means understanding that migrants are half-permitted because the economies of modern, wealthy, capitalist nations rely heavily on their work. Many migrants end up in nightwork sectors and thus, contribute to the functioning of 24/7 transport industries and nightlife activities satisfy the consumerist culture, whilst accumulating extra revenue for local, daytime-run governments. The half-permitted migrants in this book are those ensuring that 24/7 cities like London are fed on the 24-hour clock. Therefore, the ways in which migrants are treated (rejected versus permitted) when arriving in the developed societies, becomes even more relevant. What policies the government employs ‘as [its] repressive right-wing forces spread misinformation, confusion, and hate’ against and about migrants, is too of further relevance (Glick Schiller, 2021, 2023, p. 23). Moreover, the British government’s ‘racialised sorting’ (Hall, 2021, p. 154) and the ‘processes of racialisation’ (Sahraoui, 2019, pp. 83–85) that target different categories of ‘racialised groups’ (e.g., people of colour or domestic care workers) and separates migrants from locals, is especially important for understanding the contemporary world given that the migrant population grows by the year, as well as the ways in which migrants become ‘a problem’ and the tendency in mass media to frame migration as socially ‘problematic’ (Krase & Shortell, 2021). Moreover, migrant manual workers are vital for the global labour market (Ruhs, 2013; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010), but they are overrepresented in precarious work such as street cleaning, food-processing and in fruit and vegetable markets (Shaw, 2022). Furthermore, despite the high demand for low-skilled production and care work (Ratzmann & Sahraoui, 2021; Uhde & Ezzeddine, 2019), migrant workers are seen as a threat to the local labour market’s stability (Huysmans, 2000). Workers in healthcare, industrial manufacturing, communications and hospitality are organised

90

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

in shiftwork, including nights. For instance, nighttime TV and radio show producers are skilled professionals engaged in nightshift work too. Across industries and work sectors, nightshift workers’ strategic role is to support what traditionally has been structured as daytime work. In the U.K., regulations in a collective or workforce agreement specify that the nightshift lasts no less than 7 hours and starts at midnight (Kubo, 2014; Kubo et al., 2013). Trade Union Congress (McIlwaine, 2010; TUC, 2015, 2019a, b) reported that Britain’s ‘graveyard shifters’ count for 3.25 million people or more than one in nine workers in the Night Time Economy (NTE). London has the country’s second-largest contingent of nightworkers after South East England (414,000), where care workers, nurses and midwives account for the majority of nightworkers (ONS14 cited by TUC (ibid). London is the powerhouse of Britain and the work capital of Europe and the world. An overwhelming majority of migrants who reach the U.K.’s shores end up living and working in London, with a high intake in food production and consumption (Rienzo & Vargos-Silva, 2014). Notwithstanding David Cameron’s promise to ‘drive down immigration from the record high of 252,000 in 2011 (or 212,000 by the end of 2013)’, it remained unfulfilled by the time of his resignation in 2016 (Long, 2014, p. 169).15 His successor, Mrs. Theresa May, and her legacy of the ‘hostile environment’, failed in equal measure, which stands as evidence of the ‘folly of trying to manage migration in crude quantitative terms’ (ibid). Moreover, migrants working on the U.K. labour market has increased considerably from 2.9 million (in 1993) to nearly seven million in the last 20  years (Rienzo, 2016; ibid). Migrant Observatory regularly reports how foreign-­born workers fare in the U.K. labour market. In 2015, it was reported that migrants who lived and worked in London were divided between those who worked as employees (36%) and those who were self-employed (48%). Unsurprisingly, nonetheless, U.K.’s foreign-born workers know too well what the very bottom of the labour market feels like (Boswell & Geddes, 2011); the highest intake of foreign-­ born migrants are absorbed in food manufacturing (38%), residential and domestic work (32%), and make-up factories (29%) (Rienzo, 2016; ibid). In 2020, across all U.K. industries and services, the foreign-born count was 15.8%. Furthermore, E.U. migrants count for most of the 18.8% workforce in transport and storage; and third-country nationals (or non-E.U. citizens) count for 18.6% in health and 24.6% in the information and communication sectors (Fernández-Reino et al., 2020). Yet, what these migrants’ role is in the British economy, thus far, remains somewhat unclear for the broader society. In contrast to mass media accounts, social scientists have written about migrants’ positive contributions to life in the city (Aneesh, 2017; Back et  al., 2018; Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018; Sassen, 2000, 2017). Migrants (of Eastern European, African or Asian descent), documented or not, live in multi-ethnic environments ‘marked by ‘problematic’ cultural heterogeneity’, and change the meaning of the contested spaces in cities where they live and  Office for National Statistics (ONS) published in the Trade Union Congress report on Britain’s nightworkers. There are no conclusive estimates as to how many foreign-born work at night. 15  Office of National Statistics, Migration Statistics Quarterly Report, 22 May 2014, http://www. ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/migration1/migration-statistics-quarterly-report/may-2014/index.html 14

3.5  Debating the Global City

91

work (Krase & Shortell, 2021, p. 142). On this last point before debating the global city, this book puts forward the argument that global cities also attract both the powerful and rich (rentiers) and the disadvantaged (migrant workers), and it is often the latter that see urban landscapes as contested spaces (Sassen, 1991). Both the division and distribution of labour grow in an unequal manner. Moreover, in this neoliberal age, migration is ‘produced and patterned’ (Sassen, 1988, p. xxi). Migrants, therefore, ‘become both products and producers of that contested space’–the city (Krase & Shortell, 2021, p. 142).

3.5 Debating the Global City Many books have been published on the global city, but none have stood the test of time as sturdily as Saskia Sassen’s The Global City (1991). Her argument is that the global city is a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions borne out of globalising flows. Debates across the social sciences on the topic have crossed the disciplinary boundaries of geography and urban studies and tend to be opposingly camped around the global city concept with either a supportive or critical stance. Notwithstanding the contestations, scholars agree in favour of the view that global cities are localities or nodes where ‘macro processes, like global trade and micro realities, as those of housing and metropolitan transport’ meet as effects of globalisation (Acuto & Steele, 2013). Whilst these and other accounts (Swyngedouw & Cox, 1997) seriously discuss the scale of the global processes and local social phenomena or ‘glocal’ city issues that impact the lives of those who need to fit their lives to 24/7 city rhythms, very little is revealed about the strategic role migrants have in city-making and the way nocturnal rhythms of global work are restructured to fit a global economy–the particular scope of this book (Aneesh, 2021; Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018). For this study, Sassen’s (1991) global city hypothesis, when applied to reflect migration trends, presents no analytical concern, and contends with her later argument (Sassen, 2000) that the contradictions and conflicts present in global cities are the result of at least three factors: (1) that cities attract large-scale immigration; (2) that cities inevitably involve ‘increasing income and occupational polarization’; and (3) that cities concentrate a high number of low-skilled workers who have an important role in strategically maintaining the daytime structure by working at night. All three factors are indispensable if we are to capture and connect the work and workers behinds the command functions within the production processes and locality, and each crucial in reorganising work lives to fit global processes (Aneesh, 2017, 2021; Sassen, 2000). Samers (2002), however, questions Sassen’s central explanation that the global city nurtures occupational polarisation (Sassen, 1991). Additionally, he doubts that global cities are centres for expansion of labour migration because of the limitations that have been introduced by formal labour contracts in European countries. This could arguably be the case if we think of the transitional controls that prevented

92

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

workers from Romania and Bulgaria accessing the U.K.’s labour market between 2007 and 2014. Whilst it restricted inflows of migrant workers from these two E.U. countries, it has not altogether stopped them from arriving and becoming irregular workers. Equally, as the Department of Work and Pensions statistics show, many were allowed to and became self-employed before 2014. Samers (ibid) insists that there is nothing principally novel in stating that cities are a pull factor for immigrants. In reply, Sassen (ibid) argues, rightfully, that global cities grow due to the inflow of undocumented migrants working in informal sectors, and not due to registered migrants. My earlier nocturnal research and night outreach work in London, confirm that Romanian market traders, Bangladeshi rickshaw drivers, chefs in China Town and street sex workers were attracted by the unseen sectors of nightwork. It provided these workers with advantages e.g., invisibility from immigration control and the U.K. tax office, and access to workplaces where English language skills were not a must upon the start of employment, which they could not benefit from were they to seek employment in ‘less global’ cities that sleep at night. Although, in Samers terms, this may not seem so novel, it shows a win-win situation for both the city and its migrant workers unseen in the official statistics of the city. Following this line of argument, it is reasonable to argue that official figures on migrant workers in global cities are inconclusive due to such limitations. Samers (ibid) argues that it is not only global cities that benefit from the economic contribution of informal migrants, but smaller cities also, such as Dublin in Ireland, Liverpool in the U.K. and El Paso in the U.S. Samers (ibid) is offering an alternative in order to rethink the focus on immigration by linking wider ideas closer to the transnationalism model, a transition supported in the literature on ‘immigrant entrepreneurship’ (Schiller et  al., 1995). Datta and Brickell (2016) note too, that migrants create ‘translocal spaces’, which cross boundaries between countries as well as smaller cities, which reflect life-worlds that are not linked territorially (localities miles apart from one another), but spatially (by geographical scale). McEwan et  al. (2005), acknowledge that ethnicity-based networks bring economic advantages as well as introduce cross territorial boundaries. This approach is helpful as it highlights how globalisation and global cities impact on its residents. Birmingham, the second largest in the U.K., has a superdiverse population which links far beyond the city’s boundaries with their international Chinese business networks, ethnic food manufacturing and the Banghra music industry. Similar links, I have made in Chapter Two, reveal an understanding of how the migrants who converged on the New Spitalfields night market site, and their work ethics and sociabilities are very different than those from more affluent backgrounds who have a natural tendency to feel solidarity with those who have similar values. Whilst New Spitalfields precarious workers naturally show signs of fragile cooperation, these are tentative, fragile and the workers turn into competitors because the situation at New Spitalfields market is a landscape of insecurity and atomisation. Additionally, workers are used up and spent, and caught up in the demands of the physical work so much that solidarity becomes secondary to the need of surviving the nightshift, as I discuss at length in Chapter Eight.

3.6 Conclusion

93

Nevertheless, the global city is best positioned to reveal the entanglements between globalisation and migrants, as well as the polarisation of the workforce resulting from global processes that reorganise the work lives of janitors, for example, who clean the households and offices of chief executives (Aneesh, 2017; Sassen, 2017), and of taxi drivers who make sure that corporate executives in Toronto’s financial district arrive on time (Sharma, 2014). Thus, it is no longer about lowwage occupations, but of a ‘strategic infrastructure’ that includes the households of top-level executives needing to function like clockwork with no room for crises on the one hand, and the ‘maintenance domain’ or ‘pieces of production’ on the other, i.e., janitors left in the penumbra of the night to clean the offices based in the financial districts of New York City (NYC) or Toronto. Not unlike in the case of Sassen’s (2016) janitors, migrant loaders and forklift drivers’ bodily work is strategic. Put different, they too are involved in a ‘strategic maintenance set-up’, which they support physically at night – being ‘pieces of production’ in the food supply chains that feed a nation. Global cities rest on the shoulders of these migrant nightworkers bodies, so to speak. But having their bodies are being used, abused and devalued in the fruit and vegetable trade, one of the most fundamental forms of work in the production, distribution and provision of food to the 24/7 society, is wrong. In addition, there are no infrastructural resources or structural interventions from governing bodies outside of the workplace to unionise these workers and assist them in acting collectively towards being active agents of change (MacQuarie, 2019). Yet, the ‘invisible denizens’ could be described as an apolitical mass of migrants unaware of their strategic role in a global city like London, and unless supported and taught how to mobilise and demand their rights to decent working conditions.16

3.6 Conclusion Chapter Three has dissected the structural context that constrains rejected migrants in entering the ‘grey zone’ of the labour market at night, in less visible work sectors that rely heavily on manual migrant labour. Hidden in large sheds like New Spitalfields market, these migrants seek protection from the mainstream media and the neoliberal politics, which generate a generally hostile environment against migrants and a process of ‘illegalisation’, i.e., ‘the legal production of migrant ‘illegality” (Nicholas de Genova, 2002, p. 419). A majority of these migrants become illegal in the process of hiding and are, therefore, subject to deportation and housing evictions, have no access to welfare (e.g., housing or Universal Credit), have limited healthcare and face barriers towards building credit histories or taking out student loans. Additionally, for many across Europe, entering ‘illegality’ renders them more  Recent strike among security staff at New Covent Garden Market in Nine Elms London, resemble what in Sassen’s conceptualisation to understand advanced economies, indicates that in this strategic set-up of 24/7 food supply chain workers become aware of their strategic role, and begin organising. Online at: https://bit.ly/3vrOClP. Accessed 01.01.2023. 16

94

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

vulnerable in the workplace. In the process, they become fragmented from the mainstream society by the absence of connections between nightworkers and daytime regulators and relevant work forces. This chapter also explored the production of marginalisation and invisibilisation of migrant nightworkers resulting from the effects of ‘racialized sorting’ (Hall, 2021, p. 154). This is a form of colonialist logic that rigidly controls borders. More, this is the process by which hierarchies are reproduced and persist through normalisation and invisibilisation. Put differently, this border mentality inherent in the British immigration system impacts negatively on the half-rejected migrants, whilst at the same time economically half-permits them to sustain nighttime economies in larger, global U.K. cities. This ethnic-racialised approach sorts out who comes in, who is allowed to remain and who is unwanted and, therefore, who can never enter or must leave the U.K. Moreover, these migrants’ difficult experiences are produced and persist due to the larger social structures. For the past decade, and particularly since the 2016 Brexit referendum, the ‘hostile environment’ to im/migrants in the U.K. has involved harsher immigration policies and these were enforced via the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts. The chapter further outlined how the ethno-racial hierarchy maps out the fragmentation between manual workers within U.K.’s food supply chains, who must fight with one another for meagre wages in order to survive in an already precarious working environment. The ethnographic data shows how unwelcome environments have also caused precarity and suffering to the more recent waves of Eastern European migrants. This has been even more so among migrants who end up working at night in manual jobs, such as loaders or café servers at New Spitalfields, many from A2 and A8 countries, as well as third-country nationals, such as those from Turkey, who have long-established labour migration routes through bilateral agreements between the U.K. and Turkey. Their suffering has been reproduced and normalised and, to a greater extent, invisibilised by the unequal labour system that favours daytime work, and by the nature of nightwork, which is less talked about in the media or brought into the public eye. Across industries and work sectors in the E.U., nightshift workers’ strategic role is to support what traditionally has been structured as ‘daytime work’. Notwithstanding, in the move towards a 24-hour society, only 19% of the European workforce in the E.U. 2717 (including U.K. data up to January 2020) do shift work, and only 21% work nightshifts (Eurofound, 2022).18 Those who end up working after dark to gain invisibility, thus, limit their presence to the realms of nightwork. They experience the structural kind of rejection even further because they have no other option or because they want to benefit from the darkness, quiet and lack of control and surveillance that the night offers. This group of E.U. migrant workers is especially interesting as they only recently began migrating to the U.K. They stand in contrast to, for example, manual Turkish migrants,

 E.U. 27: European Union Member States, minus U.K.  The seventh EWCTS has been carried out by telephone due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The report includes data from the U.K. up to January 2020, when the U.K. exited the E.U. 17 18

3.6 Conclusion

95

who have had access to the European labour market since the 1950s under the guestworker visas in Germany and in the U.K. via business visa bilateral agreements between the British and Turkish governments. Yet, neither half-rejected nor the halfpermitted migrants challenge these hostilities, and less so, the problematic relationships with their employers or the structural inequalities inherent in these ethno-racial hierarchies of labour (discussed in-depth in chapter Four). The former migrants have no resources to do so, and the latter cannot afford it because their families at home or abroad depend on their remittances and income as the sole bread winners. As hostilities remain unchallenged, it is noteworthy how the market traders are able to re/produce segregation among workers. I focused on the New Spitalfields market in glocturnal London as the site where migrants’ bodies are embedded. This group of migrants that are discussed throughout this book, ‘provide local colour as part of the city’s diversity or inexpensive labour in service industries’ (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018, p.  2). They are the migrant ‘others’, who ‘need to prove their deservingness’ so that the contribution of their skills, bodily labour or brain power is recognised in the developed societies (Zentai, 2020, p. 208). Some of these migrants are the ‘East-West migrants’ from Eastern Europe (Romania and Bulgaria) that Favell (2014) talks about, as well as the ‘immigrants’ rather than the ‘free movers’ as described by LaFleur and Stanek (2017a). Others are third-country nationals or ‘extra-European immigrants’ from Turkey and South-East Asia. This segment of migrant workers has been proven to play a strategic role in maintaining global cities, such as London, New York, and Tokyo (Aneesh, 2017; Massey et al., 2006; Sassen, 2000). Some are first or secondgeneration migrants, and all live their working lives between the U.K. and these countries via relative and friendship networks as an aspect of so-­called ‘new economics’ of labour migration that result from household decisions, and not individual ones (King, 2012, p. 22). This other key term in this book, ‘globalisation’, refers to the social, economic, cultural, and demographic processes that take place in London –the glocturnal city situated within U.K.’s national boundaries, as well as transcending this nation’s territory. In this chapter, my purpose was to highlight other ways in which globalisation and glocturnal cities have been conceptualised within migration theories. Secondly, I showed how the glocturnal city is best positioned to reveal the entanglements between globalisation and politics of immigration. Thirdly, I demonstrated how this is so because of the way in which the glocturnal city concentrates a high number of manual migrant workers who have an important role in the strategic set­up to maintain the daytime structure by working at night, whatever their (low) status. In this vein, the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis – triggered by the collapse of the financial markets head quartered in major global cities like London and New York that branch out to international business centres in Bangkok, Taipei, Sao Paulo and Mexico City (Sassen, 2000) – caused ripple effects that have been felt in the countries at the periphery and semi-periphery of global capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, miles away from these financial hubs. Global cities are central in the accumulation of economic and corporate power to the disadvantage of smaller cities and thus, reproduce existing inequalities. Consequently, ‘highly

96

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

educated workers in the corporate sector see their incomes rise to unusually high levels while low or medium skilled workers see theirs sink’ (ibid, p. 83). Yet, whilst globalisation erodes the distinction between centrality and marginality, it simultaneously produces a differentiation in global scale through global processes that are decentred from the boundaries of specific nations. The argument developed in this chapter, is that the embodied experiences of precarity and marginalisation are reflected in the differential inclusion of half-rejected, half-permitted migrant nightworkers. Moreover, this contemporary system of immigration is routed in the broader context of global capitalist expansion. This has been reproducing for centuries the economic conditions and global inequalities that have been shaping today’s politics of immigration. These politics rule who enters, who deserves to stay if they can afford it, how they continue to live, on hold or fast tracked, and where. For some, it means to live in London’s poorer neighbourhoods, travel in the night to work at night to sustain the lives of others.

References Acuto, M., & Steele, W. (2013). Global city challenges: Debating a concept, improving the practice. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286871 Ahrens, J., & King, R. (2023). In J. Ahrens & R. King (Eds.), Onward migration and multi-sited transnationalism. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­12503-­4 Anderson, B. (2010). Migration, immigration controls and the fashioning of precarious workers. Work, Employment and Society, 24(2), 300–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017010362141 Aneesh, A. (2017). ‘Relocating global assemblages’: An interview with Saskia Sassen. Science, Technology and Society, 22(1), 128–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/0971721817694927 Aneesh, A. (2021). Nightly rhythms of global work. Contexts, 20(1), 64–65. https://doi. org/10.1177/1536504221997874 Atoui, F. (2020). The Calais crisis. In Moving images (pp. 211–228). transcript Verlag. https://doi. org/10.14361/9783839448274-­017 Back, L., Sinha, S., Bryan, C., Baraku, V., & Yembi, M. (2018). In L. Back & S. Sinha (Eds.), Migrant city (1st ed.). Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Migrant-­City/Back-­Sinha/p/ book/9780367371210. Accessed 29 Jan 2023 Bejan, R. (2020). COVID-19 and disposable migrant workers. VerfBlog, 22(April), 1–4. https:// verfassungsblog.de/covid-­19-­and-­disposable-­migrant-­workers/ Berger, J., & Mohr, J. (2010). A seventh man. Verso Books. Bojkov, V. (2004). Neither here, not there: Bulgaria and Romania in current European politics. online.ucpress.edu, 37(4), 509–522. https://online.ucpress.edu/cpcs/article-­abstract/ 37/4/509/715. Accessed 28 Dec 2022. Boswell, C., & Geddes, A. (2011). Migration and mobility in the European Union. Palgrave Macmillan. Çağlar, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2018). Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372011 Casas-Cortes, M., Cobarrubias, S., de Genova, N., Garelli, G., Grappi, G., Heller, C., et al. (2015). New keywords: Migration and borders. Cultural Studies, 29(1), 55–87. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09502386.2014.891630 Castles, S. (1984). Racism and politics in West Germany. Race & Class, 25(3), 37–51. https://doi. org/10.1177/030639688402500304

References

97

Castles, S. (1995). How nation-states respond to immigration and ethnic diversity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 21(3), 293–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.1995.9976493 Castles, S. (2005). Hierarchical citizenship in a world of unequal nation-states. PS: Political Science & Politics, 38(04), 689–692. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096505050353 Collyer, M., Hinger, S., & Schweitzer, R. (2019). Introduction. In M.  Collyer, S.  Hinger, & R. Schweitzer (Eds.), Regimes of dis-integration (IMISCOE). Springer. Cowley, U. (2004). The men who built Britain: A history of the Irish Navvy. Wolfhound Press. Accessed 22 Jan 2023. Datta, A., & Brickell, K. (2016). In A. Datta & K. Brickell (Eds.), Translocal geographies: spaces, places, connections (1st ed.). Routdledge. Accessed 1 June 2021. de Genova, N. (2002). Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31(1), 419–447. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085432 Doomernik, J., Barkema, W., & Gomes, V. (2020). How (seasonal) agricultural demands for labour are met by immigrant workers in the Netherlands and Germany (No. 3.3). Amsterdam. Duijzings, G., & Dušková, L. (Eds.). (2022). Working At Night. De Gruyter. https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110753592 Eurofound. (2022). Working conditions in the time of COVID-19: Implications for the future European foundation for the improvement of living and working conditions. Luxembourg. https://doi.org/10.2806/357794 European Migration Network. (2020). Impact of Covid-19 pandemic on voluntary and forced return procedures and policy responses. Series of EMN OECD informs on the impact of Covid-19 in the migration area. https://doi.org/10.2760/686549 Fana, M., Tolan, S., Torrejón Pérez, S., Urzi Brancati, M. C., & Fernández-Macías, E. (2020). The COVID confinement measures and EU labour markets. JCR Technical Reports. https://doi. org/10.2760/079230 Fasani, F., & Mazza, J. (2020). Immigrant key workers: Their contribution to Europe’s COVID-19 response. European Commission – Joint Research Centre, (JRC120537), 1–17. Favell, A. (2014). Immigration, integration and mobility. New agendas in migration studies. ECPR Press. Accessed 1 June 2021. Fernández-Reino, M., Sumption, M., & Vargas-Silva, C. (2020). From low-skilled to key workers: The implications of emergencies for immigration policy. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 36, 382–396. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/graa016 Glick Schiller, N. (2012). Transnationality and the city. In The new Blackwell companion to the city. Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444395105.ch16 Glick Schiller, N. (2016). The question of solidarity and society: Comment on Will Kymlicka’s article: “Solidarity in diverse societies”. Comparative Migration Studies, 4(1), 6. https://doi. org/10.1186/s40878-­016-­0027-­x Glick Schiller, N. (2021). Migration, displacement, and dispossession. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1093/ACREFORE/9780190854584.013.205 Glick Schiller, N. (2023). Debunking migration and development: A dispossession and displacement studies approach. In R.  D. W.  C.-U.  Shierup, R.  Munck, & B.  Likić-Brborić (Eds.), Handbook on migration and development (1st ed.). Edward Elgar Publishing. Glick Schiller, N., & Caglar, A. (2008). Beyond methodological ethnicity and towards city scale. In L.  Pries (Ed.), Rethinking transnationalism the meso-link of organisations (pp.  40–61). Routledge. Glick Schiller, N., & Çağlar, A. (2011). Locating migration. In N.  Glick Schiller & A. Çağlar (Eds.), Locating migration. Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801460340 Güell, B., & Garcés-mascareñas, B. (2021). The advancing alternative migration governance agricultural seasonal workers in times of Covid-19 in Spain D3. 3 Paper country cases: Spain Berta Güell and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, (February). Hall, S. (2021). The migrant’s paradox: Street livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain (1st ed.). University of Minnesota Press. Accessed 28 Dec 2022. Holmes, S. M. (2013a). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States (1st ed.). University of California Press.

98

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

Holmes, S.  M. (2013b). “Is it worth risking your life?”: Ethnography, risk and death on the U.S.-Mexico border. Social Science and Medicine, 99, 153–161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2013.05.029 Huysmans, J. (2000). The European Union and the securitization of migration. Journal of Common Market Studies, 38(5), 751–777. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-­5965.00263 Kaneff, D., & Pine, F. (2011). Emerging inequalities in Europe: Poverty and transnational migrations. In Global connectins and emerging inequalities in Europe. Anthem Press. Kasparek, B., & Speer, M. (2015). No title. bordermonitoring.eu e.V. https://bordermonitoring.eu/ ungarn/2015/09/of-­hope-­en/. Accessed 1 June 2021. King, R. (2012). Theories and typologies of migration: An overview and a primer. Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, 3(12), 3–43. www. bit.mah.se/MUEP King, R. (2020). On migration, geography, and epistemic communities. Comparative Migration Studies, 8(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-­020-­00193-­2 Krase, J., & Shortell, T. (2021). Story-making and photography: The visual essay and migration. In IMISCOE research series (pp. 141–159). Springer Science and Business Media B.V. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­67608-­7_8 Kubo, T. (2014). Estimate of the number of night shift workers in Japan. Journal of University of Occupational and Environmental Health, 36(4), 273–276. https://doi.org/10.7888/juoeh.36.273 Kubo, T., Muramatsu, K., Fujino, Y., Hayashida, K., & Matsuda, S. (2013). International comparison of the definition of night work – promoting health care of shift workers. Journal of University of Occupational and Environmental Health, 35, 163–168. https://doi.org/10.7888/ juoeh.35.163 Lafleur, J.-M., & Stanek, M. (2017a). South-North migration of EU citizens in times of crisis. (J.M. Lafleur & M. Stanek, Eds.) library.oapen.org. Springer International Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­39763-­4 Lafleur, J.-M., & Stanek, M. (2017b). EU migration and the economic crisis: Concepts and issues (pp. 1–14). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­39763-­4_1 Levy, N., Pisarevskaya, A., & Scholten, P. (2020). Between fragmentation and institutionalisation: The rise of migration studies as a research field. Comparative Migration Studies, 8(1), 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-­020-­00200-­6 Long, K. (2014). The huddled masses: Immigration and inequality (Kindle Single.). Thistle Publishing. https://www.amazon.com/Huddled-­Masses-­Immigration-­Inequality-­Kindle-­ ebook/dp/B00QKG351Y. Accessed 1 June 2021 Lopes, A., & Hall, T. (2015). Organising migrant workers: The living wage campaign at the University of East London. Industrial Relations Journal, 46(3), 208–221. Macarie, I.-C. (2014). Half-in, half-out: Roma and non-Roma Romanians with limited rights working and travelling in the European Union. INTEGRIM Online Papers, 8. http://bit.ly/1fzVoFu MacQuarie, J.-C. (2019). Invisible migrants: A micro-ethnographic account of bodily exhaustion amongst migrant manual labourers working the graveyard shift at New Spitalfields Market in London. Journal of Health Inequalities, 5(2), 198–202. https://doi.org/10.5114/jhi.2019.91400 MacQuarie, J.-C. (2020). While others sleep: The essential labor of migrant nightshift workers. Society for the Anthropology of Work, Exertions. https://doi.org/10.21428/1d6be30e.fb029d9b Mădroane, I. D. (2012). Roma, Romanian, European: A media framed battle over identity. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, 5(2). Malkki, L.  H. (1997). Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarianism and dehistoricization. In K.  Fog Olwig & H.  Kirsten (Eds.), Siting culture: The shifting anthropological object. Routledge. Mannik, L. (2012). Public and private photographs of refugees: The problem of representation. Visual Studies, 27(3), 262–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2012.717747 Massey, D.  S., Fischer, M.  J., & Capoferro, C. (2006). International migration and gender in Latin America: A comparative analysis. International Migration, 44(5), 63–91. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-­2435.2006.00387.x

References

99

Matusz, P., & Aivaliotou. (2020). Circular and temporary migration in PolanD during COVID-19 (No. Deliverable 3.2). Wroclaw. Accessed 1 June 2021 McAuliffe, M., & Triandafyllidou, A. (2021). World migration report 2022. United Nations. McElroy, E. (2020a). Digital nomads in siliconising Cluj: Material and allegorical double dispossession. Urban Studies, 57(15), 3078–3094. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019847448 McElroy, E. (2020b). Corruption, smecherie, and siliconization: Retrospective and speculative technoculture in postsocialist romania. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 6(2), 1B. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&issn=23803312&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE% 7CA644368380&sid=googleScholar&linkaccess=fulltext. Accessed 9 June 2021. McElroy, E., So, W., & Weber, N. (2021). Keeping an eye on landlord tech. Laser Focus World. https://shelterforce.org/2021/03/25/keeping-­an-­eye-­on-­landlord-­tech/ Mcewan, C., Pollard, J., Henry, N., McEwan, C., Pollard, J., & N. H. (2005). The ‘global’ in the city economy: Multicultural economic development in Birmingham. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(4), 916–933. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-­2427.2005.00628.x McIlwaine, C. (2010). Migrant machismos: Exploring gender ideologies and practices among Latin American migrants in London from a multi-scalar perspective. Gender, Place & Culture, 17(3), 281–300. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663691003737579 Mezzadra, S., & Nunes, R. (2010). The gaze of autonomy: Capitalism, migration and social struggles 1. In V. Squire (Ed.), The contested politics of mobility (1st ed., pp. 121–142). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203839829-­8 Morawska, E. E. (2007). International migration: Its various mechanisms and different theories that try to explain it. Willy Brandt Working Paper, 1/07, 1–32. Accessed 1 June 2021 Nina Glick Schiller, & Linda Basch, C.  B.-S. (1992). Towards a transnational perspective on migration: Race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism reconsidered. American Ethnologist, 25, 276. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1995.97.2.02a00610 Nyers, P. (2006). Rethinking refugees: Beyond states of emergency. Routledge. Pisarevskaya, A., Levy, N., Scholten, P., & Jansen, J. (2020). Mapping migration studies: An empirical analysis of the coming of age of a research field. Migration Studies, 8(3), 455–481. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnz031 Ratzmann, N., & Sahraoui, N. (2021). Introduction: The (un)deserving migrant? Street-level bordering practices and deservingness in access to social services. Social Policy and Society, 20(3), 436–439. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746421000129 Rienzo, C. (2016). Characteristics and outcomes of migrants in the UK labour market. In Migration observatory briefing, COMPAS (pp. 1–10). University of Oxford. Rienzo, C., & Vargos-Silva, C. (2014). Migrants in the UK labour market: An overview. The Migration Observatory at Oxford University, 1–8. Ruhs, M. (2013). The price of rights: Regulating international labor migration. Princeton University Press. Accessed 1 June 2021. Ruhs, M., & Anderson, B. (2010). Migrant workers: Who needs them? A framework for the analysis of staff shortages, immigration, and public policy. In Who needs migrant workers?: Labour shortages, immigration, and public policy (pp. 15–53). Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580590.003.0002 Sahraoui, N. (2019). From everyday racist incidents at work to institutional racism: Migrant and minority-ethnic workers’ experiences in older-age care. In S.  Hinger & R.  Schweitzer (Eds.), Regimes of dis-integration (IMISCOE) (pp.  81–99). Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­25089-­8_5 Samers, M. (2002). Immigration and the global city hypothesis: Towards an alternative research agenda. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(2), 389--+. https://doi. org/10.1111/1468-­2427.00386 Sassen, S. (1988). The mobility of labor and capital. Cambridge University Press. https://doi. org/10.1017/CBO9780511598296 Sassen, S. (1991). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2000). The global city: Strategic site/new frontier. American Studies, 41(2–3), 79–95.

100

3  Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

Sassen, S. (2016). The global city: Enabling economic intermediation and bearing its costs. City and Community, 15(2), 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12175 Sassen, S. (2017). Predatory formations dressed in wall street suits and algorithmic math. Science, Technology and Society, 1(2017), 0971721816682783. https://doi. org/10.1177/0971721816682783 Schiller, N. G. (2009). A global perspective on transnational migration: Theorizing migration without methodological nationalism. Financial Times. http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/files/ Publications/working_papers/WP_2009/WP0967GlickSchiller.pdf. Accessed 16 June 2014. Schiller, N. G., Basch, L., Szanton Blanc, C., & College, W. (1995). From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration. Source: Anthropological Quarterly, 68(1), 48–63. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Schweitzer, R. (2022). Micro-management of irregular migration. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­91731-­9 Segrave, M. (2019). Theorizing sites and strategies of differential inclusion: Unlawful migrant workers in Australia. Theoretical Criminology, 23(2), 194–210. https://doi. org/10.1177/1362480619827527 Segrave, M., & Wonders, N. (2019). Introduction: Transforming borders from below: Theory and research from across the globe. Theoretical Criminology, 23(2), 133–135. https://doi. org/10.1177/1362480619826649 Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke Universtiy Press. Shaw, R. (2022). Geographies of night work. Progress in Human Geography, 46(5), 1149–1164. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325221107638 Sigona, N. (2016). There is no refugee crisis in the UK. Blog, Postcards from … https://nandosigona.info/2016/04/12/there-­is-­no-­refugee-­crisis-­in-­the-­uk/. Accessed 1 June 2021. Stanoeva, E. (2012). The global city: A structural hole in the national territorial tissue. An interview with Saskia Sassen. Critique & Humanism, 40, 115–132. Swyngedouw, E., & Cox, K. (1997). Neither global nor local: ‘Glocalization’ and the politics of scale. Guilford Press. Accessed 1 June 2021. Travis, A. (2013, October 10). Immigration bill: Theresa May defends plans to create “hostile environment.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/10/immigration-­ bill-­theresa-­may-­hostile-­environment. Accessed 29 Jan 2023. TUC. (2015). Britain’s 3 million night workers need fair rights to work-life balance. Trade Unin Congress Analysis. https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-­analysis/reports/britains-­3-­million-­night-­ workers-­need-­fair-­rights-­work-­life-­balance. Accessed 1 June 2021. TUC. (2019a). Older workers powering an increase in night working. Trade Unin Congress Analysis. https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/older-­workers-­powering-­increase-­night-­working-­tuc-­ analysis-­reveals. Accessed 1 June 2021. TUC. (2019b). Zero hour workers twice as likely to work “health risk” night shifts. Trade Unin Congress Analysis. https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/zero-­hour-­workers-­twice-­likely-­work-­health-­ risk-­night-­shifts-­tuc-­analysis. Accessed 1 June 2021. Uhde, Z., & Ezzeddine, P. (2019). Transnational migration: Borders, gender and global justice challenges. ceeol.com, 20(1), 3–17. https://www.ceeol.com/content-­files/document-­812192. pdf. Accessed 30 May 2021. Verstraete, G. (2010). Tracking Europe: Mobility, diaspora, and the politics of location. Duke University Press. Accessed 1 June 2021. Zentai, V. (2020). Conclusions: perspectives and puzzles in researching politics of (dis)integration. In R. Schweitzer, & S. Hinger (Eds.), (pp. 201–217). Springer International Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­25089-­8_11

Chapter 4

Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

At New Spitalfields, there are peaks and drops in trading, and ebbs and flows of migrants coming in and then leaving all year round. However, work never stops. Apart from Saturday nights, New Spitalfields is open for trade 24/7. Every evening from 10 pm, nightworkers enter sheepishly through the many wide, open gates of the market. Then every morning at around 9 am, just when the last nightworkers are pulling down the shutters of the market stores and beginning to leave, the administrative, accounting and purchasing staff arrive or else continue the long journey of the night into the day. They work until the evening, when again the night staff return and hit the ground. To be precise, the reproduction of structural inequalities never ceases in this market, both sustained by and resulting from this continuous work. This chapter illuminates these continuities through a detailed analysis of the intersecting formal and informal hierarchies that structure this market. One hierarchy had at its top, the Corporation of London as the overarching owner and manager of New Spitalfields. A level down from this, sit the tenants and trading companies that operate within the premises of the market. Another formal hierarchy was that of each trading company, with its owners and executives on the highest level, and the loaders on the lowest level. Then there are the hierarchies constituted along the lines of ethnicity, nationality, language, and gender. Here, the key issues explored are the ethnic lines of division for they enable a clearer focus on those at the bottom of this unequal labour system (Fig. 4.1). This chapter complements the theoretical framework discussed in Chap. 3, to draw attention to the important role that ethnicity has in the current regime of migrant labour regularisation via ‘racialised sorting’ (Hall, 2021, p. 154), and the border tactics and discourses at the ‘centre of political life’ (Casas-Cortes et  al., 2015, p. 26). To be specific, this chapter expands on how ethnicization of work at FruitVeg segments migrant nightworkers. In this book, I use ethnicity as a ‘social category’ (Holmes, 2013a, p. 46). This usage accords with Harris’ definition of being the ‘other’ or in ‘opposition to them’ – them referring to the mainstream society, who perceive migrants as ‘others’ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_4

101

102

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

Fig. 4.1  Spitalfields Market plan

and as different from the majority (Larson et al., 1995, p. 35). For example, among BAME1 ethnic groups classification in the U.K., the ‘other white’ is a white Eastern European, that is, a white person not born in England, Wales, or Scotland. More, in the book, the ethnic ‘other’ refers to the manual migrant workers. Their every day and every night experiences of being ‘differentially included’ (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015, p. 25) in an unequal labour system and more broadly in a 24/7 society are at the centre of this ethnographic critique. Borrowed from cultural studies and applied to migration, this term of ‘differential inclusion’ pinpoints the interrelations between the key terms of this book. The term is inspired by the established voices in ‘borders, migration, and subjectivity’ studies (idem 2015, p. 25), as it: Registers the multiplication of migration control devices (conditional freedom of movement, short term labour contracts) … [and] …it provides a handle for understanding the link between migration control and regimes of labour management that create different degrees of precarity, vulnerability and freedom by granting and closing access to resources and rights according to economic, individualizing, and racist rationales.

My own ethnographic data excludes the British workforce at the market, as the research did not discuss aspects of migrant integration (Schinkel, 2022). Yet, historically the English were the first to set up fruit and vegetable stores at Spitalfields, as shown next.

 Though officially the BAME acronym (Black and Asian and Minority Ethnics) has not been used since March 2021 (Cambridge Dictionary 2022), when the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities recommended that the government stops using this term, but in recruitment classification and practices black and white paper or online forms still apply. 1

4.1  The Corporation of London

103

4.1 The Corporation of London The Corporation of London2 (CoL) is the governing body of the City of London,3 and it predates the Magna Carta (1215) that led to the development of the U.K. Parliament, over the centuries. It has been the nurturing institution of global trade and exchange; from wool to fruits, and from foreign currency to stock exchange. It still is the marketplace in Europe, attracting migrant populations from across the globe, living, trading, and working in financial services, information technology centres, and the food supply chain. The City of London or the ‘square mile’, has in its constituency 9000 wealthy residents living within the city wall (see Fig. 4.2), whilst the surrounding 32 London boroughs (including the more impoverished Tower Hamlets and Hackney) host over 7 million British and foreign-born residents. Daily, 350,000-strong army of commuters enter London Liverpool Street station (Shaxon, 2011), many of whom work in the City’s financial services. However significant the reliance on itinerant workers is, CoL rewards its local and foreign-born bankers, the high earners managing hedge funds. Meanwhile, the cumulative sum of bonuses paid to City investment

Fig. 4.2  City of London, the smallest ‘city’ in England

 In 2006, the name was changed from Corporation of London to City of London Corporation  Figure 10 City of London, the smallest ‘city’ in England London is surrounded by the ancient wall acting as boundary. The red line indicates the changes made to its boundaries in the 1990s. The red square indicates where the Old Spitalfields market was located between 1920 and 1991; New Spitalfields market operates in Leyton, East London. 2 3

104

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

bankers reached a record high of £14 billion during 2010–2011, as Britain resurfaced from the financial crisis (Shaxon, 2011 ePub, loc. 4873). Before November 2014, when it became an accredited London Living Wage (LLW) employer, CoL has often left the negotiations in disagreement with London Citizens for refusing to raise the CoL workers’ income above the national minimum wage of £6.19 per hour (2011 Living Wage rates). CoL paid the first LLW rates in April 2015. The CoL, from their headquarters based in the square mile, has operated for centuries three ancient markets: Billingsgate market, which has been trading fish since the mid-Victorian period and now relocated in East London; Smithfields market, which was established in the early Middle Ages and is the only makret in The City; and Spitalfields market, the youngest of the three, having been awarded Royal Charter in 1682, moved in 1991 to East London and became the ‘New’ Spitalfields (thereafter New Spitalfields; Taylor (2011)).4 As the U.K.’s market authority, CoL regulated all trading practices at the markets under its jurisdiction, even though nowadays some, like New Spitalfields, extended beyond the geographical borders of the City of London. According to the Tenants Association based on the New Spitalfields site, CoL, as the market’s authority, did not intervene or exercise any control over its tenants’ (traders) labour ethics and practices. From his office in the City of London, the Director of the CoL markets reported that the companies trading at New Spitalfields did not need to report to CoL how much they sold or how little they paid workers (Taylor, 2011). As I have learnt during fieldwork, most traders knowingly disrespected the legally binding working regulations and recommendations regarding the legal nighttime working hours and London Living Wage rates. Additionally, the rules and regulations should have applied equally to all traders and workers. Yet, this was not always the case. For example, up until 3 am the CoL market regulations allowed traders to lay pallets neatly on the main aisle to ease the flow of their business. CoL constabularies fined the firms who failed to free up the delivery lanes by this cut-off time. It was seen that after 3 am, pallets became hazards because they blocked the traffic along the main aisles. In truth, however, from 3 am onwards, the delivery lane became the fast lane for forklift drivers, who upon verification by checkmen picked up hundreds of pallets loaded with produce. Drivers were buzzing in and out of the market hall as fast as they could to drop off the pallets in or near customers’ vans and lorries waiting in the parking bays. Rani, a Pakistani forklift driver, claimed that the (all) white CoL constabulary men fined migrant drivers more than they did the white English drivers. On one occasion, the constabularies did their regular market round with a speed camera in their hands. They caught Rani exceeding the speed limit of 5 miles per hour and banned him from driving the forklift. In his deference, Rani explained that ‘when you’re working for a Turkish company, you’re often tired because you’re doing so many hours. They want you to drive so fast that you’re bound to lose your licence’.

 City of London plans to move the three historic markets to Dagenham if development plans will be approved. 4

4.2  The FruitVeg Company

105

According to the estimation of the Director of the CoL markets, ‘more than half [of those working here] are foreigners of one sort’ (Taylor, 2011, p. 307). Based on my time spent undertaking the research at New Spitalfields, I claim that the percentage was higher. If the ethnicity of company owners was taken into consideration, and that between 70 and 80 per cent of the market stalls were occupied by these companies, then the migrant segment of nightworkers was above two thirds of the total number of workers. Many workers were, therefore, vulnerable both to the discretionary enforcement of rules and regulations and the disciplinary regimes of the companies that they worked for, which were possible precisely because no unifying CoL policy protected workers from exploitation and abuse. Hence, in the absence of regulations to protect workers from managers and the discretionary enforcement of the other types of rules and regulations, the CoL acted as an accomplice in the reproduction of inequalities. Some of these inequalities are visible in the infographic below Table 4.1.

4.2 The FruitVeg Company ‘FruitVeg’ (a pseudonym) was the company that I got to know best after working there for 5 months. ‘TurkoVeg’, with headquarters in North London, was the parent company which established FruitVeg in the 1990s. TurkoVeg, imported produce from Turkey and FruitVeg distributed it to wholesale buyers via its store at New Spitalfields. TurkoVeg had its business partner in Turkey, a company that owned land and cultivated produce in Gaziantep, in the south-east of the country. Based on my observations and data collected via the informal conversations, FruitVeg was one of the largest trading companies operating at New Spitalfields, with yearly turnovers in the millions of pounds. It was continuously expanding through different strategies, from acquiring store space from the trading companies that went bankrupt and selling tonnes of weekly produce to warring over tomato prices, even if this meant that the company lost profit only to prevent their customers from buying from a competitor. FruitVeg’s owner was a Kurdish man from Gaziantep, Turkey, and the business language was Turkish. Many of the Turkish nationals working at FruitVeg were recruited from this region informally, by word of mouth and were offered support for arriving in the U.K. with business visas. Despite the dire working conditions and low pay, the company also attracted workers of other ethnicities and nationalities. For the sole purpose of trading, workers at FruitVeg transported the produce, manoeuvred the items by engine and manual forklifts, loaded with their bodies, and sold fresh fruits and vegetables to wholesale customers. In the following sections, I present the hierarchical distribution of positions at FruitVeg, with male owners and executives in the lead and low-paid manual workers at the bottom. I will start with the owner of FruitVeg with whom I had several brief interactions with.

106

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

Table 4.1 Abstract diagram of intersecting hierarchies of nightwork at FruitVeg. The traffic light colour system indicates at the top, the green end of the arrow, the owners/executives ‘above’, and in red workers ‘below’. The employees at the top or ‘above’ had most control over their own and others’ sleep, work patterns, pay, bank holidays and annual leave, occasional time off, health and GP visits, respect from others, tea breaks and respite, and social mobility, in contrast to those at the bottom or ‘below’ Corporation of London (CoL) — Owner and manager of New Spitalfields market FruitVeg — Tenant of CoL — Trading company Hierarchy

Position

Ethnicity

Nationality

Language

Gender

Executive Highest

Operational Manager Control sleep

Kurdish Workfloor Manager

Work patterns

Kurdish

Turkish

Turkish

British Turkish

Bulgarian

Bulgarian

English

Male

Pay Holidays

Salespeople

Time off Health Respect Tea break

Foreman

Social mobility

Checkmen

(Way up)

Loaders

Lowest

Lithuanian Lithuanian

Greek

Pakistani

Lithuanian

Pashtun

Forklift drivers

Roma

Cashiers

Turkish Cypriot

Polish

Polish

Romanian

Romanian

Turkish

Urdu and Hindi

Café Servers

Female

4.2.1 Executives The owner of TurkoVeg, Erdem, was the top executive of FruitVeg. The operations manager, who was based at the headquarters, as well as the workfloor manager who oversaw FruitVeg at New Spitalfields, were directly below him in this hierarchy. Each of these three men were Kurds from Turkey. For all of the positions at FruitVeg– salespeople, checkmen, cashiers, stock controllers, foremen, forklift drivers and loaders–the workfloor manager hired from those who knocked on his door. Occasionally, the workfloor manager recruited people of other ethnicities and placed them in positions of trust as stock controllers, cashiers or checkman. In most cases, however, such positions were usually given to those who were Kurdish, as Erdem oversaw the hiring decisions of his workfloor manager and ultimately decided who could join the upper echelons at FruitVeg. Therefore, the ‘top’ of this

4.2  The FruitVeg Company

107

upper echelon only included Kurdish-Turkish men, a clear indicator of the vertical segregation of the workforce by ethnicity. Officially, the business language was Turkish, but informally the management also spoke in their Kurdish dialect. I also heard this dialect spoken among the long-term customers of FruitVeg, as well as with Turkish nationals from the region where the business partner of TurkoVeg operated in Turkey. In this way, Erdem was trying to ensure ‘safety checks’ were in place in order to prevent dishonest and discontented employees putting his business in danger. Despite his efforts, the previous Kurdish cashier had disappeared with the company’s money and salespeople had left FruitVeg and taken regular customers with them. Following such incidents, Erdem would introduce drastic measures to prevent further damages to the business. In addition to these stories, which circulated among workers at FruitVeg and other companies, I learnt directly from a disgruntled employee why he might leave the company. He was the operations manager–one of the most protected staff members–and a U.K. born, second-generation migrant whose parents had migrated to the U.K. from the same village as the owner. The FruitVeg executive made most of the decisions, from approving international transactions to hiring and firing as he saw fit but was also consulting with the workfloor manager when hiring salespeople. Unlike the employees below him in this hierarchy, he had total control over his schedule. For instance, he had been granted study time to complete his undergraduate degree in criminology and was given the liberty to choose his schedule at the office in the company’s headquarters, as well as the hours at which he came to visit the FruitVeg store. Yet, during our interview, he complained that he had to work very long days, which stretched well into the night as one of his jobs was to also inspect the store at New Spitalfields. In short, he felt unappreciated. In his words, ‘the boss never appreciates me or what I do. It is only a matter of time before I leave this company.’ Apart from the efficiency or inefficiency of his ‘safety checks’, Erdem had other concerns–from the cutthroat competition among traders at New Spitalfields and among supermarkets, to the high rents that CoL changed its tenants, as well as managing unforeseen events that arose outside of his control (at the time of my fieldwork in 2015, it was the Calais crisis). He kept a close eye on the running of his FruitVeg store at New Spitalfields and on most nights, he chose to come to the store. He would arrive in a slow walk with his hands in his pockets. The first thing he would do was check the crates of products. He would then stand on the opposite side of the delivery aisle, observing everyone and everything until the early hours of the morning. Yet, he never attended staff meetings at FruitVeg where he could have heard the workers voicing complaints about the precarious working conditions and the foreman’s draconic disciplining, which were based on the orders passed down by the workfloor manager. The workers’ needs seemed to be last on Erdem’s list of priorities. Although Erdem was known among my co-workers to be distant man who hardly talked to anyone other than the workfloor manager and salespeople, he made an exception with me. He knew why I was in the market from our brief conversations about my studies, although mainly from the information that he collected via his

108

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

staff about me and my performance. He chose to greet me on his regular nightly inspections and would ask me how my studies were going. He was amenable, always polite, and even posed in the photoshoot that I organised during one nightshift. However, he refused to be interviewed. Erdem displayed this liberty with the same apparent ease he did in choosing his hours of inspection after a long day’s work at TurkoVeg, where his quiet office was based.

4.2.2 The Workfloor Manager The workfloor manager, Mehmet, was directly below Erdem in the company hierarchy. He was in charge of details–from hiring workers, monitoring them directly or via the CCTV (Closed-circuit Television) application installed on his mobile phone, meeting salespeople and loaders in the office, speaking to customers and taking their orders to liaising with the operations manager based at TurkoVeg. Though he had his private office, as the only office at FruitVeg that was beside the cashiers, Mehmet was mostly out on the delivery aisle from where he could directly monitor the workers, especially the loaders and forklift drivers. Sometimes, he disappeared for short periods, though not without putting one of the salespeople in charge. Every night, Mehmet arrived on time, and six nights per week he clocked-in who arrived on time and who was late. He permanently controlled how workers experienced the nightshift. He dictated when and where workers could eat, and if and when they were allowed to leave the workfloor. Yet, Mehmet too was supervised by Erdem upon the owner’s nightly inspections. As I was to learn, Mehmet also put a lot of energy into training new employees on how not to waste the company’s time and money. Whilst an apprentice loader at FruitVeg, I requested time off to undertake the forklift driving course. Our conversation took place in Turkish as he did not speak English well enough to convey his messages. As he explained to me, ‘FruitVeg employees who went on this course worked during the night and did their course in the morning, following the nightshift. You don’t need time off for that course. You’ll be fine doing the same’. I insisted, saying that I needed to sleep at night to be able to have a fresh mind whilst I was learning to drive the vehicle and for memorising the theory. He replied, ‘Do you know how many hours I sleep? About four to five hours per night. I need to take the kids to school when I get home in the morning and take care of household duties before I come here. So, I must be up a lot of the time’. Again I insisted that I needed the time off, arguing that if I rested, I would not need to take the full 5 day course, 3 days would be enough. I added that I would accept a pay cut for those 3 days. He responded by saying, ‘First, the company would not pay you while would be on the course anyway. Second, everyone did very well without taking time off. I need people to be at work. But I am going to make an exception. You take time off now, but you cannot ask for leave or holidays for the rest of the year. You can go back to work now’. I went back to work and did end up taking the course.

4.2  The FruitVeg Company

109

As an apprentice loader, I was paid £280 take-home pay per week. The forklift driving course cost £250 and there were additional costs for sitting the test. Thus, I lost 1 week’s wages. After the training course, I had to work another week before I received any earnings and so this meant a £530 income deficit for that month. Additionally, the next 3 weeks wages came to a total of £840, which meant that I was only left with £310 to cover living expenses, namely, rent (£420 per month), commuting costs (£298.70), food (£400) and other expenses (£100). In total, my debt for that month was -£908.70. Following this, I spoke to co-workers who had borrowed money from Mehmet or the company to take their families on summer holidays in their countries of origin. Upon return, they had paid back, on a monthly basis, what they had borrowed. This demonstrated to me how in-work poverty is maintained in this unequal labour system, through debt escalation, chaining nightworkers on poverty rates and trapping them and their families in precarity. The manager’s explanation that FruitVeg workers were capable of doing both the training and nightshifts without days off, could be taken at face value only if the financial costs and the health consequences were ignored. As far as I was concerned, that was not easy to do. Additionally, the manager and I–an apprentice loader, were not in similar situations, despite his claim that he did not sleep much either. During the nightshift, the manager could take breaks as he needed. He also came to the market and left as he pleased. A loader could do neither of these. Nightwork felt different for those who could be in control of their sleep time or privileged because they could leave the market as they saw fit. More importantly, at the end of the month, the manager walked home with a £6000 salary paid in cash, not £1400 as loaders did. The New Spitalfields night market was a challenging environment and, to this extent, the work ethic at FruitVeg strongly reflected a landscape of survival. The workfloor manager and salespeople were under pressure from hurried customers. In turn, they projected this pressure onto all those below them in the workplace hierarchy. One night, Apo, a long-term employee working as a checkman at the time of my fieldwork, shared his frustration with me. He had had enough of the manager ‘pouring his anxiety over to us’. That was the time of the ‘Calais crisis’, when the media and the U.K. government blamed the disruptions to food imports from continental Europe, not only on the strikes of French lorry drivers, but also on the growing number of Syrian refugees gathering at Calais. At New Spitalfields, traders worried about the lack of supply and thus, over losing regular customers who could simply purchase from supermarkets instead. Supermarkets were less affected by these disruptions, their massive buying power allowing them to fly or ship produce over to the U.K. from other parts of the world. The FruitVeg manager claimed that his salespeople and checkmen needed to work harder not to lose business, and consequently their jobs. Apo stated that he was considering taking a break from working at the night market. Yet, as I was to learn, despite the inconveniences, dislikes and threats, Apo and many other workers would return to their workplace the next nightshift. They would carry on, as one of my co-workers put it, “til we see what else’. Nevertheless, the loaders and forklift drivers were those upon whose minds and bodies this pressure was mostly placed. The workfloor manager shouted his orders

110

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

to the foreman, who yelled in turn at the workers that he oversaw and over whom he kept tight control throughout the night. For workers, the team meetings were another source of anxiety. The meetings I attended, were held after the 10 to 16-h nightshifts ended. I noticed how tense and disengaged my co-workers were, needless to say partly due to exhaustion. And partly because, the meetings lasted two-to-threehours and were haphazardly scheduled by the workfloor manager. These men were physically exhausted, and still under the duress from the nightshift that just ended. No one listened to the manager. Workers had grown despondent of him as he never appreciated their work and rarely, if ever, took the points that they raised and the ideas they suggested during meetings into consideration. During and outside of these meetings, the manager chose discipline over understanding. Yet, out of fear, workers displayed no intention to confront the manager for not allowing them to contribute on any front, let alone ask for improved working conditions. As Bekir, a co-worker, confessed, ‘I can’t lose my job’. Every Saturday morning, Mehmet paid all workers in cash. Holding an A4 cardboard box, previously a case for holding white A4 printing paper, he walked around the store and gave each and every one of them a small, brown, square envelope with the worker’s name hand-written on it. There was no payslip included unless one expressly requested it. At New Spitalfields, workers were at the mercy of despotic managers like Mehmet. To reiterate, this disparity between those at the top and those at the bottom of this pecking order was possible due to the mechanisms that reproduced abuse and control, and thus reproducing precarity and inequality night after night.

4.2.3 Salespeople In the FruitVeg hierarchy, the salespeople were right beneath the manager. Sales staff surveyed the male loaders and drivers, feeding back to the manager on an ongoing basis. They had no decisional powers as such, unless the workfloor manager relegated it to them. Yet, they occupied a very well-paid position in the company, for this relied on their sales skill to make profit. They also felt entitled to attribute themselves power and their often-abusive behaviour was never criticised or punished. They turned themselves into the eyes of the higher ranked in this pecking order, surveying the manual workers while close by on the workfloor or while sitting in the warm office, via the closed-circuit television system that peered into all corners of the workfloor. They shouted at and even kicked the manual workers. Some used very abusive language towards loaders. Others behaved irresponsibly while on the nightshift (e.g., driving the forklift under the influence of alcohol) or being physically violent. I was once kicked by one such sales person, who was nicknamed ‘deli’ (crazy). During the peak time (midnight to 3 am), this salesman was standing with his hands in his pockets, blocking the narrow pedestrian lane that everyone used. As I approached him at speed while carrying a 20 kg load on my shoulder, I did not have time to avoid him. He took on step side way, turned and kicked me with his knee in a pressure point on the side of my right thigh. The pain

4.2  The FruitVeg Company

111

I felt made me shout out loud while I lost balance and instinctively dropped the sack of potato on the ground. Later I was told that I was expected to move out of his way, i.e., pass him by without him having to step out of the way. Since I did not comply, he kicked me. There was no reaction from the manager, and I did not file a complaint at the advice of another co-worker. He told me there ‘was no point’ and warned me that I might lose my job. ‘Better let it go,’ he advised me. The division of labour was clear. In this way, the management perpetuated the hierarchical powers of those ‘above’ over those ‘below’. The manager also transgressed his usual role to manage the team, and served certain customers, who preferred him to the rest of the sales team. One customer in particular was well known among the FruitVeg team. Firstly, he would buy all the near expiry date products at discounted rates. In turn, the manager would make large discounts. While these two parties seemed content, the other parties were not, including loaders and forklift drivers. Every Saturday, this customer was notoriously late, arriving most mornings around 9 am, just as the store was about to close its shutters. Thus, the customer was standing between the loaders’ craving for respite after a long week of nights. My fieldnotes conserved this ‘usual Saturday scene’, following a Friday’s 12-hour nightshift. Vignette № 4 Date: 2nd May 2015 ‘Mutlu Radio’ (Happy Radio) is on. The speakers are blasting out KurdishTurkish music from the front of the van. The FruitVeg manager and his customer, sit and drink a ‘special mix’ – whiskey and Redbull. As this customer’s van is being filled up with second class produce, another manager joins them, and the three of them are having a karaoke session in Kurdish. At the back of the van, Z., Gică and me load the van to the brim. Basrí transports the last round of crates by forklift. We are being released from duty and told we can leave. Two other co-workers watch the scene from the nearby gate. This vignette illustrates not only the division of labour, but also ‘a host of small pleasures in it, without which it would be hard to preserve in the trade’ (Wacquant, 2004, 68). More, the scene highlights the bonding among loaders and forklift drivers, who otherwise work just to ‘do their job.’

4.2.4 The Foreman The foreman was next in the hierarchy of labour. Even small, family-owned companies with two to three employees, at New Spitalfields, hired someone to be in charge of leading and disciplining those at the bottom, that is, the loaders and forklift

112

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

drivers. The foreman could report on the workers below him, but he was not able to fire anyone. At FruitVeg, this person was Gică, a Turkish-speaking Roma man of Romanian nationality. His English was quite limited. As he pointed out, he had never needed to learn English since he had always ‘worked with Turks’. Gică had attended primary school in Romania, as required by law, but he struggled to read not only in English, but also in Romanian. However, he had learnt the English spelling of the produce (e.g., apple or cassava) and knew them by heart. Gică exercised authority over a team of 10–20 men–the exact number varied during on or off-peak time. Most of these men were loaders, that is, manual workers. He behaved like the drill sergeant of an army, taking orders from above and barking them downwards to those beneath him. He even ordered those below him to report back every time nature called. Time permitted for bathroom relief was meant to be very swift, even though the toilets were a good 5 min walk from the shopfloor. His 8 years of experience in this market allowed him to transgress roles, working up to foreman from his former position as a loader and occasionally, when the company was short staffed in this area, he worked as a checkman. Consequently, most nightshifts Gică loaded produce, instructed loaders, and stacked crates so that the shopfloor looked presentable after the peak period of midnight to 3 am. He ate his packed food or bought meals sitting atop produce sacks, just like the rest of the loaders and forklift drivers. Still, Gică had some liberties. For example, he could decide when and how often he went to the toilet. He left the stand as he pleased unless urgent business kept him there. In addition, his supervisory position brought a higher pay rate than forklift drivers and loaders. His main tool of power sat in his back pocket, literally, for he kept the customers’ orders in his back pocket, which determined who received what orders and how often they received them. The cashier printed the customers’ orders (known as tickets) all night. Gică’s job was to distribute these to loaders, who would then prepare the order. He gave these tickets to everyone, according to what he assessed they could do. He could also assign someone to ‘shadow’ a customer who was placing a large order, which could sometimes consist of a few hundred items stacked on 10–20 pallets. The new, inexperienced loaders received short orders to pack on pallets, which would be between 10 and 60 items. He knew what the experienced loaders could handle and never checked on them. Instead, before the checkman verified how the order was dealt with, Gică would check on the new loaders to see if the order was complete. The checkman would then look them over and decide if the orders were complete, that was, that they contained the right items, the correct number of items, if they were securely packed and if the loader needed to do something additional to finish them off. At times, Gică replaced the checkman. Whenever he fulfilled this role and found that items were missing or that wrong items were placed on a pallet, Gică went through all the video footage to ascertain what had happened and who was to blame for the mistake. He would then shout out the name of the loader written on that ticket. In this way, he publicly shamed loaders for doing a poor job. Often, loaders were at fault, either because of tiredness or because, as I

4.2  The FruitVeg Company

113

observed on many occasions when stock was low, customers would ‘steal’ products from the pallet of another customer’s order whilst it was being prepared. He would do this when the loader was not there to see it happening and stop the customer from doing that. Like other ‘old crew’ nightshift workers at New Spitalfields, Gică had earned the management’s trust and had worked his way up the hierarchy from being a loader to holding the foreman’s position. Yet, this was the furthest he could go. Gică himself had long been subjected to the employer’s labour discipline and had experienced the physical nature and hardship of nightshift work. In his position as foreman, Gică used his bodily knowledge to guide him in getting his co-workers to do the jobs he needed them to, but that approach often caused them pain and suffering. He was responsibly carrying out the mission set by the higher-ups, with no tolerance for disobedience or discontent among those lower down. He followed a particular work ethos already practised within the company and social landscape of this night market, which was handed down to him via upper management, and which he applied diligently on his co-workers’ bodies exhausted and spent by night labour. Moreover, he supervised the loaders, the people in the lowest positions and with the most precarious jobs at the market. I observed and experienced how people ‘above’ poorly treated those ‘below’ them, for instance, by interrupting a loader mid-sentence, not moving out of the way when loaders approached with heavy loads on their backs, shouting the orders at them rather than using a friendly tone, talking about them in derogatory terms or approaching them only to rebuke them. Gică used disciplining methods to tame the labouring bodies of loaders and forklift drivers, who ended up suffering and living with chronic pains, muscle injuries, physical colds and sweats and mental strains, in addition to pay cuts, no meal or rest breaks and humiliation when reporting the need to use the bathroom or other basic needs. Although Gică mirrored the behaviour of the higher-ups, he shared more worries in common with those below him. For example, he experienced his own physical suffering, pain and stress when orders were not completed by loaders, received insults from the manager who would blame and shame him for being incompetent, as well as contempt from unsatisfied customers who would eagerly remember that he was Roma and therefore, ‘less’ of a human being. This foreman was, therefore, suspended on the mid level of precarity. The executives, workfloor managers and foremen working at this night market were complicit in supporting systematic precarity. From top to bottom, suffering and worry accumulated and nobody. The degree to which staff suffered typically increased downward the hierarchy. All nightworkers worried over losing sleep, weakening their bodies, and ruining their social lives whilst needing to be awake and alert at the market. Still, every nightworker had their own set of worries and concerns–owners and executives worried about being thrown out of the business, salesmen about losing customers, checkmen about not being thorough enough, forklift drivers about losing their licences and loaders about losing their jobs.

114

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

4.2.5 Checkmen FruitVeg hired three or four checkmen. Their job was to verify that the correct items and the specified quantity were neatly stacked by loaders on pallets and ready to be delivered to the customer who would then pay for them. These checkmen often found mistakes and recalled or put deliveries on hold. Exhaustion coupled with the pressures placed on loaders, were among the main causes for errors. If they found mistakes, for example, products missing from the list, checkmen would shout out the loader’s name and instruct him to replace the wrong product and to add what was missing or remove what was additional when quantities did not match. Once orders were completed by loaders, checkmen tallied the goods stacked on pallets with the tickets attached. When not busy checking the orders, checkmen were on the lookout for ‘mystery shoppers’, that was, employees of other companies pretending to be customers and spying on specific produce prices. Being a checker was a position of trust rather than power. At FruitVeg, it was usually given to men of the same ethnicity or nationality as the executives. This was the case for Nomar, a Turkish man, and Apo, a Turkish-speaking Romanian-Roma national, whom were both hired through the ethnic ties that they shared with either the workfloor manager or the ‘old crew’ workers. Rani, a British-Pakistani man in his thirties, was an exception to this rule. The workfloor manager employed Rani after he lost his forklift driving licence. As he recounted: I was lucky that the manager gave me a job as a checkman as now I don’t have to worry about not driving again at the market. Otherwise, I would have had to leave this market. I will never go back to picking and loading produce as I did when I first arrived here some 14 years ago. It would mean returning to the life of the men (loaders) you see here, now. They are like dead men walking. I have no intention of doing that.

Rani had been working at street markets since the age of 14 and had spent almost an equal number of years in various positions at New Spitalfields. This market had been the place where he, an undocumented migrant, could earn a living. Rani spoke fast and loudly. His job as a checkman required a high-volume voice to be able to be heard over hundreds of pallets, other men’s voices and above the constant beeping and engine sounds of the forklifts that incessantly passed by the stand. One minute, one could see Rani having a chat with the trader opposite FruitVeg and the next with the forklift drivers waiting to reload. He was very skilled at interacting with customers, talking all night to whomever passed by the stand. His manager depended on experienced staff of his calibre. Additionally, Rani owned an embodied capital–both technical skills and strategic knowledge, which made him indispensable to the management. He somewhat proudly admitted that despite his undisciplined behaviour, the workfloor manager had, ‘been very good to me. Many times, I didn’t turn up for the nightshift and he still paid me. He gives me the night off, even when I give him few hours’ notice’. As a checkman, Rani enjoyed more liberties and a higher salary than he had had as a forklift driver. Yet, during the formal interview that I conducted with him, he stated that he wished to leave the job. However, the manager would not

4.2  The FruitVeg Company

115

approve of this unless Rani found an appropriate replacement. He confessed his frustration with the manager in this way: He rejected every replacement guy that I found for him. He came up with one excuse or another so that he would not hire that person. The manager tells me that he can’t let me go because I understand people. He once said to me, ‘Oh, you understand drivers. You understand what to do. They don’t. They need three months’ worth of training’. So, he never lets me go. But he has been good to me. I can’t ignore that and just leave him.

This situation illuminated further dynamics of this night market. The managers were lenient with experienced workers like Rani for they were rare. The management depended on such workers, almost as much, if not the same, as they counted on trustworthy and efficient cashiers. From another angle, of course that Rani could have left and never return, if so pleased. But because of the emotional bond that carries an expectation of reciprocity, a feeling that he ‘has a debt’ to pay back to his manager, ‘who has been very good to me’ (Rani), he could not simply exit this delicate, win-lose situation. Rani, being in a vulnerable position, may have lost sight of the exploitative nature of their connection. Rani was at loss because his manager was taking advantage of his overpowering position, finding excuses to refuse any match that could replace Rani, as he understood the business, and everyone at FruitVeg, including loaders and forklift drivers.

4.2.6 Loaders and Forklift Drivers At New Spitalfields, 300 nights a year, male loaders carried tonnes of produce on their bodies and forklift drivers transported thousands of pallets. On Thursday nights, the busiest nights in the market, loaders and forklift drivers would sweat and discard a couple layers of clothing even before the market gates opened. At midnight, when the public rushed through the gates to their preferred stands, hundreds of grocers would come to stock up on produce to cover their weekend trade. The orders came in thick and fast. The loaders bended and lifted boxes and were constantly on the move. Forklift drivers honked their horns and the screech of brakes punctuated the nightshift soundscape. A long trail of forklifts and vans would begin to zoom in and out of the market. As the rhythms intensified, people would shout at one another, swearing loudly. On these nights, New Spitalfields resembled pandemonium, with people rushing about and colliding into one another. Yet, quiet nightshifts were also difficult. Nightwork is unstable work. Workers were afraid of losing their jobs as it was not unusual for people to be fired without notice if business dropped. Later, when the owner needed extra labour power again, they would either try to bring back the same workers or hire new ones. At FruitVeg, as with all the other companies operating at this night market, loaders did one of the most important jobs–loading produce onto customer’s pallets and off-loading produce from the lorries, and so in a very literal way, stood under the weight of produce all night long. As one of my co-workers said, they took a ‘dog’s

116

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

life’ for a living. To survive this kind of work, they needed to take on the duress of being awake and staying alert whilst working at night. This was the most challenging task of all, even for workers who had partly adapted their biological clock to these new circadian rhythms. Yet, whilst they were essential workers in this trade, they were relegated to the lowest level. The bodily work of loaders–the lifting up and putting down of produce with their bodies and the bending over and pulling of manual forklifts loaded with hundreds of kilos–was crucial to the business. Moreover, without forklift drivers the work became difficult, though still not impossible. Drivers and their tools, the mechanical forklifts, could be replaced by other workers handling manual forklifts. Small stalls did not even have mechanical forklifts. Further, a company could function without salesmen and checkmen, but not without loaders. Despite the important role that loaders had, it was constantly minimised by the management. In their view, these loaders could be easily replaced. Consequently, the managers ignored or discounted the skills and knowledge that the loaders accumulated. Moreover, the workfloor managers easily dispensed of these workers, mostly working for cash and without a contract. Early labour migration scholarship (Piore, 1979), depicted migrants as birds landing in labour insecurity once arriving in the labour markets of high-income countries (e.g., the US and the U.K.). The current book shows that this predicament is still the case for migrant nightworkers converging on the New Spitalfields grounds without ethnic ties. Similarly, political economist, Guy Standing (2011, p. 3), highlights that ‘most [migrants] must put up with short-term contracts, with low wages and few benefits. The process is systemic, not accidental.’ Precarious migrant workers, therefore, are trapped in a vicious cycle of low-income and social immobility. That is, they not only end up in precarious nightwork, but also hang in on a ‘precariousness loop’ – nightwork-daysleep, from one abusive employer to the next, and unless protected by ethnic links, most become atomised, fragmented among themselves, as well as segmented, as nightworkers, from the broader majority of the society. This belt loop of precariousness is perpetuated, as Lopes and Hall (2015, p. 208) note, by the fact that ‘migrant workers represent some of the most vulnerable and least protected groups of workers in the U.K.’ A different angle on this set of dynamics is offered by literature on investment and disinvestment of bodies subordinated to capital gains (Sharma, 2014). This book takes this argument in a novel direction in order to highlight that whilst migrants contribute to ‘city-making’ (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018), global cities are a special case because the occupational polarisation in the labour market creates significant differences between the ‘disinvested’ bodies of manual workers (e.g., cleaners, taxi drivers and market workers) and the corporate executives, whose bodies are taken care of and fostered (Sassen, 1991; Sharma, 2013; Sharman & Sharman, 2008). The exploitation mechanisms localised in glocturnal cities, make those at the bottom of the labour market vie fiercely with one another for low-paid work, in turn breeding a culture in which workers seldomly cooperate with one another or show solidarity. Drawing from empirical evidence, the analysis presented in Chap. 8 will show how possibilities for cooperation among precarious nightworkers take a

4.2  The FruitVeg Company

117

fragile form, if any form at all, due to the segmentation and fragmentation mechanisms employed by management.

4.2.7 Women at the Market New Spitalfields was predominantly a masculine environment. Yet, women worked there too, as cashiers and café servers. Cashiers were almost entirely hidden from view, protected and better paid. In contrast, café servers were highly visible, as they needed to walk thousands of miles on foot between the café, the market stands and the customers’ vans parked throughout the market to deliver food and drinks. They were treated unfairly and unequally by all. In the market hierarchy, they were the female counterparts of the loaders–essential but disrespected and exploited. The café servers I talked to thought that the place of women was relegated to being indoors because this way they could be protected from the men’s inappropriate comments and behaviours. Cashiers At New Spitalfields, the majority of transactions were made in cash. Therefore, being a cashier was a position of trust and was mostly given to women who had family relatives or ethnic ties to the companies’ executives. They too arrived at the market around 10 pm but remained hidden for the entire night in porter cabins used as offices. Each porter cabin contained one to three office desks. Customers went to these desks and paid for their purchases. It was at this point of the transaction, that customers could see the women working behind the desks. Upon receiving cash payments, cashiers would liaise with the checkmen to release the goods which were then transported to the customers’ vehicles parked at the front of the market. In most cases, these women did not need to step out of the cabin until the end of their shift. They could order food and drinks by phone, or their bosses could order something for them. Everything was delivered by women café servers. Some porter cabins had toilets attached to them. If this was not the case, women could use the bathrooms outside the market hall in the auxiliary buildings that also hosted café stores. But there had been cases of abuse by males entering the females toilets. Hence, CoL management issued warning messages inscribed on the toilet entrances that read: ‘Any male found in this toilet will be prosecuted’. To illustrate the difference in treatment that female cashiers and café servers experienced, I introduce Ana, a Romanian woman in her thirties, who managed to move from one position to the other. She arrived at New Spitalfields on an agency contract. As she pointed out, ‘I paid an upfront fee to get me here’. Ana’s mother had also moved from Romania to care for Ana’s 5-year-old boy. Ana was married to a taxi driver who also worked nightshifts, which suited their schedules. I met her at a café owned by a man of Turkish nationality during the time she worked there. We

118

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

later became co-workers as I took a job as a café server. Whilst I was employed at the café, Ana then became a cashier. I interviewed her sometime after she started this new role. Ana began her story in regard to her time as a café server with a comment about the long hours of work. In her words, ‘We worked 12 hours but declared only two. Everyone does this at the market, so they don’t pay taxes’. This impacted on her family life, as she recounted: I used to come home every night with my feet in blisters from walking long distances to deliver for the café. I was exhausted. Imagine, I used to wake up at 7 pm to get out at 9 pm and arrive at work at 10 pm. Every morning around 9 am, I finished the nightshift. I would get home about 10:30 am. I was not able to do anything else. Sometimes, I would even skip shower. I used to eat and go to bed and wake up again in the evening. My mum used to take care of my child. I wouldn’t have any chance to do this work, without the help of my mum.

After overcoming her initial hesitancy, Ana also talked about necessity to perform certain gendered behaviour when around were men. This involved developing a ‘simple’ strategy to avoid uncomfortable situations, although she was tense all the time. When delivering her orders to the customers, she would spend as little time as possible in their presence. In her words, ‘I just took [or] passed on the delivery. I used to speak to whom I thought I should, and that was it. In this way, I did not give men chances to behave rudely’. Whilst her co-worker, I noted how differently Ana was treated to another English woman who worked temporarily at this café or the Turkish-born women at the other cafés at the market. The manager would shout at Ana to, ‘get off your bum and serve’ or either throw a drink at her or on the floor rather than passing it to her. She often told me in Romanian, ‘you see how miserably they [Turkish men] behave towards Romanian women. They wouldn’t do the same to an English woman’. During the interview, I also learnt that she was abused by her manager, who eventually fired her without notice after she returned from an unpaid holiday. Luckily, this happened at a time when Ana was pondering a job offer from an English trader. The man had offered her the cashier’s position in his company. Despite being excited, Ana took some convincing to take up the role because she did not have any basic computer skills and was not confident about her knowledge of the English language. She confessed that: I feared this change. The English customers speak so fast that I would have no chance understanding them. That thought scared me. I knew that what I needed to learn would come, I was not stressed about that. But I was scared that I would not understand the English customers. But those at the firm speak to me clearly and slowly. They start you easily. They knew from the start what I could [could not] do. They showed me stuff. ‘Don’t worry’, the boss used to say, ‘you’ll learn things. No worries’.

Ana’s timetable changed too and now started at 2 am, finishing at 7 am. She received a salary increase and an employment contract as well. Overall, her quality of life changed for the better. In her words: I am paid more than when I worked for the Turkish café owner on 11-to-12-hour long nightshifts. Then I had no contract and no paid annual leave. Now, I sit all night at a desk, and I don’t worry over being kicked out of a job because I am well into my thirties. This is what

4.2  The FruitVeg Company

119

would have happened to me sooner or later if I were to stay and work for the Turkish café owner. Now it’s a million times easier–mentally, physically … I need to concentrate there too, but it’s much easier. When I get home, I can play with my boy for a bit. On weekends, I spend more time with family since I changed jobs … At this English firm, I work with papers [i.e., a work contract]. The boss pays my holidays and the nightshifts are six hours long, not 11, 12. I get paid much better than I was at the coffee shop even though I work half the time. It’s a jump.

Further to this, Ana no longer worked with women from Bulgaria, Lithuania, Romania and Turkey, but with English-speaking male and female customers, which enhanced her communication skills as well as her computer literacy. These were skills that she could transfer outside the night market. Nevertheless, for her the fundamental difference between being a female café server and a cashier was still that, at this market a woman was shown respect only if she occupied the latter position. Café Servers There were five coffee shops located around the main market hall, and they were all owned by men. Most café servers were women in their twenties from Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Lithuania) and occasionally, from Turkey. Even though most of them were educated, they were offered the most menial jobs. All of them worked both inside the cafés, preparing and serving food and drinks and cleaning, and outside taking and delivering orders to market workers and customers. Some found this work overwhelming. This was the case of Lexa, an inexperienced café worker from Romania without any ethnic network and having only been in the U.K. labour market for less than 6 months. She fought to stay awake and work the long hours of the nightshift. Lexa found herself worn out by the demands of nightwork: ‘My life was spent on work, sleep, work, sleep. I was physically exhausted’. In addition, she struggled to put up with the abuse from her employer. On one occasion after her manager refused to grant her a night off, Lexa missed her next shift only to be docked two nights’ pay. She endured it all because her aims were to save money quickly and bring her young daughter to the U.K. Eventually, she left this café to work at another coffee shop in the Billingsgate fish market. It was not uncommon for women servers and cashiers to encounter exploitative practices, such as in Lexa’s case, or experience harassment at the hands of male colleagues or managers. Others, however, seemed to thrive here. This was the case of Flory, who was a part of the first generation in her family to be born in England. Her mother was from Cyprus and her father from Turkey. She was in her early twenties and was still attending college. She was fluent in English and Turkish and spoke easily with everyone, switching between these languages as needed. These cordial encounters always resulted in sales of drinks or food. She sold more to the English traders than to the migrant-owned stalls. In her words, ‘They prefer me, as I am more outgoing, flattering them, laughing with them’. Her social skills, however, came with a price at this market where café owners compete fiercely for business. She explained to me

120

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

why she could not change her workplace at this market, although she had been offered a better salary by other café owners: The [other] girls here make sales of £80 to £100 per nightshift. I am so good with people that I easily make £200 per shift. And that’s why he won’t let me go and work for the other coffee shops. If I would work for the other café owners, I would take all his customers with me. Here it’s to do with who makes more sales, who grabs the next customer … I must accept my boss’ terms or forget about working at this market. I like to work here because I keep bonding with people.

Flory’s witty personality seemed to be the reason why male customers preferred to not only banter with her and buy their food and drinks from her, but her experience also demonstrated what was at stake for someone with excellent social skills. Once night, Ali, a Turkish male co-worker with whom she was close, stretched his arm around her shoulders and said to me smilingly, ‘when you work with someone like Flory, there is nothing like a night job. I recommend nightwork to anyone’. Flory seemed to navigate her way carefully and skilfully among the male workers, as if floating above survival needs and able to focus more on bonding with people. Along with the hundreds of cups of hot drinks that Flory delivered, she listened to tales of migration, family unification or partner separation, loneliness and details of deceitful relationships that eventually broke down. In her words: Working at night in this market café fulfils more than just making good sales. It has a social dimension. I don’t know, you feel like a lonely person. Yeah, I would say [that about a] night job. There are so many people at the market, working here at night. They broke up with their wives who would cheat on the men who had no time for them. Many people explained to me… ‘cause you know… I build up relationships with people, and they tell me everything… so when they wanna talk to someone, they come to me. [..] They, the people I associate with here, are good. That’s what, I reckon, brings me back. Because obviously, you don’t have much … when you work here you don’t have a social life. The vast majority literally cut off their social life [outside of this market].

Many of the workers would stop in the midst of the market race to chat to Flory. Her social skills and amiability reminded me of the hostesses that Allison (1994, p. 59) describes in her work on a Tokyo ‘hostess club’, who provide a kind of ‘functional lubrication’ as they flirt with and flatter their white-collar male clientele. Flory crafted a kind-hearted nightwork sociality through smiles and witty repartee, and through sharing and listening to stories. On the one hand, these elements, reflect both a form of emotional labour with its exploitative bonds attached, like in Rani’s and Lexa’s situations. On the other hand, this is a form of emotional labour that draws on the skills of the worker ‘to manage his or her own feelings to produce a desired state of mind in a customer or prospective customer’ (Mears & Finlay, 2005, p. 319). In a similar way, Flory displays both soft skills for sociability, and an ability to navigate her manager’s expectations of high sales. She had grasped an essential part of working at night. She schmoozed customers and workers. She was the soulsoother of the nightshifters with a friendly ear, helping people cope with the demands of the nightshift. More, in contrast to Lexa, Flory thrived as a café server because as a second-generation migrant she had ethnic ties and had gained experience navigating the ethnic segregation at this nightmarket.

4.3  Segmentation at the Night Market

121

As noted earlier, Flory was an exception. Café servers were placed at the bottom of the pecking order, but lower than male loaders. Although most of the women working at these cafés were more educated than male loaders or forklift drivers, the masculinised work environment regulated by loose and unobserved rules infected these women’s experiences to a deeper level of precarity than it did for male loaders, by being mixed with abuse and harassment.

4.3 Segmentation at the Night Market This chapter has unravelled the interconnected hierarchies that structure this night market. In this section, I return to a discussion of the ethnic lines of division for they enable a clearer focus on those at the bottom of this unequal labour system. As emphasised throughout the chapter, New Spitalfields is an ethnically diverse market. Though there is little mention of the English traders at New Spitalfields, historically they were the first to set up fruit and vegetable stores where Spitalfields market was located for centuries in the City of London till 1991 when it moved to East London. The English traders have been followed by migrants who arrived from countries with colonial ties to the U.K., mostly from Asia. Then there have been the waves of Turkish nationals who have had access to the labour market through bilateral agreements between Turkey and the U.K.  It is only from the early 2000s onwards that New Spitalfields began to attract Eastern European migrants, who are currently overrepresented. Then following the economic downturn, European migrants have travelled from the Mediterranean to the U.K., arriving at New Spitalfields via existing ethnic connections and business networks, but their numbers are rather small compared with that of Eastern Europeans. Since their arrival, Eastern Europeans have been seen as providers of muscle force. For the Turkish, Kurdish, Cypriots or Pakistani owners and executives, Eastern Europeans, even those who are Muslims and may even speak Turkish, are not considered fellow humans nor skilled and hardworking people, but as, ‘stupid goats’ and ‘Gypsies’. Such terms were used on regular basis, not only by those higher in the pecking order, but also by customers. One customer at FruitVeg, for example, discarded my offer to shadow him and carry the produce for him as he shopped around this store. He threw me the line, ‘I knew you [Romanians] are all stupid and thieves’ and left it like that, without any further explanation. I felt abused and confused. A month prior, this man had praised me for my diligence and personalised service (shadowing) that FruitVeg offered to regular customers like him. He often shouted ‘Doktor’ at me, as he had learned from the manager that I was a doctoral student. I could not find out what suddenly prompted him to treat me as his inferior. Ministry of Health, Jeremy Hunt’s legacy to ‘combat an ‘epidemic of health tourism” by Eastern Europeans, has led to them being accused of taking advantage of the free NHS services before paying enough taxes, despite the statistics showing that ‘migrants in the U.K. consistently appear to report better health than their U.K. counterparts’, and that ‘in fact, migrants cost the NHS less per head than do

122

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

citizens’ (Long, 2014, p. 88 ePub). As well as being blamed for stealing the jobs of British workers, Eastern European migrants were also ‘benefit tourists’. As such, they were seen as undeserving of respect and equal treatment. And in this customer’s perception, I was just another ‘Romanian thief’, who could be ‘written off or deemed less human’ (Holmes, 2013a, p. 60). There were also other less aggressive ways to establish distance from this new wave of migrants at the market–and in turn, justify their exploitation. Many of the people in positions of power that I encountered spoke about the ‘old times’ and the ‘old crew’, that is, those who were there before the arrival in large numbers of Eastern Europeans. For example, they pointed out that the ‘old crew’ workers relied more on one other’s help. In contrast, the ‘new’ workers were more individualistic, only concerned with themselves and ‘doing their job’, and uninterested in showing solidarity with others–proof, therefore, of their lesser humanity. Workers at FruitVeg, as well as other firms, who had climbed up the hierarchy, reminisced about the times when the ‘old crew’ were kinder to those who joined the ranks as the ‘new crew’, such as Albanians. The old crew included salespeople or checkmen of Turkish nationality who had worked nightshifts for between 8 and 20 years. They attributed higher qualities to younger, new crew members who just ‘did their job’ and assigned poor attributes to those who did less of the workload to survive the night. Nevertheless, these terms diverted the attention away from the one criterion that mattered in this market, which is family and ethnic ties to the top management (owners, workfloor managers and salespersons). Without these connections, an individual was vulnerable (to subjugation) and their opportunities were limited. Throughout the market, the old crew workers were openly xenophobic over the new crew of different ethnicities. This distinction between the old and new cohorts was not overtly demarcated by those aligning themselves with the good, ‘old time’, but it may have served as a soft ethnic division for them. Some Romanian workers also formed old crew and new crew groups, but the majority were placed in the lower echelons of this hierarchy. These included loaders, forklift drivers and the women who worked as café servers (as shown in Table  4.2). I often heard them complaining that the Turkish owners ‘favour the Turks’. As a Romanian co-worker put it, ‘they give their Turks less to do, while I break my back and can never go up the (work) ladder’. The case of Gică, the foreman introduced earlier in the chapter, is illustrative of this. Gică belonged to the old crew, having spent nearly a decade at the market. Yet, despite being occasionally asked to cover a checkman’s role, he was never offered a managerial position because he lacked such relative affiliation or ethnic ties. He had few opportunities to climb the labour hierarchy beyond the ‘drill sergeant’ level. As a Roma man, he also experienced other structural inequalities because of his ethnicity. As discussed, there were exceptions to these experiences. Ana, the Romanian woman who arrived at the market via other Romanians, worked for a while in the lowest position as a café server and was offered a cashier’s job by an English trader. Counter-intuitively, Ana had created this opportunity for herself by restraining her behaviour when she delivered drinks and food throughout the market, during which time she met and impressed her future employer. Basrí, a Turkish-speaking Roma man of Bulgarian nationality, is another example. He too did not feel that he had the

4.3  Segmentation at the Night Market

123

Table 4.2  Labour organisation at FruitVeg firm. Continuous lines show direct command; interrupted lines indirect oversight. (*) The numerical values indicate the number of employees on that position. Traffic light colour system indicates in red the lowest position (with least control) and green, the highest position in the hierarchy, and most control over the ones below. Cashiers are mostly women. At FruitVeg this position was also given to men. Women café servers are employed by Café owners, not traders like FruitVeg firm. The café servers work across the five café shops located around the main market hall, which are independent businesses

Owner of FruitVeg (1) Based at TurkoVeg (HQ)

FruitVe g Est. 1990

Operations Manager (1) Based at TurkoVeg (HQ) Workfloor Manager (1)

Salesmen (5)

Cashier (1)

Stock controller (1)

Loaders and Forklift drivers (4)

Checkmen (2-3)

Forman (1)

Loaders (10-12)

Women café servers work in auxiliary services (20-25)

required computing and English language skills to move out of his position, yet secured a higher paid and less body breaking job as a forklift driver. Additionally, in 2019, when I last saw him at New Spitalfields, he was a workfloor manager, at a newly set up store. While these social mobility trajectories are among the few exceptions that I have encountered at the market, they tell of the possibilities that exist. Some people, who are not prepared to tolerate the meagre existence and have the entrepreneurial abilities to fight it and the confidence to take up the challenge, escape from the loop belt of precariousness. In addition, these exceptions confirm that on the whole, sharing the same ethnicity offers one a lucrative position at this market.

124

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

Further on, these ties created disadvantages as well. Many unskilled nightworkers at New Spitalfields admitted that the lack of certain skills (mainly English language proficiency) prevented them to work for and with people of other ethnicities and nationalities. This restricted how active they were in seeking work elsewhere. From my vantage point as an employee in workplaces where the business and working language was Turkish, I noticed that this was the case for Turkish speakers from Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. These people often needed to accept and became dependent on the workplaces that traded in their mother tongue, therefore running the risk of remaining in this deadlock permanently. This was one of the reasons why Basrí, for example, shared the same fate as many hundreds who remained on similar positions for longer than they had anticipated or intended. My ethnographic critique points at a pecking order that is ethnically segmented perpetually, by the management who allows this to fragment and control workers. Language was often employed as a tool of fragmentation. As I observed during staff meetings at FruitVeg, communication between low and middle level staff was impeded because the manager did not have sufficient language skills yet did not hire translators. As a result, these meetings turned into three-hour long monologues by the managers in a language that not all workers could follow. Only the Turkish speakers could distil the management’s messages and translated small and disjointed pieces of information to the non-Turkish speakers. Subsequently, workers easily became confused and unable to cooperate on critical issues concerning their poor working conditions. They could not voice their concerns about how they were controlled by higher-ups who ordered them when to eat and sit, and when they were permitted go to the toilet, through manipulative practices and monitoring via CCTV. They continued to be subject to the foreman’s shouting of orders and distribution of numbing and monotonous tasks. Eastern European workers, particularly, took home nothing other than terror. These are the forces that make a person do a job regardless of the senseless conditions in which one must do it (Werker Collective et al., 2017). Migrant workers especially, internalise this terror. This internalisation prompts them to obediently execute the orders of the higher-ups. Moreover, it also places them in constant competition with others in the lower paid ranks. This terror, thus, results in obedient individualism. Therefore, at New Spitalfields, structurally vulnerable migrants like those arriving after 2000 from Eastern Europe, have been half-rejected and half-permitted. Their labour power was needed to cover difficult, unwanted night jobs. Yet, they have been derided, if not condemned, for ‘swamping’ the market, as well as the country, and for being deemed less human.

4.4 Conclusion Based on the ethnographic data, this critique shows that the segmentation of workers happens along ethnic lines. Being ethnically tied to the management dictates how much control nightworkers have over theirs and others’ sleeping time and patterns. More, this link defines their work patterns, pay rates, and holidays (if and how

4.4 Conclusion

125

much time off they are allowed). Those located at the bottom wish for themselves not only health and respect from others, but also small things such as the possibility have a tea break during a long night’s shift. Social mobility or the ‘way up’ from the bottom layer in this pecking order is out of the question for many manual labourers, and especially for the female café servers situated at the very bottom due to the auxiliary nature of their work. At the same time, the chapter has closely explored migrant subjectivities (desires, actions, and struggles), thus, moving away from objectifying migrants and embracing instead scholarship that pleads for ‘re-migranticizing’ migration studies (King, 2020, p.  8; see also Dahinden, 2016; Schinkel, 2018, 2019). In effect, at New Spitalfields, there are ‘second-generation’ migrants like Flory who have not experienced migration directly as an event. More importantly, this theoretical framework applies to the ethnic niche of migrant workers who end up at New Spitalfields and must tolerate the intolerable as they do not share the ethnicity of those in positions of power. Framed in this way, ethnicity is a ‘social feature’ that belongs to the contemporary ‘social regime of capital’ (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015, p. 25). As such, ethnicity ‘may subjugate or empower, or it may simply set the ideological parameters of power-laden negotiations or conflicts among different classes or power blocs’ (Larson et al., 1995, p. 35). In the context of New Spitalfields nightmarket, those who are in positions that permit them to subjugate others, are also in control of their own working pattern, pay and respect from others. They are owners, executives, managers, and salespeople. They can also choose to follow traditional daytime work and sleep patterns and hours, and control the needs of those who must tame their bodies’ need for sleep and rest. These are the loaders, forklift drivers or porters, café servers and cashiers. This chapter has also showed how those at the bottom of the informal hierarchy– the manual migrant nightworkers arriving from Eastern Europe–experience ‘conjugated oppression’. This is a term that I borrow from Bourgois (apud Holmes, 2013a, p. 65) to emphasise that all these elements ‘work together to produce an oppression that is experientially and materially different from that produced by either alone.’ This emphasis is all the more relevant for a labour sector such as the food sector, which heavily relies on the migrant workers trapped at its bottom (Flachs, 2020; Güell & Garcés-mascareñas, 2021; Holmes, 2013b; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016; Matusz & Aivaliotou, 2020). This discussion will be elaborated on in Chap. 5 with recent considerations of nightwork and its social and ethnic demographics (Duijzings & Dušková, 2022; Shaw, 2022). Chapter 5 will shows that the normalisation of nightwork is linked to global, supra-national structures, yet supported by national labour regimes that target vulnerable migrants in difficult working conditions shunned by native-like citizens (Broberg et al., 2023; Fasani & Mazza, 2020). On the backdrop of the post-circadian capitalist regime set to extract maximum of labour power from migrant workers’ bodies, Chap. 4 has explored the intersections of hierarchies to reveal how ethnically segmented workers experience different degrees of dispossession (see Chap. 5) and form a habitus of nightwork (see Chap. 6). Further, the relationships between nightworkers and the nightwork

126

4  Intersecting Hierarchies of Nightwork

structure creates a set of struggles, vulnerabilities and embodied precariousness for these fe/male migrants (see Chap. 7).

References Allison, A. (1994). Nightwork: Pleasure, sexuality and corporate masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. The University of Chicago Press. Broberg, N., Gonnot, J., Poeschel, F., & Ruhs, M. (2023). The role of labour market institutions in shaping reliance on migrant labour in essential occupations: A comparative analyses across European countries. https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/ scholar?q=cache:g_Z5BOMKD6YJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&scilib=1. Accessed 27 Jan 2023 Çağlar, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2018). Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372011 Casas-Cortes, M., Cobarrubias, S., de Genova, N., Garelli, G., Grappi, G., Heller, C., et al. (2015). New keywords: Migration and borders. Cultural Studies, 29(1), 55–87. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09502386.2014.891630 Dahinden, J. (2016). A plea for the ‘de-migranticization’ of research on migration and integration. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(13), 2207–2225. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015. 1124129 Duijzings, G., & Dušková, L. (Eds.). (2022). Working At Night. De Gruyter. https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110753592 Fasani, F., & Mazza, J. (2020). Immigrant key workers: Their contribution to Europe’s COVID-19 response. European Commission – Joint Research Centre, (JRC120537), 1–17. Flachs, A. (2020). Essential agrarian histories for essential agrarian futures. Society for the Anthropology of Work. https://doi.org/10.21428/1d6be30e.45f279ec Güell, B., & Garcés-mascareñas, B. (2021). The advancing alternative migration governance agricultural seasonal workers in times of Covid-19 in Spain D3. 3 Paper country cases: Spain Berta Güell and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, (February). Hall, S. (2021). The migrant’s paradox: Street livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain (1st ed.). University of Minnesota Press. Accessed 28 Dec 2022. Holmes, S. M. (2013a). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States (1st ed.). University of California Press. Holmes, S.  M. (2013b). “Is it worth risking your life?”: Ethnography, risk and death on the U.S.-Mexico border. Social Science and Medicine, 99, 153–161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2013.05.029 Holmes, S. M., & Castañeda, H. (2016). Representing the “European refugee crisis” in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death. American Ethnologist, 43(1), 12–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12259 King, R. (2020). On migration, geography, and epistemic communities. Comparative Migration Studies, 8(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-020-00193-2 Larson, B., Harris, O., & Tandeter, E. (Eds.). (1995). Ethnicity, markets and migration in the andes: At the crossroads of history and anthropology (1st ed.). Duke University PRess. Long, K. (2014). The huddled masses: Immigration and inequality (Kindle Single.). Thistle Publishing. https://www.amazon.com/Huddled-Masses-Immigration-Inequality-Kindleebook/dp/B00QKG351Y. Accessed 1 June 2021 Lopes, A., & Hall, T. (2015). Organising migrant workers: The living wage campaign at the University of East London. Industrial Relations Journal, 46(3), 208–221. Matusz, P., & Aivaliotou. (2020). Circular and temporary migration in PolanD during COVID-19 (No. Deliverable 3.2). Wroclaw. Accessed 1 June 2021

References

127

Mears, A., & Finlay, W. (2005). Not just a paper doll: How models manage bodily capital and why they perform emotional labor. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 34(3), 317–343. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0891241605274559 Piore, M. J. (1979). Birds of passage. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511572210 Sassen, S. (1991). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press. Schinkel, W. (2018). Against ‘immigrant integration’: For an end to neocolonial knowledge production. Comparative Migration Studies, 6(1), 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-018-0095-1 Schinkel, W. (2019). Migration studies: An imposition. Comparative Migration Studies, 7(1), 32. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0136-4 Schinkel, W. (2022). To decolonize migration studies means to dismantle it. On Adrian Favell’s The Integration Nation and question-ability. Ethnic and Racial Studies. https://doi.org/10.108 0/01419870.2022.2130704 Sharma, S. (2013). Because the night belongs to lovers: Occupying the time of precarity. Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies, 11(1), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/1479142 0.2013.828384 Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke Universtiy Press. Sharman, R. L., & Sharman, C. H. (2008). Nightshift NYC. University of California Press. Shaw, R. (2022). Geographies of night work. Progress in Human Geography, 46(5), 1149–1164. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325221107638 Shaxon, N. (2011). Treasure islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: New dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academics. Taylor, C. (2011). Londoners: The days and nights of London now-as told by those who love it, hate it, live it, left it and long for it. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=NqcNoAl jD8AC&oi=fnd&pg=PT5&dq=craig+taylor+2011+londoners&ots=e2ew6ijpno&sig=iH68Bd cFl2StZ2-ryNkk0WH-C6Q. Accessed 30 Dec 2022 Wacquant, L. (2004). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/425391. Werker Collective, Vishmidt, M., & Jeschke, L. (2017). 365 days of invisible work. (M. Roig Blesa, B. Choi, R. Delfos, & Y. van der Heide, Eds.) (1st ed.). Spector Books. Accessed 7 June 2021.

Chapter 5

The Normalisation of Nightwork

I began this book with the problems of nightwork, inviting the reader to look beyond its normalisation in 24/7 capitalism and to recognise its problems. To have to wake up in the evenings to travel to work overnight for low pay whilst the rest of society sleeps, feels unfair and unjust. Sleeping in the day and working all night is dreadful. Eating at night is unhealthy and working all night disrupts the circadian rhythms. Living and working in opposite rhythms to mainstream society warrants nightworkers’ invisibility not only in their milieu–not socialising with friends during the day and evenings makes nightworkers feel like a different breed–but also among other workers as workers’ organisations rarely, if ever, include the problems that nightworkers face on their agendas. Many of the migrant nightworkers with whom I laboured alongside and chatted with and interviewed, complained about being tired of feeling dreadful. Only very few said that the nightshift suited them better than dayshifts. In this chapter, I focus on the normalisation of nightwork. By this I mean that nightwork has become a common component in most sectors of the economy and is no longer the exception that it used to be. This suggests that the economy has become a 24/7 economy and that cities are being transformed into ‘24-hour cities’ (Acuto et al., 2022, p. 58). It is due to this that this phase of capitalism can be called post-circadian capitalism. How has the normalisation of nightwork happened in temporal and spatial terms? And how and why has it been possible for it to go unnoticed, despite its inherent problems? What role have processes like electrification, industrialisation, financialisation and digitalisation played in the colonisation of the night and hence, its normalisation? How could the night be colonised without the intervention of institutions of power? And why have nightshift workers been excluded in this normalisation process from enjoying similar benefits as daytime workers? To answer these questions, I foreground a series of interrelated conditions, mechanisms and processes that have provoked and maintained the transition from circadian to post-circadian capitalism. I hope in answering these central questions on the rather invisibilised and peripherally discussed phenomenon of nightwork, to connect fields of studies previously not discussed together. Those being the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_5

129

130

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

embodied anthropology of labour merged with the subfields within night studies1 – nighttime economy, alcohol consumption, lighting and light pollution, lack of sleep, night tourism and nightlife under the umbrella of migration studies focusing on marginalised, racialised and ethnicised migrant groups. Neither of these fields and sub-fields have thoroughly researched nightwork other than to only peripherally link it to other night themes or human activities taking place after dark. I thus, discuss the more general term ‘neo-liberalisation’, the global reach of ‘dispossession’, the more particular ‘intensification of labour’, ‘alterations to time regimentation’ and the rise of a particular locality that I call the ‘glocturnal city’. Overall, the historical context for these developments is the global reach of what Harvey (2005, 2007) calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’, whose effects have been experienced even more acutely since ‘the aftermath of the 2007/2008 global financial collapse’ (Carbonella & Kasmir, 2014, p. 2). Further to this, I point out how the normalisation of nightwork has completely glossed over its consequences for workers on schedules in the unsocial hours of evenings and nights (e.g., the harmful physical, psychological and emotional health impacts), the dispossession of their bodily capital and their reduction to bio-­ automatons subordinated to capitalist production. To illustrate the impacts of these macro-processes at the individual level, the four intimate ethnographic portraits of nightworkers (in Sect. 5.2) introduce their migratory paths and describe their struggles to adapt to a nightwork regime of discipline, the feeling of being trapped in hidden work that is damaging to their relationships, ruining their bodies, and isolating them from their families, friends and (day) life overall. Though they struggle in different ways to work at night, these nightworkers have common qualities of what Bourdieu (2000, pp. 145–146) calls ‘somatic compliance’, which leads to a ‘collective automaton’. Other related terms used in this book are ‘bio-automatons’, ‘half-­ humans, half-machines’, ‘bodies-turned-machines’, ‘walking ghosts’, and ‘dead people walking’, all of which emphasise the docile, compliant behaviour and disposable bodies of these workers whom are subjected to ‘the basis of implicit collusion among all agents who are products of similar conditions and conditioning that produce compliant automatons’ (2000, pp. 145–146).

 Luc Gwiazdzinski, Marco Maggioli, Will Straw (2020). Night studies: Regards croisés sur les nouveaux visages de la nuit l’innovation autrement. Elya Editions. 1

5.1  Transition from Circadian to Post-circadian, 24/7 Capitalism

131

5.1 Transition from Circadian to Post-circadian, 24/7 Capitalism 5.1.1 Neo-liberalisation The ‘creative destruction’ of neo-liberalisation (Harvey, 2005, 2007) has prompted the transition from circadian to post-circadian capitalism. This tone has been set in the US and the U.K. (Prasad, 2006). In the US, market deregulation coincided with new employment reforms that were implemented by Ronald Reagan’s administration through deindustrialisation – and ‘[that] led to new forms of precarious work and indented labour … [relying on] unskilled and temporary workers with no union rights’ (Mollona, 2013, p. 142).2 These became unpopular with workers, who were increasingly spending their leisure time at work in order to manage their precarious households. Similarly, in the late 1970s in the U.K., the government led by Margaret Thatcher implemented unprecedented measures to de-regularise the market, experimenting with tax cuts and diminishing welfare support by the British state. In both contexts, the implementation of these policies was designed to make Reagan and Thatcher popular with voters, yet their policies became controversial as both leaders aimed to ‘roll back the state’ and control the public purse. Eras that ‘promoted more egalitarian distributive measures’ ended with the implementation of neoliberal free-­ market policies, which attracted more public support during Thatcherism than those of previous governments (Harvey, 2007, p. 22). Other states followed the two revolutionary populist administrations of Reagan and Thatcher. From Sweden to New Zealand, neoliberal practices have swept the Global North. With the exception of a few states such as North Korea, still resisting the tidal wave of neoliberalism, this ‘creative destruction’ has for the worst affected the working landscape of large (Choonara, 2019; Harvey, 2007) countries like India, Brazil or China in the Global South to the degree that ‘increased informalisation and precarisation of labour  – whether inside or outside the factory’ has become the norm (Mollona, 2013, p. 204). Among its effects, Harvey (2007, p. 23) mentions the impact on ‘division of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life, attachments to the land, habits of the heart and ways of thought’. Neoliberalism appealed to the public for its promised individual freedoms for everyone (sexual liberation and consumerism) and succeeded to infest governments from those on the world’s periphery to its centre, with the US and the U.K. as the forerunners (Harvey, 2007, p. 26). Through mechanisms such as the commodification of labour and elements like financialisaton, neoliberalism has provided limited access to free education and healthcare and has attacked the rights to the state pension. This form emphasises ‘primitive accumulation’ based on the antagonistic relationship between those ‘who command the labour of those who do not’ (Graeber, 2014, p.  345), i.e., the 1%  Mollona, M. 2014. Informal Labour, Factory Labour or the End of Labour? Anthropological Reflections on Labour Value. In Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism: Contemporary Themes and Theoretical Issues, ed. M. Atzeni, 181–209. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. 2

132

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

commanding the 99% in the interest of multiplying their capital. In other words, the ‘neo’ in the neoliberal reforms promised freedoms and instead ‘restored class power’ (Harvey, 2007, p. 30). Moreover, the increase in poverty, homelessness and unemployment rates during Reagan’s administration in the US and Thatcher’s administration in the U.K., did not jeopardise their subsequent re-election nor threaten their respective parties’ popularity among the public. More to the interest of this study, the U.K. has been a testing ground for neoliberal policies implemented after 1979 to resolve the British ‘winter of discontent’ (Prasad, 2006). Political geographer Jamie Peck (2013) points out that despite the 2008 economic crisis, neoliberal practices have intensified. Neoliberalism has not only survived this global economic crisis, but its doctrines and policies are successfully applied to further welfare cuts through harsh measures, with labour power succumbing to capital demands. In the U.K., the destructive reach of neoliberal practices and activities of corporations has been carried on long after the Thatcherite era. Mediated by neoliberal led governments, such as Tony Blair’s Whigs faction that lead Britain into the twenty-first century, new forms of precarisation and the further privatisation of public-owned properties have continued to make labour relations subservient to capital accumulation.

5.1.2 Global Dispossession In Harvey’s (2005) analysis of the ‘accumulation by dispossession’, the interconnection between labour and dispossession is amply asserted. Additionally, it exposes how this aggressive neo-liberalisation has been possible with the active role of states in incorporating ‘unwaged or unfree forms of labour’ (Carbonella & Kasmir, 2014, p. 24) though new enclosures of land, property, commons and rights, which combined have unleashed a significant process of dispossession (Gill, 2014). Harvey’s (2005) key concept of dispossession is central to labour anthropologists (Kasmir & Carbonella, 2014), and is a conceptual tool used in this book to shine a light on the differential values placed on labourers  – invested corporates versus disinvested ‘low-skilled’ workers. Dispossession, thus, is also linked to the production of difference through bio-politics and necro-politics (Bauman, 2002; Li, 2010; Rajaram, 2015; Sharma, 2014). Some people are fostered and taken care of, whilst others are left in neglect and barely able to make a living from working. In other words, the affluent and the highly paid are ‘invested’ into whilst those whose ‘labour is surplus in relation to [the] utility for capital’ are ‘disinvested’ (Li, 2010, p. 68). Dispossession, like migrancy, is not only a matter of the class that an individual belongs to or how people distinguish one another (white, wealthy, expat professionals versus low-paid, ethnically diverse migrants), but is also a matter of whether one is in stable employment and able to afford to live in a certain locality. Labour anthropologist Whitehead (2010) argues that the dispossession of workers through their marginalisation from secure employment and their forced reliance on taking flexible contracts that are away from global city centres, are features of a ‘double

5.1  Transition from Circadian to Post-circadian, 24/7 Capitalism

133

dispossession’. Moreover, differential dispossession is a destructive process whereby human worthlessness is ‘created’ at the advantage of capital accumulation (Narotzky, 2022). This enduring process has been reproducing inequalities along the lines of gender, age and wage-topping wageless workers, or of privileged versus deprived communities. In nineteenth century London, for example, wageless dock workers were paid in ‘chips’, i.e., the scraps and waste left over from shipbuilding. The River Thames Police (waged workers) decided whom to pay or not. On the one hand, the division created from within one class (waged versus wageless workers) and, on the other hand, between classes (police wage labourers acting on behalf of the oppressors– capitalists who extract labour from the wageless who were paid in chips). This highlights how the reclassification of the less waged and the poor became a central feature of capital accumulation through dispossession across the industrialised world. In the twentieth century, the arrival of Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the US, faced insecure employment, below living wage rates and social exclusion. Despite the precarious situation of the workers, solidarity between African Americans, black and newly arrived European immigrants gave the workers bargaining power. Under the American Federation of Labour union, they aspired for equality and fought together for it. However, this was a short-lived class solidarity, for it was crushed by a wartime US government through racial divisions between African Americans, white and Southern-Eastern European immigrants. Du Bois (1920) highlighted this division in his analysis of the 1917 race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois (apud Kasmir & Carbonella, 2014). Du Bois stated that the privileges and rights of white males would reign over the women, men and children of colour, whose work significantly advantaged the reconstruction of the American economy and its burgeoning society on the backs of the labouring ‘others’. Further divisions, between white and black people, women and men, young and old, occurred within conditions created by the political arms of the state. These divisions forged differences instead of solidarity. In brief, such ‘divisions … became a cornerstone of power for emergent capitalist classes’ (Federici, 2004; apud Kasmir & Carbonella, 2014, p. 15). Several characteristics and consequences of this substantial process of dispossession are of particular importance for this book. Firstly, there is the global reach of dispossession. Dispossessed workers are everywhere–in the old and newly industrialised and post-industrial countries from the US to the U.K., the E.U. and countries of the former Soviet bloc, and from the South Americas to China and India. Everywhere, capital accumulation is predicted on the ‘disinvestment’ in labourers’ lives and bodies (MacQuarie 2019; Sharma, 2014). Secondly, the dispossessed labourers are not so much ‘outside’ of capitalism, but more likely at its epicentre in global cities driving the capitalist transformations (Carbonella & Kasmir, 2014; Gill, 2014; Kasmir & Carbonella, 2008, 2014; Kasmir & Gill, 2022). Thirdly, capitalists ‘fish’ from a ‘surplus population’ of disposable workers when and as they please (Wolf, 2001). More to the concern of this book, they play dice with the lives of these denizens – migrants who travel the world for work and who have a ‘limited range of rights and weaker entitlement to them, than the [local] citizen’ (Standing, 2012, p.  590). Their

134

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

contribution is rendered insignificant by comparison to the native-like citizens whom they share the cities where they live and work (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018), and they lack rights to decent work (Macarie 2017). Thus, the advent of the post-circadian capitalism has meant that millions of workers have been dispossessed – then, the rural workers of their land; now, urban workers of their labour power. Standing’s (2011, p. x) analysis in relation to capital and the role of the state is another example of scholarship that attests to the disappearance of the proletariat which was replaced by a ‘dangerous class’ of precarious workers, the ‘precariat’. They form a large pool of non-unionisable workers facing labour insecurity and in-work poverty. Some of them are forced to disregard their biological clocks to work at night in order to help make entire sectors of the economy possible and yet, they are rendered as ‘invisible denizens’ (Macarie 2017). This book argues that, for the normalisation of nightwork to happen, dispossession has had to take other forms as well. This book identifies three processes that produce these other forms of dispossession. These processes are the intensification of labour, alterations to time regimentation and the constitution of the glocturnal city. Together, these processes have caused the dispossession of one’s own private time (time to spend with family, friends and colleagues) and the dispossession of one’s own bodily labour power (this is spent in 24/7 rhythms for capital accumulation). These forms of dispossession largely affect migrant workers living in global cities where capital needs ceaseless investment and re-investment.

5.1.3 The Intensification of Labour The intensification of labour is the first crucial process that offers a way of articulating what this book calls the ‘post-circadian capitalism’. This is a capitalism within which nightwork has been normalised. This process transforms workers’ lives through controlling mechanisms that, for the purpose of capital accumulation, expand labour into the workers’ time for leisure and sociability, alienates people from their tasks and extracts extreme labour power until they are left used up and exhausted. In its the beginnings, this process meant extension of work into the evening and late into the night to meet planned deadlines or the symbolic extra nightshift to meet production quotas (Duijzings & Dušková, 2022). For time immemorial, the human 24  hour physiological cycle or circadian rhythm, which regulates the activities of being awake and active, as well as those of sleep and rest, were in sync with natural light and the seasons. The advent of capitalism interfered with the length and distribution of hours in a working day, which was synced with the seasons and with daylight. Whilst humans still function by the 24 h circadian clock, the capitalist mode of production began early on to disregard such biological rhythms in favour of capital gains. A system of shift work has gradually been perfected with the help of technology. In the early modern period, stretching the working time late into the evenings was common during the short days of fall and winter. In the eighteenth century in

5.1  Transition from Circadian to Post-circadian, 24/7 Capitalism

135

Britain, children and women were working in the cotton mill houses lit by candlelight (Crary, 2013). In the nineteenth century, women wove cloths throughout the night in the water-powered textile mills lit by gas lamps (Baldwin, 2012). On the other side of the Atlantic, between 1811 and 1816, the Luddites, a band of English workmen concerned with the social implications of technological advancements, smashed machinery and burnt down factories in protest of these changes (Godfrey, 1990). In spite of such opposition, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, electrification made possible the nocturnalisation of working places and cities. In addition to this, numerous technological developments increased production capacities (Schlör, 1998). Across the world, from the East to the West, Soviet countries and Western Europe to North America, the mid-twentieth century saw an expansion of the nightshift as it took advantage of these developments to ensure maximum gains in production (Baldwin, 2012; Duijzings & Dušková, 2022). As shift work has been extended beyond the limits of the daytime and into the evenings or night, nightwork has come to be seen as a part of the working life of exhausted day workers who were then replaced by nightworkers in the never-ending production cycle. In the twenty-first century, this relentless march of capitalism has led to the rapid, continuous multiplication of nighttime services and nightlife sectors well beyond the range of industries that have customarily relied on nighttime production in the circadian phase of capitalism. One of the early signs of this trend was the aggressive expansion of supermarkets in the US and the U.K.. By the end of the 1970s, the working hours of 82% of 6599 7-Eleven convenience stores had been extended beyond the 7 am to 11 pm time frame to continue throughout the night (Sharman & Sharman, 2008). Tesco, Britain’s largest groceries supermarket, surprised its competitors Sainsbury’s and Co-op just before Christmas 1998 by operating throughout the night. Many supermarkets, IT industries and other service-based operations have since expanded into the night. The transition from the circadian phase to a post-circadian capitalism has involved not only the intensification of labour, but also the articulation of a new order that disrespects physiology and sociability. In this new order, the physiological rhythms are ignored and the nightworkers are denied something basic, yet, also essential to human life, which is sleep. Crary (2013) warns that humans of the post-­ circadian capitalist era are confronted with the ‘end of sleep’. Moreover, this new order disregards the self-organisation of time. This post-circadian capitalist era not only disrespects our biological clock, how we spend our waking time and when we relax and how (little) we sleep, but also controls the time we spend for ourselves and our families and friends. Furthermore, through an emphasis on flexible working hours and short-term projects, this new order fragments ‘static personal ethics’. These were once characterised by a deep understanding and engagement with one’s meaning of labour (Sennett, 1998). The imposed flexibility alienates workers from labour and weakens possibilities for long-term ties among workers. The new order opens the way to ‘irreversible change and multiple, fragmented activity [that] may be comfortable for the new regime’s masters … but it may disorient the regime’s servants’ (Sennett, 1998, p. 117).

136

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

The increase of nightshift work has stretched the individual and the social resources of workers to levels unseen before the neoliberal capitalist expansion. Part of the new order of the neoliberal exploitative mechanisms, means not only that it extracts capital from workers’ labour time, but also that it milks out as much labour as possible from the bodies of workers at great costs to all levels of human needs, affecting their physical, intimate and social lives. The blurring of the boundaries between daywork and nightwork production, and between leisure and work nurtures a 24/7 regime of production that prefers a flexible-labour force working around the clock, as well as sleepless consumers. Thus, the adage ‘the early bird catches the worm’ is a thing of the past. The 24/7 capitalism has disturbed the circadian rhythms and has subordinated human needs to market demands. Yet, the stretch of the labour power for capital gains would have not been possible without the second process, namely, the alterations to time regimentation. These have gradually been devised and introduced to suit 24/7 capitalism.

5.1.4 Alterations to Time Regimentation Several alterations to time regimentation have made it possible for the current phase of capitalism to be called a post-circadian capitalism. They represent the culmination of trends that have begun to take form since the early modern period with the development of the money economy, and more importantly, due to its ‘calculating character’ (coined by George Simmel (1903), rendered by Boy, 2020). The first to mention is the very alteration of the circadian rhythm. This means that humans are awake and alert during the day and asleep and at-rest during the night. In this post-­ circadian capitalist era, humans’ biological time regimentation is disregarded. Nightworkers hack into their biological rhythms to switch from daysleep to nightwork to sustain 24/7 production and consumption, and support the time daytime infrastructure. Then there are the alterations to how humans experience time, that is, – alterations to people’s inner, biological clock to suit nightworking hours. Clocks, especially pocket watches, increased people’s awareness of the passing the time with family, socially with friends or strangers or whilst spent working unsociable hours in the evenings or late at night. In short, with the punctuality that they made possible, clocks transformed people’s sense of time in regards to work and leisure. Thompson (1967) pointed out that the pocket watch disciplined the labour force and cemented the difference between ‘how time passed’ and ‘how much time costs’–the latter notion characterising the ‘mature capitalist society’. Likewise, Mitchell (2002) emphasised that the growing awareness of time translated into demands for faster productivity and the rapid release of new consumer products, particularly in fast-growing cities like London and New  York. Next to rapidity and punctuality, another feature that coloured people’s perception of time was regularity. For workers in particular, life was measured by units of time, such as by the number of years one spent in school, then by a working life sliced into 10–12 h shifts and followed

5.1  Transition from Circadian to Post-circadian, 24/7 Capitalism

137

by the period of retirement. Those lucky to reach retirement age, spent their free time socialising with other retirees. In post-circadian capitalism, time is no longer measured in blocks, but calculated by (digital) bites and sliced into short segments, which are measured and paid by the second or paid by the piece. More and more, time zones are being eliminated. The market marches towards a ‘global integration’ of service industries and consumption in a time zoneless fashion. Businesses operate around the clock irrespective of the providers’ geographical location and ‘work lives are reorganised to fit global processes’ (Aneesh, 2021, p.  65). Capital is extracted from zero-hour contracted workers in exchange for a specific time sold by the labourer, freelancer or agency worker called upon for solo work or short-term projects. By implication, the labourer must be exceedingly flexible. This means that as a worker or consultant, one needs to arrange one’s work life around others on whom one’s work (and livelihoods) depends. Parameters such as work and home, nine to five, weekdays and weekends have been replaced with working from home, unpredictable and flexible hours, working by the piece or getting paid to click on web links at any time of the day or night. Instead of long-term contracts, as was the case in the Fordist era (Standing, 2011). Nowadays, everybody is expected to simultaneously fulfil the needs of ‘world-­ making/wealth-creating capitalism’ (Kalb, 2013) at very short (and until further) notice. The old phrase ‘long-term’ employee has dissipated and been replaced by new phrases such as ‘flexi-term’ and ‘flexi-curity’ for ‘independent contractors’. As a result, ‘flexitime’ has been intruding into the social, physical, emotional and psychological realms of our working lives and by extension, our personal lives and our capabilities for sociability. Today, the sleepless bird catches the worm, not the early one. This may be a consultant working in their own home late in the evenings preparing to present a marketing strategy to new clients the next day or a teacher marking student essays late into the night and outside of contractual hours. First mechanised and now digital-led eras have, thus, subordinated humans to the 24/7 accumulation-production-consumption cycle. This transformation affects everyone. It ‘is not happening on a Richter magnitude, but it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism’ (Sennett, 1998, p. 31), and requires people to be at ease with it. Differences exist, however, in that a consultant may buy solutions to escape the ‘time-squeeze’, but manual, low-paid workers can only merely survive and cannot keep up with the demands of household management (Standing, 2011). Nightworkers are being squeezed out of private time (to enjoy nature, exercise or learn a foreign language) and thus, experience a ‘profound inequality in [their] control over time’ (Standing, 2011, p.  129). They face ‘spatial injustice’ by being squeezed out of social space as they are either sleeping or commuting to work whilst their work colleagues or family members are partying or going to sleep at the reverse time. In this phase of the ‘reorganisation of post-Fordist work’, alterations to time regimentation have attacked marginalised groups (Fedyuk & Stewart, 2018). Standing (2011) calls this sizeable segment of the workforce who live and work precariously, the ‘infantry of capitalism’ (Standing, 2011, p.  113). Unlike during ‘the full-employment system of industrial society … with a radical alternative of

138

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

unemployment’, these post-Fordist workers are left only with the alternative of navigating the ‘risk-fraught system of flexible, pluralized, decentralized underemployment’ (Beck, 1992, p.  143). Many are migrants working for and supplying post-industrial, 24/7 cities with unlimited low-cost labour.

5.1.5 The Global City As emphasised, the expansion of production into the night depends on the existence a disposable labour force and requires alterations to time regimentation. Yet, it also needs a nurturing ground. This book argues that this ground is the global city and its peculiar structures and resources. First, it is a strategic locale for corporations and financial hubs. Investments are not only directed towards high profile locations, but also for the entertainment of their owners and employers. Investments are, thus, being made into service-based industries and for the creation of ‘nonplace[s] of ‘corporate playscapes’ in cities dedicated to servicing a high mobile professional service class’ (Chatterton, 2002, p. 2). The celebration of the night as a time for leisurely consumption is part of this offer of new entertainment opportunities. Second, and closely related to this first characteristic, the global city is the epicentre of occupational polarisation between the city’s blue, pink and white-collar workers (Sassen, 2001). This strategic locale attracts ‘many different work cultures, besides the corporate culture, involved in the work of globalisation’ (Sassen, 2005). The global city is, thus, the very location where the ‘place-bound labour market for talent [meets] low-wage workers’. Many migrants are attracted by the global cities’ promise of opportunities, and so travel against the odds, beginning their journeys with social and financial debt. Some migrants even risk their lives to escape poverty or to be able to financially support their families in their home countries, or both. In this way, migrants become the ‘flexible, obedient’ pool of labour ready to accept the ‘prevailing wages’ due to the burdening debt escalation in their home country, and expose themselves to exploitation in host countries that demand unlimited supplies of low-cost labour (Holgate, 2005; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010, p. 4). Nightworkers are among these low-wage workers. Again, they are the ‘invisible denizens’ who play no part in ‘the increasing corporatisation, purification and privatisation of city centres and their centres of consumption’, other than to travail deep into the night to cater for the privileged consumers of nightlife (Chatterton, 2002, p. 2). To foreground these ‘invisible denizens’ and their essential work, I propose that we replace the notion of ‘global city’ with that of the ‘glocturnal city’. Global cities used to sleep at night, but the continuous demands for 24 h, 7 days per week work, leisurely activities and nightlife has subordinated humans to the needs of the nighttime economy. Nocturnal production and consumption create new possibilities for capital accumulation at the cost of workers’ livelihoods. Yet, moving the night frontier further into the daylight without catering for the needs of its diverse nighttime workforce means colonising not only the processes, but also the

5.2 Nightworkers

139

workers of this 24/7 society. The glocturnal city is the site where both global and nocturnal meet. ‘Global’ refers to the mechanisms, techniques and elements of capitalist development that enable concentrations of wealth, power and white-collar workers at the top, and a differential distribution of rights to the city among blue and pink-collar workers (Patel, 2010), some of them nightworkers, who experience a troubling precarity at the bottom. ‘Nocturnal’ indicates nighttime work and the lives spent in nightwork so that the nocturnal revellers, partygoers and nighttime gourmands can enjoy the nightlife. ‘Glocturnal’ is a portmanteau of ‘global’ and ‘nocturnal’ and indicates the essential nature of nightwork for global cities. The term ‘glocturnal city’, thus, points at the global dimensions and particular dynamics that lead to an infrastructure that supports and expands nighttime production and consumption, whilst downplaying the difficult experiences and precarious existences of the behind the scenes workers who make the nighttime and other sectors of the economy possible. Therefore, working at night in the glocturnal city means that you are one of the ‘pieces of a production process’ with an essential role in advancing the economies of global cities (Sassen in conversation with Aneesh, 2017), but that you are marginalised by the mainstream daytime society and obscured by the darkness in a city that never sleeps. In geographer Rob Shaw’s (2022) rendering, the glocturnal city rests on the indispensable shoulders of such invisibilised nocturnal workers in order to multiply global capital, connect cities across timezones and provide services to daytime consumers. The glocturnal city has, thus, its own localised mechanisms of exploitation, which operate together with the more general mechanisms of labour intensification and alterations to time regimentation, their articulation pushing for the normalisation of nightwork and shaping the sad fate of the most vulnerable labour force. These are the manual migrant workers, who live through bodily, social and affective precariousness without a professional future in a 24/7 capitalism. Yet, they are the growers of a glocturnal city, transgressing the day-night frontier, whilst hacking into their inner, biological clock night by night. To understand how these conditions, mechanisms and processes conjoin to dispossess workers of their bodily resources and rights to the city and to decent work conditions–which together reduce them to disposable bio-automatons subordinated to capitalist production–I invite the reader to take a closer look at the experiences of migrant nightworkers employed at New Spitalfields nightmarket in London. The ethnographic material discussed in the next section and in subsequent chapters, reveals that the dominant logic that organises work in the night market is the production of disposability and dispossession.

5.2 Nightworkers These ethnographic portraits provide insights into the precarious livelihoods of migrant nightworkers and how they struggle to adapt to work at night. I introduce a woman, whom I call Lexa, and three men, whom I call Logan, Gică and Basrí, who were aged between their late twenties to late thirties. When I entered the field, these

140

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

four people had had different working histories and experiences at the night market. Logan had been working for 17 years, Gică for 8 years, Basrí for 4 years and Lexa only for 6 months. By the time I left the field site, Basrí had stopped working the nightshifts and was unemployed and living in temporary accommodation with his wife and three children. Within Lexa’s first 6 months at the market, she had switched jobs a few times between cafés at New Spitalfields and another market named Billingsgate Fish Market. The other two nightworkers continued in their better positioned and higher paid roles. Although all were U.K. and E.U. citizens working in London, (i.e., regular resident migrants), the three men chose not to declare their earnings in full. However, although they did not pay taxes, this did not mean that they were irregular migrants. They earnt undeclared money and thus, worked irregularly, but did not break immigration regulations. Other irregular migrants also work at the New Spitalfields market, such as Turkish workers on business visas who cannot declare that they work and thus, cannot pay taxes. Their incomes are quasi-undeclared earnings. Nevertheless, in these cases, it is not by choice, but determined by their immigration status. Each of these four migrant’s trajectories differed. Lexa was a single mother who, at the time, was separated from her 5-year-old daughter who had remained in Romania and was living with her grandparents. Lexa was actively trying to bring her daughter to the U.K., so the two could live together. Logan had arrived from Turkey as a teenager to join his sister who was already living in the U.K. When I met him, he had been divorced twice and was single. Gică and Basrí had each travelled alone at first from Romania and Bulgaria respectively, and had later brought their families over to the U.K. Unlike Basrí, who lived with his wife and three children in London, Gică later sent his wife and child back to Romania and was sharing accommodation with his younger brother and brother-in-law and their respective families in East London. They also each had different levels of education. Lexa had competed secondary school. The three males had only been educated up to primary school level and had no professional backgrounds. Although the three men were of different nationalities, they all spoke Turkish and hence, could work for Turkish-owned companies that traded at New Spitalfields market. Lexa had to make do with Romanian and her limited English. None of these four people felt they were being deskilled by doing these jobs at the night market, however three admitted that they would have liked to have been able to move on, but could not because their English language skills were below the requirements needed outside of this labour market. In different ways, Gică’s and Basrí’s lives were trapped in-between their hopes to save money quickly to support their families and the lack of time they had to spend with their wives and children, whether in the U.K. or their home country. The consequences of the normalisation of nightwork surface most poignantly in Lexa’s case, so I begin with her portrait.

5.2 Nightworkers

141

5.2.1 Lexa Lexa was a Romanian café server in her late twenties. Having had obtained secondary school education in Romania made her an exception among the nightworkers at the New Spitalfields market. However, in Romania, her high school diploma was not a real asset from which she could gain a decently remunerated job. Therefore, she decided to migrate to the U.K. As she recounted, ‘I came to London on a Friday, and I started to work [at New Spitalfields] on that very night. Since then, I have worked nights. It was a bit hard till I became accustomed with the night schedule’. A friend of hers, another Romanian who had been working at the market for a few years, had recommended her to the café owners. As she explained, ‘I came here to make money. This friend I was telling you about called me and told me ‘look, they pay £1,000 a month, are you interested?’ In Romania, I would never make this much in a month. I said yes, of course’. Though a fresh employee, Lexa quickly realised that her employment was ‘not quite legal here’. She also felt through her body that the nightshift was too long and leaving her extremely tired. Yet, she reasoned, ‘in Romania income is low 10–20M RON [in 2015, this amounted to £150–300 per month], so we come here and work not only without a contract but also on low wages. £200 per week is a low wage here, but it would be enough for one month in Romania’.3 From the very start, Lexa had struggled not only to work at night, but also to put up with the incertitude of her position. The four Turkish men who owned the café hired migrant women like Lexa without a contract and paid them in cash. Particularly at the beginning of their employment, newly arrived migrants are left to their own devices to navigate and perform precarity as they do not receive access to a work induction program nor any warnings about or preparation for working without a contract. Lexa had trekked on a steep path to adjust to the her new working and living conditions in England, which involved needing to accept living in shared accommodation below the standards that she was used to in her native country. When hired, Lexa had no previous experience working in a café. For the first 2 weeks, her duties were mainly to clean the kitchen and the front of the café, refill drink shelves and stock up the storeroom with the new deliveries. Meanwhile, she was learning to prepare fast food. She had gradually been allowed to serve market customers over the counter. Though she would have preferred now and again to

 In 2015, minimum wage in Romania was 975 RON or 5.71 RON per hour (€1.29 per hour). Year on year, minimum wages in Romania have increased. In 2023, Labour Ministry predicts that the minimum wages will increase with 17.6% up to €600 (or 3000 RON), equivalent of (€3.6 per hour or 18.1 RON). Available at: https://bit.ly/economic_min_wage_ro. Accessed: 07.01.2023. In 2021, the national minimum wage in Romania was fixed at €458.1 per month or €5497.20 per year. Available at: https://bit.ly/minwage_ro_2021. Accessed: 07.04.2021. In February 2018, the minimum wage in Romania increased from €275 per month or €1.65/h (1,250 RON per month or 7.38 RON per hour) to €319 per month or €1.88/h (1,450 RON/month or 8.56 RON/h). Between January 2018–2020, the minimum monthly salary increased from 2000 to 2400 RON per month; The university degree holders’ monthly wage reached 3000 RON in 2020. 3

142

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

have a break from the monotonous atmosphere of the café, at the beginning she was not permitted to deliver food and drink orders to the market stores nor orders placed over the phone by workers and buyers. Again, the reasons were not very clearly explained and she therefore assumed it was because of her poor English. Most café customers were male market workers of other nationalities (e.g., Chinese, Turkish) and thus, non-native English speakers. This did not help Lexa improve her English language skills. For example, the Chinese customers were asking for coffee with tsugăr and she could not understand their accents and had to ask them to repeat it several times. As she emphasised, ‘I felt that I had a few drawbacks then … I thought I knew English, but what I learnt in high school in Romania was not good enough here. It was hard because most customers were not native English, and I could not understand their accent’. Apart from this, being indoors for stretches of 11–12 h at a time and working beside her abusive manager became problematic, and often led to arguments. Eventually, she asked one of the café co-­owners if she could work at their Billingsgate café instead. To her delight, he agreed to this. At this new place, a fish market café, there were many more fluent English speaking customers than foreign or overseas customers and Lexa’s English language skills significantly improved because of these interactions. Nevertheless, when she eventually returned to the first café, this was her only new asset. I formally interviewed Lexa 6 months after she arrived at the New Spitalfields market. Her motivation for moving to the U.K. was driven by her wish to bring her daughter over to the U.K. where she could ‘have a proper education’. Why she insisted working nights was not clear at this point, therefore I encouraged her to detail for me her nightshift working experience. Her shift patterns and the time she spent at work comprised of 11- or 12-h nightshifts, starting between 9 pm and 10 pm and finishing no earlier than 9 am. Yet that was not all. When Lexa and I worked together at the café, I often observed her arriving for her shift and she seemed ready to sleep, rather than work. During our interview, I learnt the reason why. As Lexa put it: Having worked here [New Spitalfields] for the past five months on the same pattern, my body got used to it in a way. I was waking up between 3 pm and 4 pm, and although I had to leave later, at about 10 pm, I could no longer sleep. I thought to do something else. So, I took another job. Since I happen to think that time is money, I needed to act.

The month before I interviewed her, Lexa arrived at the market between 9 pm and 10 pm straight from her other daytime job at a hotel where she was a janitor and housekeeper. She complained about how demanding the hotel customers were and that she never knew when her nine-hour day shift ended or whether her boss would request her to do overtime. Often, such unexpected requests would cause her delays getting to her market job. Though she asked the café manager to let her start at midnight like the rest of the café workers, he refused – in her view, because that’s how ‘they treat us, Romanians’. At the café too, the length of the nightshift was never very clear. In Lexa’s words:

5.2 Nightworkers

143

They pay us under the national minimum wage per hour and keep us on a shift that could last up to 12 to 13 hours. You know when you start work, but you don’t know when you finish.

The schedule overlaps and reproaches she received for being late were unpleasant. However, Lexa was more concerned about her health. As she recounted, ‘after one month of working in two places, I began to feel it on my body. I am now dependent on Redbull, which is not healthy, but I drink it daily because of the physical exhaustion that I feel in my body … One night I felt really exhausted, so I asked [my manager] to give me one night off because I could not keep up anymore. But he wouldn’t have it!’ Her anxieties over the prospect of becoming physically ill led her to disobey her manager and take absence without leave for one night. On that occasion, her behaviour provoked the manager who decided to cut her pay for two nights, although she had only missed one nightshift. At the end of the interview, Lexa reflected on her 6 months of nightwork. I have been working in the U.K. nightly for six months now. I think that you don’t really have a life. It’s just work. Nothing else. I believe that you don’t have a life when you work nights.

When she came to work at the New Spitalfields night market, she had high hopes of bringing her daughter over to the U.K. Though she spent the first 6 months in the liminal space between work and sleep, the money she had managed to save were not exactly what she had projected before arriving in the U.K. In late 2015, Lexa admitted that she was nowhere near achieving her primary goal of bringing her daughter over to the U.K.4 Her story, thus, offers a window for further reflection upon the factors that attract migrants to global cities, as well as what contributes to the employment scenarios that entrap these nightworkers in a troubling precarity, especially in the early part of their arrival in a new country.

5.2.2 Basrí During our formal interview, Basrí introduced himself as ‘a Bulgarian Muslim of Ottoman descent’. He was the worker to whom I felt closest to and with whom I spent the most time with whilst working as a loader at New Spitalfields. Often, he would preach to me from the Quran, and he told me that in Bulgaria he had been offered the possibility of becoming an Imam. I thought to myself that with his deep voice and enthusiasm, he would probably have been good at leading the prayers. Instead of becoming an Imam, he had left Bulgaria at the age of 15, already married, and had migrated through Greece, Italy, France and Germany, eventually settling with his family in the U.K.. Basrí and his wife and children sometimes travelled  By 2019, when I next met Lexa, her daughter was living with her in the U.K.  Lexa’s parents rotated to come to the U.K. to look after their niece while their daughter was out working on platforms like Uber and Bolt. 4

144

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

together. He recollected how upon arriving in the U.K., ‘I looked for a job … and found one here [at New Spitalfields market]’. Like many poor migrants, Basrí was penniless and jobless when he arrived in the U.K. with his family. The only support they had at that time came from a close relative. His limited education constrained him to working nights at the market, the best paid job that he could find as a newly arrived migrant in London. He had worked at this night market since 2011, first as a loader and later manoeuvring the forklift, loading tonnes of fresh produce. He had worked six nightshifts per week, usually from 10 pm to 9 am, though sometimes the nightshift stretched into lunch time. He had worked up to between 66 and 70 h per week at the market. In 2011, he also worked two part-time jobs during the daytime in addition to working six nights a week. When I first met him in early February 2015, Basrí complained of bodily exhaustion caused by the interminable nightshifts and repetitive manual labour, coupled with sleep deprivation. As he explained, ‘sometimes, you’re lucky if you sleep three to five hours. Other times, you sleep eight to ten hours, but it is still not enough because day sleep is not the same as night sleep’. With regret in his voice, he said that he was sacrificing time with his family to work the ‘graveyard shift’. In his words: Saturday morning when you finish the working week you go home to help with housework or sleep, you play with the children, you see your wife, you eat or go out with family, but it’s hard because you just spend some time with family and before you realise it, Sunday is back again. You’re lucky if you get to go out for a bit. Before you know it, Sunday night you’re back at the market to start another week of nights.

On the 1 day a week he had off work, he needed to spend it with his wife and children, which meant that at 10 pm on Sunday nights he would show up for the nightshift sleepy and weary. Very few nightshift workers I met were able to master, even over years, juggling the combined activities of meetings their daily responsibilities, taking their children to nursery, food shopping and getting daytime sleep whilst toiling in the night. Unlike many work colleagues, Basrí was swift in mind and action. His muscular body could resist the heavy loads and mental stress. At nearly 6 ft. (almost 1.90 m) tall, he could pick up and place on his shoulders at one time 12 to 15 5–6 kg crates of mangoes or take ten 5 kg sacks of onions in each hand, whilst he whizzed through the pallets lying on the floor. His face betrayed the enjoyment of the adrenaline shots that he received when pressed for time and from receiving large orders from the foreman. Basrí paced quickly and enjoyed this physical work. Additionally, he knew what he was capable of and he was not shy in showing off his skill in being able to stack hundreds of items onto a 2 m high pallet. Though an experienced nightworker, Basrí barely made enough money to cover the daily needs of his family (in 2015, the family consisted of two adults and two children), and was unable to put money aside for contingencies or to support extended family members. To offer an indication of his earnings, in 2015 an inexperienced male worker, like myself, took home £280–£320 each week after income taxes.

5.2 Nightworkers

145

In mid-2015, Basrí undertook forklift driving training and within days from passing the test he was given a pay rise and hired as a porter. Forklift drivers not only have better financial prospects than loaders, but also a different kind of stress. Almost every night, as the market rhythm increased, usually from 2 am onwards, managers and salesmen were under pressure from rushing customers who wanted their orders to be prepared rapidly. In turn, the higher ranked put pressure on the ones below them, loaders and forklift drivers, to finish orders faster. Though driving the forklift was not as physically demanding as loading was, Basrí emphasised that: Working as a forklift driver, compared to [being] a loader, is a bit easier. But it is a different tiredness. It gets stressful. Your head gets tired … But it is better because your body does not get tired … (long sigh) … That’s how it is … Nightshift work is … hard. This work … working at the market is hard. I got used to it. One reason is that you work together with a group of workers; another is that customers come in and it gets us [stimulating], you know? … you get to know people from every side of the market … I mean, time passes by well, for me. Different, but OK. For now, we continue like this. We’ll see for how long.

In a very short time, Basrí proved to be very good at driving the forklift. Having been a former driver in a garage in Istanbul myself, I often marvelled at how skilfully he approached, a pallet laid horizontally. He smoothly inserted the right fork at a 45° angle. Whilst moving forward slowly, he pulled the lever on the right to adjust the mast. As the mast slid to the right and the forklift advanced forward, the pallet rotated. Gradually the pallet fitted on the forks like a glove. Basrí was as fast and precise on the ground as a peregrine in the air. Yet, Basrí’s experience of nightshift work and his relationship to the nocturnal world could hardly be described as a continuous history of mastering a habitus of daytime sleep and nightwork. Whilst he struggled to tame the need for sleep and rest, precarity had sedimented into his body. He would have preferred working shorter daytime shifts, but this type of work was almost out of reach for him. His predicament meant that besides lacking English language skills, he also had no time to seek work elsewhere. There was also the matter of money, as the wages for a daytime job were nowhere near what he might get paid in cash in this market. In his words: On Saturday morning you finish the working week … You go out for a bit and that’s pretty much it. Before you know it, on Sunday night you’re back at the market to start another week of nights. How can I look for work when I am so exhausted, my body and head hurting all the time? How can I spend time with family and at the same time sleep to recover in one day?

What Basrí experiences here is equal to ‘nightshift jetlag’. This social form of jetlag is a tiredness that goes beyond the physical felt by people in industrialised societies. Similarly, to what Prof Till Roenneberg (2012) and his colleagues found, nightshift jetlag applies to nightworkers who not only that they wake up in the middle of their biological night, but also who are permanently awake and alert while working at night, hacking into their circadian, biological rhythms night after night. More, migrant workers at the language skills that would enable them to find better jobs. Even some of the better jobs in the market were inaccessible as their minimal English restricted them from working for the English companies at New Spitalfields.

146

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

Unlike traders of other nationalities, the English-owned firms offered regular nightshift lengths of 8 h, overtime rates, bank holiday time when these firms were shut for business and annual leave. As Basrí further explained: We do talk among ourselves about the poor working conditions here. But no one does anything and we continue to work in these conditions. This is because we don’t learn English while we work in Turkish. So, if you don’t speak a fair level of English, you can’t go anywhere else.

Mental and physical fatigue and exhaustion accumulated over the years and prompted Basrí to continuously think of leaving his job at the market. I asked him to tell me how he saw his life changing if he was no longer a nightworker. His answer was this: Of course, I’ll be able to meet with friends, sleep at night with my wife, see my children going to bed, go on holidays, have a social life … Now, with 11 hour long shifts, I can have none of that. So that’s how it has been for the past five years. But if I worked eight hour dayshifts my life would change.

On one occasion, as Basrí returned home from work, I heard his wife announce to their children that ‘the guest has come’, referring to him. On another occasion, Basrí put it differently. He asked me if I knew what the Turkish notion of gurbet meant because that best encapsulated his experience as a nightworker. This Turkish word refers to the existential predicament of being away from home and longing for your loved ones. That was the predicament of the nightworker.

5.2.3 Gică In February 2015, when I commenced working for FruitVeg, Gică was on 3 months’ leave to spend time with his family in Romania. I later learnt that this leave agreement between himself and the management was not an ordinary one. Only workers who had been employed at this company for long periods of time and in key, trusted positions including sales and management staff, were allowed to take 2–3 months of annual leave. In contrast, the lower ranks were allowed a maximum of 4–5 weeks. When the foreman returned, he took up his principal roles, that was, loading and supervising a team of loaders. Gică was a Turkish-speaking Romanian Roma man in his early thirties who had worked his way up the market hierarchy from being a disposable loader to holding the permanent position as foreman. Gică’s older brother, Apo, had been the first in their family to find employment at New Spitalfields. A few years later in 2002, Gică also came to London and started working in the same place. Romania joined the E.U. in 2007 and so this indicates that these men were possibly working illegally in the U.K. at the time. However, Gică never confirmed my assumption. He only spoke reluctantly about himself and his migration history, and details about his early years in the U.K. kept changing from one chat to another. On the only occasion that Gică invited me to a night party, I heard him and his younger brother, Ily, reminiscing about ‘their time’–the

5.2 Nightworkers

147

favourite theme being of stealing car radios during high school. The brothers referred to themselves as cuțitari (a Romanian term that refers to ‘knife handling gangsters’) who did ‘use their knife on others’. In addition, I learnt from him and his relatives that he was an experienced loader. In Romania, Gică had worked as a night loader and forklift driver in his hometown of the port of Constanta in south-east Romania. He had also done this work at his older brother’s company in Cluj-Napoca, central Romania. His brother managed a wholesale trade in fruits and vegetables, but when the business collapsed, he moved to the U.K. and found employment as loader at New Spitalfields. A semi-illiterate man with very poor English language skills, he could not obtain a forklift driving licence in the U.K. A few months later, Gică and their younger brother, Ily, followed and found employment in the same place. Their fluency in Turkish–the trade language among the large traders at New Spitalfields– was an advantage that set them apart from the rest of the migrants, except those of Kurdish-Turkish background. Apart from these three brothers, who now lived permanently in the U.K., in the months that I worked at the market for this research, I also met other members of their family–a cousin and two brothers-in-law. They were returnee migrants and had been travelling in cycles between the U.K. and Romania for several years. The extended family not only worked together, but also shared a three-bedroom terraced house. Other relatives of Gică’s family also lived in this house–his sister, sister-in-­ law and a nephew. At the time of meeting Gică’s, his wife and their 3 year old son had moved back to Romania because their son had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Following the diagnosis, they had decided that it was in the child’s best interest to receive the long-term medical care that he needed in their home country. In addition, the couple thought that the wife’s family could provide the support that Gică and his relatives could not give, since most of them worked at night and had to rest during the day. When I joined FruitVeg, Gică had been working at this 30 employee fruit and vegetable store for about 4–5 years. Nightly, from Sunday to Friday he dispatched the orders onto us, the loaders, and made sure that we completed them. The orders involved preparing and loading the products onto pallets and waiting for the check-­ man to inspect them afterwards. Upon check-man’s approval, the forklift drivers transported the pallets to the customers’ vans. Apart from his supervisory position, Gică occasionally fulfilled the role of the check-man too. In addition, he trained and kept a close eye on the ‘new blood’, as new employees hit the shop floor running. During the 14-month period when I frequented the night market as either an employed or to observe, my conversations with Gică happened haphazardly. We talked somewhat unexpectedly and always on his own accord. He declined my request to interview him. He appeared to me not only unpredictable, but also withdrawn and quiet. At times, I would arrive earlier than Gică for the nightshift and would observe him as he approached our stand, always in the company of his brother and his brother-in-law. His forged, iron arms barely moved alongside his body as he walking firmly, but slowly. He appeared stocky, was 5.4–5.6 ft. (1.65–1.70 m) tall and showed more apathy than his two companions. Rain or shine, he wore the same blue baseball hat, covering his nearly bald head. In the winter months, with

148

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

temperatures in the market hall dropping below 0 °C, he would always wear his blue jacket with thin, white and yellow lines on both sleeves. His sullen face barely pulled a smile most nights, but he immediately lit up whenever he saw a female café server pass by the stand. My overall impression of Gică was that he was an insensitive person. Nevertheless, there were occasions on which I saw another side of him. In one instance, towards the end of a shift, Gică stopped by to help me finish up my work in the dried root vegetable section and we completed the last orders together. His gesture was a surprise, for he often appeared to take no notice of me. On another occasion, I felt sick at work and was shivering during that nightshift. Gică, himself having just gotten over a cold that made him bedridden for 24 four hours, came over to me and gave me a Nurofen tablet. This eased my cold for a few hours and helped me finish my shift and return home safely. As Wacquant (2004, p.  44) would put it, Gică ‘acquire[d] the corporeal and moral dispositions that are indispensable if one is to successfully endure the learning’ of this trade. This foreman had experienced the physical hardship of nightwork in Romania and the U.K. Yet, his formative years back in Romania and the work in night markets, had translated into an embodied insensitivity towards co-workers. Gică treated the loaders, the lowest category of workers in the market hierarchy, with undisguised contempt. That could include talking over a loader mid-sentence, not stepping out of the way for a loader coming through from the opposite direction carrying produce on his body and most of the time, shouting his orders at loaders instead of calmly communicating his instructions. However, he was never to be entirely successful in this trade. Despite his loyalty towards the company and embodied obedience towards the managers, Gică could not advance further than his position in the labour hierarchy. His identity as a Turkish Romanian Roma person prevented him from advancing in a company where higher positions were reserved for those of Kurdish and Turkish backgrounds, the most valuable capital in a fiercely competitive night economy marked by dispossession and disposability (as explained in-depth in Chap. 2).

5.2.4 Logan Logan was a 34 year old naturalised British man of Turkish descent. Born in Giresun in northern Turkey, he began working at an early age, doing nightshifts on a dairy farm each Saturday. When he was a teenager, he came to the U.K. to spend time with his elder sister. As some of their relatives worked at New Spitalfields, Logan visited this night market and loved it. He would have liked to have stayed and worked there, but his age prevented him from gaining employment. He later returned to London when he turned 16 years old and with the help of his family he fulfilled this wish. For the last 17 years, Logan had been working at New Spitalfields, successfully navigating through different roles, from loader to middle level manager.

5.2 Nightworkers

149

He even had his own company, trading in fruits and vegetables for a while, until he decided that working for others was equally rewarding but less challenging. When I met him, he was a middle level manager in a different company than that I worked for. Logan immediately agreed to be interviewed. With excitement in his voice, he began his story: I have been working at this market since I was 16. I saw the drama and the life in this market, and I wanted to work in this market. But I couldn’t because … they said you had to be at least 16 years old. So I left, went to Turkey. When I turned 16, I came back and asked for a job. It all started from there. I started from the very bottom. I worked my way up over these 17 years … In my early days at the market, I worked for a Chinese company, its name was Kong Ming. There, I swept the floor, loaded produce and made tea because I was too young for the difficult jobs, my body couldn’t cope.

His current employer, an ex-accountant turned groceries trader, left Logan in charge of everything at his company. In Logan’s words: Here I’ve been brought up to manage the loaders and forklift drivers, the buying and the selling … For me, there are no specific duties and there is no specific order of the duties I must follow. I speak good English and can do business with everyone. You might think I am the salesman. But I am telling you I am not just a salesman! When it comes to it, I’ll become a manager. I’ll tell my bosses they’re wrong. When it comes to it, I load pallets. I’ll drive a forklift. I’ll sell stuff. I really don’t mind. If the business runs, that’s all that matters.

During the interview, Logan did not shy away from presenting himself as a successful man. As he put it, ‘I have been in the business for so long. I know this business and I am good at it’. For him, the night trading ‘just rolls and rolls’. He spoke at length about his dedication to work. He had just worked with no limit to his working hours and no weekends. As he explained: You [can] work 24/7. You can get a phone call from a customer, a supplier when you sleep, when you walk, when you’re off, when you’re in the street. You can’t switch your phone off in this industry. If you do, you’ll lose business. And now, the market is very hard. Every little thing that you try to get is a benefit for you … So, on a good day, you do 12 hours.

His goal was to maximise his income. He had, consequently, capitalised on every opportunity that this work offered to him and in the end, reaped the economic rewards that enabled him an independent way of living. Furthermore, Logan did not miss an opportunity to emphasise that he was a successful nightworker, able to cope better with the rhythms of nightwork than others and better adapted than others to a life on the opposite rhythms to daytime people. He admitted that he no longer had regular sleep patterns, but casted this in a positive light. He pointed out that the night rhythm suited him well because in his words, ‘if I were to work in the daytime, I wouldn’t be able to do all these things that I can do once I leave the nightshift behind’. On most mornings after leaving the market premises, a tired Logan could not sleep and therefore, he filled up the time with household chores and extra company duties such as banking. By midday or soon after, he would go to bed for 5 or 6 h and then he would wake up and prepare for another night at the market. Logan had turned this constant activity into his primary source of self-worth.

150

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

Though much more briefly, during this interview Logan also concentrated on how nightwork had taken over other areas of his life. He had been married and divorced twice during the 17 years that he had been working nights at the market. He had two daughters from his first marriage, who were both living with their mother. On other occasions, either from Logan himself or other workers, I learnt that both wives had divorced him on the grounds that he was never there for the family. Logan shared his perspective on the dilemmas associated with this with me. In his words: Nothing else really bothers me. Nothing else. It is just this difficulty … You have no life. You do a 12 hour nightshift. On a good day, you do ten hours. You go home, your kids are in school. You wake up, they sleep. So, what kind of life you get? You get only Sundays. Those are just half days. Saturday you come home and you’re knackered. They want to go somewhere. You want to sleep. Sunday, you got time off until 4 pm. Say, you go out at 10 am and finish at 4 pm, you’ve got only six or eight hours one day per weekend. Once a week, to see your family! There is no social life … I love my family, my kids, but I love this job as well. What am I going to do if I leave this job? I don’t think I can work in a kebab shop or a supermarket, if you know what I mean. I do this job because I love it. I do it from my heart. I don’t do it just for the money.

Whenever he could, he sacrificed sleeping and resting just to be with his daughters. He told himself that this sacrifice was worth making for they would soon grow up and would live a life of their own. He pictured himself in old age, reflecting upon what he did with his life and having to admit to himself and his significant others that he mostly focused on money. He saw that dedicating time to his children would make his pursuit of materialistic goals more acceptable. He would say to this future self that, ‘I tried to do it as much as I could’. Logan also recognised that nightwork had impacted on his social life. This excluded day folk, as he was more comfortable with and more often met the network of people that he worked and did business with in the hours of the night. Logan pointed out a very important issue with nightwork, which was that even when an individual was not at the bottom of precarity, one’s life as a nightworker was still hidden from diurnal eyes. Mainstream society–including the labour system that is traditionally designed for daytime work–knew nothing about his existence. Moreover, his life as a nightworker was still difficult to accept and accommodate by diurnal people. As Flory explained, many men who confided to her, were very lonely and suffered marriage breakdowns because their wives or partners could not accommodate to the nightwork rhythms of their husbands. This kind of downfall happened to Logan too. He suffered two marriage breakdowns over the 17 years of working at night, in his words, ‘caused by spending most nights at work’. When one works the ‘graveyard shift’, time flows by. When one permanently works nights and for as long as Logan has, life flies by. He was a successful nightworker, but he had paid for this success in different ways. These four stories enable glimpses into the impacts that the normalisation of nightwork has on the bodies and lives of nightworkers. In the next chapter, I will take up these four cases again, but this time will demonstrate how a habitus of nightwork forms and is deployed in order to adapt to and resist the methods of destruction that subordinate workers in a post-circadian capitalism.

5.3  The Normalisation of Nightwork and Its Consequences

151

5.3 The Normalisation of Nightwork and Its Consequences During the transition from a circadian phase to a post-circadian one, in other words, to a form of capitalism that demands incessant work 24 h and 7 days per week, nightwork has been normalised. This means that nightwork has become an ordinary component in most sectors of the 24/7 economy and is no longer the exception that it used to be throughout labour history. For workers, the normalisation of nightwork means that their biological, circadian rhythms and their emotional and social needs are disregarded. This book and this chapter in particular, point out that capitalism refuses to recognise and find solutions for the problems that nightwork poses. The glocturnal city is the key location of post-circadian capitalism. Nocturnal consumption and production are parallel processes of colonising the night in order to create new possibilities for accumulation of capital. As these processes intensified, capitalism transited from a circadian phase of the twentieth century to the post-­ circadian capitalist rhythms of the twenty-first century. Yet, moving the night frontier further into the daylight has also meant that the bodies of the workers of this 24/7 society have bene colonised. Nightwork negatively impacts on physical health. Among researchers, there is a consensus that this work disrupts the 24 h biological clock. This increases the risks for bodily illness and somatic maladjustments due to the lack of nighttime sleep, which is an integral part of the body’s functions (Archer et al., 2014; Arendt, 2010; Boivin & Boudreau, 2014; Costa, 2001, 2006; Roden et al., 1993). Post-circadian capitalism normalises nightwork, but disregards nightworkers’ needs. It does not consider the physiological, social, psychological and emotional needs of these armies of workers. In Europe, London is the glocturnal city par excellence, attracting migrants from all corners of the world, high or low-skilled. Many see themselves as temporary economic migrants. They are motivated by the amounts of money that they could earn and save in countries with ‘mature economies’ (King, 2012). The migrant nightworkers I encountered at New Spitalfields are among them. It is likely that they perceived nightshift work as a more lucrative way to make and save money quickly to return to their home countries, but that appeared to be the illusion that kept them waking up every evening to travel in the dark to work all night. I met migrants who stated that they did not calculate income at face value or its actual worth, that is, in relation to the wage threshold in the U.K. and the costs of living. They were unaware how much they would earn and how little they would have left from their wage to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. In short, they were not aware how little they would earn. Additionally, I met migrants working at this night market who had been economically resourceless for years, despite working six nights per week. They said that their actual worth was judged according to their employers’ ungrateful lens. Repeatedly, these dreamers of an economically decent life begged their abusive managers to hire them because they felt expendable. Capitalism continues to downplay the essential nature of nightwork, cast nightworkers as expendable and force them to inhabit the lowest levels of precarity in the labour system.

152

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

These migrant nightworkers engaged nightly in one of the most fundamental forms of work, feeding this 24/7 society around the clock. Yet, unlike the NYC janitors in Sassen’s case (2016), they were not aware of the key role they held in maintaining a 24/7 city operational.

References Acuto, M., Seijas, A., McArthur, J., & Robin, E. (2022). Managing cities at night: A practitioner guide to the urban governance of the night-time economy (1st ed.). Bristol University Press. Aneesh, A. (2017). ‘Relocating global assemblages’: An interview with Saskia Sassen. Science, Technology and Society, 22(1), 128–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/0971721817694927 Aneesh, A. (2021). Nightly rhythms of global work. Contexts, 20(1), 64–65. https://doi. org/10.1177/1536504221997874 Archer, S.  N., Laing, E.  E., Moller-Levet, C.  S., van der Veen, D.  R., Bucca, G., Lazar, A.  S., et  al. (2014). Mistimed sleep disrupts circadian regulation of the human transcriptome. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(6), E682–E691. https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1316335111 Arendt, J. (2010). Shift work: Coping with the biological clock. Occupational Medicine. https:// doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqp162 Baldwin, C. P. (2012). In the watches of the night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930. The University of Chicago Press. Accessed 11 Jan 2015. Bauman, Z. (2002). Global solidarity. Tikkun, 17(1), 12–14. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Social Forces. Sage Publications. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2579937. Boivin, D.  B., & Boudreau, P. (2014). Impacts of shift work on sleep and circadian rhythms. Pathologie Biologie. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patbio.2014.08.001 Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Standford University Press. Boy, J. D. (2020). ‘The metropolis and the life of spirit’ by Georg Simmel: A new translation. Journal of Classical Sociology, 21(2), 188–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X20980638 Çağlar, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2018). Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372011 Carbonella, A., & Kasmir, S. (2014). Toward a global anthropology of labor. In S.  Kasmir & A.  Carbonella (Eds.), Blood and fire: Toward a global anthropology of labor (pp.  1–30). New York and Oxford. Chatterton, P. (2002). “Squatting is still legal, necessary and free”: A brief intervention in the corporate city. Antipode, 34(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00223 Choonara, J. (2019). Insecurity, precarious work and labour markets: Challenging the orthodoxy. Palgrave Macmillan. Costa, G. (2001). The 24-hour society between myth and reality. Journal of human ergology, 30(1–2), 15–20. Costa, G. (2006). Flexibility of working hours in the 24-hour society. Medicina del Lavoro, 97, 280–287. Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late capitalism and the end of sleep. Verso Books. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1920, March). Woman suffrage. Crisis, 19, 234–234. Duijzings, G., & Dušková, L. (Eds.). (2022). Working At Night. De Gruyter. https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110753592 Federici, S. (2004). Women, land-struggles and globalization: An international perspective. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 39(1–2), 47–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909604048250

References

153

Fedyuk, O., & Stewart, P. (2018). Inclusion and exclusion in Europe : migration, work and employment perspectives. ECPR Press and Rowman & Littlefield International. https://cir.nii. ac.jp/crid/1130288435721023128.bib?lang=en Gill, L. (2014). Fragmented solidarity: Political violence and neoliberalism in Colombia. In S.  Kasmir & A.  Carbonella (Eds.), Blood and fire: Toward a global anthropology of labor (pp. 30–77). New York and Oxford. Godfrey, L. (1990). The new antievolutionism. Reviews in Anthropology, 15(1-4), 149–159. Graeber, D. (2014). Debt: The first 5,000 years. Melville House. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2007). Neo-liberalism as creative destruction. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(21), 22–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-­3684.2006.00211.x Holgate, J. (2005). Organizing migrant workers: a case study of working conditions and unionization in a London sandwich factory. Work, Employment & Society, 19(3), 463–480. https://doi. org/10.1177/0950017005055666 Kalb, D. (2013). Financialization and the capitalist moment: Marx versus Weber in the anthropology of global systems. American Ethnologist, 40(2), 258–266. https://doi.org/10.1111/ amet.12018 Kasmir, S., & Carbonella, A. (2008). Dispossession and the anthropology of labor. Critique of Anthropology, 28(1), 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X07086555 Kasmir, S., & Carbonella, A. (2014). In S. Kasmir & A. Carbonella (Eds.), Blood and fire: Toward a global anthropology of labor (1st ed.). Berghahn. Accessed 8 June 2021. Kasmir, S., & Gill, L. (2022). The Routledge handbook of the anthropology of labor. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003158448 King, R. (2012). Theories and typologies of migration: An overview and a primer. Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, 3(12), 3–43. www. bit.mah.se/MUEP Li, T. M. (2010). To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations. Antipode, 41, 66–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­8330.2009.00717.x Macarie, I.-C. (2017). Invisible denizens: Migrant night shift workers’ fragile possibilities for solidarity in the post-circadian capitalist era (No. 4). Centre for Policy Studies. Budapest. https:// doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.13770.06084 MacQuarie, J.-C. (2019). Invisible migrants: A micro-ethnographic account of bodily exhaustion amongst migrant manual labourers working the graveyard shift at New Spitalfields Market in London. Journal of Health Inequalities, 5(2), 198–202. https://doi.org/10.5114/jhi.2019.91400 Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. University of California Press. Mollona, M. (2013). Factory labour or the end of labour? Anthropological reflections on labour value. https://research.gold.ac.uk/11781/. Accessed 7 Feb 2023. Narotzky, S. (2022). To have a life. In The Routledge handbook of the anthropology of labor (pp. 3–16). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003158448-­2 Patel, R. (2010). Working the night shift: Women’s employment in the transnational call center industry. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (1st ed.). Stanford University Press. Peck, J. (2013). Explaining (with) neoliberalism. Territory, Politics, Governance, 1(2), 132–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2013.785365 Prasad, M. (2006). The politics of free markets: The rise of neoliberal economic policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Chicago University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0008423908080311 Rajaram, P.  K. (2015). Common marginalizations: Neoliberalism, undocumented migrants and other surplus populations. Migration, Mobility, & Displacement, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.18357/ mmd11201513288 Roden, M., Koller, M., Pirich, K., Vierhapper, H., & Waldhauser, F. (1993). The circadian melatonin and cortisol secretion pattern in permanent night shift workers. The American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, 265(1), R261–R267.

154

5  The Normalisation of Nightwork

Roenneberg, T., Allebrandt, K. V., Merrow, M., & Vetter, C. (2012). Social Jetlag and obesity. Current Biology, 22(10), 939–943. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.038 Ruhs, M., & Anderson, B. (2010). Migrant workers: Who needs them? A framework for the analysis of staff shortages, immigration, and public policy. In Who needs migrant workers?: Labour shortages, immigration, and public policy (pp. 15–53). Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580590.003.0002 Sassen, S. (2001). Cracked casings: Notes towards an analytics for studying transnational processes. In L. Pries (Ed.), New transnational social spaces: International migration and transnational companies (pp. 187–212). Routledge. Sassen, S. (2005). The repositioning of citizenship and alienage: emergent subjects and spaces for politics. Globalizations, 2(1), 79–94. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content =t713685353~db=all Sassen, S. (2016). The global city: Enabling economic intermediation and bearing its costs. City and Community, 15(2), 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12175 Schlör, J. (1998). Nights in the big city: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930 (Topographics). Reaktion Books. Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism (1st ed.). W.W. Norton & Co. Accessed 9 June 2021. Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke Universtiy Press. Sharman, R. L., & Sharman, C. H. (2008). Nightshift NYC. University of California Press. Shaw, R. (2022). Geographies of night work. Progress in Human Geography, 46(5), 1149–1164. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325221107638 Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: New dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academics. Standing, G. (2012). The precariat: From denizens to citizens? Polity, 44(4), 588–608. https://doi. org/10.1057/pol.2012.15 Thompson, E. T. (1967). Time, work-displine, and industrial capitalism. Past & Present, 38(1963), 57–97. https://doi.org/10.1093/past/38.1.56 Wacquant, L. (2004). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/425391 Whitehead, J. (2010). In S. Kasmir & A. Carbonella (Eds.), Flexible labor/flexible housing: The rescaling of Mumbai into a global financial center and the fate of its working class (pp. 123–166). Berghahn Books. Wolf, R. E. (2001). Pathways of power: Building and anthropology of the modern world. Accessed 8 June 2021.

Chapter 6

Habitus of Nightwork

6.1 Introduction Mauss (1973 [1935]) writes that the body is ‘the first and most natural tool of man [sic]’. This could not be truer in the case of manual migrant nightworkers at New Spitalfields. Mauss (1973 [1935]) also insists that the body expresses individual and collective social actions through physical techniques. Whilst some techniques are acquired through imitating adults and peers and passed down through tradition, others are imposed through explicit social and educational training. These nightworkers complied with a largely lonely labouring process that consisted of repetitive tasks, from lifting cranes, carrying sacks, taking orders, serving coffees and hot food to making cash transactions. In their case, specific physical techniques were imposed onto their bodies through the harsher training of the post-circadian capitalist regime of discipline. This sought to extract as much use as possible from them, leaving them exhausted and obedient. For instance, this regime drove nightworkers to travail uninterruptedly as a way of avoiding the unbearable pain that would enter their bodies when they paused for meal breaks or when they returned to work after having taken time off. Additionally, it morphed precarious nightworkers into submissive bio-machines who were frozen by the fear of being expendable and disposable. Therefore, they had learnt to be nightworkers by understanding how to behave according to some codes of conduct that were acceptable and required. In the case of males, this was a code of virility, i.e., by adopting certain bodily postures to express toughness and masculinity and adapting one’s body in the face of disciplinary power. Female café servers avoided spending more time than needed during deliveries of hot food and drinks and rush back to the café instead or they learnt how to be submissive, not comment against their male managers’ request or abstain from using toilet as and when needed, but only when there were no customers to serve. In doing so, they had honed their bodies to ensure that they remained physically competitive for their employer. These human subjects, then, are always embodied, not © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_6

155

156

6  Habitus of Nightwork

only in the fact of them being ‘engendered in political and social agency’ (Isabell Lorey, 2015, ePub 332.), but also in them being racialised (Rajaram, 2015; Sahraoui, 2020). Their bodies had also absorbed the social structures and sedimented them into expectations and anticipations – from when it was correct to act and how to respond, to what was reasonable to expect from someone in a specific position within the social space of the market. Bourdieu (2000) argues that ‘habitus’, as the generative principle in the production of social interactions, facilitates the understanding of the social world neither through consciousness alone, as subjectivists think, nor according to some external laws independent of an individual’s will and effort, as objectivists argue. Instead, habitus is a continuum that fuses the two ends (idem, pp.  188–189). Moreover, habitus explains goal-oriented human efforts achieved through bodily know-how. This practical comprehension is conditioned by the well-­ defined social space in which habitus is acquired. Habitus, thus, re-enacts embodied activities with limited freedom, conditioned by a specific social space. Humans are sensorial, biological individuals. They are aware of the outside, physical world through the body’s movements of the limbs (kinaesthesia), smell, sight, sound, and touch, and comprehend it with their physical brain and capacity to think, i.e., consciousness. Furthermore, human bodies are social agents because they occupy positions in a social space (‘field’) that they inhabit physically. This ‘field’ impacts on and produces social agents adaptable to it and the social world in which they perform. The agents, in turn, create their own version of that world and respond, act, and behave through a set of physical responses that facilitate that performance (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 189). In the specificities of the ‘field’ of the New Spitalfields market that this ethnography focuses on, this translated into nightworkers trying to protect their bodies from being overly exhausted by not overloading their co-workers’ produce or carrying extra weights that inadvertently tired them out. This bodily knowledge is structured and embedded over time and not via discourse, but through practice. In this way, one’s practical knowledge of the outside world is sedimented repeatedly in layers of embodied structures that become subconscious. Habitus, thus, explains a practical understanding of the outer world incorporated into a human body, whilst the body extends beyond itself into the social world. Over time and through innumerable repetitions, a worker’s movements are engraved into the body until they become second nature. This set of dispositions acquired in and structured by a particular ‘field’ resurface again and again if the specific conditions in which they were learnt, practiced, and felt by the body continue. I call this the habitus of nightwork. Though I put Bourdieu’s notion of habitus at the centre of my analysis, I also draw on Foucauldian ideas of biopower as developed in Sharma’s (2013, 2014) studies on how some bodies are invested into whilst others are divested in the process of capital accumulation. Additionally, I apply Foucault’s discussion on biopolitics and discipline to explore forces of the New Spitalfields night market. This is a particular manifestation of wider conditions, illustrating how contemporary capitalism extracts labour from the bodies used and left exhausted. Nonetheless, a Foucauldian conceptualisation of the body omits any notion of bodily resistance on

6.1 Introduction

157

behalf of those subject to disciplinary power or against the oppressing power. Therefore, I complement this conceptualisation with McNay’s (1991) work, which points out how female and male bodies resist differently to exercised power, as well as Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock (1987, p. 6) insights into ‘the mindful-body’, a concept of the body that thinks and acts, yet is unseparated from the mind. This conceptual scaffolding supports an ethnography of suffering. I foreground the same four individuals that I introduced in the previous chapter and their experiences to demonstrate how the habitus of nightwork forms and is deployed by workers to adapt, survive, and resist, and by their managers to make workers comply and do their jobs. Lexa and Basrí are at the receiving end of individual hardships. Gică and Logan occupy vital positions at the lower level of the hierarchical structure in this night market. The latter two, have some leverage to influence their managers and owners and as such to move the bar towards the less troubling end of precarity. However, they too are subject to a systematic schedule of six nights per week, sometimes stretching beyond 11-h shifts. In this sense, Logan and Gică, partly embody histories of exploitation shared with other co-workers, as well as the exploiters’ attributes and conditions, to create a habitus of nightwork in others. All four nightworkers face the insensitive labour control of their employers and a demanding nightly schedule that disrespects the limits of their bodies rendered to be fit and active in the hours of the night when most human beings barely function. I directly observed my co-workers’ bodily capital, that was, their physical and mental abilities to endure and embody the duress of nightwork. Together we discussed their experiences of corporeal suffering, physical exhaustion, chronic tiredness, circadian maladjustment, sleep disturbances, social isolation, and alienation. In analysing these histories, I also set in motion my own experience. I was subjected to the harsh labour discipline and the means and strategies used to drill the workers’ bodies into docile behaviour. Thus, I draw upon the skills and experiences that I gained as a loader-cum-ethnographer whilst immersed in the labouring process and social space of the night market. The topic of blood, sweat and tears science has been inquired into by sociologists (Bourdieu, 2000; Wacquant, 2004), anthropologists (Csordas, 1990; Strathern, 1996), geographers and neuroscientists (Bastien, 2005), scholars focusing on migrating bodies (de Casanova & Jafar, 2013, p. 60) and by medical anthropologists offering insights into the embodied anthropology of Mexican farmworkers in the US (Holmes 2013a, b). Before turning to my own ethnography and offering my contribution to this science, I will discuss two studies that are pertinent to the current analysis. These are studies of people who similarly do demanding manual tasks of carrying loads with and on their bodies, but who have been trained under very different circumstances than those of London’s New Spitalfields market. The first of these studies illustrates the embodied knowledge gained in the realm of work by semi-illiterate lunch carriers handling food loads in Mumbai (Fig. 6.1). Dabbawalas, as the lunch carriers are called, on a daily basis deliver around 250,000 dabbas (‘lunches’) promptly and without mistakes, as generations before

158

6  Habitus of Nightwork

Fig. 6.1  Dabbawalas (lunch carrier) of Mumbai. Two workers carry a load of packed lunches on the train that links North with South of Mumbai. (Source: https://www.fourseasons.com/magazine/ taste/four-­seasons-­mumbai-­dabbawala-­experience/)

them have done for the past 125 years.1 Every day, each of these men carry crates weighing approximately 60 kg full of lunch pots that they pick up and drop off at various addresses. They connect the North and South of Mumbai, homes and offices, homemakers with husbands, mothers with sons and daughters living or working across the city (Pathak, 2010; Percot, 2005). Fifty per cent of these lunch carriers are semi-illiterate, whilst the rest are educated up to school grade or college. Most walas (‘carriers’) run or bike without navigation technology, i.e., they use no GPS systems to carve their routes through the incessant traffic of Mumbai’s streets. They also do not use smart technology, for instance, for capturing screenshots or to copy and paste the annotated food pots prepared by X family, living at Y floor, in the Z block in the North and waiting to be delivered at a specific address in the South of Mumbai. Instead, they know all of this by heart and could do it with their eyes closed. The workers’ practical understanding, gained over an extended period, sediments and serves with a precision that educated people and corporate giants would likely be unable to fathom without using computing systems. But the walas’ ‘secret’ in being able to do all of this is out in the open; it is in the workers’ bodily learning and the precise movements involved in carrying the pots, which are placed into crates and then rested on their heads or secured in the trolleys or push-bikes that are then pushed by two to three walas. They comprehend the social space through their bodies by negotiating their way on foot through traffic and navigating the ‘food line’, that is, Mumbai’s train line which connects the impoverished areas in the North with the wealthy business centres in the South. At the same time, they learn  Public Radio International (PRI) Available at: http://bit.ly/2zYAqGx Accessed 29.03.2021

1

6.2  Embodied Histories

159

the codes that are inscribed on each pot, which indicate which food pot belongs to what house, and where they need to be delivered to so that they reach the daughters and sons working in the busy South of Mumbai. Though semi-illiterate, dabbawalas learn to imprint the codes that are written on the pots in their minds. As some psychologists might point out, their working memory is recognition and not the recall-­ based type. In brief, dabbawalas demonstrate embodied knowledge that is not acquired through formal education, but through repetitive, daily practical tasks, executed and engraved into their bodies over a long period of time. The second study I will present, is of the Nepalese porters of Rai, Sherpa and Tamang ethnicities, who are hired by merchants to carry loads on their heads at altitudes of 3500 m or more. Porters use a head strap (namlo) to support a basket (doko) containing the load whilst walking, and a t-shaped wooden stick to support the basket whilst resting. Passing onlookers trekking on the way to the weekly bazaar in the town of Namche, might notice that the porters are poorly dressed, and that many are bare footed with only some wearing sneakers. The tracks that porters travel by are no more than dirt paths and are unregulated, unlike the of weight loads limited to 30 kg per porter on the tourist tracks. In this study, a team of researchers and clinicians measured a single day’s efforts of 113 adult female and male porters who were randomly selected from 642 porters observed from dawn to dusk, and calculated that the 113 adults carried a total of 28 tonnes of food and materials on their bodies in this 1 day (Basnyat & Schepens, 2001). The weight that some men carried exceeded 125% of their total body weight. When divided among the participants, each load weighed approximately 247 kg per person. Due to carrying loads under reduced oxygen conditions, the researchers found, particularly among the porters of Rai and Tamang ethnicities who were not used to high altitudes, that the likelihood that their strenuous effort could potentially progress into ‘fatal high altitude cerebral edema (HACE) or high-altitude pulmonary edema if not properly treated’ was high (Basnyat & Schepens, 2001, p. 316). Often thought of as a late or end-stage acute mountain sickness (AMS), this high-altitude illness causes fatigue and can lead to critical conditions such as coma and death because of brain herniation within 24 h (Jensen & Vincent, 2017). Yet, despite the enormous weights and strenuous efforts, these porters manage to undertake this work because the embodied knowledge required to do it has been engraved into their bodies over a long period of time (Bastien, 2005).

6.2 Embodied Histories 6.2.1 Lexa Lexa was a Romanian female café server. As previously noted, her difficulty to cope with being up at night was magnified by the unknown factors associated with the job. She had to get accustomed not only with nightwork, but also with working for

160

6  Habitus of Nightwork

abusive employers and without a work contract, and to do so within a male dominated workplace. New elements are added to her story here in order to offer a more palpable sense of how she entered and ‘played the game’ of precarity (Bourdieu, 2000). External as well as individual factors had determined her migration trajectory to London. She arrived in the U.K. at a time when anti-migrant and anti-refugee media campaigns inflamed the public’s perceptions. Allegedly, migrants were abusing the U.K.’s social welfare system. Lexa spent her days working as a janitor and cleaning hotel rooms, and her nights selling hot drinks and food, and lived on a few hours of sleep each 24-h cycle. Constrained by having limited free time or time to sleep, Lexa’s concerns with earning money grew with every minute of her waking hours. Despite the hardships, she was determined to save enough to bring her daughter over to the U.K. so that they could live together. That was a more pressing issue for her than the maltreatment she received at both the night market and her day job, as well as the biased news in the media. Whilst Lexa and I worked together at the café, we had a few chances to talk about the difficulties that she experienced. Lexa emphasised that when she moved to London and began working at the night market, she told herself that she would need time to get accustomed to her new life. Yet, she was soon to realise that that was exactly what she did not have. In her words, You get home tired, you sleep, you have no time for you, for others, for anything really. You wake up two hours before the shift and this way, in the past months, my life was spent on work, sleep, work, sleep. I am exhausted.

Before she was allowed to deliver orders to market stores, Lexa spent her 11- or 12-h long nightshifts inside the small café under the constant surveillance of the manager. Their frequent disagreements only increased her constant tiredness. One day, I entered the café and witnessed a heated discussion between her and the café manager. Later, I had the chance to ask Lexa what happened. This is what she whispered to me: Due to physical exhaustion, I asked for one night off because I could not keep up. But he did not approve. So, I did not turn up that night, so I won’t get so exhausted. Unfortunately, like in Romania, no one is willing to understand these situations. So, he cut two nights’ worth of my pay even though I only missed one … This is not normal!

Lexa was working without a contract and her abusive café owner exploited that situation to his own benefit. On a different occasion, I learnt that the café owners did not pay the first weeks’ worth of her salary, but instead held the payment as a deposit in case Lexa might leave without notice. This is a common practice at the night market where most workers are paid cash in hand. Lexa elaborated on this abusive practice: ‘Even the way they held my deposit, it’s not normal! I understand that this is how it works here [at the market]. I know that these employers do the same and hold the deposit of all new starters. But in others’ cases, they did it monthly and took £20 for a year. But in my case, they held my full weekly salary as a deposit for 2 weeks in a row’. Lexa had to make do with the little cash that she had borrowed in Romania to be able to move to London.

6.2  Embodied Histories

161

Lexa’s vulnerability was not only financial and occupational. She was also inexperienced with the masculinised culture of the market. One morning, Lexa told me that she confronted her manager who had made indecent proposals to her whilst at work. However, since confronting him, he had begun talking inappropriately and abusively to Lexa in front of her colleagues or sometimes whilst the odd early customer walked into the café. As a male employee, I had never experienced this. The café manager never misbehaved or threatened me. He neither misbehaved with the other two English females who had joined and left the café during that time. As Lexa pointed out, In Romania, I used to work two nights per week in a casino. And like in Romania, here too no one cares about us, women facing troubles. It did not happen to me there. It happened here. This is not normal. I could not accept it anymore.

That was the first time that Lexa left the New Spitalfields night market. The café market service was provided by women delivering drinks and food in a predominately male working environment. They experienced more indignities than male workers. As part of their role as delivery servers, the women also needed to find new customers and increase their sales. Yet, there was no financial incentive attached to these expectations that required soft skills. Similar to the findings of the night ethnography of a Tokyo hostess club undertaken by Allisson (1994), having switched from being a loader to a café worker at this night market, I gained insights into the injustices and humiliation that café delivery women experienced in a masculinised workplace and the specificities around women migrants’ bonded labour. Once I was hired as a male café worker, I was ridiculed by my former manual labour co-­workers because I had taken a ‘woman’s job’. Whilst they were not making indecent proposals to me as had I watched them doing to female café workers, these males did indulge in innuendos, such as lifting my apron whilst I was passing by with take away orders. These soon became the delight of my new male clientele. They treated me with condescension because I had unknowingly crossed an invisible line between the masculine role of manual heavy loading and the feminine role of carrying trays of hot drinks. The latter was a ‘woman’s job’, which males were not supposed to accept. Had I not shifted my position from an insider working at the grocery stand to that of a male café deliverer–adopting a female’s role that was seen as weak and placed at the very low end of the labour hierarchy at this market–my insider’s knowledge or behind the scene know-how, as it were, I would have missed out valuable data about the rules governing a well-established hierarchical order. By taking on what at this market was traditionally a female’s role, I was able to see and feel their injustice and humiliation from under their skin, as it were. What was even more insightful, was learning how female workers responded to such encounters by learning techniques of bodily management for self-preservation in the face of their oppression. When the café manager forbade Flory–another café server–from taking any work offers from elsewhere, she complied. Other compliant behaviour included executing the managers’ orders unquestioningly, doing unpaid overtime and not looking up or into the workers’ eyes of those who behaved rudely to them.

162

6  Habitus of Nightwork

During the 6 weeks I was Lexa’s work colleague at this café, three women came and left. One lasted only 3 days, the others left within weeks. Lexa was the fourth delivery woman employed by the café owners. She was determined to hold on, which she did for another few months, after which she also left. But, a couple of weeks later, Lexa returned to work at this café, reasoning that ‘there is nothing we can do. It is our fault really because we accept to work in these conditions, which are controlled by them’. Her rationale somewhat reflects Bourdieu’s (2000, pp. 149–150) statement that, ‘in all conceivable circumstances of a type, a particular set of agents will behave in a particular way’. I hypothesise that Lexa arrived at the market with a habitus of nightwork already embodied from her previous years of working in a casino in Romania, where similar precarious working conditions applied. Subsequently, the instances of abuse that occurred in this new environment may have triggered predetermined responses of docility and revolt within a similar regime of discipline. Her response to the abuse also indicates that she accepted the unacceptable for an ‘independent woman’, as she described herself. Lexa felt trapped between her goal of uniting with her daughter and with wanting to decide about finding new employment in a permanent role with less precarious working conditions. Following the abuse, however, she left the market for a couple of weeks because, in her words, ‘I could not bear it or accept it anymore. That is why I decided to stop working for him’. I asked Lexa: ‘What stopped you from making this decision earlier?’ She replied: I did not have time to look for another, better job because working nights means resting in the day … You can hardly wake up two hours before the shift and go to work. My life was spent on work, sleep, work, sleep. However, I did find work offers with a contract and on some weekly pay, legal, via bank accounts, not cash like here. But there is a transition period in which I need to learn how things work and wait till my first pay, and that I could not afford [to wait]. So, I returned to the café.

As with other returnee migrant nightworkers that I met at New Spitalfields, such reasoning leads them to anomie due to ongoing uncertainty. Many migrants return resourceless, penniless, begging their abusive superiors to give them back their old jobs. This was Lexa’s case too. Lexa continued to work at the market despite such injustices. Though she tried to deal with the injustices on her own, overall, her position remained vulnerable. First of all, she was physically vulnerable. As she explained, ‘Working nights meant that I try, but many a times fail, to rest in the day. I am physically exhausted’. Lexa had been working 6  months at New Spitalfields, by the time I formally interviewed her. During the interview, Lexa asked me to help her to denounce her abusive employers for unlawfully holding 2  weeks’ deposit and cutting her pay without justification. Despite my efforts to connect Lexa with the appropriate authorities, she dropped her case 2 weeks later, partly because she had experienced injustice before and partly because she felt too tired to fight. Later, after I quit the café work and continued my fieldwork with non-participant observations, I also interviewed the café owner who had stopped Lexa’s 2-week deposit. I asked him if he ever acted improperly against his employees. My word choice seemed to astonish him, ‘Improper? Why?’ Before I had the chance to ask a follow-up question, he

6.2  Embodied Histories

163

diverted our conversation and began talking about the hardships that he himself faced as a new worker at this night market. Lexa left and returned three more times over the period that she worked at the night market. When she spoke about her past in Romania, she never mentioned abuse having occurred either in her previous job or at home. As she continued to reflect on her experiences in our conversations, there was a recurring theme in her thoughts, namely, the lack of balance between day sleep, family, and social time. As Lexa stated, ‘Now, I think that you do not have a life when you work nights. You get home tired, you sleep, you have no time for children’. This was the concern of a mother who hoped to reunite with her daughter in the U.K. Lexa also admitted that: I do not know exactly [how things are] done, but they [owners] know what they are doing since they keep hiring one person after another in this illegal way. Take this example, here where I work at the café, they pay cash in hand without a contract and on poor pay … I looked somewhere else, but there are jobs that pay worse than mine. So, the problem is with those who accept these conditions, not with the ones who pay so little.

Ehrenreich’s (2011) investigation is relevant here, as it reveals the embedded inequalities in the labour system, whereby low wage earners in the U.S. have to live through in-work poverty, i.e., sleeping in cars or motels because they cannot afford to put down a rent deposit or forced to take anti-drug tests by Wal and Mart supermarket, as a condition included in the hiring contract. Workers in hospitality, cleaning and supermarkets are unappreciated by their U.S.-based employers. Lexa too saw her own worth through her employers’ unappreciative lens. Her experience, which stretched over half a year of nightshift work at the market, included episodes of employer abuse, anomie born out of sustained defeat, self-doubt in acquiring a protected job and many uncertainties in regard to her financial situation. Her account is based on her first months of living in the U.K. and as such, it is illustrative of a migrant’s experiences at the beginning of the migration trajectory. In this case, despite the will to improve her life and to bring her daughter over to the U.K., Lexa experienced a deep lack of self-confidence. Her limited skills in grappling with the market environment only aggravated this. Lexa shares a similar predicament of other migrant women, that of landing in a new territory without a network of support, a friend’s advice, a teacher’s guidance, or a properly regulated workplace, which offers new employees an induction. Here, at the New Spitalfields market, she received none of this. Going through Lexa’s story, therefore, Bourdieu’s work in the sociology of reflexivity may be a useful corrective for feminist social theories (McNay, 1991). Lexa shapes her identity through ‘crisis-based reflexivity’ but responds very differently to the changes that she encounters as she moves within and across fields (e.g., casino work in Romania, different café owners and day and night jobs). Her work identity seems mutable, but because she has changed the environment in which she learnt how to perform precarity (in a Romanian casino), her previous experiences of precarity are not helpful for avoiding future precarious work environments and abusive employers. Lexa’s disembodied experiences, thus, point to the ‘obstacles that confront the transposition of the feminine habitus into different fields of action’ (McNay, 1991, p. 113).

164

6  Habitus of Nightwork

In Lexa’s case, it seems that the habitus of nightwork rewards her only so far as to help her survive until she ‘learns how things work’, and only aids her towards maintaining a vicious cycle of a precarious working life. Facing prolonged physical tiredness and her oppressive employers, may only lead to a situation where, as McNay (1991, p. 127) writes, ‘a body bears the marks, the “stigmata of experience”, upon its surface’. Such stigmata of precarity is written all over Lexa’s bodily experiences whilst she carries on trying to meet her human needs and fulfil her hopes, grappling with the deprived working conditions that leave marks on her embodied experience in this ‘context of differentiated powers relations’ (McNay, 1991, p. 114). None of these experiences have assisted Lexa to move on and beyond precarity. After 4  years, Lexa stopped working full-time at the night market. As of 2019, she had become a rideshare driver for companies like Uber, mostly doing nightshifts for the higher rates.

6.2.2 Basrí In autumn 2015, Basrí missed three nightshifts in a row. On the fourth night, I called to check up on him. He explained that following an incident with a friend of their landlord who had attempted to molest his teenage daughter, the police evacuated his family from their rented flat into emergency accommodation. Despite holding two or three jobs at the same time and working round-the-clock, Basrí had no savings. Homeless and cashless, their only option was to apply for temporary accommodation from the council. Over three consecutive days, he, his pregnant wife, their two children and all of their belongings were moved in and out of three hostels while the council assessed their case. I was present at one stage of the assessment to interpret for the family. Throughout this time, I saw a different Basrí from the confident loader I knew. In the meeting with the housing officer, he could not speak and was neither spoken to as he was not addressed throughout the assessment. He was unsure and quiet. The officer in charge only spoke to his wife because she was the only one qualified to receive welfare support. On the fourth day, the officer decided to house the family in a one-bedroom flat in a hostel for temporary accommodation in North London. Basrí returned to do the graveyard shift the following night after they had been housed. Though the family had a roof over their heads, Basrí faced new challenges. First, he had a long commute from home, which was in North London, to and between the two workplaces in East London. Second, he worked in two jobs. In the evening, from 6 pm to 9 pm, he was delivering takeaways, and from 10 pm to 9 am he was loading and later forklift driving at New Spitalfields. Third, he had to rest in one room, while the children played and his wife took care of the baby, cooked, and washed the family’s clothes in the same room. In February 2016, their youngest child, Güngüneş (‘Sunny Day’, in literal translation from Turkish), was born in this accommodation. For over a year, this family of five lived in this one-bedroom

6.2  Embodied Histories

165

temporary shelter. This situation magnified his precarity–a nightworker who had his bodily power as his only resource and yet could not properly rest and sleep. Basrí was stuck there at the market as he could not find better pay elsewhere. Despite the difficult working conditions, he ended up returning to work in the night market and for the same employer each time he took forced leave. At this company, the business language was Turkish, and this was one of his native languages (he was Bulgarian Roma and could speak Turkish). He commented on the precarity he encountered at this company: For example, at this company you eat on your feet or whilst sitting on boxes or on the forklift, if you’re a driver. They do not invest in improving our work conditions. If you get sick, you only get paid sick leave for a maximum of two days. So, you can’t even get sick, or your pay is cut after two days.

Market workers complied with superficial work ethics which therein maintained the poor working conditions. Having fallen sick once, there was a night that I did not sign in to work. The doctor advised me to take respite and issued me with a seven-­ day medical certificate. Upon returning to work the night after, I showed the certificate to my supervisor and he and other co-workers immediately responded by laughing at me and asked, ‘What, you have AIDS or something?’ Another co-worker suggested that I had forged the certificate on a home PC. Based upon Basrí’s words along with my co-workers’ reaction to my medical certificate, I claim that workers do not know their basic rights to healthcare and are not aware that when one falls ill that one is entitled to payment by the employer. Moreover, if they do know that they have these rights, then they do not dare request what they are entitled to by law for they realise it might result in being fired and replaced with another expendable worker. Some have confirmed this second claim to me by emphasising how every single night they could see people knocking at their manager’s office door and asking for employment, and that they knew all too well that other migrants desperately needed those jobs. These workers were painfully aware that they were expendable, so they chiselled their bodies to ensure that they remained physically competitive for their employer. In the team meetings that I was present at, the manager made a point of reminding workers how expendable they were and how if they did not ‘get their act together’ they would be replaced. Further to this, the workers themselves also play a role in reproducing masculinised working culture norms, which prevent them from showing signs of ‘weakness’ even when they are genuinely sick. Some of my co-workers confessed that they had never seen a medical certificate until I showed them mine. This could be due to a variety of reasons and a combination of individual and structural factors. Individually, workers who lack proficient English language skills are less determined to leave the market site. Hence, they accept the precarisation mechanisms that limit their economic rights. Structurally, labour regulators do not inspect these workplaces at night since they are daytime organisations. In addition, managing site authorities like the Corporation of London do not check if the traders provide decent working conditions to their staff. Ultimately, it comes down to the trading companies, and these do not provide workers with regular breaks for rest and mealtimes, eatery spaces,

166

6  Habitus of Nightwork

medical insurance, overtime rates, sick pay, or entitlement to paid annual leave. When I asked Basrí if he ever spoke to his co-workers about the rules that he finds unacceptable, he said: We do talk among ourselves. Everyone says that they are tired … you’re also tired of accepting it … How much longer will we accept this? We do ask ourselves. But in the end no one does anything because we must continue working here. This is because we don’t learn English whilst we work in Turkish. So, if you don’t speak a fair level of English, you can’t go anywhere else.

Lack of decent working conditions at the night market heightened precarity. Basrí could not complain too much about these conditions and neither could his colleagues. Most of them had not been able to obtain the language skills that would help them find better jobs. In addition, all of them feared that they would be replaced overnight if they complained. They avoided confronting others directly, co-workers and superiors alike. The most they could do was to change employer inside the night market based on what they were told or promised by them, that is, better pay, better working hours and more entitlements. Nevertheless, these promises were rarely fulfilled once they moved to the competitor. In the worst case, they were seen as traitors and though employed, they were mistreated on these grounds. A few workers did leave the night market quite quickly. I did not have the chance to speak with them so cannot comment on their reasons for doing so, however, Basrí told me that: People who cannot cope with the intensity of nightshift work and back-breaking loads leave within days. But the ones who are forced to stay because of some difficult circumstances, they overcome the beginnings, they learn the job and later they cannot just leave nightshift work … they leave perhaps for a few months, but I have seen many who return and say that they can no longer break away from doing nights … I have known many people who did that; they left and returned … Nightshift workers are trapped, like the sleepless bats.

Basrí also left and returned several times. In May 2016, when we met again briefly, I learned that he had again stopped working at the night market. His explanation was short, ‘I have had enough’. However, in December 2016 during a Skype conversation, he revealed that he had returned to work at the market but at a different company and on a higher wage. By May 2017, when I re-visited New Spitalfields, he had once again returned to the same company where we worked together in 2015. Then as we spoke again in 2017, by now 2 years after I had exited the field site, Basrí said with tiredness injected in his face, that he no longer coped as well as he used to with this nocturnal, stressful rhythm and with sleeping frugally during the day. I asked him what he thought of working dayshifts, and he answered: ‘I think of changing to days every month. I cannot carry on working nights for long. It does not help my health. Hopefully, this year is the last I work nights’. However, he eventually ran out of savings and returned to the night market. Both Lexa’s and Basrí’s accounts reflect their predicament, as sole family providers, in accepting the precarity of nightwork on economic grounds. Their resilient habitus enables them to grapple with the precarious working conditions at the market and supports the observation that those who tame the night rhythm ‘no longer

6.2  Embodied Histories

167

break away’, as Basrí put it. However, as soon as better opportunities arise, they leave nightwork schedules and this market behind in exchange for more appropriate monetary returns and more humane working conditions, as it proved to be the case with Lexa. Habitus is ‘the basis of implicit collusion among all agents who are products of similar conditions and conditioning’ (Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 144–145). Yet, also crucially important are the factors that facilitate the sedimenting of these dispositions and the explicit routinisation of the habitus of nightwork. I focus next on one such factor, that is, the actions of a foreman. He has the power to ‘mould’ the bodies of the newly arrived nightworkers into docile bio-automatons. The repeated episodes of docility that I observed indicate how workers’ responses have been cast and sedimented into their bodies and minds night by night, but also through the actions of their superiors. One result of this is demonstrated in the workers’ embodied knowledge and skills in re-adjusting and surviving in contexts where co-workers manipulated and overpowered them. These people-instruments facilitate the performance of precarity, e.g., abusing Lexa’s lack of nightshift experience and Basrí’s limited English language skills. On the back of this argument, the next interlocutor, Gică, the foreman in charge of the loaders and forklift drivers at FruitVeg, is one such instrument of precarisation, as well as factor in the formation of a habitus of nightwork. He practices the methods and uses the tactics that he himself has been subject to. In other words, he enacts the same onto others so that precarity dominates their nightwork experiences.

6.2.3 Gică Gică, the foreman, supervised the loaders, those being the workers who inhabited the lowest level of precarity in the night market. He also trained and disciplined the new loaders, but only those who could endure under his command were deemed experienced enough to work at FruitVeg. He was like a drill sergeant; an instrument that instilled and perpetuated a habitus of precarity into the workers’ bodies and behaviours. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this man worked his way up the labour hierarchy from a disposable loader to a foreman. He maintained his position of power with the help of a social network of his own making and with the help of the management. Gică had many relatives and allies in the night market. His younger brother, Ily, was his right-hand man and replaced him in whenever he was absent. Other relatives also worked under their command. Gică and his relatives had an advantage over other Romanian workers as they were among the first to arrive at New Spitalfields before Romania joined the E.U. and were fluent in Turkish, the trade language among the large traders at New Spitalfields. Besides this, they all had always worked for the same company. When Gică and his two brothers–his younger brother Ily and an older brother, Apo–arrived at New Spitalfields, SuperFruit was their first stop. This situation seemed to continue as Ily confirmed: ‘Romanians bring each other over. The market

168

6  Habitus of Nightwork

is full of Romanians now, and many work for SuperFruit’. One day, for an undisclosed reason, Apo, the older brother, left SuperFruit for another company, FruitVeg and the younger brothers followed suit. Then other relatives who had also come to the market from Romania, joined them at FruitVeg. These two companies, SuperFruit and FruitVeg, had been competing with one another for many years and all employees took part in this competition. From the top management all the way down to the loaders, these men projected a ‘masculine honour’ upon their respective employer. Ily went as far as to stress that, ‘if we [brothers] were to go back and work for SuperFruit, no loader working there now could keep up with us’. I asked Ily why he thought so. He replied, ‘They would simply not last. The other Romanians could not compete with us’. Ily’s assessment was not an objective one. He was not referring at their loading skills, but to the other workers’ hesitance to cross paths with them. Many of my co-workers indeed approached them cautiously. If they did not actively try to win favours and thus, become allies with Gică and his brothers, many workers avoided interfering in the business of the ‘brothers from the Dobruja region’, as they were known to the other Romanians. The backing that came from the workfloor management gave Gică extra powers. The manager never interfered when loaders reported Gică as acting preferentially towards his relatives and allies, who received from Gică ticket orders regularly. Gică never seemed to be affected by the ebbs and flows of the trade and by the threats of redundancy that permanently hung over the heads of the rest of the loaders. Loaders were intimidated by Gică as he oversaw the distribution of the orders. They could see him collecting pieces of paper and placing them into his back pocket, which were the invoices that the salespeople typed up and the orders of which needed to be prepared by the loaders. Gică divided the labour to each loader as he wished and saw fit. Though a semi-illiterate man, this foreman was unmistakably precise in tailoring the right order for the right man. He assigned orders to whom he thought was capable of performing the best if assigned a specific assignment. He also knew the power he had and used it to his benefit and for the protection of his acolytes. Those excluded from his preferential list performed their best just so they would not be blacklisted. Gică’s power to distribute orders also affected the loaders at an intimate level. Emotions could be triggered when one’s labour power was dismissed or not required. Especially when trading was low, being given less or no orders at all could play tricks on one’s mind. It could amplify feelings of anxiety at losing one’s job, could induce boredom from not feeling one was needed when they were struggling to stay awake, and could make one feel totally useless. As I observed and experienced under Gică’s supervision, such feelings led to a desperate will to be a useful individual and a docile worker. Some workers checked in with the foreman and volunteered to do any task only to appear preoccupied in Gică’s presence. Others busied themselves with all sorts of meaningless tasks without being prompted, from sweeping the floor to piling the pallets. Many begged for work. I could never forget that feeling of anxiety that creeped into me, which was followed by a sense of anomie! I so desperately wanted to help and be useful just so my research would not be interrupted due to being laid off. Gică played well upon these feelings and uncertainties,

6.2  Embodied Histories

169

dictating to what extent workers were protected or expendable, turning them into obedient bodies and continuously and forcefully casting them as ‘disposable workers’ in the capitalist story of profit accumulation. The repeated episodes of docility that I observed suggested how workers’ responses had been cast and sedimented into their bodies and minds night after night. Despite this, the foreman did not convey any signs that satisfaction was drawn from overpowering his co-workers. His behaviour, in comparison to other potential candidates for his supervisory position, displayed a sense of discipline towards himself and this by extension was the way he regularised other workers’ time-labour discipline. Nevertheless, it was clear to the loaders under his command that they would either be disrespected by him or would be ignored altogether. Gică shared specific gestures with the managers and salesmen that indicated contempt, from talking over a loader mid-sentence to shouting the orders at them. During one nightshift, a salesman who was standing with hands in his pockets in a tiny aisle, kicked me on a pressure point on the side of my right leg. This had me on the floor in an instant. I was carrying a 20 kg load on my shoulder. Whilst I was not aware of what his real intent was, I was told that the salesman did that because he expected loaders to move out of his way, and not by communicative means. Since I apparently did not show any sign of doing that, he kicked me and walked away without an apology or explanation. Such gestures were copied downwards from managers to salesmen and further down by foremen. He salesman also knew that the loaders disrespected him, whilst at the same time feared him and his allies. There was one more element that played a role in this mutual animosity – customers and co-workers were aware of Gică’s Roma heritage. He once directed my attention to a Kurdish customer and said: ‘He is the one calling me and my brothers ‘Gypsy”. Gică was acutely aware of the negative connotation of ‘Gypsy’, which for many meant being deemed a lower kind of human being. The newcomers had to put up with dishonest behaviour. I experienced this directly from my first day of work at this company, when the engraving of a particular work ethos into my body began. One Saturday morning, 2  months into my apprenticeship at FruitVeg, Gică waved at me to join for a ‘special’, that is, a whiskey and Coke in a can. At this night market, the weekend arrived on Saturday mornings. Just before close, the foreman would open a bottle of this ‘special’ mix and would invite a selected few to drink a glass. As he handed over the glasses, he would say, ‘Here you are, you’ve earned it’. At first sight, this gesture might come off as a good foreman inviting his workers for a treat at the end of a difficult week. But this foreman had a hidden agenda, and it was someone else in the team who connected the dots for me. Gică ran an informal side business that brought him up to £100 per week and he sometimes shared this money with his acolytes. Gică earnt this money by selling off the pallets that remained within the company’s premises after the products had been sold. However, he had to find a way to enlist new loaders into this scheme and to make sure that they would become submissive enough to collect, pile and guard the pallets until he could sell them to lorry drivers who would be returning to Europe. He, therefore, invited those who collected pallets for him that week, whether they knew what they were involved in or not, and made them feel ‘special’

170

6  Habitus of Nightwork

through this invitation to drink a ‘special’ next to his trusted people. In this way, the guest workers had actually already paid for their drinks. More to this, the newcomers had to put up with his tactics of disciplining them. A few months into my position, Gică told me, ‘From now on, you will report to me or the manager every time you want to go to the toilet’. I did so, until I found an occasion to confront him about it. The following Saturday morning, we gathered as usual for a drink at the café. I took a sit at the large table, joining a group of nine, making up a group of ten Romanian men who worked at SuperFruit, to catchup with them. I joined them instead of the small group that Gică presided. Later, I learnt that this was an affront to Gică. Yet, there was worse to come. Dumi, a Romanian check-­ man at SuperFruit, was sitting to my right. I whispered to him about the ‘Toilet time reporting’ request and tried to verify with him Gică’s story that workers from other companies had their pay cut if they spent longer than 5  min in the toilet. Dumi seemed stunned. Without warning, he turned and shouted across the large table so Gică could hear him: ‘Stop telling this man fake stories about other people!’ before he burst into a hearty laughter. Gică did not respond. Five minutes later, Dumi left, and I joined Gică and my co-workers. In a quiet tone, Gică whispered in my ear: ‘You have a big mouth. You should not have told others from another company what I told you to do. You wait till next week’. He turned around and did not talk to me again that morning. Next week, Gică was even more frugal in his instructions towards me, and the orders came scarce in my direction, too. I followed-up on the ‘toilet time reporting’ with workers from other companies as well. It appeared that Gică had made up this rule to manipulate me and, by extension, I assume that he used the same tactic with all other inexperienced workers. No other company took from a worker’s pay if they dwelled for too long responding to nature’s call in the toilet, although they did require them to just signal when they needed to leave the stand. One month after that conversation, other incidents took place. Usually, at the end of the nightshift, a couple of forklift drivers would load the products from the lower to the upper floor, and the loaders would take over and move these fully loaded pallets into the fridges. As I planned to apply for a forklift driving licence, I asked the supervisor to allow me to practice on the spare forklift, but Gică abruptly refused. Ily, his younger brother, and right-hand man, re-framed Gică’s ban in a more ‘positive’ format. He told me: Look at this hairy guy [Basrí, the Bulgarian Roma man introduced earlier in the chapter]. Look at how he lifts the loaded pallets, not like you, wandering outside the market hall for one hour and bringing three pallets. You make sure you do as Gică says. If you want to be hired as a porter, you do not collect empty pallets, you need to get going with loaded pallets.

I practiced in my spare time, passed the test to drive a forklift and got the driving licence. Soon after I found out how futile the test was. The forklift driving license had no real value unless the foreman approved of it. Gică banned me from driving a forklift on the pretext that if he, a Romanian supervisor, would allow me, his co-­ national to drive a forklift, the manager would reproach him for favouring ‘his Romanian’ against the other two new drivers of a different nationality, including

6.2  Embodied Histories

171

Basrí. Yet, he also banned these other new drivers until further notice. Additionally, Gică reproached Basrí for spending too much time practising driving outside the market hall instead of collecting pallets, a repetitive task at the end of the shift that all drivers disliked. One night, Gică ordered Basrí to stop the engine and get off the forklift immediately. Basrí informed him that the store manager gave him the forklift key and continued to drive, shouting to Gică to speak to the manager if he had a complaint to make against him. I watched Basrí driving away from the stand and out of the market hall. Having observed the above incident between Basrí and the supervisor, I asked the supervisor to allow me to drive the spare forklift like Basrí just did. He refused, explaining that: If you want to practice, you come early in your own time. In the morning you can’t do it anymore because I don’t need forklift drivers, I need loaders. You come and practice on the company’s money and then leave trained for higher pay.

Basrí in defying our foreman, illustrates that over the 4 years, he has learnt practical strategies to navigate through disciplining measures. I was not as prepared as Basrí to confront the foreman. These were incidents through which I gained more insight into the ‘backstage behaviour’ and the rules governing it. Gică’s actions were attuned to the company’s interests to develop capital at the expense of his co-workers’ bodily power. He forbade me to drive a forklift, and I became a dissatisfied worker, cursing in my low-­ toned voice for being banned. Yet, I submitted to the foreman’s ‘art of governing’ and acted in turn with ‘internalized self-discipline, a mode of self-control that always serves to regulate one’s own precariousness’ (Lorey & Butler, 2015, ePub 442–449). Episodes of docility suggest how workers’ responses have been embodied in histories that sediment into their bodies and minds, night after night. They hint at the embodied skills that inexperienced workers deploy to re-adjust and survive in such contexts where co-actors manipulate and overpower them. Workers develop strategies to manage precariousness. The skills one needs depend on specific individual properties, from how one deals with spontaneous blows to how profoundly sedimented one’s bodily histories are and how quickly one deploys them in conflict situations. Today’s capitalist working environment dispossesses the workers of their bodily and social capital. This diminishes one’s sense of social worth and increases structural inequalities. However, Wacquant (2014) argues that ‘all social agents are in a hierarchical distribution of forms of capital rooted in or derived from the economic structure’. This is a strikingly useful thought to be carried into the next story of Logan. He is a nightworker who had occupied various roles and had eventually climbed to the top of the hierarchical chain of command in this trade. His case helps me close this discussion on how nightwork is slowly, but surely inscribed and deposited into one’s body and mind as a kind of unspoken and tacit knowledge, another habitus of nightwork.

172

6  Habitus of Nightwork

6.2.4 Logan As noted in Chap. 5, Logan was a man who wore many hats simultaneously, both out of necessity and out of choice. In contrast to large wholesale trading companies, where five or six salespeople were hired to sell all night and well into the next day, smaller companies relied on experienced individuals such as Logan who could flexibly fulfil various positions. He was a salesperson, but also acted as the owner’s right-hand man, workfloor manager, head of purchasing and supervisor in charge of the manual workers. He would sell produce all night long and during the early hours of the day, when trading slowed down, he would purchase produce for his company. Yet, he also found the time and energy to supervise his team of five men. From the stand where I worked, and later when I visited the market, I observed him overseeing every move of the loaders and forklift drivers. He exercised his power through such apparent scenes of teamwork. During our interview, Logan spoke with authority not only about his experience of nightshifting, but also about that of others whom he had been managing in the past as a business owner and, at the time of our formal discussion, as a manager. He confidently declared that everyone could work long nightshifts of more than 10 h, just like he did in his early years at New Spitalfields. Switching perspective, he insisted that he had been acculturated to the English work ethos, which put an emphasis on fundamental rights to humane, dignified working conditions. He praised himself in following that ethos on a nightly basis. To exemplify these claims, he brought to the foreground a few work-related issues. One of these issues was about breaks. Logan explained that the workers under his command could leave the company’s stand and have breaks, either to eat or go to the café and toilet. In his words: If I’m in charge, I would like to know where my staff are, at the toilet, at the café … It’s not the case of … ‘Why is he going to the toilet?’ But when you don’t know [where your staff are], it’s the worst. It’s best if you know. So, if I am going to the toilet, I’ll tell my boss, so he keeps an eye on [the stand]. 

As I both experienced myself and observed, as well as was told by my co-workers, at New Spitalfields–and the company where Logan worked was no exception–workers were controlled by higher-ups, who seized upon opportunities to control when workers could eat, sit, rest, and go for toilet relief. Management used various tactics, from monitoring via CCTV to ordering their supervisors to apply manipulating practices and bullying the workers of the lowest status in this pecking order. Additionally, the right to have regular breaks throughout the shift was breached nightly and or otherwise applied customarily according to the whims of the company’s ethos. I shared my insights with Logan, but he disagreed with me and insisted that this was not the case at his company: They are [allowed]. You get breaks when there is nothing to do when the stand is not busy. They’re not slaves. In my opinion, if the job slows down and they want to go to have breakfast, that’s fine. As long as I know that they can go ahead … They are human beings, like

6.2  Embodied Histories

173

us. There is no difference between us and the loaders or forklift drivers … I don’t look at it that way. Other people do, but I don’t.  I know there are loads of traders who do, but that’s wrong! They are human beings. There is no difference. If there is a break, let them have it. But they’ve got to realise this. They got to appreciate it!

Logan tried to set himself apart in this working environment. He claimed that he recognised and respected the workers’ rights but ended up speaking about how grateful they should be for the breaks that he allowed them to have. In this way, he reflected a figure of authority ‘in an old-style work hierarchy’. An authority figure wilds power and displays it, i.e., takes responsibility. S/he ‘might do that by overtly declaring, “I have the power, I know what’s best, obey me.”’ (Sennett, 1998, p. 227). On a different occasion, I challenged Gică, the foreman, on the same issue. He was not as deceptively permissive, but instead quite the opposite. In his uncaring, insensitive, yet direct manner, he said that ‘If even my brother tells me when he goes to the toilet, then you too should tell me at once when you leave the stand for any reason’. Ily was not only his brother, but also a senior worker at this stand. Therefore, this was Gică’s way of saying that an apprentice should report to him no matter what he left the stand for. The other issue that Logan foregrounded in our discussion was about leave from work. He explained with authority that there was no guarantee that ‘you’ll get full holiday pay because you’re working full-time’, but that it all depended on a company’s policy and whether the company had a sick leave policy. He admitted that in this market, English-owned companies offered their workers sick pay up to a certain amount of time. In contrast, at his company it depended on his judgment. In his words, ‘If you get sick twice a month, I will think this is turning into a habit. I won’t think it is reasonable’. I also asked Logan to clarify his company’s policy on annual leave. He said that experienced loaders got 2 weeks off every year. Seconds later, he added: ‘But I get five. If you add the two, three days, here and there, it will be about six weeks … If you add it all up, I take about six weeks leave in total’. This was meant to be a factual comment. In other words, he, as the owner’s right-hand man and the workfloor manager, was entitled to 6 weeks’ annual leave per year, while the workers under his command got only 2 weeks, regardless of their experience, position, or the length of time they had been employed at this company. Market workers were employed and paid directly by the traders, not by the Corporation of London–which managed and owned the New Spitalfields market– and not by the Tenancy Association, which was physically based on the market grounds of New Spitalfields. The workers were, thus, subject to those companies’ policies. Logan and other low and middle-level managers’ disciplinary regimes overrode the role that the market’s authorities should have held. In this way, the City of London participated in re-producing precarity. These workers did not belong to a union. In addition, the management purposefully fragmented co-workers apart. They were easily confused and unable to cooperate on important issues concerning their rights and working conditions. Any investment into the working conditions was kept at a bare minimum so that management could maintain the arrangement of having other workers completing the menial tasks, which were needed in the business operations.

174

6  Habitus of Nightwork

A particularly efficient strategy that the management across different companies employed to keep workers under control, was the use of a single language as the trade language. Turkish-owned companies’ work ethics encultured low rank employees into the use of Turkish as the only business language. The higher-level staff of these companies spoke among themselves and to the workers in Turkish. Most customers at these companies were Turkish-speaking grocers. The employees rarely interacted with the English-speaking staff at the Corporation of London and other market authorities. This had an impact both on workers who spoke Turkish and on those who did not speak Turkish. The working lives of the non-Turkish speakers workers employed at these companies, mostly Pakistani and Romanian workers, were difficult. Communication between low and workfloor management was impeded, mainly because the managers did not have adequate English language skills, yet they would not hire translators for staff meetings. These meetings could take hours, but only Turkish speakers could distil the management’s messages. The non-Turkish speakers took little away, as I observed during several team meetings at the Turkish company that I worked for. The Turkish-speaking manual workers faced consequences of a different nature. They lacked additional language skills that they would need to work with people of other ethnicities and nationalities. In most cases, this meant a lack of English language skills. They had to accept and become dependent on the workplaces that traded in their mother tongue. In the long term, this proved detrimental because they were not able to become proficient in English, which could have helped them find work elsewhere. Workers, like Basrí, remained in the same precarious position for much longer than they initially imagined or intended to occupy. I probed Logan as to whether, at his company such practices of using a single language existed. He confirmed: Yes. But if you want to communicate with people, you’ll find a way somehow, even when we speak different languages. You understand what I mean? … If you want to communicate with someone of a different nationality and there is no middle language that you both understand, there is always a way. And that person will be able to understand you. Plus, if you want that person to understand, you’ll try to explain the best you can.

This answer is deceptively simple, and makes language seem unnecessary in this type of manual work. Superficially, bodily postures, mirroring techniques and learning by doing are enough to carry out these menial tasks in which workers are reduced to autonomous labour units. However, if we focus on the tasks and their complexity and specifically, on the roles of and relationships between each worker involved in carrying out these tasks, we can recognise that the lack of a common language between workers of different nationalities present advantages to the management. Unless workers share a similar language and a team of workers all obtain vital information regarding their tasks and the instructions on how to carry these out, the relationships among co-workers, and between co-workers and management remain limited, lack of communication fragmented their will to cooperate. In truth, the lack of a common language enables the management to fragment workers and thus, prevent cooperation from forming. It is one of the instruments used to

6.2  Embodied Histories

175

inculcate obedient individualism, the very opposite of defiant individualism (Wacquant, 2004, p. 40). The obedient, terrorised worker does not confront people higher up in the labour hierarchy, from the foreman and salesman to a manager or the owner of the trading stall. All those in the higher echelons delegate tasks downward either non-verbally or verbally to those below them. Having internalised the capitalist discipline, those in the lower positions execute the work and compete with their similarly positioned co-workers. This here is a brief outline, of a denser explication offered in Chap. 8 that foregrounds embodied, yet fragmented cooperation, that exists among highly precarious people at work. Briefly, the eighth chapter explores the labour processes mediated through the workers’ bodies. Namely, it focuses on rituals ingrained in the body through repetitive, physical labour, the informal social relations that have been borne out of physical, bodily gestures, and upon which workers build or learn to engage meaningfully in dealing with ambiguity, social resistance, and difference. In short, Chap. 8 ‘demonstrates the functions of the body in constructing social competency’ (Wacquant, 2015, p.  7), or how ‘physical skills … apply to social life’ (Sennett, 2012, p. 199). Logan’s case connects the threads discussed so far. He shares with other migrant workers introduced here, and by extension the many other migrant manual workers I encountered in this market, the circadian adjustments required in order to work the nightshift and endure the physical suffering, bodily exhaustion, mental alienation, and social isolation that this work provokes. However, his case also brings to the foreground specific elements of the embodiment of institutional presence through organisational labour disciplinary practices. Logan’s experiences and troubles in climbing the social and organisational hierarchy in his 17  years of night market work are ‘stamped by membership in the collectives and attachments to institutions’ (Wacquant, 2014). Someone like Logan uses his body to give orders and carry out practices that the other three actors experience at the receiving end. Although he too was at the receiving end one time, Logan is now in an authoritative position higher than Gică, the foreman. This position is released from the incessant mistreatment, wage cuts and debt escalation that characterise highly regimented workplaces like theirs. Logan can and will defend and serve his employers’ goals, especially the goal of extracting capital with the least possible investment in employees. Moreover, Logan’s cumulative experiences as a salesman and former owner of a trading company, enables him to embody the ‘class habitus’ specific to managers, traders, and owners, in and outside of the market. For these reasons, his case is essential for this analysis. The habitus of nightwork cannot be fully understood without the role of people like Logan since he embodies everything needed to ‘inculcate, cultivate, and reward distinct but transposable sets of categories, skills, and desires among their participants’ (Bourdieu, 1998  in Wacquant, 2014). Logan had sedimented the habitus of nightwork and had reaped the rewards in a job that he was so absorbed by.

176

6  Habitus of Nightwork

6.3 Habitus of Nightwork This chapter has used a Bourdieusian conceptual framework. The New Spitalfields night market has been approached as the site of production and operation of a particular habitus, that is, the habitus of nightwork. Additionally, embodied histories have been foregrounded to demonstrate how this habitus forms and manifests in the lived experience of four nightworkers. These worker’s bodies are their ‘stock-in trade’ (Wacquant, 2004, p. 129) or their ‘means of production’ (Wacquant, 1995, p. 67). They sell their labour and skills in exchange for a living wage, regardless of their place in the hierarchy at this night market. They incorporate bodily practices (e.g., men stand and load all night; women walk with blisters on their feet, and all must remain alert whilst up and working at night). They try, but do not necessarily succeed, to avoid the repetitiveness of manual work and cope with the demanding activities and rhythms of nightwork. Lexa occupies the most precarious position among the four workers. Her short history at the market reveals the struggles of the inexperienced nightworker and the abuses that female workers are more likely to experience than men in this masculine environment. She shares with the others the hardships of market nightwork in an environment regulated by soft and unobserved rules. Despite her determination, these experiences have tested her abilities to inhabit the dispositions needed to perform competitively in the nocturnal landscape of the market. She endures because of her aim to save money fast and bring her young daughter to the U.K. Her case demonstrates most vividly how tiny the increments in the pay cheque are for women at the market. Basrí personifies the trapped migrant who despite living in the same city with his family, is always away from home and struggles to divide his time and energy between nightwork and family commitments. Though nightshifting at the market is hard, this is this family’s main source of income. Basrí needs to sacrifice himself and their time together and get the job done so that his wife can take care of their three children. He repeatedly emphasises that he does not have a choice and continues despite the senseless and stressful working conditions. Gică’s exploitative ways of getting his workers to do the jobs needed to be done is the cause of much of the other workers’ stress. He has embodied the post-­circadian capitalist regime of discipline and does not require expert language skills to apply it onto others. Moreover, he mirrors the exploitative behaviour of the higher-ups, from salesmen and middle level managers to the ‘precious’ customers. Some of the individuals belonging to the higher echelons shout at and even kick workers. Others, like Lexa’s café manager, unlawfully deduct their staff’s wages, a common practice among traders at New Spitalfields. Gică reflects a position of micro-power, which he and all above him cannot seem to relinquish in their interactions with the lowly loaders and forklift drivers. All the years that he spent learning the craft of manipulating co-workers are unveiled in his current nightly practices. There is a direct correlation between bodily capital and labour, which is a co-­ dependency that puts its mark on the habitus of nightwork. This is better revealed in

6.3  Habitus of Nightwork

177

Gică’s case–the agent who enables a form of capital accumulation to ‘appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labour’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 280). Gică represents Wacquant’s boxers at work, who exploit their bodily capital and learning. His laurels do not come in the form of prizes, but with every act of submission and obedience by the lowly workers. The foreman’s regimenting practices determine the only acceptable behaviour under his command – the obedient individual, which has been portrayed via the two low-paid manual workers, Lexa and Basrí. They obediently followed orders. In Basrí’s case, there is also a small possibility to avoid the micro-power of the foreman –‘though this is really a curse fortifying the division between a lowly employee and middle manager’ (Jeschke in conversation with Lisa in Werker Collective et al., 2017). These three cases demonstrate that there are differences of degrees in how bodily learning is acquired, what each can do and to what extent apply the bodily knowledge to reduce or prevent the post-circadian capitalist regime of discipline from completely reducing them to bio-automatons. Yet, the fourth case of Logan, further clarifies these differences. All nightworkers, Logan included, to different degrees share the physical suffering, social isolation and circadian adjustments involved in working the nightshift. The practices, embedded through a continuum of interactions between habitus and the field, makes the first three workers competent within the night market social space but less competent outside of it, though Lexa’s eventual escape demonstrates that in certain cases competence can be acquired. Unlike the other three persons, Logan has sedimented the habitus of nightwork and ‘reaped the rewards’ in a job that he was so absorbed by (Wacquant, 2015, p. 4). However, this has happened gradually and strenuously. His experiences, and specifically the troubles in climbing the social and organisational hierarchy in his 17 years of nightwork at the market, are ‘stamped by membership in the collectives and attachments to institutions’ (Wacquant, 2014). His knowledge is not only reliant on the embodied knowledge, but also on structures that include sets of individuals, networks, and organisations outside of the company he works for, or a set of bodily skills. He is proficient at applying such skills sets that he himself internalised through nocturnal work relations and diurnal capital accumulation. He demonstrates an institutionalised set of skills inculcated as he progressed up the organisational hierarchy. More to this, Logan’s position permits practices that the other three have no insight into. Because of their limited position in the night market hierarchy, they cannot perform specific duties, such as dismissals, as part of their disciplinary methods. Though Gică performs some of these duties, Logan’s actions speak closer to class habitus than the foreman’s ever will. As the middle-level manager, Logan makes his decisions about his workers not from the conviction that they deserve the rights given to them, but on the basis that they should be appreciative of his indulgence. Logan does not convey an image of satisfaction drawn from power over his workers, but from ‘fusing with the mask’–the persona he puts on at work whilst monitoring the lower-waged others and their progress (Werker Collective et  al., 2017). He acts in a specific manner because he follows a particular work ethos

178

6  Habitus of Nightwork

practised within the social landscape of the market, he himself being to an extent subject to the business owners’ whose companies he runs. Though Logan is the least precarious of these four persons and not detached from the privileges that he holds, the role that he has in disciplining the workers (i.e., controlling their time and liberties) is critical. He is one of those who controls and dictates how workers like Lexa, Basrí and even Gică experience the nightshift. Such people are in a position of power in which they instrumentalise drill sergeants like Gică to carry out tasks that slowly, but surely inscribe and deposit into the bodies and minds of manual nightworkers a kind of embodied knowledge. I call this ‘habitus of nightwork’. Workers learn and develop bodily management techniques to adapt and resist regimes of disciplines. Those bodies who do not develop such techniques are slowly and surely crushed by these methods of destruction. Work breaks them. Other bodies, like Logan’s, which transcend these methods of destruction and acquire qualities of a class habitus, they break work instead. In short, the habitus of nightwork forms and is then deployed as bodily knowledge by the many lower-paid workers in order to adapt and survive the nightshift, and by the few high-­ ups to make sure that the jobs get done.

References Allison, A. (1994). Nightwork: Pleasure, sexuality and corporate masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. The University of Chicago. Basnyat, B., & Schepens, B. (2001). The burden of the Himalayan porter [2]. High Altitude Medicine and Biology, 2(2), 315–316. https://doi.org/10.1089/152702901750265431 Bastien, G. J. (2005). Energetics of load carrying in Nepalese porters. Science, 308(5729), 1755–1755. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1111513 Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In Readings in economic sociology (pp. 280–291). Blackwell Publishers Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470755679. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason: On the theory of action. On the theory of action. Standford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Standford University Press. Csordas, T. J. (1990). Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. Ethos, 18(1), 5–47. https://doi. org/10.1525/eth.1990.18.1.02a00010 de Casanova, E.  M., & Jafar, A. (Eds.). (2013). Bodies without borders. Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137365385 Ehrenreich, B. (2011). Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America. Henry Holt. Holmes, S. M. (2013a). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States (1st ed.). University of California Press. Holmes, S.  M. (2013b). “Is it worth risking your life?”: Ethnography, risk and death on the U.S.-Mexico border. Social Science and Medicine, 99, 153–161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2013.05.029 Jensen, J., & Vincent, A. (2017). High altitude cerebral edema (HACE). https://europepmc.org/ article/nbk/nbk430916. Accessed 7 June 2021. Lorey, I., & Butler, J. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Verso Books. Accessed 31 May 2021. Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Verso. Accessed 4 Jan 2023.

References

179

McNay, L. (1991). The Foucauldian body and the exclusion of experience. Hypatia, 6(3), 125–139. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1991.tb00259.x Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88. https://doi. org/10.1080/03085147300000003 Rajaram, P.  K. (2015). Common marginalizations: Neoliberalism, undocumented migrants and other surplus populations. Migration, Mobility, & Displacement, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.18357/ mmd11201513288 Pathak, G. S. (2010). Delivering the nation: The Dabbawalas of Mumbai. South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies, 33(2), 235–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2010.493280 Percot, M. (2005). Dabbawalas, tiffin carriers of Mumbai: Answering a need for specific catering (pp. 1–10). Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Urbaine/CNRS. Sahraoui, N. (2020). From everyday racist incidents at work to institutional racism: Migrant and minority-ethnic workers’ experiences in older-age care. In IMISCOE research series (pp. 81–99). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­25089-­8_5 Scheper-Hughes, A. N., & Lock, M. M. (1987). The mindful body: A prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology. Medical Anthropological Quarterly, 1(1), 6–41. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/648769 Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism (1st ed.). W.W. Norton & Co. Accessed 9 June 2021. Sennett, R. (2012). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation (1st ed.). Yale University Press. Accessed 9 June 2021. Sharma, S. (2013). Because the night belongs to lovers: Occupying the time of precarity. Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies, 11(1), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/1479142 0.2013.828384 Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke Universtiy Press. Strathern, A.. (1996). Body thoughts. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Wacquant, L. J. D. (2004). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/425391 Wacquant, L. J. D. (2014). Homines in extremis: What fighting scholars teach us about Habitus. Body & Society, 20(2), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X13501348 Wacquant, L. J. D. (2015). For a sociology of flesh and blood. Qualitative Sociology, 38(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-­014-­9291-­y Wacquant, L. (1995). Pugs at work: Bodily capital and bodily labour among proffesional boxers. Body & Society, 1(1), 65–93. Werker Collective, Vishmidt, M., & Jeschke, L. (2017). 365 days of invisible work. (M. Roig Blesa, B. Choi, R. Delfos, & Y. van der Heide, Eds.) (1st ed.). Spector Books. Accessed 7 June 2021.

Chapter 7

Embodied Precariousness

In the previous chapters, I have presented the ways in which migrant manual nightworkers experience being on the lowest level of precariousness in an unequal labour system. I focused on both the structural mechanisms that determine work precariousness, from a lack of labour regulation and the harsh disciplinary measures to the labour intensification and time regimentation, as well as the effects of precarious nightwork on workers, from the physical depletion to their social isolation. The companies that operated at New Spitalfields devised policies that allowed them to extract labour from workers without contracts and without paying for overtime, annual leave nor bank holiday rates. In short, this is a structurally enforced precariousness that exempts companies from accountability, devolves risks and passes costs onto workers. I have also shown why and how nightworkers were trapped at the bottom of this unequal labour system. Initially, many nightworkers felt empowered by the opportunities that they had heard about from ‘successful’ nightworkers. Nightwork seemed to be about the freedom to choose how and when one worked. Yet, even after several years of nightshifts at the New Spitalfields night market, very few had reached a level where they were afforded that degree of independence. Nightwork had not offered the same possibilities to everybody, but upon arriving at the market many were unable to anticipate the time trap that lay ahead, which was to keep them in years of troubling precariousness. At worst, as one co-worker, Fakir, confessed to me on a cold morning at about 4 am as he sat on a forklift in the front car park: ‘I came here [from Pakistan] and said to myself that after I saved £10,000, I’ll go back. Ten years have passed and I still haven’t saved it. The work here, at this night market … it’s all in vain. It goes down the drain’. Workers like Fakir placed high hopes on nighttime work, yet often ended up as victims of their predatory employers. In this chapter, I continue to peel the layers of precariousness, but do so by going under the skin, so to say, of these migrant manual nightworkers. Nightwork exacerbates precariousness by undoing workers’ circadian rhythms, resulting in greater alienation and exclusion, as well as psycho-physical undoing. Close to a decade of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_7

181

182

7  Embodied Precariousness

my life has been spent investigating, as well as living through precariousness myself. I was acquainted with precariousness since the 90’s as a manual migrant worker in Istanbul, but my understanding of the embodied dimensions of precariousness only gained weight as I began to work among the migrant manual nightworkers at New Spitalfields and directly experienced the exhaustive bodily, behavioural and mental micro-processes and strategies involved in the ‘adaptation’ of the human body to precariousness. A few clarifications are necessary. Not all nightworkers at Spitalfields experienced this level of precariousness. In addition to this, precariousness is not only particular to nightwork. For instance, there are precarious workers in day jobs all over the world, as precariousness has become widespread in the contemporary world. Furthermore, there are nighttime jobs that are not precarious at all (e.g., nightlife venue management or stockbroking in London for Asian trading markets) or at all times (e.g., clerical work, public servant work, clinical occupations or parttime office roles). However, for migrants who work in precarious jobs at night, one experiences this embodied precariousness. This is a specific type of bodily humiliation, destruction and decay; a psycho-physical condition of uncertainty made in flesh and blood, which is unlike the existential suffering of ill health and death that Butler (2004) mentions, but close to the ‘broken body’ that Molé (2008, 2010) speaks about.

7.1 Under My Skin As argued in Chapter Two, it made sense to experiment with nightnography and explore the micro-processes by which nightworkers’ bodies become burdened with and by precariousness. In early 2015, after some time of wandering around the market hall asking for any kind of work, I finally found employment at the New Spitalfields night market. I wrote in Chap. 4 that my position changed from that of an outsider to an insider. But, even in the early stages of seeking work, my English accent gave away that I was not the regular migrant jobseeker. The wholesale store managers were used to seeing people with minimal English language skills knocking at their porta cabin doors. Still, I managed to gain access into this market and throughout this time ‘learn by body … how the social order inscribes itself in bodies’ (Bourdieu, 1990, 2000, p. 141) (Fig. 7.1). Nightworkers incorporated practical knowledge with somatic changes to adapt to night rhythms and develop bodily management techniques to respond to the harsh labour regimes. They learnt to enact bodily practices and perform with competency as they reproduced their labour power at night. The less educated workers at the New Spitalfields market had limited to no English language skills, yet they learnt to become efficient and competitive in the market. They grasped their roles as they went and became resilient loaders, fast drivers and even salesmen. More inexperienced night market loaders identified fruit and vegetables in the crates, boxes and sacks despite not having reading and writing skills in English (some were also illiterate in their mother tongue). They carved their routes through the columns of hundreds of items located in various sections on both ground and upper floors. They

7.1  Under My Skin

183

Fig. 7.1  Basrí carrying a load of mangoes

associated the products’ features (size, colour, weight, country of origin) with the help of their senses of smell, taste and touch. They acquired the physically demanding techniques of grabbing, picking, pulling and twisting using their wrists and bodies within the first few nights on the job (see Fig. 7.2).1 The Turkish, Romanian, Pakistani and Bulgarian workers who wanted to earn more money, learnt to drive the forklifts. Though some hardly spoke or understood English, they received the necessary training from an English instructor, watched English language tutorials and learnt to drive by following the instructions that were demonstrated in English. Additionally, male loaders carried tonnes of produce on their bodies, drivers transported and delivered lorry loads of pallets of fresh and frozen produce, and female café servers walked thousands of miles on foot between the store, lorries and customers’ vans parked throughout the 31 acres of Spitalfields market. Beyond the physical burden of carrying the goods on their bodies and withstanding the nighttime work, these nightworkers willingly extended their bodies into the social world of work. For instance, they acquainted themselves with the names of  Nightshift worker repetitively executes movements in manual handling of lifting crates, grabbing sacks, and resting boxes on the shoulder to carry to/from pallets throughout the nightshift. 1

184

7  Embodied Precariousness

Fig. 7.2  In this frame-by-frame sequence, Basrí, the loader, is shown executing repetitive, micro-­ movements in manual handling: gripping and grabbing 5 kg onion sacks; lifting 7–10 kg crates; carrying a load of 11 boxes of mangoes; and lifting again 20 kg sack of potatoes. The two photos in the lower left corner shows him carrying a 70 kg load of mangoes by resting it on his right arm and shoulder as he balances the load with his left arm. I foreground Basrí to visually depict the dexterity required to undertake this sequence of actions. The visual arrangement (above) compiles a set of movements, steps, twists, and turns that a loader encounters in a repetitive manner throughout his nights of labour. Basrí ‘loading in action’ consists of sequences that include being handed out an order by the foreman; preparing the space for the pallet and carrying on from the stack to an area that the loaders decide; then the gestures of grabbing, picking, gripping, twisting, and moving several hundred of products follow in an unthinkable manner during incessant rhythms, the peak of the nightshift. Source: Author http://bit.ly/blckbstr2

the regular customers, their order preferences, the product types, the nights and time when these customers would arrive and leave. This was their social space, where they interacted with co-workers, managers, customers and market constabulary officers, and sedimented inside their bodies whilst inhabiting the market landscape six nights per week. As I have learnt through inhabiting this space and time alongside them, it was a mix of sheer effort and burden executed and felt without thinking. It is the embodied form of knowledge and not discourse that allowed them to navigate that specific field in which their skills were acquired and applied in that social corner of the night. My research involved operationalising from the ground up an understanding of habitus as the scaffolding for the embodied precariousness in the world of

7.1  Under My Skin

185

nightwork. Initially, I relied on skills that I embodied during my previous engagement with nightwork. As the fieldwork progressed and I deepened into the nightnography with my body, I allowed the experience to enter deep under my skin. In the early months, my habitus began forming from having to wake up in the evenings and prepare meals and eat before travelling to work, and then working during the deep hours of the night. In the interim stages, I acquired bodily ‘the taste and aches of action’ (Wacquant, 2004, p. viii). Some actions were only slightly noticeable, whilst others became burdensome. I became increasingly aware of aches and pains I was having that I neither desired nor anticipated feeling in my body. Over the course of the fieldwork, I learnt how to re-adjust my body to reduce these pains caused from heavy lifting, and to re-organise my bedroom for the need to sleep during the daytime. In the latter stages, it was the acute feelings of bodily and mental exhaustion that indicated how my normal circadian rhythms had changed from when I had functioned diurnally (by being awake in the day) to now needing to use the daytime hours to sleep and relax. Gradually, I had become a competent loader and invested financially and physically into learning to drive a forklift. In this chapter, I use my bodily experiences to reveal the unarticulated -these are the inarticulable processes and they are unspoken because of the unspeakable meanings underlying the experiences of precariousness. I also present some of my perspectives on debates that exist within the emergent literature on embodied anthropology in migration, in order to explore the embodied precariousness that migrant manual nightworkers experience (Holmes, 2013a, b; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016). In these terms, I aim to describe my co-workers’ experiences as bodily consequences of precariousness, which they found difficult to explain in our conversations. I thus, produced this data as I began to register the effects inflicted onto my body, from the pains and aches that I suffered, and through which I gained the needed insights into embodied, social suffering and hierarchy-produced precariousness. I collected this data not only with my eyes and ears alone, but in my shoulders that hurt under the heavy weight of loaded crates, trays and sacks; for the fear that my sore knees are going to give out under the weight at any point; due to sweats and stress given the pressured to complete orders to keep my job; in my lower back pains that were worse when I stood up after the breaks; in the blisters on my toes locked in for long hours under toe capped boots; and blisters on my gloveless fingers grabbing, twisting, lifting numberless items in one nightshift alone; or accumulated through lack of day sleep, and conversely the long hours of staying awake in which I tried to hack into my circadian rhythms so that I will be alert and proficient whilst working at night.

7.1.1 Becoming a Nightworker The following vignettes offer glimpses into my first period working at the market from January to February 2015, during when I was trying to adjust to my new weekly schedule, which consisted of working 10.5  hour nightshifts six nights per week.

186

7  Embodied Precariousness

Vignette №1 29 January 2015 First nightshift Daytime sleep duration: 4.5 hours Total walking distance during nightshift: 13 km Nightshift duration: 9.5 hours; 1:00 am–10:30 am Commuting time: 1 hour and 50 minutes each way I coped well during my first nightshift, at least I was up and standing all night. After the long commute, I feel like I am plodding in my thinking, and physically too. I am about to have brunch at 11:55 am. All I can think about right now is how fast I can eat so I can lie down and sleep. Still, I am overjoyed that I could stay awake through my first nightshift and during my commute to and from Spitalfields market.

Vignette №2 6 February 2015 First week of nightshifts Daytime sleep duration before nightshift: 5 hours Total walking distance during nightshift: 3.6 km Nightshift duration: 10.5 hours; 12:00 am–10:30 am Commuting time: 1 hour and 40 minutes each way It is very difficult to stay awake and work between 4:00–6:00 am. I have the feeling that my legs are going to give out under me. However, after 6:00 am something happens and I feel re-energised. My eating patterns have changed. I ate at midnight, snacked between 2:00–3:00 am and had breakfast around midday the next day. I have been writing my field notes every morning following each nightshift. This is why I only get into bed at around 1:00 pm. Since I started nightshifting, I have only slept 4–5 hours at most in the daytime. I am also adopting new sleeping habits to adjust to my new daily sleep pattern. I bought a pair of earplugs, and I pull the blinds to surround myself in darkness before I fall asleep. But 4.5 hours of sleep is never enough and I wake up tired from the night before. I feel pains in my right clavicle and the joint of my right shoulder where I have been resting the produce that I carry. The load weight varies between the sacks of potatoes which weigh up to 20 kg each, the 15 kg sacks of onions and the 10 kg boxes of cassava. During the nightshift, I often felt weak and confused. The period from 2 am to 4  am was the most difficult. That timeframe is the nadir or the window in the biological-­circadian 24 hour rhythms when humans are at their lowest level of activity. At the nadir, I often sensed a loss of balance. Between February and August 2015, I worked on nightshifts of up to 16 hours six nights per week. The intensity,

7.1  Under My Skin

187

as well as the workload, almost tripled. My body ached and suffered as I re-adjusted and learnt to cope. I weighed 83.2 kg when I began nightshifting. After 1 month, I weighed 79.4 kg. The video recordings and the field notes that I wrote during my first month of fieldwork indicated that I began to feel the undesirable effects of these changes both physically and mentally. I lived on a reversed cycle of work and sleep and only rested on Saturdays. On average, after beginning the nightshift work, my usual 7–8 hours of sleep per night had been replaced by a 4.5 hour daytime sleep. Over time, my total daytime hours of sleep dropped further and I missed on average, 3 hours of daytime sleep. As I increasingly immersed myself in the field, I often experienced weakness and confusion both physically and mentally, and this became part of my livelihood and work life. I recollect the bodily aches and pains that I experienced when I overloaded my body with products, which placed pressure on my joints, muscles and ligaments, as recorded in the vignette above. Walking at work was also exhausting.2 At the first workplace, I walked an average of 6 km each night. At the second workplace, the average distance increased to between 12–13 km, especially in the first few weeks when I could not easily find the produce that I needed to prepare the orders I was given by the foreman. On a nightshift before or after a bank holiday, the exhaustion was unimaginable. By the end of the year in December 2015, I had walked a total of 2310  km within the market premises. Vignette №3 3 April 2015 Record breaking – 25 km walked during nightshift Daytime sleep duration: 5 hours Total walking distance during nightshift: 25 km Nightshift duration: 11.5 hours; 11:00 pm −10:30 am Commuting time: 1 hour each way I survived the first 11.5-hour nightshift with only 5  hours sleep the day before. The Pacer application that I use to monitor my physical activity recorded 37,977 steps or the equivalent of 25 km of walking that night alone. I walked most of that distance whilst carrying produce by hand and on my shoulders. During the six-night week, the intensity of the toil varies as does the length of time when a loader is active through the night.

 Figure 7.3 shows the number of steps converted into kilometres. The intensity of the physical effort changes from one night to the next. The frequency shows activity by the hour. The busiest shifts are on Sunday night (shown as Monday because Pacer collects data (steps) from midnight set on 24:00 display). Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday nightshifts are the busiest of the week because customers stock-up before and after Saturday nights when the market is shut. Please note that the distance is covered during the ‘active time’ period and not during the time Pacer tracks each step. The lower values (under 5k) show errors, e.g., phone battery depleted during the shift. 2

188

7  Embodied Precariousness

Vignette №4 29 April 2015 Up and working beyond the nadir point Total walking distance overnight: 16 km Daytime sleep duration: 4.5 hours Nightshift duration: 11 hours; 11:00 pm–09:00 pm Commuting time: 1 hour each way Most sales take place up to 3:00 am. By this time, most pallets have been cleared off the central aisle and moved into the company’s stand. Consequently, there is hardly any space left to even place a foot inside the stand. Among us loaders, there is not much energy left either. This is the time of the nadir when humans are at their lowest point in the 24 hour circadian, biological rhythm. Yet, at 3:00 am the market has its own pace and to those in charge it means slaying us, the workers. We need to squeeze out whatever energy is left in our bodies so that the rest of the orders can continue to be shipped out. The nadir is completely ignored. A couple of times my knees gave out under me. My eyes closed whilst I was standing and reading aloud one of my regular customer’s invoices. After months of nightwork, it was easier to bear or find tricks to pass through the nadir point. But it unmistakably arrived every morning between 4:00 am and 6:00 am. When daylight would open the sky, energy got rekindled in my mind and body, and that’s how it went on.

During that year of fieldwork I lost 14 kg. By combining the measurements of distances, weights and times, I hope that this data demonstrates that the efforts nightworkers face whilst lifting and carrying loads with their hands adds additional issues and concerns regarding the health of these workers, and illustrates the points I have made about the importance of sleep or lack thereof (Fig. 7.3).

7.1.2 Becoming a Loader A loader’s body is the main tool for executing the manual muscle work at the night market. Each night, I lifted and carried loads on my body that were in total around five to ten times greater than my body weight or equivalent to approximately 500 kg of fruit and vegetables, and I handled and pushed a manual forklift loaded with pallets weighing 1–2 tonnes of produce. Depending on how busy a nightshift would be, an experienced and exceptionally strong worker like Basrí could carry loads totalling around 2–3 tonnes of produce per night. As an apprentice loader, I hit the ground running though I had only received a 30 minute induction, at best. I learnt, acted and evaluated the rest of the rules and the techniques of loading and carrying the produce, whilst on the go. Evaluation of one’s performance is unmistakably

7.1  Under My Skin

189

Fig. 7.3  Descriptive data shows the active time vs total time (6h34m vs 13h43m), the distance covered (18.8 km), the average number of steps (12,713) and the total for the 4 days (88,992). On some nights I would be left without battery on my phone. And every Saturday the night market was closed

measured by the small scratches on one’s bare hands and the aches and pains that subsequently appear in certain parts of the body (bone structures or lower back). An experienced loader covers distances three to four times longer and faster than an apprentice. Yet, both carry loads with their bodies that lead to a ‘particular (re) socialisation of physiology’, which is needed for the loader to perform ‘habitually, kinetically in a temporarily structured’ manner fitting to the demands of the field (Wacquant 2004, pp. 59–60). In the places where I worked, manual forklifts were scarce, and the engine forklifts were rarely nearby when needing to ask for a co-­ worker’s help. For these reasons, loaders relied on their bodies to lift and carry pallet loads of produce. I tried to emulate my new work colleagues who, for instance, could lift five crates of tomatoes at a time. That was beyond my power, so I had to reduce what I lifted to only three crates, but this slowed me down. I observed my co-workers movements intensely to try to perform as quickly as they did, which included learning how to pick up the tomato crates whilst walking. That was a feat for me, but for them it was automatic. They proceeded with their right hand at the bottom of the first crate and reached the top of the fifth crate with their left arm, which was elevated above head height. Then with one hand holding the bottom and the other holding the top crate, they lifted all five crates and transferred them swiftly and directly onto their right shoulder, all in what seemed like one effortless action done with apparent mindlessness, which really had become second nature, mind and body united. The experienced co-workers could execute these actions naturally, precisely and whilst on the move without hesitation, deviation or the need for repetition in just under 10 seconds.

190

7  Embodied Precariousness

I learnt over the course of a few months that all the repetitive movements of grabbing, lifting and loading were executed in a specific order and respected certain bodily postures. You needed to face the crates sideways, grab and lift with the whole body and from the hips and not rely on arm muscle. In fact, reducing the muscular work to a minimum and relying on techniques like moving the hips in line with the shoulders and keeping them under the weight of the load would guarantee one’s efficiency and prevent causing injuries or pain when you suddenly needed to twist and twirl the body to navigate through the narrow aisles of the stores. As a FruitVeg employee, I was trained to work fast under Basrí’s instruction. These knowledge and skills had long sedimented into his body. He demonstrated how to best position my body so that I could lift a heavy crate on my shoulder without hurting myself and I learnt how to grip with great speed and hold in each hand several sacks of onions. He explained how to manoeuvre a mechanical forklift and how to stack boxes on a pallet. Basrí could move through the market premises blindfolded. He pointed out to me where the fridges were that stored the perishable products and helped me quickly locate apples from New Zeeland or papaya from Brazil. He showed me various types of exotic fruits and taught me how to eat them. In the few dead moments during trading, we snuck in hidden corners together and ate the veggies and fruits that he picked from the crates. In addition, he warned me who the difficult customers were, shared with me impressions he had about our work colleagues and advised me to exercise caution in interactions with Gică, the foreman. Bourdieu contends that ‘the hallmark of practice … follows a logic that unfolds directly in bodily gymnastics’ (cited by Wacquant 2004, p. 58). Therefore, to understand the intensity at which one performs as a night market loader, one needs to immerse oneself in it, learn it first-hand and incorporate the experience moment by moment.

7.1.3 Working as a Loader Loaders worked under the command of a foreman. This man gave them a ‘ticket’ (i.e., a printed invoice) and they rushed to find an empty pallet and an empty space on the work floor. They did not have the luxury to walk so ran as we loaded the listed products on our bodies, carried them and then piled them up on the pallet. Space at the company trading was scarce, so finding a place was not always easy. In addition, during busy times, especially around bank holidays when pallets ran low, co-­workers and customers snatched the pallets from one another. These instances often resulted in hostile verbal exchanges between those involved in these transactions. Various factors determined a loader’s volume of work. An important factor was the scale of the business. A small family-owned business had fewer customers and consequently, less orders. For the loaders, this meant a smaller volume

7.1  Under My Skin

191

of work and less stress. In contrast, larger companies with more employees and customers, were more demanding. The four workers who were foregrounded in the previous chapters, Lexa, Basrí, Gică, Logan and I worked at one of these large wholesalers. Loaders walked faster or ran and looked for shortcuts to reach the produce and their assigned pallet. They had to learn various techniques to ease the lifting and carrying of more and heavier crates and sacks at once. Other factors increased the travail for the loaders. One factor was the scarcity of the products. Scarcity meant that on a particular night, only a few companies had a certain type of product. Tomatoes, for instance, were a very popular product. Tomatoes were sold in 5  kg crates and wholesale customers bought in very large quantities and thus, they were sold very quickly. At such times, all customers would gravitate towards the company with tomatoes and in panic, would buy larger quantities than usual. Thus, the loaders’ efforts had to multiply several times. Another factor was the ‘price war’ between large companies. Such a ‘war’ happened when there was an abundance of certain products, let’s say tomatoes again, for they were more perishable than other vegetables. The rival was usually between two or three wholesalers among the larger companies that could afford to drop the price. Inevitably, a ‘price war’ could ensue once a week. Once again, the volume of work for loaders and forklift porters at these times increased many times over. On a nightly basis, we would have to carry thousands of crates of product, e.g., tomatoes, to stay with this example. One customer alone could buy over 100 crates of tomatoes, in addition to over 200 other items on the invoice. The high volume demands, coupled with the pressure from customers and the scrutinising presence of the watchful manager or supervisor who observed us from his post, forced us to move faster and faster. Between 12:00 am and 3:00 am, the peak hours of the night market, which were sometimes extended further into the morning, no one rested. We were on our toes, up and down the stairs and carrying loads on our shoulders for hours at a time until we saw the dawn through the crevices of the market hall’s roof. We could only hear the whistling commands, the high-pitched voices of forklift drivers yelling at us to move pallets out of the way, the customers calling out at drivers to transport their pallets to the car and the foreman’s shouting at us to load, carry and wrap the orders more rapidly. Every night, it seemed that hell descended on the Spitalfields grounds.

Vignette №5 7 April 2015 Burdensome bank holidays Daytime sleep duration: 4 hours Total walking distance during nightshift: 9.5 km Nightshift duration: 11.8 hour | 10:00 pm −9:30 am Commuting time: 1 hour each way (continued)

192

7  Embodied Precariousness

I detest bank holidays since doing nightshifts at the market. The nightshift before and after the Easter bank holiday is murderously busy. The customers buy more on Thursday and Friday nights, as well as the Monday night following the Easter bank holiday. They buy products to stock up before and after a bank holiday. I feel as if the end of the world arrives because customers seem to buy everything off the stands. If a product is out of stock and they see it on a pallet prepared for another customer, they steal it and put it on their pallet. Everybody shouts at whomever is nearby. The manager shouts at the supervisor, the supervisor at the loaders, the loaders to one another, the salesmen shout at forklift drivers and loaders, and the customers also shout at loaders and at forklift drivers for not having prepared their orders fast enough. Forklift drivers argue among themselves over who should go and pick up which pallet, and when nothing gets resolved they block the central aisle and start beeping and screaming at each other from the seat of their forklift just like in road rage scenes. Traffic stops and everybody protests until the way is cleared, one way or another. Inevitably, by 3:00 am you hear from the café delivery women that at least one physical fight took place between workers that night. It is mayhem! Sweating and swearing, loaders performed the same tasks repeatedly. The new loaders bled from the wounds or blisters on their hands because they did not wear gloves and their skin had not yet toughened. Whilst frequency and fluctuation varied between Sunday or Thursday, the busiest nights, there was very little to no variation in the loaders’ tasks. Every night, loaders received invoices, picked up pallets, loaded crates and boxes, completed the orders, wrapped the pallets and moved them onto the central aisle by hand for forklift drivers to pick up and deliver the pallets outside the market hall. It was the same monotonous work, night after night. The manual actions of loaders stopped where the forklift manoeuvring the heavy pallets took over. Each night, the rhythm of the night market increased incessantly until loaders felt exhausted. To keep pace with the speed of work, they turned to energising beverages. One co-worker in his mid-40s, for example, consumed four energy drinks per night, sometimes mixed with whisky brought by the café server. As he lifted hundreds of crates of vegetables, he quenched his thirst with coffees, which were also sometimes mixed with whiskey, too. He drank everything whilst on the move. Regardless of their position, on the organisational scale, from loaders upwards, men drank alcohol and other energising drinks in high amounts to endure the load of the night. I tested energy drinks on my body, but after several nights had to stop as my heart rate increased with each can of Redbull. Though classified to be as safe as coffee, these energising drinks felt almost lethal for my heart rate. After ingesting each first can of Redbull, a sickening feeling would follow whilst on my way to lifting more crates and sacks. The adverse effects that I felt on my breathing and the tingling sensations in my fingertips made me completely stop drinking them. Whenever a customer offered me a can, I accepted it but passed it on to my co-workers whom

7.1  Under My Skin

193

I knew continued to consume it, regardless of what I described to them. However, if a customer offered me a coffee with two sugars, I gratefully accepted it as it helped to decrease the weariness that I felt in my body, on my sleepy eyes and on my brain. After 3:00 am, by now 4–5 hours into their shifts, loaders could break for food. However, there was no place to rest. The managing authorities tried to squeeze every drop of sweat out of the workers’ physical resources and turn it into capital. They did not offer eatery spaces, a kitchen or any facilities. Loaders ate and smoked whilst standing, and did so frugally as breaks could be interrupted without notice. Porters could at least eat whilst sitting on the forklift and had the option to stop at the market café and eat a snack. Food was available from the market cafés placed around the market hall. The café servers easily covered all areas of the market hall and delivered energy drinks straight to the store so that loaders and drivers did not need to stop or interrupt their fast working rhythms. During busy nights, workers were not allowed to have their 15–20 minutes off and had to work the nightshift without food. In addition, comfort breaks were strictly monitored and in some cases, it required reporting toilet breaks. Whenever possible, I insisted on taking my break. However, at around 4:00 am and sometimes whilst on my break, at least one regular customer solicited my help to compile his order while he was present on the shop floor. At dusk, workers were allowed to sit and rest on boxes and sacks. Their bodies ached from the pains caused by the repetitive movements. I was a few months into my fieldwork when I felt a sharp pain or ‘direct embodiment’ of loading (Wacquant 2004, p. 60). I later loathed these physical pains. Everyone around me experienced them. At New Spitalfields, loaders and drivers were men, and café servers and cashiers are female. Though women did not carry heavy weights, but trays of drinks, their individual histories of precariousness accumulate in their bodies just as much as in the case of loaders and drivers. Their suffering and learning were of a different quality because their bodies engaged in similarly demanding activities whilst transitioning through socially diverse encounters, fulfilling multiple roles in any one nightshift (barista, server, saleswoman and washer). Male loaders suffered back aches from the back-breaking tasks of loading repeatedly, whilst women experienced back pain due to walking and delivering hot drinks and food to workers and customers throughout the 31 acre site of the night market. Both men and women all suffered blows from the physically draining nightly walking, but of a different nature and to differing degrees. Sometimes workers preferred to continue working so they did not feel the pain. They swept the floor or levelled produce so the stand looked appealing to customers. Yet, when the market activity slowed down, more often than not the foreman or the manager assigned various tasks to whoever was found resting. This could include anything from picking up litter, sweeping the shop floor, unwrapping new pallets of produce, levelling crates to sorting fruits and vegetables into first and second class categories. Workers were not allowed a moment of respite. The management scrutinised them continuously and kept them occupied with brain-­numbing tasks throughout the nightshift. Workers were also threatened throughout the night by their respective managers that they would be replaced by new workers if they did not sell

194

7  Embodied Precariousness

more cups of coffee and fast food or did not load faster. They all endured and resiliently carried on. As their individual and collective histories of suffering were deposited into their bodies and minds, they became more skilled and adapted to the nocturnal landscape of the market. No one cried at this market. Only the apprentice worker wept, at times, in the toilet and once outside of the market grounds. Every morning, by the time the first rays of sun could be seen peering through the glass crevices of the roof, the pallets of tomatoes, peppers and sacks of potatoes and onions disappeared and the stands looked bare and nearly empty of produce. The groceries that had required our sweat–and sometimes blood and tears–were sold by the end of almost every night. Six nights a week from 10:00 pm to 09:30 am, loaders to forklift drivers, café servers and salesmen, had to fight with the physiological circadian rhythms, especially during the nadir point when the body tends to lie down. The ‘sleepless bat’ experiences revealed a callous world. Cumulatively, the physical duress and mental strains, and the manager’s manipulative practices of a disciplined regime led newcomers to quit working within days or weeks. Only the mastery of one’s (corporeal, visual and mental) skills of coping with the carrying, walking, loading or forklift driving was the decisive factor behind those who remained. The ones with years of experience sometimes made bets that the newcomers would leave within the first week. Those who passed the test usually demonstrated an ability to overcome the horrific duress of those first weeks, to stay awake, be up and alert during the nadir point and engage in the strenuous, repetitive practices. If achieved, one earnt their rite of passage. In my case, this startling realisation came when I was able to start moving without thinking, swiftly executing the acts of the work required. The body carried the mind during times of duress, tiredness and mental exhaustion. Precariousness had, thus, become embodied (Fig. 7.4).

7.2 Debating Precarity and Precariousness The literature on precarity takes a socio-political approach epistemologically, whilst precariousness an existential approach ontologically. Yet, there are also recent studies that combine these ontological and epistemological positions to describe a set of processes and mechanisms that inflict precarity onto every aspect of one’s life (e.g., social, biological, physical and psychological), which make one subject to becoming precarious or living in and with precariousness in the ‘ultimate’ form of capitalist work relations, that is, ‘hybrid work’ (Armano & Murgia, 2017; Murgia & de Heusch, 2020; Pulignano et al., 2021) and the sharing economy or digital platform work (Schor, 2020). Studies in the existential camp are written by anthropologists and political theorists influenced by Butler’s (2004) work on precariousness, a companion to precarity, a notion that denotes a life condition that all of us humans are subjected to in our lifetime. These studies focus on ‘emotion and subjectivity, exploring disenfranchisement, displacement, and uncertainty’ (Kasmir, 2018, p.  3). They show how

7.2  Debating Precarity and Precariousness

195

Fig. 7.4  Loading sequences, pauses for break and interactions with co-workers

precarity ‘creates subjects who are at the mercy of marginality, anxiety, and paranoia’ (Molé (2010), apud Kasmir, 2018, p. 3). The theorists and economic sociologists who adopt the socio-political approach largely agree with the existential camp of scholars. They portray Dickensian conditions created by the contemporary globalising forces of neoliberalism or the neoliberal capitalism era that began some 40 years ago (Kasmir, 2018) and is characterised by poor social conditions leading to the creation of the ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2011) and resulting in ‘precariousness’ (Lorey & Butler, 2015). However, the two camps share terms like precarious livelihoods, precarity and precariat, which are used interchangeably to describe ‘the bare life’, ‘disposable people’, ‘surplus populations’, a ‘state of exception and wasted lives’ or ‘permanent joblessness’. A recent stream of literature overlaps these two approaches and proposes a novel lexicon for describing the process of precarity in this ‘new’ neoliberal form of work, hybrid work and the sharing economy on digital platforms, i.e., reproducing (versus disrupting) entrenched inequality (Schor, 2020). Part and parcel of these processes are flexibilisation, individualisation and disengagement of labour from capital (Choonara, 2019; Bauman, 2002; Murgia & de Heusch, 2020). Choonara inspired by Bauman (2002) argues that today’s labourers bodies are no longer tied to their bodily work as was the case in the ‘old capitalist society’ (2019, p. 24). Take for example, a food delivery worker whose wait time between orders delivered and taken anew is unpaid by the platform which pays by the piece. Their bodies experience the unbearable lightness of waiting for hours on end between orders received via digital applications. Whilst I acknowledge this reality, namely that the share

196

7  Embodied Precariousness

economy is the capitalist mode of relations of production at its worst, ‘driving precarity to its limits’ (Schor, 2020, p. 71), I show that labour is not ‘disembodied’ from the labourers’ bodies. On the contrary, today’s post-circadian capitalist era demands too that the kinds of precarious nightwork at New Spitalfields extracts capital in the same old ways, through disciplining the bodies of loaders or café servers. In other words, successful trading at New Spitalfields is tied to the ‘labourers’ bodies’ to keep work processes under control and extract a surplus of capital from their bodily labour (Bauman (2002, pp. 120–121). Supervisors like Gică discipline their bodies in ways that eventually force workers into ‘submission and exploitation’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 99). The notion of precarity in today’s meaning within employment relations as ‘increasingly contingent and flexible’ forms of work, is limited here because it focuses on the objective circumstances of work, but it excludes the subjective experiences of the workers and their bodies (Choonara, 2019, p. 37). Similar, yet less helpful than Butler’s (2004) existential take on precarity, Barbier’s (2002, p.  4) efforts to delink precarity from poverty to widen its meaning as a ‘social background present everywhere in society’ is not particularly insightful in this analysis also, because many nightworkers are poor migrants seeking to find viable ways to live and end up working at night. Although, many of these studies analytically discuss the embodied dimension of precarity, they only get ‘close’ to the skin of the subjects. Their type of ethnographic engagement, which relies on discourse alone, prevents them from exploring precarity or precariousness in more direct ways (Allison, 2016; Han, 2018; Lorey & Butler, 2015). They make their case on the ‘existential conditions of social life’ in abstract terms (Kasmir, 2018, p. 2) to illustrate a precarious life that is framed as working poverty, job instability and flexibility, wagelessness and unsteady income (Allison, 2013; Armano & Murgia, 2017; Pulignano et al., 2021), and which is associated with abandonment, survival and suffering (Han, 2018). These studies have, thus, limited explanatory potential on what happens to the workers’ bodies and subjectivities. I, thus, extract from the vast literature on precarity and precariousness a series of conceptual tools that enable me to emphasise the embodied kind of precariousness that my ‘under the skin’ ethnographic research has brought to the surface in the remaining of this chapter. However, Standing’s (2011) work is particularly useful in understanding the effects of globalisation on the pool of migrant workers in global cities that he calls ‘precariat’. From the perspectives of globalisation and critical labour studies, precarity not only invades households and workplaces, but also morphs into biographies and groups people into a class of the precariat. People are expected to be adaptable in a flexible market to the ‘as and when’ or ‘catch as one can catch’ nature and conditions of employment, as noted earlier. They are also demanded to travel to work across territorial borders. Standing (ibid) argues that this accounts for the growth of a global precariat. The precariat also includes migrant academics and creatives, but the majority are disaffected, unskilled migrants, who transact their bodily labour in exchange for meagre wages. These millions of migrants no longer have the stability to fight the precarious working conditions that the proletariat had in the past. They have become alienated, anomic,

7.2  Debating Precarity and Precariousness

197

anxious and angry (Standing, 2011, p. 19). They resent the life that ‘short-termism’ or flexi-jobs brings with it, its insecurities and that it has ‘no construction of trusting relationships built up in meaningful structures or networks’ (Standing, 2011, p. 20). They are deprived of a meaningful life and consequently, may be seething with resentment and anger against fellow citizens who experience material and social success. Standing emphasises that the precariat is the new dangerous class, for it is made of a mass of people, many who are migrants, easily manipulated because they vie with one another for jobs at the bottom of the labour market. Thus, the precariat is a conceptual tool for the current analysis as it incorporates the masses of migrant workers in glocturnal cities like London. I researched some of the most precarious workers. They were not the migrants with ‘outside options’, that is, with the power to change their conditions because they had alternatives. They were not the educated, highly skilled migrants who could turn down the offers that they did not like, choose other types of (daytime) work or return to their countries of origin. In contrast to Standing, my research highlights the vulnerability of the precariat. Those without a worthy place in society and who live with growing despair, fall prey to predatory employers, as Lexa did, for example. At worst, anxiety caused by the insecurity experienced by the most precarious workers, like Lexa or Basrí, makes them succumb to capital demands over their personal, physical and social needs for a life outside of work. This disrupts the balance between work and the domestic and social spheres of life (Mezzadra & Nielson, 2013). I also select conceptual tools from the work of political theorist Isabell Lorey (2015), for her work illuminates the specific conditions that the modern institutions of power have created and, more to the argument of this book, the impact these institutions might have on the bodies of migrants that are used up and spent in nightwork. Lorey addresses the ‘government of the precarious’, pointing out that the neoliberal subjects–made of minds and bodies–are simultaneously self-determined and subjugated. These modes of ‘subjectivation’ manifest through precariousness. In her view, precariousness, is the end result of dominating, neoliberal forms of precarity, and it refers specifically to a mind-body state. These modes of ‘subjectivation’ define subjects who negotiate their conflictual position and experience half in sovereignty and half in precariousness. An individual is a determined, self-­ governing mind and a body subordinated ‘to the conditions of […] existence’ that protect some lives and exclude others (Lorey & Butler, 2015, ePub, p. 324). Further, ‘each body finds itself potentially threatened by others who are, by definition, precarious as well’, as in Standing’s precariat and subsequently, each of the precarious subjects experience ‘forms of domination’ (Lorey, 2015, ePub, p. 351). This is a gripping argument because it shows that ‘domination turns existential precariousness into an anxiety towards others who cause harm’ (Lorey, 2015, ePub, p. 351). In other words, not only do those under constant domination lead precarious lives prone to ‘insecurity and vulnerability, destabilization and endangerment’ (Lorey & Butler, 2015, ePub, p. 302), but this group of vulnerable subjects also vie with one another, despite being considered disposable or subjugated. This structural approach enables me to underline that precarity is further aggravated in the case of ‘low-­ skilled’ migrants, who are more likely than locals or highly skilled migrants to

198

7  Embodied Precariousness

accept unskilled jobs without a work contract and at unsociable hours, their bodies therefore not infrequently bearing ‘the stigmata of experience, upon its surface’ (McNay, 1991, p. 127). With the help of these conceptual tools, this book recentres the often overlooked manual migrant nightworkers as vulnerable members of the precariat. More importantly, from a theoretical perspective the book’s primary research shows that in the case of nightworkers precarity does not only enter their minds, lives and households, but also cuts deep into their bodies, causing precariousness to bleed through and under the skin.

7.3 Embodied Precariousness This embodied precarity is not expressed through discourse, but in the bodily responses to regimes of discipline that seek to extract as much use as possible from the labouring bodies, leaving them exhausted, spent and obedient. These workers’ bodies are burdened not only by the physical toil of nightwork, but by the absence of authorities, the transformation of co-workers into ‘instruments of precarity’ and a particular working culture. The lack of regulation and support, the unwillingness of market authorities to invest in bettering conditions of work and the unwillingness of a state authority to engage with work problems, heighten embodied precarity. As narrated in the previous chapters, Basrí could not complain too much about these conditions and neither could his colleagues. Most of them lacked the English language skills that would enable them to find better jobs. In addition, all of them feared that they would be replaced overnight if they complained. They knew too well that other migrants desperately needed those jobs. They also feared that they would be replaced with ‘new blood’ if they took paid sick leave, even the 1–2 days that they could take. These workers were aware that they were expendable, so they chiselled their bodies to ensure that they remained physically competitive for their employer. They avoided confronting others directly, co-workers and superiors alike. The most they could do was to change employer. Yet, the promises of other employers were rarely fulfilled. Sharma (2014) found that the state partners up with capitalist development plans at the expense of impoverished bodies (disinvestment) to benefit the bodily capital of others (investment). These disinvested bodies have a strategic role in speeding up the incessant rhythms of capital gains. Overall, this situation opens opportunities for exploitation mechanisms handed down through work echelons and generations of abused workers. Then, there are the ‘people-instruments’ who exacerbate the precarity of their work colleagues. As recounted in the previous chapters, at New Spitalfields market, a foreman, Gică, was such an instrument. His own precarious working life forged him into a mixture of embodied insensitiveness towards co-workers and obedience to managers. He had become a ‘drill sergeant’ responsibly carrying out the mission set by the higher-ups, and imprinting a regime of discipline onto the workers. Workers docilely executed their work with bodily responses of exhaustion, perspiration and frustration.

References

199

These men also reproduce a particular working culture, which emphasises masculine toughness and discourages them from asking to stay at home and recover from sickness, and which cultivates a superficial teamwork ethos that does not allow them to collaborate. These workers train their bodies and minds to respond with docility, and survive in contexts where other actors manipulate and overpower them. They travail uninterruptedly for the fear of the unbearable pain entering their bodies when they pause for meal breaks or if taking time off work. By and large, they comply with work ethics that reproduce an on-going in-work poverty. They do not engage or are too exhausted to engage unions to represent them and advocate for their statutory rights to medical insurance, sick pay and paid annual leave. The production of worker solidarities is further undermined by a schedule opposite to the one kept by traditional labour organisations. These conditions morph precarious migrant nightworkers into submissive bio-machines frozen by the fear of being expendable and disposable. The outcome is an embodied precarity. This conceptualisation of precarity captures unseen and unstated disruptions to self, work and time in the case of labour processes underpinned by technologies of discipline. This dialectic between disciplinary power and techniques of bodily management is what constitutes workers’ subjectivities. Embodied precarity is, thus, intimately and unremarkably woven within today’s capitalist labour conditions, in its socio-­political mechanisms and material conditions that, in this case, impact on nightworkers’ daily and nightly lives, and even more so when they are migrants. Though in this book the focus is on nightwork, the conceptualisation is equally powerful for analysing other domains that deplete workers of their bodily resources and cast them into obedient and disposable bodies. This is more relevant because precarity has been normalised in many work sectors (Choonara, 2019, 2020). This conceptualisation points at a particular kind of bodily humiliation, destruction and decay, and a kind of psycho-physical condition of uncertainty made in flesh and blood. Thus, this book offers an experience laden conceptualisation of precarity, and seeks to contribute to the small body of literature that highlights this dimension through ethnographic work, rather than abstract thinking alone (Molé, 2010; Holmes, 2013a, b). In the next chapter, I will address the other relevant aspects of bodily capital accumulated through nightwork by concentrating on the fragility of cooperation in the night market and how this capital might apply in the ways one conducts their social life outside the workplace.

References Allison, A. (2013). Precarious Japan. Duke University Press. https://studiesonasia.scholasticahq. com/article/14462.pdf. Accessed 31 May 2021 Allison, A. (2016, September). Precarity: Commentary by Anne Allison. Curated Collections, Cultural Anthropology, 2014, 2014–2017. Accessed 8 June 2021. Armano, E., & Murgia, A. (2017). Hybrid areas of work in Italy. Hypotheses to interpret the transformations of precariousness and subjectivity mapping precariousness view project fathers in organizations view project. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316958621

200

7  Embodied Precariousness

Barbier, J. (2002). A survey of the use of the term précarité in French economics and sociology (No. 19). Paris. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Barbier%2C+J.+2002. +A+Survey+of+the+Use+of+the+Term+Pr%C3%A9carit%C3%A9+in+French+Economics+ and+Sociology.+Centre+d%E2%80%99Etudes+de+l%E2%80%99Emploi%2C+Working+Pa per+19. Accessed 8 June 2021. Bauman, Z. (2002). Global solidarity. Tikkun, 17(1), 12–14. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Standford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF00680104 Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason: On the theory of action. On the theory of action. Standford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Standford University Press. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso Books. Choonara, J. (2019). Insecurity, precarious work and labour markets: Challenging the orthodoxy. Palgrave Macmillan. Choonara, J. (2020). The precarious concept of precarity. Review of Radical Political Economics, 52(3), 427–446. https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613420920427 Han, C. (2018). Precarity, precariousness, and vulnerability. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47(1), 331–343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-­anthro-­102116-­041644 Holmes, S. M. (2013a). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States (1st ed.). University of California Press. Holmes, S.  M. (2013b). “Is it worth risking your life?”: Ethnography, risk and death on the U.S.-Mexico border. Social Science and Medicine, 99, 153–161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2013.05.029 Holmes, S. M., & Castañeda, H. (2016). Representing the “European refugee crisis” in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death. American Ethnologist, 43(1), 12–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12259 Kasmir, S. (2018). Precarity. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 1–15. https://doi. org/10.29164/18precarity Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Verso. Accessed 4 Jan 2023. Lorey, I., & Butler, J. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Verso Books. Accessed 31 May 2021. McNay, L. (1991). The Foucauldian body and the exclusion of experience. Hypatia, 6(3), 125–139. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1991.tb00259.x Mezzadra, S., & Nielson, B. (2013). Border as method or the multiplication of labor. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13398-­014-­0173-­7.2 Molé, N. J. (2008). Living it on the skin: Italian states, working illness. American Ethnologist, 35(2), 189–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2008.1548-­1425.00030.x Molé, N. J. (2010). Precarious subjects: Anticipating neoliberalism in northern Italy’s workplace. American Anthropologist, 112(1), 38–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-­1433.2009.01195.x Murgia, A., & de Heusch, S. (2020). It started with the arts and now it concerns all sectors: The case of smart, a cooperative of ‘salaried autonomous workers,’ 211–230. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­38246-­9_12 Pulignano, V., Murgia, A., Armano, E., & Briziarelli, M. (2021). Editorial: Non-standard work, self-employment and precariousness. Frontiers in Sociology, 5(March), 2020–2021. https://doi. org/10.3389/fsoc.2020.00063 Schor, J. (2020). After the gig. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/ 9780520974227 Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke Universtiy Press. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: New dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academics. Wacquant, L. (2004d). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/425391

Chapter 8

Fragmented Cooperation

8.1 Competition and Cooperation at New Spitalfields Market At FruitVeg, the official start time is 10 pm. Workers arrive one by one. There are no change rooms, so everyone works in the clothes they travel in. When entering the FruitVeg stand, each worker hangs their ‘lunch’ bag on the hooks fixed on the metal board sheets that separate one store from another. Then they disappear between the tall aisles of pallets stacked with fresh fruits and vegetables, minding their own business until the orders are distributed. If one could see the FruitVeg store from above in those dull moments of waiting, it would be tantamount to catching glimpses of atomised individuals. Upon my arrival at the stand one Thursday nightshift, the first co-worker I met was Muro, a 43  year old loader. He murmured, ‘Good morning’ at 10  pm as he entered the stand. Then he hid his small iron box full of rolled up cigarettes under a pallet. Throughout the night, every now and again, he would take out one cigarette from this hidden box that all other workers knew about. The last to show up was Basrí. He whispered a half-pitched, ‘Merhaba’ (‘hello’ in Turkish). The manager pretended not to notice his late arrival and continued to browse his phone. Basrí walked straight towards a porter sitting on his forklift with the engine started and leaned onto the warm framework of the forklift. His swollen eyes were testimony that he again did not get enough sleep. As I continued to observe the scene, Nomar, one of the two checkmen working at FruitVeg, walked towards Basrí with a cup of coffee in his hand. Nomar also put his hands on the forklift to warm them up whilst the engine was running. Flory, the café server, passed by the stand. Unlike these three men, she appeared lively at this early hour of the night, ready for a chat. In the end, she left with one order for an energising drink for Basrí.

Craftsmen who become good at making things, develop physical skills which apply to social life – Richard Sennett (2012a, p. 199). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_8

201

202

8  Fragmented Cooperation

Every night before midnight, a long trail of white vans cues up outside of the market. Most drivers sleep into their vans until midnight when the gates open to the public, including the wholesale customers. At midnight, they start the engines and drive into the parking area inside the market to park their vans and walk quickly to the stands where they buy produce night after night. Their orders are waiting for them, wrapped and ready to be transported to their vans. By this time, loaders and porters will be sweating and discarding a few layers of clothes. Loaders know their usual customers and vice versa. I would notice the friendly exchanges of glances and smiles between customers, managers, owners and café waitresses. Yet, I rarely observed co-workers helping each other to finish a task. Nightly, loaders, checkmen and drivers enacted wars with the use of various objects of disruption. For manual labourers, these could be human bodies, brooms, forklifts, pallets and knifes, whilst for middle-level management the price of products were the cutting-edge instruments used to forge cooperation or provoke fierce competition. As the incessant rhythms would take over the nightmarket, the shouting voices, the horns of forklifts, the sound of pallets falling on the floor and sometimes the screeching wheels, betrayed the real tumult of the nightshift. Capitalist production relations entail cooperation and competition. In Hassan’s (2003, p. 12) view, cooperation only comes close to capitalism, whilst competition is its essence. His observation is rather sobering. The overall conditions at New Spitalfields market is one of competition and atomization. Workers put up masks (personas), hide their own anxieties vis-à-vis each other, and use routinised bodily gestures to communicate toughness and masculinity. However, cooperation is not completely absent. As described in previous chapters, especially Chap. 3, cooperation is fragmented along ethnic lines. Moreover, as this chapter will further detail, cooperation particularly manifests during trivial disruptions of the workflow, as well as in the small pleasures enjoyed in a group, such as drinking or smoking together or in conversations with Flory, a friendly café server introduced earlier in the book. This fragile cooperation between workers is systematically weakened or undermined, and because of that, collective action is unlikely to emerge. This chapter highlights the workers’ trajectories from being naturally cooperative to socially competitive. Additionally, the chapter demonstrates that labourers are so caught up in the physical demands of work that any form of solidarity becomes fragile and secondary to the purpose of surviving. The two following claims are put forward here—firstly, migrant nightworkers do something together, but not with one another, and secondly, that contemporary capitalism turns cooperative people into competitors. Figure 8.1 illustrates how resistance, fragmentation and competition prevail in the face of solidarity on the work floor. The number of instances indicate the number of times that I heard my co-workers talking to me or among themselves, and the acts that I observed them engaged with. Nightworkers survive bodily precariousness because they are immune to other co-workers’ needs and not because they offer each other mutual support out of human concern or care. This finding is counter-­intuitive to common solidarity proponents in migration studies, anthropologies of work and night studies.

8.2  Weakened Cooperation

203

Fig. 8.1  Data analysis by source and analytical categories. Source: MacQuarie (2016) Night Shifts in the Nocturnal City of the Future. 2016 Euro Science Open Forum. Poster Exhibition, Marie-Curie Alumni Association. Manchester, United Kingdom

Still, this ethnographic reality needs further explanation. How do nightshifters work together to get jobs done despite their differences in skill levels and backgrounds (e.g., nationalities, languages, ethnicities) and against the interventions of the owners and executives that nurtured division, fragmentation, and ultimately fierce competition among co-workers? This chapter argues that the answer lies in a particular type of cooperation, namely embodied cooperation. This is the outcome of an individual’s ability to connect and cooperate with others through the mobilisation of bodily knowledge, not through common beliefs shared with other people, and neither by relying on connecions made with others (family, friends, associations, or networks) in private or political spheres.

8.2 Weakened Cooperation Before I entered the field, I posited that people working in harsh conditions would carry the burden of the nightshift together, engage with one another and cooperate to fight the establishment and produce ‘ruptures’ in its divisive labour practices (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018, p.  154). However, the fieldwork nuanced this perspective. As noted in earlier chapters of this book (particularly Chap. 2), ethnic belonging fundamentally shapes the subjectivities of the nightshift workers, positioning them between being part of a subjugated group or being part of an empowered group.

204

8  Fragmented Cooperation

These two broadly separated groups, as I discovered further along in the fieldwork, barely knew one another on a personal level, disagreed and disliked each other. In most cases, each person was very different from the one working next to them. They not only formed a largely alienated group, but also a competitive group. In the following pages, I will illustrate these dynamics of competition and collaboration through the story of a side-line operation in which all workers at FruitVeg were involved. The set of incidents described revolve around a certain event in the fieldwork, which has inflicted negatively on the workers’ unpaid hours (six extra hours). The set of dynamics that I registered could be named as friction and division of a large group into three sub-groups of loaders (A1 and A2) and forklift drivers (A3), which has furthered the already competitive atmosphere in the FruitVeg team, due to loaders vying with one another for some meagre earnings on top of their weekly wages. At New Spitalfields market, fruits and vegetables are stacked on wooden pallets. Products grown on mainland Europe are stacked on EPALs.1 These are strongly built and have a long-life cycle. Additionally, they are different in size and weight from the pallets made in the U.K. The demand for EPALs is higher than for U.K. pallets. Consequently, empty EPALs become valuable commodities, usually worth £2 each and are traded between the mainland lorry drivers and nightmarket workers. Once the produce initially stacked on these pallets is sold to wholesale customers, the empty pallets remain the property of the company that bought the fruits and vegetables that they came on. At FruitVeg, the store manager permits the workers to profit from selling the pallets on the condition that it does not interfere with FruitVeg’s functioning (i.e., the store always needs a certain number of pallets in order to transport produce stored on its premises to the customers’ vans). FruitVeg workers collect, stock and sell them to lorry drivers. These drivers then take the pallets back to mainland Europe, where they are sold on to fruit and vegetable producers who re-use them. Gică, the foreman, oversees this weekly operation and decides who joins in. This is a trick of the trade, of which newly hired workers are neither meant to know about nor are invited to participate until Gică decides so. He designates a team, who collects and stores up to 70 pallets per week, and also decides which porter will finalise the sale. In addition to his weekly pay of £500–£700, Gică collects an additional £70–£140 from the pallet sales depending on how many EPALs are stored and or otherwise sold in any respective week. He pays the porter a commission whilst the rest of loaders who participate in the weekly collection receive a few sterling, according to Gică’s mood, as I was told by the disgruntled loaders. Although low wage loaders only receive tiny increments for their assistance in the pallet trading, this sufficiently helps to increase their weekly pays of £280–£320  The EUR/EPAL-pallet is 1,200 mm × 800 mm × 144 mm (47.2 in × 31.5 in × 5.7 in); it is a four-­ way pallet made of wood that is nailed with 78 special nails in a prescribed pattern. The weight of a EUR/EPAL-pallet (EPAL 1) is approx. 25 kg. Around 450–500 million EUR-pallets are in circulation. The EUR/EPAL-pallet may weigh up to 1,500  kg (3,300 lb). (1.5 metric tonnes) when equally loaded, otherwise the limit is 1,000  kg (2,200 lb). Online at: www.epal-pallets.org. Accessed: 05.05.2021 1

8.2  Weakened Cooperation

205

when compared to those who do not participate in Gică’s operation. EPALs, consequently, are not only objects of commerce, but also objects of division in this nightmarket. On the one hand, the division of labour is reflected in who collects and guards the pallets until sold, and who sells them and keeps the money. This is the hierarchy in this pecking order, i.e., foreman versus loaders and porters. On the other hand, the micro levels of power are mirrored in this transaction, i.e., the manager allows the foreman to carry out this operation until further notice and the foreman decides how it unfolds. Moreover, the EPAL transactions are also instruments for monitoring the internalisation of the regimes of discipline and competition, rather than used as a way of stimulating cooperation among the workers on low wages. As I observed both directly inside as well as outside of the workplace, workers compete fiercely with one another and only cooperate infrequently. However, in this precarious environment, the EPAL transactions are instances in which ethnic-based relations matter. As noted, at FruitVeg, Gică, the foreman, controls the weekly sales of EPALs and shares most of the revenue from this transaction with his relatives. The core group that forms around Gică consists of five to six members of his family and some acolytes that support them, most of them being Turkish-speaking Roma from Romania and ethnic Romanians hailing from the same region. Every Saturday morning, Gică arranges the EPAL sale with a driver who is going back to Europe, and a porter nominated by Gică transports the pallets to that driver’s lorry and returns with the cash to give it to Gică. He then decides who gets paid a portion of the cash or who otherwise receives a w. Some of the workers who ‘helped’ to collect and store the pallets receive a small share, but the majority receive a can of coke or Redbull mixed with whisky (‘special mix’), which they have to consume between pallets of produce, supposedly ‘hidden’ from the manager despite that he can observe them via a closed-circuit television that can peer into any corner of the store. Gică does not straightforwardly preclude anyone form joining, but discreetly makes his plans long before he discloses this additional activity to new loaders on his team. As a side note, it is worth mentioning that I only became aware of this undertaking when Gică invited me to have a ‘special mix’ one time. This was my reward for having unknowingly collected pallets for him over several months. Unquestioned participation in this operation over time was a ‘rite of passage’ that gained me acceptance in his team. The whole pallet team consists of loaders and drivers from Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey and most participate for the reasons explained above. Let us call them group A. They collect, stock, and sell the EPALs under Gică’s strict instructions. However, it is not long before fragmentation occurs due to differences of opinion over how much money each member of Group A should receive. In this set-up, the only ones who do not complain are the porters since they receive a commission. As the core group, which consists of Gică and his relatives, have a strong hold of this side-operation, the tipping point always turns in their favour at the loss of the rest of the team. Group A, thus, disintegrates into two sub-groups. Let us call them sub-groups A1 and A2. Sub-group A1 forms around Gică, who is the foreman. The newly formed

206

8  Fragmented Cooperation

sub-group A2 is led by a loader, a Turkish-speaking Roma from Bulgaria. Both sub-­ groups rely on a third group of forklift drivers and porters. Let us call them sub-­ group A3. These forklift drivers (A3) continue to transport the pallets for both sub-groups (A1 and A2), and return the money from the sales to the head of each sub-group. This new set-up brings A1 and A2 into fierce competition. Each group ends up collecting, depositing and selling pallets separately, thus beginning a fight with one another over the empty EPALs and for storage space. The manager notices the new dynamics as the fights become visible when the groups verbally abuse one another over this. His concern is both organisational and logistic in nature, since there are now two sub-groups storing pallets separately before selling them at the end of the week. This requires double the space than before. One other consequence is that loaders become more preoccupied with this side-operation than with the primary tasks they are getting paid for. He intervenes by seizing this activity. He summons all the workers to an ad-hoc meeting and announces that he forbids all loaders and the foreman to be involved in the EPAL operation. I too take part in this meeting and hear how he threatens everyone with dismissal if they refuse to obey his orders and schedule. In his words, ‘You will be replaced immediately with other workers seeking employment every night from me’. This is credible as migrants seek employment with this company every night, although are often turned away. As a method of disciplining the workers quarrelling over the EPAL operation, the manager increases the nightshift, therein, by an extra hour without overtime pay (i.e., workers must now clock in at 10  pm, instead of 11 pm). No one dares to protest, and the manager’s authority remains unquestioned. In this way, he manipulates the workers’ competition and extracts more of the workers’ labour by increasing production time at their expense. The workers are further pushed into precarity by becoming divided and thus, are easier to control. The manager also approves sub-group A3, the forklift drivers and porters, to take over this operation and instructs them to take all the earnings and not share them with the others. In reaction, Gică, the leader of sub-group A1, instructs his team to break the pallets so that the forklift drivers can no longer sell them on to the lorry drivers. Nevertheless, the porters are extremely satisfied, not only because they could retain all revenues from the sale of the pallets, but also because some justice has been done. Rani, who was a long-term driver before he became a checkman, explains to me that until the Romanian clique took control of this operation, porters used to oversee the sales of EPALs and equally divided the earnings among everyone involved. The porters were the originators of the EPAL operation and were the first point of call between the lorry drivers (buyers) and the loaders (middlemen) who never leave the stand. The porters (forklift drivers) in sub-group A3 embody the third block of the social bonding among workers who are different, who undertake different tasks and engage in difficult encounters. The porters know that it will not be effective to engage in a fight with either sub-­ groups A1 or A2. They take the path of least resistance and wait until a ‘window of opportunity’ (Cairney & St Denny, 2020, p. 27) has been created at the conjunction between three streams—(1) problem, (2) politics and (3) power. The first stream is

8.2  Weakened Cooperation

207

the EPAL operation becoming a problem for the manager, who saw the team splitting into two groups over the side-operation and losing efficiency with their primary work. The second stream is reflected in the inequality-based politics that the Romanian clique led against the rest of the loaders and the long-term injustice against the porters. The third stream is manifested in the power held under the authority of FruitVeg’s manager. In this difficult encounter, all three streams met and created a ‘window of opportunity’ for a change in the manager’s business agenda. In the end, the manager extracted an extra hour of unpaid labour from the loaders, gave porters the rights to collect and sell pallets as well as keep the extra earnings, leaving the former more disgruntled than before. Sennett (2012a, p. 149) argues that civility during crisis in the workshop is subject to a ‘social triangle consisting of earned authority, mutual respect and cooperation’. This applied to this situation at the New Spitalfields nightmarket. Loaders can be said to be one side of the triangle, having been stripped of the opportunity to make extra cash and having only their meagre weekly wages to rely on. A number of the loaders follow the foreman’s instruction to break the pallets so the forklift drivers can no longer sell them. This new dynamic prevents any further cohesion among the team. On the second side of the triangle are the other loaders now grudgingly respecting the porters, who return in equal measure grudging respect to these loaders for not following the foreman’s request to destroy the pallets. These porters and loaders equally understand the mutual problems created by the new working regime of longer hours at no extra pay imposed by the manager. Infrequently and only to a small extent, this mutuality is expressed in the way they try to help one another to make their work bearable. On the third side of the triangle is the manager who having overheard the disgruntled loaders, forbids them to take part in the EPAL operation and places it entirely under the control and benefit of porters. The sides of a social triangle are not fixed or placed equidistantly. Nonetheless, they reflect the dimensions of an ‘earned authority, mutual respect, and cooperation during crisis’ (Sennett, 2012b, p. 148). The earned authority is what the porters and a faction of the loaders show to one another. This kind of authority is used to build trust among co-workers through the demonstration of skills and not through despotic discipline, and through tackling a problem by understanding it rather than by crashing it. This leads to cooperation and an easing of the consequences because the burden is shared by these exhausted bodies. Sennett, however, pays less attention to a more vertical kind of authority, that is, the opposite of a horizontal ‘earned authority’. I argue that the vertical kind is equally important. In the story presented here, it explains the dominance of the manager over the highly precarious workers, who cannot challenge him or restore some degree of civility and respect. This manager applies an unfair tactic that turns a crisis into an advantage for the company and at the expense of the discontented loaders who are now further marginalised and more precarious than before because of his tactic. This story shows how cooperation can manifest on the backdrop of competition. These workers’ relations focused on the tiny extra benefits that one could get during a nightshift. Nevertheless, these precarious workers did not have or develop

208

8  Fragmented Cooperation

aspirations for transformative resistance to either the immediate or the broader conditions of their working lives.

8.3 Short-Lived Cooperation At New Spitalfields, long-lasting cooperation is rather absent. What is more common is short-term cooperation that punctuates routine actions. Despite that in many instances the nightworkers disliked each other, disagreed or were different from one other, they were inclined to cooperate. Further to this, though exhausted, they reached beyond their differences and the structural conditions of the market, which most often than not aimed to prevent them from doing so. Nevertheless, this cooperation was carried out in ways that served one’s self-interest. In other words, nightworkers are concerned with their co-workers only if the others completed their assigned tickets (orders) or in their own words this meant that ‘everyone was there to ‘do their own work’, and not cheat’. It is based on this assessment, that they decide whether or not to engage in friendly, cooperative ways of working. Still, even when they do work together on similar tasks, they limit the number of interactions among themselves. This particularity echoes data from Sennett’s (2012a, p.  169) study of bakery workers, who knew ‘who to count on’ in a crisis. However, the lack of empathy displayed by workers towards their co-workers’ suffering or those unwilling to ‘do their work’ needs further explanation. It would be deceptively simple to think that the market nightworkers did not cooperate because they were incapable of tolerating difference or responding to others’ needs. Presumably, it was due to exhaustion and the pressures of constantly having to perform competently that workers who did not ‘do their work’ appeared as insincere and were labelled as ‘lazy’. Having delved into the micro-fabric of the market relationships where ‘self-interest’ prevailed, I observed how my co-workers liaised with those who did ‘do their work’ and distanced themselves from those who did not. I tried to understand how they navigated their relations with people who worked differently to themselves and what was meant by someone who just ‘did their job’. In addition, my conversations with workers from several other companies elicited similarly positive ideas in terms of respecting and trusting co-workers who ‘did their job’. My data showed that workers who labelled others as ‘different’ did so not in inferior-superior terms, but that it was contingent on the commitment displayed when a co-worker was ‘doing their work’ or how sincere they appeared to be towards performing their tasks. The ethnic lines that play such an important role in the fragmentation of cooperation also becomes visible in these ethnographic examples. First, the workers’ motivation to either do ‘more or less’ for others depended on how well these others ‘did their job’. Secondly, it dictated their decisions in whether or not to forge social bonds with the people involved. Irrespective of their position, my interlocutors admitted that those who did not ‘do their work’ or who tried to cheat would be ethnically labelled as the ‘Turkish workers’ who only worked when ‘our Turkish boss showed up’. According to the Romanian workers, once the boss

8.3  Short-Lived Cooperation

209

left the store, word of this would get around and the ‘lazy Turkish workers’ would stop performing, which slowed the rest of the team down. Romanians and Bulgarians called the ‘Turkish workers’ lazy because they would only complete two orders whilst Romanians and Bulgarians would treble that volume. Ervan and Barik, an uncle and nephew, were both loaders and were Turkish-­ speaking Romania Roma. Both worked at SuperFruit, a large, Turkish-owned company based at New Spitalfields that rivalled with FruitVeg. Barik was in his early twenties and had 4 years’ nightwork experience at the company. Ervan was in his forties and had been working at SuperFruit for a similar length of time. Ervan explained to me that, ‘The Turkish guy sits, and you put in the hours’. He insisted that Turkish loaders lived off the other workers’ backs, as the manager ‘favoured his lazy Turkish workers’. Ervan elaborated by saying that at SuperFruit, the setup of the distribution of orders was like the other Turkish companies, e.g., FruitVeg. At SuperFruit, ‘the Turkish [supervisor] distributes the tickets to all loaders (most were from Romania, Albania, Bulgaria and Turkey), but he favours his Turkish workers. Our Turkish [co-workers] say to him (also a Turkish), ‘leave us alone, give it to the Romanians”. So, he gives us ‘seven, eight, nine orders more than he gives to the Turkish co-workers’. Both Ervan and Barik argued that the problem lied with the management who were of Turkish descent. The management ‘favours Turkish workers against Albanian, Bulgarian or Romanian co-workers’. Barik claimed that on most nights, his Turkish co-workers ‘finish their two tickets and then sit and rest. I have my pocket full of orders and run around. They never offer to help’. For this reason, Barik complained to their Turkish owner and ‘things changed for a while. The Turkish co-workers started to help. I felt that there was no more discrimination between us or Albanians and the Turkish’. However, a few weeks after our discussion, Ervan contacted me and asked to meet for coffee. He explained to me why he was no longer working for SuperFruit: ‘One day, I quit working for SuperFruit because I could not take it anymore. The discrimination between us and Turkish workers … was unbearable. So, after four years of working there, I left SuperFruit to work for another company where I stayed for about six months’. On that same day, Ervan clarified for me how this new workplace had promised him contracted hours and a pay rise, but 6 months down the line neither of these were fulfilled. He had asked to meet with me to ask for support to report this employer to the U.K. authorities. Two weeks later he called to tell me to stop pursuing anyone as he had returned to SuperFruit and that all had been resolved. He was, thus, forced to return to his abusive employer. As counter-intuitive as this might sound, one Turkish-born British man confessed to me that in his 2 years of experience at this market, he noticed that ‘People don’t do their work, but … they are annoyed with you because you’re doing your part. Can you understand this?’, Adin asked rhetorically. Very few Turkish salesmen wanted to or could be interviewed. A Turkish salesman who had been working at SuperFruit for almost 15 years admitted that, ‘At the end of the day, if they [loaders] come here to work, then it’s OK for me; it’s OK for everyone working here. We are like a family’. One of his wholesale customers, himself also of Turkish nationality,

210

8  Fragmented Cooperation

declared that, ‘It doesn’t matter where people come from, as long as they do their work’. Logan, the salesperson whom I introduced in Chaps. 6 and 7, also confirmed this to be the case: ‘That’s correct. I had my own company and 80 per cent of employees were made of Asians, Romanians, Lithuanians … it doesn’t matter where they come from, as long as they come and do their job’. Although Ervan and Barik felt strongly discriminated as Romanian nationals, all my interlocutors seemed to agree that regardless of the ethnicity and nationality of their co-workers, all that one needed to do whilst on the nightshift was to ‘do their job’. Across the board, ‘doing your job’ meant a strong work ethic that all team members needed to abide by so that consequently, no one would need to do any extra work. Some division of labour practices might be tainted with ‘positional traits’, such as the SuperFruit manager favouring ‘his Turks’, or the Romanian foreman at FruitVeg favouring his Romanian relatives over the rest of his team of mixed nationalities. Dinu, a Romanian working as a checkman at SuperFruit, commented that those working at FruitVeg, the rival company, did not do their job seriously. He described them as the kind of ‘workers who only work when their boss is around’. He shared his surprise that ‘they should be reprimanded, but they are not’. Unsurprisingly, therefore, workers decide whether or not to ‘do their job’ depending on whom they would work with on a particular shift, and based on this judgement they cooperate either ‘more or less’ with their co-workers regardless of the others’ ethnic or national background. The migrants in this nightnography are not bound together by what Collins (1981, p. 999) calls ‘moral solidarity’. Moreover, the nightnography revealed that the short-term cooperation that nevertheless binds them is insufficient for spurring interest in their co-worker or for forming solidary ties with co-workers even when they experience similar precarious working conditions.

8.4 Embodied Cooperation The previous sections exemplified what might bring these workers together, however temporarily. In this section, the focus is on how these very different people involved in distinct tasks work together to get jobs at the nightmarket done. Despite the relatively high numbers of team members working in the same format for six nights per week, I observed signs of weak cooperation among divided co-workers. Apart from this, none of the usually invoked research variables such as numerical size, level of affectivity or co-presence, indicated a significant correlation with a strong presence of cooperation in the market. Evidence of ‘domains of commonality’ (e.g., common suffering and hardships), can be found in ethnographically informed discussions on transnational migrants’ everyday lives in European cities (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016). Despite that such experiences are shared by those working at New Spitalfields, I could not contribute to this transnational trend in migration scholarship.

8.4  Embodied Cooperation

211

Sporadically, I found that workers engaged in doing different tasks together as a team, but that the management’s labour division tactics succeeded in producing docile, obedient responses and in the long-run, workers remained disinterested in their co-workers’ precariousness and self-interested in revenues and surviving the nightshift. Put differently, I noted that co-workers collaborated among themselves, but without producing long-lasting effects of cooperation at the workplace. Except for unusual occurrences, possibilities for cooperation were corroded by the work structures and thus, remained fragile. Sennett’s (1998, 2008, 2012a) historical sociology of cooperation guides the focus here. Sennett argues that cooperation among people who live with difference requires the mastering of four social skills: (1) dialogics, (2) the subjunctive tone, (3) informalising contexts of disagreements and (4) empathising curiously about the problem at stake to keep distance whilst inquiring. Sennet’s insights are central to this nightnography of migrant workers on a market site because it is a location where ‘differences’ can be overcome and mediated’ (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018, p.  126). Additionally, this nightnography draws inspiration from contemporary urban ethnographers committed to countering political narratives that define migrants’ cultural differences as problematic. They argue that diversity and difference are assets central to everyday urban social life (Vertovec, 2007, apud Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018, p. 126). Drawing on this theoretical framework, I propose an embodied approach, i.e., I foreground the body as the medium for social interactions. This approach concentrates on an individual’s ability to connect and cooperate with others as it is enabled by their bodily knowledge, rather than through common beliefs shared with other people or by relying on connections made with others in private and political spheres (family, friends, associations and networks), as in the case of women factory workers in Italy who drew upon this kind of solidarity to improve their working conditions. This approach to cooperation presupposes that: • One does not necessarily look to reach an agreement, but rather an understanding of the other, and that in order to achieve this, one needs to be comfortable with ambiguities • One uses the subjunctive voice, not the declarative—this means one states upfront the very opposite of what one thinks • One informalises situations so that the interlocutors can keep the conversation moving • One has a cooler, empathic response, i.e. being curious about what and how something unfortunate has happened to another person, rather than feeling for the other person (i.e., showing sympathy). As such, as Sennett (2012a, 2012b, p. 6)) puts it, the ‘dialogic entails good listening skills, to behave tactfully, [to be able to] peer into shadows of disagreement to contain it and find points of agreement to defuse a difficult situation’. However, there is a level of sophistication in Sennett’s conceptual framework that did not apply in this case. This group of workers did not excel at articulating disagreements, but were more centred on the embodied form when in disagreement (e.g., throwing produce,

212

8  Fragmented Cooperation

breaking tools, hiding equipment from co-workers and physically grouping together ready to engage in a punch-up). I also update Sennett’s historical sociology of cooperation to the post-circadian capitalist context. I adapt it to the microcosm of this workplace and the special domain of the food distribution industry to show that the vulnerabilities of labour and limited possibilities for cooperation are a particular manifestation of wider conditions of immigration and labour policies, combined with the idiosyncratic and individual trajectories of manual labour migrants. On the nightmarket workfloor, the management manipulates in-group members against one another by exploiting their bodily labour for the company’s benefit. On a casual basis, the manager would extend the nightshift up to 16 hours instead of the legally 8 hours, but on a regular basis the nightshift would last up 11–12 hours. Additionally, it does not guarantee or offer any healthcare benefits or holiday entitlements to manual workers. Furthermore, it manipulates workers by forbidding them to engage in activities that bring extra earnings and threatening them with expendability, thus, aggravating their disposability and fragmentation. In addition to this, I bind Sennett’s conceptualisation with the conditions of migration and political processes in contemporary U.K., which lead to the marginalisation of working migrants. Further to this, the neoliberal structural mechanisms (see Chap. 5) and workers’ migrancy conditions (see Chap. 3) not only involve fierce survival and competition, but systematically draw on the power of weakening cooperation between workers, many of whom are undocumented migrants, who have been pushed further into the grey economy zones—most which involve working at night. In my fieldwork, I explored if nightworkers’ physical labour skills might be their means for developing embodied cooperation, even if in weak and fragile forms. In order to do so, I investigated the repetitiveness of labour tasks such as lifting, carrying, bending, twisting and the more general handling of these physical acts. As such, in this analysis, I delve into the labour processes and interactions that happened over many nights but focus mainly on those which were mediated through the workers’ bodies. What are the possibilities for embodied cooperation to emerge in the workplace? To answer this question, a disaggregation of the steps and components involved is needed to understand, how the physical, bodily acts connect to social relations, and how they are embodied through the hidden relationship between the body parts that sometimes seem disarticulated, when in fact they are interconnected. Disaggregation involves the following steps: • Building rhythmic practices in the nightly routines, e.g., rearranging the produce displayed in front of the store every night between 3 to 5 am and sweeping the floor every morning before the shutters go down at 9 am • Building informality through bodily gestures. Informality is born out of spontaneous moments of disruption, like when a load of prunes falls off the pallet and everyone is at first startled by the noise, but then they come together to pick up the produce spread all over the floor

8.4  Embodied Cooperation

213

• Binding together with co-workers without physically resisting one another in moments of disruption. The components to be disaggregated are the rhythmic practices, bodily gestures and physical resistance. Each require consistency, months, if not years, of practice before they can become embodied and acted as second nature, so to speak. These three ingredients are interconnected, and for this analysis on strengthening social skills through an embodiment of physical acts, each of these components will gradually be introduced and disaggregated further into palpable pieces, such as lifting crates or sacks numerous times, a pat on the shoulder or bending knees to reach a box lying on the floor dozens of times per hour, six nights per week over 300 nights per year. Physical activities become ritualised when actions, movements and behaviours are ingrained in the body. This is how people develop good or bad habits, which can be shaped by certain experiences in specific places. Some are perfected (like in ballet dancing or martial arts) until our ‘mindful body’ (Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987) can remember and execute the learnt behaviour subconsciously and not via involuntary reflexes (like a sneeze). Smiling or frowning without conscious effort are examples of involuntary bodily gestures. By becoming better at naturally expressing certain bodily gestures we become more informal when acting in social encounters. In other words, bodily gestures made of physical motions tend to ease or informalise social relations. These might bond co-workers who are able to read cues and signs when, for instance, someone winks, smiles, frowns, shakes hands or shrugs their shoulders. The most puzzling of the three components, refers to responses in ambiguous, social situations of physical resistance among people who interact with others who are different than themselves. A comparable example is that of carpenters learning to carve in a piece of wood without fighting with the knots (Sennett, 2012a). As I observed and practiced alongside my co-workers, in our nightly tasks, we learnt how to engage meaningfully with the tasks ahead, in order to hone resilience and bear the heavy weights of produce we carried on our backs on most nights. This effective approach against physical resistance of the night itself and that of night labour, relates to workers learning how to lift and break down heavier loads, and when to rest (if allowed) and drink energizing drinks. Ultimately, learning from workers who apply minimum resistance during physical encounters could provide an understanding of how they deal with difference in social interactions. Let me be clear, these abstract modes provide insights into social relations developed via ritualised acts of bodily cooperation— they do not qualify someone good at the physical skills of lifting and loading to be good in social encounters. Rather, they highlight someone’s potential to apply physical skills in encounters of cooperation.

214

8  Fragmented Cooperation

8.4.1 Rhythmic Practices Rhythmic, repetitive practices are the bedrock of any ritual that governs human skills towards ‘actively [interacting] with the world’ (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, apud Holmes, 2013a, 51). Next to repetitiveness, in the creation of rituals, time and what Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) call ‘mindful body’ are equally important. In their view, mind and body are one, and at the same time subject and object. Our human bodies are subject to and the subject of the processes that govern our 24-hour circadian rhythms, that is, the biological clock that controls our states of waking and sleeping. Sleeping and eating habits are ingrained in the first days of a human’s life. From the developmental phases of infancy, mothers ingrain in an infant’s body that sleeping occurs at night and wakefulness occurs in the day until it is habituated to the phases of being active in the day and restful at night. The second stage involves the evaluation and re-evaluation of habits, including sleeping and being awake if one works the nightshift. During this stage, both mind and body work together to question the established habit. In the third stage, habits are re-ingrained into new forms. Thus, over time, three rhythms are born: ingraining, evaluating, and re-ingraining. Nightworkers embody a kind of knowledge that transpires through ingrained bodily gestures and that helps to bring ease to their social relations with others, including those in superior echelons. The gestures become rituals that mirror others’ movements in the same time and space. Additionally, repeated movements, from shaking hands and loading to drinking coffee and greetings through eye contact, become harmonised between people who share similar and, in some ways, predictable rhythms. In the following pages, I demonstrate that rhythmic practices have a role in creating bodily cooperation among people dealing with difference and ambiguities in the workplace. I foreground the stories of two workers to demonstrate how embodiment or rhythmic practices happen. I introduced Rani, a Pakistan-born checkman at New Spitalfields, in Chap. 4 (see Sect. 4.2.5). As a nightworker, he repeatedly performed a weekly ritual after finishing his 66–70-hour week of nightshifts. In his words: When I finish a week’s work, I travel to the other side of the country to see my family. On arrival I spend the first 3 to 4 hours chatting with my cousins. They sit down with me once I get there. Then I sleep. When I wake up, we sit down and have another chat. I go to sleep again for another few hours in the night, but I wake up at 2 am. So, I sit down with my sis, my aunty, my family, whoever is there, and we chat. Then I go to sleep again, around 7 to 8 am. I sleep 4 to 5 hours and I eat something when I wake up. We go out for 2 to 3 hours and on return I rest for 2 hours. I wake up and go back to London by train or bus. I go straight back to work to begin a new week of nights.

Every week, Rani visits his family in the North of England. He is in his early thirties and has worked in street markets since the age of 14, with over 14 years of his work experience being spent in various positions at New Spitalfields. At the time I interviewed him, he was hired as the checkman of FruitVeg. He was one of the workers who had hacked into his own circadian rhythms and was now attuned to being up at

8.4  Embodied Cooperation

215

night. Whilst on his family visits, he needed to respect his attuned rhythms. Despite being off work, he would wake up at 2 am as his body was adjusted to being awake at night. He also still needed to sleep during the early hours of the morning, as he did when returning from work every morning. Rani has been a young adult for most of the 14 years he has worked at the nightmarket. Whilst on shift, he learnt the walking, carrying, and loading skills required to carry produce on one’s body. When off duty, he studied tricks of the trade with more experienced workers, focusing extensively on how to drive the forklift, and when and how to adjust the mast to load onto the forks of the forklift safely and steadily. As he has progressed in his work, he also experienced small, ritualised pleasures of the nightmarket, such as on Saturday mornings when he would join workers for a drink at the café after a week of loading and driving. Even more rhythmical and ritualised than his family visits, Rani worked an average of 11 hours per night, starting each night at 10 pm and finishing around 9 am. Over the 14 years of working at the market, he accumulated about 288,288 working hours on nightshifts. Using the measure of 10,000 of hours of practice required for mastering a skill (Sennett, 2012b), it is safe to argue that long-term full-time nightworkers like Rani spend an abundant number of hours, perhaps quadruple the number that Sennett offers, to hone any or all of their physical skills, which included for Rani hacking into his physiological rhythms to stay awake many nights in a row. Rani spoke loudly and fast, and I could hear a slight accent in his English. His job demanded that his voice reach across hundreds of pallets, over other males’ loud voices and above the constant beeping and engine sounds of the forklifts that pass incessantly by the stand. One minute you could see Rani making small talk with a trader opposite to FruitVeg, and the next with other Asian forklift drivers waiting to reload. As the work rhythm would increase, the pitch of his voice would rise, and to the trained eye he showed signs of stress. He would shout at his porter colleagues who needed to speed things up as customers were waiting outside the market hall for their orders to be wrapped up and ready to go. Fluent and unselfconscious, Rani would thoroughly check the pallets that were waiting for his approval. Once orders were completed by the loaders, he would check the goods before the pallets left the stand. If he found mistakes or missing products of the pallets, for example, he would check the loader’s name marked on the prepared pallet and call him over to swiftly to correct the mistake, regardless of what other activity the loader was engaged with at that time. It was Rani’s responsibility that pallets left the stand without any errors. From the spot where he Rani would stand, I saw how he would observe the whole store and watched every move of the loaders with his dark peregrine eyes. He also watched for mystery shoppers, that were, traders from other stands checking on prices or shoplifters. He interacted with customers, speaking to whomever passed by the stand throughout the night. The constabularies did their market rounds with a speed camera in their hands and he would talk to them too. One night they caught him exceeding the speed limit of the market’s premises, and fined and banned him from driving the forklift. Most forklift drivers who lose their licences are invited to return to the position of being a loader, which they occupied before passing the forklift driving test. But this was not Rani’s case. As recounted in Chaps. 3 and 4, he

216

8  Fragmented Cooperation

instead became a checkman as his manager depended on experienced staff of his calibre. He held an embodied capital—technical skills and strategic knowledge— that was indispensable to the management. The same mechanisms of fragmentation that segregate the expendable section of the labour force did not affect Rani, a non-­ expendable worker. Yet, Rani both enjoyed and felt the pressure of his responsibilities. Another angle on this set of dynamics in relation to the investment and or otherwise disinvestment of bodies subordinated to capital gains, was previously offered in Chaps. 6 and 7 (Sharma, 2014). Here, it is suffice to say, that managers were more lenient with workers like Rani on whom they depend on, but were inflexible with the loaders who are easily replaceable. Additionally, in the case of non-expendable workers, the managers undo their position of micro-power because they need those workers, but with expendable workers like loaders, they extract extreme labour power from their bodies and exchange them as and when desired because there are many of them and their skills are not essential for the business. It is only in certain instances that loaders can become less expendable, such as when many workers at a time leave the job and very few people seeking work at the market. At such times, managers’ may temporarily see loaders as essential, but only due to the economic impact that the curve between supply and demand is having upon their market trade. There is another possibility, which I will emphasise in this section, namely, that ‘physical gestures give life to informal social relations’ (Sennett, 2012b, p. 199). Given that Rani has embodied the rituals of the work floor, he is comfortable with his manager’s resistance to replacing him. In this way, Rani is not only able to respond to the conflicting ways in which the social relations in this microcosmos both bond and strengthen them, but he is also able to create new social relations. As Sennett (2012b, p.  202) emphasises, it takes time, practice and rhythm to develop a ‘quiver of skills’ that once re-ingrained become rituals, whether they be in the workshop, the family or on the street. However, to frame this issue more broadly and extend it to social rituals within and without the workplace, Goffman’s (1956) work is also useful. I draw upon the Goffmanian idea of the ‘social roles’ or ‘scripts’ used by people in social encounters that become routine and repetitive, and how they are ritualised indoors and acted unselfconsciously when out in the world. Similarly, workers perform or put masks on (personas) to hide their own anxieties from one other. They use routinized bodily gestures to communicate toughness and masculinity and engage in behaviours for the purpose of self-preservation in harsh environments. To make these points clearer, I will bring Muzo to the foreground. He is a Turkish nightshift manager of a small grocery shop in North London, and a regular customer at FruitVeg. He would purchase fruits and vegetables and then transport the produce and stocks up the shelves ready for the early morning customers. Muzo repeated this five times a week and is one of those grocers that opens as early as 6  am. He explained that in his family there is a similar ritual used for completing their household duties. He oversaw their child rearing as his wife worked during the day. His son played on his own whilst Muzo slept and his mother was at work. To maintain a working order in each of their own schedules, as well as their son’s, this couple

8.4  Embodied Cooperation

217

found a way to sync the three of them in rhythm and maintain a harmony that could keep everyone happy ‘for the time being’. They established a ritual with a similar ‘everyday expertise’ as the community members in de Certeau’s (1984, apud Sennett, 2012b) study of the Croix-Rousse neighbourhood whose ‘shared rituals hold this very poor community together’. In this case too, necessity drives this family to become ‘experts’. Moreover, out of necessity, Muzo and his wife work on opposite shift patterns, yet they maintain the household through a division of labour assumed in different tempos. Muzo explained that since managing the grocery store at night, he and his wife hardly saw one another: My wife is a hairdresser. She leaves early in the morning around 6:30 am. I don’t leave work until 7 am. By the time I get home, she’s already left. In the evenings, she comes home around 8 pm. I leave home at 7 pm. I mean, there is about an hour and a half difference between us. Sometimes, 4 to 5 days go by without seeing one another. We live in the same place, but we don’t see each other.

Though I do not claim that this is Muzo’s case too, a few co-workers confessed to me that they do the nightshift because it keeps the household ‘going’, as the partners hardly see each other or spend time together. Conversely, other partnerships or marriages dissolve because of the nightshift schedule that keeps one or both spouses away too much of the time, leading to both parties agreeing to separate. Although he admits that being on an opposite schedule to his wife is ‘not ideal’, Muzo does not have a choice as jobs ‘come by hard’. He hoped to have soon found another job that ‘puts all of us on days’. For the time being, he practiced a pattern of duties and behaviours with ‘expert’ knowledge (Sennett, 2012b, pp. 203–204). Yet, this begs the following questions—as he has ingrained these night and day rhythms in both his work and home schedules over the past 10 years, will he be capable of reversing to daytime rhythms? Or will he suffer from ‘role dissonance’ since schedules will change, including his presence in the house (Sennett, 2012b, p. 203)? Will he grieve for the loss of relationships with nocturnal people whom he was sharing the night rhythms with and which might otherwise prove redundant because of his adopted (day) rhythms? Conversely, a follow-up question might inquire as to how he might establish new social ties with people who live on daytime rhythms, whom he might not otherwise meet whilst a nocturnal worker. Although not dissimilar to other ritualised behaviours, people do alter rituals. This reflects the need to pause and reflect so to be able to re-adjust and improve (Sennett, 2012b). It is down to individuals to recreate new rhythms that can nurture new skills, but this is not without its challenges. Some of these challenges are external. For example, daytime rhythms in the workplace seem more structured. One reason why daytime staff are less likely to shift and change between one role or duty to the next is because a boss’ role is to manage and prevent day employees from doing that. Workers like Muzo might find a controlling boss less bearable and revert back to nightshifts because of it. Muzo confirmed that he had experienced certain freedoms in his role as the night manager. Boundaries at night seem to soften and shift. In truth, even managers go beyond what is required of their job roles as the nightshift advances. Often, I noted that

218

8  Fragmented Cooperation

whenever the owner was absent, the market managers would spend hours on end on social media. To offer another example — managers performed several roles during the same nightshift; and they would regularly drive the forklift if one of his drivers was absent or ill in order to speed-up the workflow of sales-loading-wrapping-­ checking-transporting. This kind of transgression allows for openness and a changing of roles. It could also explain that unstructured nighttime workplaces offer more freedom to both managers and staff. To a regular consumer or a casual observer of nighttime workplaces, all this might seem like a haphazard syncopation. Nonetheless, whilst society sleeps, some must remain awake. Diurnal people sleep, rest or party at night, but the fruit and vegetable wholesale markets are open for business all night. Fresh fruits await the early morning customer or might appear in the desserts of someone’s lunch or dinner, and the last pair of hands that prepared and passed the fresh produce might be those of a migrant. Perhaps, end consumers are unaware of this or caught up in their own struggles to survive the incessant rhythms of their regular, daily beats. At night, rhythmic physical labour is executed by bodies awake and alert. Role transgression is frequent. The balance between competition and cooperation is delicate, with instances of competition erupting more frequently. Workers fight against physical hardships ‘without the intervention of conscious thought’ (Wacquant, 2004, p. 97). As explained earlier they learn to apply minimum resistance in physical encounters; as well as, in social exchanges with co-workers, management or customers, using friendly bodily gestures that prove effective to defuse escalating instances. If social fluency results partly from a worker’s physical skills embodied as social rituals, then the reverse is also valid. Physical gestures partly build the informality needed for social bonding, as the next section will demonstrate.

8.4.2 Bodily Gestures One way to understand how bodily gestures create an informal atmosphere is to imagine an inviting smile, a frown that reads ‘this is my chair’ or a luthier in a musical instrument workshop who draws her rump in because she sensed her work fellow was next to or behind her. No words are uttered in any of these instances, yet authority (earnt expertise), trust (leap of faith) and cooperation (under duress) between each person is reinforced in a bodily manner, without recourse to discourse, and re-ingrained and perfected through daily repetition. Sennett’s explanation leads to an understanding of what lies behind the coded gestures that create social space and the physical movements that informalise the social relations within that space. These craft people earnt one another’s respect by undertaking their job with expertise. They are confident and authoritative in their skills. Their gestures are emotional responses displayed through physical acts (showing versus telling) that embed informality in social contexts. Moreover, coded gestures are performed and feel informal, but these should not be interpreted as readily embodied just because they seem involuntary to an observer. Their simplicity is deceptive. They depend on the

8.4  Embodied Cooperation

219

context, as well as the message that the signifier wishes to send. They are conducive to learnt behaviour, yet to the untrained eye it may deceivingly seem like ‘surface simplicity’ (Wacquant, 2004, p.  69). Such subtleties can go unnoticed, yet those experienced in it need ‘to see the bodily gesture to understand the act’ (Sennett, 2012b, p. 207). I take Sennett’s advice a step further to argue that watching and linking cognitively a specific physical movement to an action does not liken to feeling the action, which is crucial in embodiment. During my fieldwork, I thought that I could hide my lack of my experience from my co-workers if I copied them. As a novice loader, I first copied (and failed to embody) the gestures of senior co-workers by observing them. I was deceived by the ‘simple’ task of gripping tomato crates the way my experienced co-workers did and quickly lifting them in sets of five (each crate weighs five kilograms). Loaders hone many skills, from gripping, throwing, bending and lifting with one or both hands, to setting a load on their shoulder whilst walking fast to keep up with the incessant pace of the workplace. Repetition makes practice perfect. Loaders need 5–6 months of nightly practice to become competitive workers in the capitalist chain of production. Those with an inner talent, like Basrí, need less. They build on these skills as they acquire other posts, as a checkman or porter who drives a forklift. However, staying awake and alert at night is the most challenging skill of all, even for workers who have partly adapted their biological clock to the new circadian rhythms. Whilst up and alert, whether one is a loader, café server or porter, all talk, some smile to customers, do calculations and count items, drive or lift produce manually, drink fluids and ingest food, that is, a whole set of activities that require maintaining a good attention span, and cognitive and social skills throughout the night. Multiple acts that are bound and synchronised by rhythms, dictate who stays or goes in the context of this night market. Without doubt, if one disrupts their regular practice, they slide out of rhythm and risk losing the hard-earned embodied knowledge and crucial skills that make them a competitive worker. Conversely, continuous practice of bodily actions leads to the formation of skills that are ingrained and acted upon without conscious thought until they become a ritual. Sennett (2012b) emphasises that it takes a person up to ten thousand hours or five to six years of four hours of daily practice to attain sufficient command and rhythm over skills in order for them to become an ingrained routine. For Bourdieu (2000), ingraining happens through the embodiment of physical acts over time and in the specific fields that they are acquired. Once set and structured as second-nature responses, these acts are executed without thinking or planning. Soon enough, I learnt that an excellent command of such moves would involve months of bodily practice before they could be executed unselfconsciously. In particular, I understood that only repetitive movements would guarantee automatised efficiency in the constant lifting of heavy boxes and crates of produce. This insight travelled through my body, mostly in the form of physical pains, and demanded that I change my behaviour e.g., to be more patient and to carry fewer crates, at least for a while. For instance, the heavy crates would slip from my shoulder and off my tired

220

8  Fragmented Cooperation

fingers, my knees ached from having to walk long distances every night and I experienced excruciating pains from repeatedly bending my back in the heat of the action, which did not allow me to slow down. I experienced how feeling can be invisible, that is, until it is felt (Wacquant, 2004, p. 69). Even when aided by visual cues, for instance, watching how a co-worker grips five tomato crates to lift it up on one shoulder or where he positioned his body before grappling with two sacks of potatoes of 20 kg each, my cognitive understanding of an action did not make a feeling arise till I put it into action through trial and errors. Put different, a conceptual understanding can be divorced from what is actually involved and how it actually feels. Eventually, my movements did become involuntary, but only after practicing the techniques with the crates, boxes and sacks thousands of times whilst working six nights a week. Similarly, for more complicated actions which require manoeuvring a forklift to lift empty pallets, an inexperienced person unaccustomed to the work would not automatically be respected by the managers or co-workers when initially hired. The forklift driver earns authority after he is able to insert the right fork at a 45° angle whilst moving forward and precisely stopping at the edge of the pallet without moving it to lift the load, which usually weighs over a tonne. Though this may seem trivial and a minor as a physical action that informalises the social context, it is a complex operation that requires several conditions. Specifically, at the market, forklift drivers use one of three levers to adjust the mast so that as the forklift advances it pushes the right corner of the pallet and turns it sideways so that both forks fit neatly under the pallet. The pallet then fits smoothly onto the forks, like a glove fits on a hand. Experienced drivers like Basrí take 30  seconds to complete such task. Within weeks of passing the test, Basrí jumped one night on a forklift and manoeuvred it with such easiness and confidence that sold his skills to the manager, who hired him as a forklift driver, at the earliest opportunity, without putting him on a trial for a week. Basrí was unrestrained in his actions and thus, he demanded openness and lightness from others, and I presume, this was because his body’s precise gestures signalled confidence and trust in others. Basrí’s physical skills worked to his advantage invited other co-workers to cooperate with him, and in this instance, he gained employment. This example helps to illustrate how certain physical skills can be exploited in social encounters that attract material advantages, trust, which may lead to cooperation. I, for example, asked the manager to offer me a position as a forklift driver when he was short of porters. He put me to test, which I failed. There were other co-workers there with more years of experience than Basrí and me. But they did not perform with such ease as Basrí, precision and confidence, as him and were not put on the job as porters. Admittedly, Basrí was already a trusted and tested employee as he had been working at FruitVeg for 2 years. Besides, Basrí embodied two components of the experience of working that may have influenced the manager to hire him as a porter, thus increasing his pay cheque with a couple of hundred British pounds per week. He appeared taking pride in what he was doing, as in the feeling that jobs need to get done (not avoided), regardless of the awful conditions

8.4  Embodied Cooperation

221

of this job. This in turn, seemed to have given him high satisfaction that pervaded a fusion with his work, with the tasks at hand. Nonetheless, it would be misleading to think that Basrí’s bodily capital was somewhat involuntary. Rather, it was quite the opposite, as his arsenal was built over many years of nightwork and was coupled with an innate talent. Moreover, Basrí demonstrated ‘physical rehabilitation, a genuine remoulding of one’s kinetic coordination, and even a psychic conversion’, similar to what Wacquant (2004, p. 69) found during his ethnography of prize boxers. This may sound rather complex, but scholars such as Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987; Bourdieu, 1990; Wacquant, 1995; Gherardi, 2006; Sennett, 2008; Holmes, 2013a, b, agree that bodies are ‘mindful. Ethnographic fieldworkers turn their bodies into data collection objects that pick up invaluable information, not only via ears and eyes, but also through bodily repetitions, rhythms, and gestures. During my nightnography, I collected field data that gave me insights into the how co-workers with or without an innate talent quickly developed technical skills repeating the same gestures hundreds of times everynight. Gestures—one of the necessary elements in the embodiment of social bonds next to rhythm and resistance—are voluntary. They are learnt reflexes, such as touching one’s stomach if feeling nauseous or one’s throat when hyperventilating. At work, gestures may also reveal an capitalist discipline internalised to the extent whereby the subject never notices that someone monitors her/him, yet s/he acts fiercely or laxly on the task at hand. Gestures thus embedded in physical skills may separate the novice from the highly skilled craft wo/man. As mentioned earlier, the novice in the trade is spotted immediately by their clumsiness, hesitation, or precision in commanding the skills involved in driving a forklift. The novice’s behaviour demonstrates the ‘intervention of conscious thought into the coordination of gestures and movements’ (Wacquant, 2004, p. 97). In such instances, they rely on telling rather than showing the action. In contrast, the seasoned worker shows, rather tells. In daily life, gestures, the touching of hands and bodies, certain look in the lover’s eyes, are reciprocated in physical acts that connect or divide one another. The aim of this discussion on the nuts and bolts of the physical gestures borne in the work of a night porter, has been to unpack how coded gestures informalise social relations in the night market space. In the following section, I will explain the third building block in a ritualised process of embodied cooperation in nightworkers, which is about dealing with resistance from co-­ workers who are different to oneself.

8.4.3 Dealing with Resistance Under the heavy weights of crates, loaders endure through an economy of gestures. On the FruitVeg work floor, loaders and porters learn to reduce resistance against the weight of the load, as well as how to grit through the tensions that arise in particular work situations. This type of resistance is different from, for instance, not

222

8  Fragmented Cooperation

complying with illegal transactions or refusing authoritarian rules. It is also distinct from an unwillingness to accept inappropriate work behaviours, which is different in many ways from labour resistances through strikes (Mathur, 2022) and other large scale actions of group solidarity that openly resist abuses of power by employers (Betti et al., 2022). Starting from Sennett’s (2012a, p. 210) observations on the politics of cooperation, I illustrate with an example whereby applying minimum resistance to diffuse a delicate and potentially conflictual situation, led to long-term collaboration. This is about an encounter between Basrí and me, which provoked a dialogical expression through our bodies, which did not lead to reciprocal understanding at the time, but to uneasiness. Although Basrí and I did not engage in a physical fight (to our benefit), going through the challenging motions and uncomfortable emotions was the beginning of our long-term, embodied cooperation that stretched beyond the market site, in life situations outside of fieldwork (e.g., interpreting for him and his family at the local council when they became homeless). During one nightshift, when the activity in the market hit a lull, out of boredom, Basrí invited me to wrestle with him. It all began with a regretful admission on my part, as I had told him that I had practised martial arts for a few years. He immediately became interested and urged me to demonstrate what I could do. Instinctively, I wedged a pallet on the tip of my still capped boot and lifted it up then placed it on the stack of pallets near me. I reacted unthinkingly, and I could not explain why I did that. Worse, on the spot, I realised through Basrí’s body language that he interpreted my gesture as a provocation. His face lit up and his pupils enlarged with excitement: ‘Let’s go outside and have a friendly fight’. I had no intention to fight a nearly 6 ft. stocky man, so I tried my best to diffuse the tension by insisting that I did not fight friends. Basrí picked up a pallet of some 14 kg, lifted it above his head and put it on top of the two-metre stack of pallets. He then looked at me, as if to ask, ‘Do you still want to measure up to me?’ I refrained from demonstrating my physical skills against his. Instead, I gave him a surprised look and walked away. Had I provoked him further, perhaps we would have become unemployed. My automatic gesture of lifting a pallet wedged on the tip of my capped boot triggered this incident and Basrí took this to mean, ‘Ah, he is provoking me’ and so he retaliated. I, on the other hand, reacted to his prompts with bodily movements that were conveying the wrong message. To put it in another way, I lost my ‘expressive control’ over my behavioural ‘signalling’ (Goffman, 1956, pp. 59–60). On nights like that when the shift got quiet, boredom-based anxiety tested workers’ abilities to control their emotions in the masculine culture of the market. Fortunately, this incident had a happy ending as from then on Basrí and I supported one another on a nightly basis. He taught me how to stack crates on a pallet so that they would not collapse later for large orders. I helped him at closing times when cleaning duties would otherwise delay him leaving. Additionally, the degrees of amicable exchanges between us inside the workplace, translated in similar exchanges outside of it. For instance, later, when I asked for his help, Basrí offered to participate in visual recordings for my research. He also asked for favours in return, for

8.4  Embodied Cooperation

223

example, to support him with language translation and social contacts during the brief period of homelessness that he went through later that year. Further opportunities for cooperation through exchanges in social capital arose between us throughout my fieldwork and continued long after I finished it. For example, I made phone calls to the local council to pay and cancel his parking fines. He participated in follow-up interviews and video shoots after I exited the fieldwork. Sennett (2012c, p.  199) finds that ‘physical labour can instil dialogical social labour’ through rituals of exchange between cooperation and competition. He borrows the term ‘dialogics’ from the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who argues that any conversation includes many hidden, codified layers. For Sennett (2012b) then, practising dialogics means listening carefully and distinguishing between what people say and what they mean to say. Though in such conversations interlocutors might not reach an immediate agreement on the issues at stake, empathy may facilitate an understanding of the other’s point of view, yet not reaching an agreement. Thus, one needs to be skilled at finding out what the other means to say but does not overtly says it. As a result of such dialogical encounter, one understands the other better, but without necessarily reaching an agreement. In dialogic-based forms of cooperation, unlike with dialectics, the goal is to handle ambiguity and difference. In my tense encounter with Basrí, before any language-based exchange occurred, the subconscious gestures brought us into dialogue. My informalised bodily expressions and facial gestures subsequently defused the tension. By exploring the function of gathering, learning and practising bodily knowledge and foregrounding a particular type of cooperation, namely, embodied cooperation, this book complements Sennett’s theoretisation of cooperation. The development of this form of cooperation is a demanding process. It involves intensive bodily learning in exchanges with others. It resembles the understanding that can gradually develop in close relationships, such as learning from someone’s bodily signals when they are displaying anger as a symptom of an underlying anxiety and so knowing when and how to support them, or recognising when a child cannot express their need for help and instead displaces it through anger. This form of cooperation is difficult to learn because, as Sennett (2012b) explains, it uses the subjunctive voice, that is, a more evasive approach rather than a direct one. This requires sensitivity in dealing with ambiguity, just as working with resistance means to apply minimum force to ‘get rid of the friction’ (Sennett, 2012a, p. 210). Sennett’s proposal also emphasises the importance of informality in the development of cooperation. The New Spitalfields night market is a challenging environment. Workers are worn out due to physical exhaustion, stress and anxiety. Informality lessens the tension and deescalates accumulated emotions. Informal gestures ease the exchanges between people as they allow them to explore the underlying layers of what they mean to say to one another. The opposite of this happened during the team meetings. I noted how tense and disengaged my co-workers were. Everyone spoke, but low-skilled workers were interrupted by the manager who dismissed their ideas or suggestions. Additionally, this manager chose despotic discipline over understanding. In real terms, no one engaged meaningfully. The manager was not interested in listening to what staff had to say. In turn, employees

224

8  Fragmented Cooperation

grew despondent, yet they showed no intent to challenge the establishment for not allowing them to contribute with useful ideas. Moreover, empathy is the most crucial ingredient of Sennett’s concept of cooperation. Empathy is different from action-based solidarity that is motivated by sympathy for another. Empathy is a more relaxed emotion. The empathic person is more interested in what is happening with another person and less in feeling for that person. In addition, empathy invovles keeping an emotional distance whilst remaining curious without presumption. An empathic strategy tackles both ambiguity and engages with resistance through the use of minimum force. There is a qualitative difference in the two approaches to tackling the same puzzle. On the one hand, there is the use of one’s social and interpersonal skills to resolve ambiguities and increase cooperation with another whose manner and demeanour differs from their own. On the other hand, a fighting mentality aims at eradicating the problem without knowing what the problem was in the first place. Working with resistance invites one to learn how to understand the problem rather than shutting it down. Empathy is what lacked on a large scale among New Spitalfields workers. On some occasions, however, fragile signs of cooperation were present. These were displayed in moments of trivial disruptions, as will be discussed next.

8.4.4 Trivial Disruptions In this chapter, disruptions are shown to be trivial events that nurture possibilities for collaboration between co-workers. In these moments, the innate capacity to cooperate resurfaces and tests the social cohesion of the group. Some disruptions, like the following event, are more dramatic than others. One morning around 9 am and just before closing, a tonne of prunes hit the ground with a loud bang. This point in the shift was usually the time when the produce was stored in the fridges on the upper floor or stacked on the ground behind the store’s shutters. Forklift drivers and loaders are involved in this sort of closing time operation, clearing the floor area in front of the store. In this case, a driver misjudged the angle and swerved too quickly. As he attempted to enter the store’s area and place the pallet behind the shutters, he sped up too much for such a manoeuvre and the huge load of prunes fell off the pallet. It turned out that the driver was under the influence of alcohol, for that morning he had had a few ‘special mix’ drinks that the foreman had paid him for taking part in the EPAL operation. All errors of judgement could be put down to alcohol, rather than his lack of skills or a rushed job in his desire to finish quickly and go home. A moment of dead silence followed, which was noticeable as the market was usually noisy during this closing hour. At that very moment, I had been filming my co-workers. I heard the bang and turned around to see where the sound came from. I saw many bodies moving as if a conductor was directing them. Despite the animosity and divergences that commonly characterised the relationships between these men, in this case everyone rushed to collect the fruits off the floor. Everyone did so, from the foreman, loaders

8.5 Sociability

225

and porters to the salespeople who had just earlier been hanging about chit-chatting and laughing. In this moment of trivial disruption, they cooperated like an orchestra, but without a conductor. All their bodily gestures disclosed this intent. Fortunately, there were no victims in this accident, and the manager issued the porter only a verbal warning and made no deductions from his salary. In this ‘scenography’, the traits for collective action bound workers in one, in a final act before they left the market at the end of the nightshift. These men gathered around the forklift to engage in these acts of repair, collecting the prunes from the floor, selecting the good ones from the bad and trying to mend the wooden crates to stack them back on the pallet. Individuals otherwise concerned with just ‘[doing] their work’ now congregated under a common agenda, i.e., to rapidly finish this job and leave work. All were tired and could hardly wait to go home. Yet, they worked as one in a rare moment of cooperation. Other disruptive events were less dramatic than this incident. Many times, I witnessed how forklift drivers blocked the central aisle of the market with the forklift to snatch a conversation with other drivers or watch football matches together on their mobile phones. The drivers behind them would beep their horns to decongest the traffic jam created by the ones who were having fun on YouTube. These were brief episodes for they all feared being caught by the market constabularies or the CCTV equipment installed everywhere inside the market hall. They would put their mobiles back into their pocket and smile with complicity to one another whilst the other drivers swore at them for blocking the aisle. Despite the annoyance, there was an unspoken agreement among drivers who behaved similarly. As the mayhem of the working pace reached its peak, the monotony could also be broken through kind gestures, friendly waves and drivers getting off to pick up loads that fell off others’ forklifts—which was more frequently done through bursts of anger. These trivial disruptions strengthened collaboration among co-workers. However, as they were infrequent they were not routinised into unselfconscious responses. Instead, the trivial disruptions in the nightshift work rhythms brought people into an open zone of cooperation and competition.

8.5 Sociability In an increasingly congested world of social relationships and policy making on immigration, health, and labour issues, revealing a complex set of arrangements from different interest groups and actors in the developed societies, what tools and frameworks, charters and policies should be implemented to create the right conditions for mobilising for nightworkers to ‘become visible’? So far in this chapter, my focus has been on cooperation. In this section, I inquire into the usefulness of a different notion, namely, sociability. This notion directs attention to the social behaviour that produces transient forms of bonding between people who are different. In addition, sociability fits conventions by which people who seem to ‘share [equal]

226

8  Fragmented Cooperation

aspirations and [show] mutual respect’ act together (Glick Schiller and Çağlar (2016, p. 18). I ask, is sociability transferable outside of workplace practices? This nightnography shows that for most New Spitalfields workers, the social reproduction is subsumed to the means of surviving. By and large, nightworkers are disinterested in building collective sociability at and outside of this workplace. At this market, they act out of competition and usually only cooperate in instances of trivial disruption. One exception to this is Flory, the café server introduced in Chap. 3, whose wish was to build relationships in the market. In this section, I call upon Flory’s experiences again to illustrate that, however transient, forms of bonding between people can occur, even among those who deal with resistance and difference on an ongoing basis. Whenever Flory passed by the FruitVeg stand, she would smile and join in on conversations. She recognised the emotional challenges faced by all nightshifters in maintaining long-term intimate relationships in their private lives and in dealing with loneliness. Her attitude was rather unusual, given the maltreatment of nightworkers. At this market, it was somewhat suspicious to show concern for the wellbeing of others. Flory’s keen interest in engaging with and confiding in other market workers was also the opposite of the ritual gathering in the market café on Saturday mornings. Those were moments when a hard-fought week of strenuous labour came to an end. Not everyone attended these meetings. Basrí, for example, precluded himself from such social gatherings to spend time with his family instead. The usual Saturday morning crowd consisted of a couple of single women, a dozen of single men or men with families away in their home countries, like Gică, who congregated in the café to drink and play or watch card games. Loaders and drivers belonging to the same company sat at tables in small groups, rarely mixing with those working for different companies, and for hours would watch their managers play card games. It might seem appropriate to render such instances with reference to the Geertzian ‘scenography of deep play’, whereby ‘adults seething and confessing enact everyday rituals to bind people together socially’ (Sennett, 2008, p. 271). Nonetheless, ion the time spent with my co-workers at the market café on Saturday mornings, I observed none of the Geertzian ‘deep play’ enacted. That is, no dialogic exchanges nor confessional practices occurred in the almost ritual gatherings in the market café. Yet, some of these people did confide in Flory. Outside of the market, these workers only socialise on rare occasions. Whatever stamina they have left in their bodies after a week of nightshifts, they use for family time on Saturdays and Sundays. In Basrí’s case, for example, nightshifting has become too strenuous for him to have a social life. For Mehmet, another porter who has been working at this market for about 4–5 years, ‘nightwork eats your life away’. The price they pay for family time results in a lack of sleep and therefore, they return to yet another week of nightwork weary from the lack of rest. Yet, these workers’ bodies gave away the joy of relief at not having to return to loading, serving or selling for their night off through their gestures. The café servers counting the money at closing time shared similar feelings. At the end of each week, I too felt in my body and mind, the jubilation in the air.

8.6 Conclusion

227

Considering these particularities, I argue that sociability tolerates difference, but it is not a strong enough social adhesive for collective action, and especially not in the long term. Sociability is a ‘mutual awareness’ of the differences among members of a group (Sennett, 2012b, p. 39) and therefore, displays a feeling of being together, but whilst doing individual tasks alone. Moreover, in this context, sociability does not provide the framework needed to build strong social skills that apply outside the workplace. Such a possibility could be pertinent perhaps in contexts whereby migrants do organise to defend their rights, improve working conditions and speak against tyranny and despotic establishments. As Sassen (2017) explains, in the strategic set-up of global cities, janitors are a credible case of ‘becoming visible’ in New York City because they are aware of their role in maintaining the lives and work of others. Janitors in NYC and taxi drivers in Toronto are perhaps creating a precedent that could become part of the solution for the plight of nightworkers in highly precarious environments, as well as offering a model for others to follow in organising to fight for their working and economic rights to the city. On this basis, nightworkers who share a degree of embodied precarity inherent in their poor working conditions, in principle, should have sufficient reasons and possibilities to organise. Yet, under no circumstance has this been the case at this night market. Here there are no dynamics that bond people together on similar moral grounds, as there are in the shared beliefs that bring other people together in the streets to strike against oppressive governments or exploitative working conditions.

8.6 Conclusion This chapter’s task has been to investigate how workers learn to apply the various physical skills that they gain under the conditions of fierce competition and atomisation. I posited that technical skills acquired on the work floor might provide insights into how to apply these out of the market in the wider society. In other words, I argued that people with good physical skills might become great at strengthening social bonds in and out of the work floor. The chapter has explored the reasons that prevented people who were so different from one another to bond outside of working hours, congregate for collective action and improve their lived time at work. Additionally, the chapter investigated how strong or fragile the possibilities were for creating social bonds among co-workers outside the marketplace, when chances to cooperate were thin on the work floor. I have answered this question by revealing what happens in the workers’ bodies when social bonds among humans turned bio-machines are enacted and by explaining the three building blocks for embodied cooperation. I have shown that rhythms and rituals ingrain in the body through repetitive movements, and gestures build informality through actors’ bodies and give birth to social bonding by defusing tension in aggressive environments and complex situations. These three areas of the embodiment of physical skills provide insights into the possibilities for cultivating technical skills that when applied to social encounters outside of the workplace may

228

8  Fragmented Cooperation

create opportunities for cooperation. Whilst cooperation among workers on the work floor is weak and further weakened by the internalised capitalist discipline among co-workers, brief cooperation surfaces in moments of disruptions. Workers bond briefly through non-resistance and tacit cooperation. Though limited in scope, the task-based encounters in moments of trivial disruptions reveal that the co-workers are inclined to cooperate. The market workers’ capacity and will to cooperate is more strongly revealed in contexts where they are engaged in lucrative schemes for extra revenue. Self-interest based cooperation is, nonetheless, fragile, and does not encourage collective action beyond the workplace. The hidden pleasures and moments of disruptions constitute only a small proportion of the social scene at the market. Neither, however, enhances the workers’ social livelihoods in or out of the workplace. Put differently, these brief moments of embodied cooperation are not readily transferable outside of the market practices. Apart from the workers’ individual conditions, structural factors weaken bodily cooperation. The nightshift workers’ experiences highlight that precariousness is inherent in their environment. As explained, the management did not encourage them to use their embodied capital to cooperate and neither did it create opportunities for that. On the contrary, management was swift in furthering bodily precariousness by extending the nightshift whilst cutting opportunities to earn extra cash. Lastly, the chapter has showed that although embodied cooperation reveals itself in trivial disruptions of nightwork activities, it is seldom and not solidified enough to organise the workers for collective actions or social interactions outside the workplace. Market workers do something together, but not with one another. These bio-­ automatons vie with one another as they grow disinterested in others’ precarity. In short, this chapter has explored whether these fragile possibilities could spur interests within another worker and thus, engage in doing something together outside of the workplace. Instead, it has found that despite the levels of insecurity experienced by the manual workers, only weak and rare forms of cooperation were present, both in action and words. Put differently, there was less cooperation and more competition. Hence, I argue that capitalism turns cooperative people into competitors.

References Betti, E., Papastephanakē, L., Tolomelli, M., & Zimmermann, S. (2022). Thinking the history of women’s activism into global labor history. In E. Betti, L. Papastephanakē, M. Tolomelli, & S. Zimmermann (Eds.), Women, work, and activism: Chapters of an inclusive history of labor in the long twentieth century (1st ed., p. 354). Central European University Press. https://ceupress.com/book/women-­work-­and-­activism. Accessed 18 Jan 2023. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Standford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF00680104 Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Standford University Press. Çağlar, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2018). Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372011

References

229

Cairney, P., & St Denny, E. (2020). A window of opportunity for prevention policy design. Why Isn’t Government Policy More Preventive? 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1093/ OSO/9780198793298.003.0002 de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. University of California Press. Collins, R. (1981). On the microfoundations of macrosociology. American Journal of Sociology, 86(5), 984–1041. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2778745?seq=1. Accessed 9 June 2021 Gherardi, S. (2006). Organizational knowledge: The texture of workplace learning. In J.  Child & S. Rodrigues (Eds.), Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (Vol. 53). Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Glick Schiller, N., & Çağlar, A. (2016). Displacement, emplacement and migrant newcomers: Rethinking urban sociabilities within multiscalar power. Identities, 23(1), 17–34. https://doi. org/10.1080/1070289X.2015.1016520 Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life. University of Edinburgh and Social Sciences Research Centre. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089106 Hassan, R. (2003). The chronoscopic society: Globalization, time and knowledge in the network economy (digital formations). Peter Lang. Holmes, S. M. (2013a). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States (1st ed.). University of California Press. Holmes, S.  M. (2013b). “Is it worth risking your life?”: Ethnography, risk and death on the U.S.-Mexico border. Social Science and Medicine, 99, 153–161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2013.05.029 MacQuarie, J.-C. (2016). Night shifts in the nocturnal city of the future. In S.  Krstić & P. Cunningham (Eds.), EuroScience open forum (pp. 77–78). Marie Curie Alumni Association. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.35637.99040 Mathur, C. (2022). A strike to remember. In S.  Kasmir & L.  Gil (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of the anthropology of labor (pp.  335–347). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.432 4/9781003158448-­33 Sassen, S. (2017). Predatory formations dressed in wall street suits and algorithmic math. Science, Technology and Society, 1(2017), 0971721816682783. https://doi. org/10.1177/0971721816682783 Scheper-Hughes, A. N., & Lock, M. M. (1987). The mindful body: A prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology. Medical Anthropological Quarterly, 1(1), 6–41. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/648769 Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism (1st ed.). W.W. Norton & Co. Accessed 9 June 2021. Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. Allen Lane. Yale University Press. Sennett, R. (2012a). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation (1st ed.). Yale University Press. Accessed 9 June 2021. Sennett, R. (2012b). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of co-operation. Aging (Vol. 7). Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke Universtiy Press. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701599465 Wacquant, L. (1995). Pugs at work: Bodily capital and bodily labour among proffesional boxers. Body & Society, 1(1), 65–93. Wacquant, L. (2004). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/425391

Chapter 9

Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork

9.1 Post-Circadian Capitalism In the not-so-distant past Fordist system of wage relations, workers were ruled by the clock. The 24-hour day was divided into periods for work, leisure and sleep. Additionally, life was scheduled and predictable by the years one spent in education, work and retirement. The capitalist regime respected the physiological and social rhythms of the bodies at work. In today’s capitalism, workers are still ruled by the clock. However, the 24-hour day is no longer divided into distinct periods for work, leisure and sleep. The goal of around-the-clock production and consumption completely drives this phase of capitalism. Consequently, the capitalist regime disrespects workers’ time outside of work. It permeates not only workers’ physiological needs for resting their bodies, but also possibilities to engage socially. Nowhere is this more visible and visceral than in the case of manual nightworkers. The body is first and foremost the manual worker’s means of production. The nightshift depletes workers’ bodily resources insofar as they need to stay alert during the hours when human bodies are supposed to rest. The individual needs to constantly manage their resources in order to be able to perform competitively and prevent getting ill and consequently, losing their job. The consumption of these resources requires the stamina to withstand the strenuous work and overall duress. Sleepless and exhausted workers lack vigour and health. Moreover, nightworkers lack social stamina and end up isolated and alienated from their social milieu and from society at large. Migration adds another layer of difficulty for there is a crucial connection between labour processes, bodily experiences and migrant trajectories. The socio-economic position of migrants and their social networks translates into different levels of precarity and shapes how their bodies are used and abused in the labour process. Despite the migrant manual nightworkers’ implicit knowledge of their bodies’ limits and capabilities, the lack of decent working conditions and harsh labour discipline results in an embodied precarity. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_9

231

232

9  Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork

The argument of this book is that the embodied precarity that migrant manual nightworkers experience reveals an understanding of how it is that ‘post-circadian’ can be said to be a more appropriate term than ‘post-Fordist’ for today’s capitalism: This is due to the significance that nightwork has come to have in the capitalist system. This book has exposed how capitalism disrespects nightworkers’ physiological need to rest, sleep and recover from hard labour, and how it abuses their bodies and livelihoods by extracting the maximum from their labour through a regime of discipline, which then impacts on their social lives and sociality, weakens cooperation among workers and denies them access to or a sufficient budget for the types of training and career development that could help them exit precarious nightwork. Moreover, the book has tracked the mechanisms of destruction, such as extreme extraction of labour power from bodies that carry the burden of nightwork and has elucidated the instruments that hinder cohesion between vulnerable groups who are placed on a different temporal axis to the day from mainstream society. The book also scaled up the analysis, moving from the individual level to the structural mechanisms that perpetuate the disregard of nightworkers. These are migration and its by-products. One by-product is the production of disposability; the expendable bodies of nightworkers being depleted of resources through physical labour for capital gains. The other by-product is the production of invisibility, as nightwork functions as a temporal axis of exclusion under post-circadian capitalism, not unlike the spatial axis of exclusion in the case of domestic labour. The production of disposability merges with that of invisibility and pushes nightworkers on the lowest level of precarity in the labour system. In the following pages, I present the book’s key findings, and highlight its contribution to debates on the demand for disposable migrants in post-industrial societies.

9.2 The Glocturnal City This book has taken the glocturnal city as its exemplary site of investigation because this has become a privileged site for attracting migrant labour power and the strategic terrain for occupational polarisation between high and low-skilled migrant workers. Additionally, the glocturnal city has incorporated globalisation dynamics by investing in infrastructure that supports and expands nighttime production and consumption, but that disinvests in the workers who make this possible, those being the unseen (and often undocumented) migrant workers. In London, the City’s financial district celebrates its highly paid executives but fails to recognise its migrant workers, let alone resolve the problems with nightwork. Value is attached to the lives and bodies of the former whilst it is denied to the latter whom are marked as disposable or expendable, and left in neglect or abandoned and disinvested (Sharma, 2014). The needs of migrant workers pass unobserved by City of London’s authorities, corporations and more specifically to the case analysed here, the small company owners and fruit and vegetable traders at the

9.3  Invisible Denizens

233

New Spitalfields night market. This market is owned and managed by the Corporation of London (CoL), which up until April 2015 had not been paying London Living Wage rates1 to its workers and contractors who were maintaining the financial district in the City or the Square Mile. The U.K.’s most extensive employment study for the Office for National Statistics (ONS) recommends that nightshifts be 8 hours long and include regular breaks in any 24 hour period, and that there is a maximum cycle of 17 nightshifts per month. Nevertheless, traders at New Spitalfields market do not follow such recommendations. The nightly reality of glocturnal cities nurtures a division between those ‘travelling in the dark to travail at night’ and those partying or going home to sleep (ebook Beaumont, 2015, pp. 216–219). More importantly, the book has approached the glocturnal city as the ideal location to analyse the development of a post-circadian capitalism that fails to recognise the biological need to sleep and rest for the armies of migrants travelling at night to work. Nocturnal consumption and production are parallel processes of colonising the night that create new possibilities for the accumulation of capital. Moving the night frontier further into the daylight means to not only colonise the processes, but also the workers of this 24/7 society. Since the nineteenth century when the advancement of capitalism begun, we have transited from a globalisation period where respect for the circadian rhythms involved a work-home balance to a post-circadian capitalist global work phase where these rhythms are disrespected and work lives are reorganised for the benefit of the global economy.

9.3 Invisible Denizens Glocturnal London is the home of an army of ‘invisible denizens’ made up of hundreds of thousands of migrants working at night. Marginalised by the mainstream daytime society and obscured by the darkness, nightworkers wake up in the evening whilst others go to bed, and travel to work in the dark when nobody sees them. They go home to sleep in the day when most daytime workers are at work, and again no one sees them. It is as if they do not exist in 24/7 cities, and not only in London, but also Delhi, Mumbai and New York. These are ‘global denizens’ or the ‘light infantry of global capitalism’ overrepresented in low and medium to low-skilled occupations (Standing, 2012, p. 597). By and large migrants are those who clean streets, homes and offices, and ensure that private and public transport runs like clockwork. They are the ‘other nine-to-five’ workers, suffering from biological casualties (lack of sleep and exercise) and social ones (absence of friendships and want of general sociality). Moreover, they carry the burden of nightwork on their bodies, and some do it six nights per week for meagre wages. Despite being poorly paid and  The Living Wage is an hourly rate, calculated according to the cost of living in the U.K. by the Living Wage Foundation. The London Living Wage (LLW) is currently £11.95 per hour. Corporation of London has become a LLW employer in November 2014, but it has not aligned with the rates till April 2015. Online at: http://bit.ly/3GORpL4 Accessed 18.01.2023 1

234

9  Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork

inadequately housed, precarious migrants are central to the maintenance of the city’s infrastructure in many sectors (e.g., communication, healthcare, finance, food and transport). Their ‘strategic role’ can also involve withstanding the ‘nightly rhythms of global work’ in Delhi’s call centres to serve U.S. or Australia-based customers (Aneesh, 2021; Patel 2010); it may mean that night taxi drivers subsume their own time needs or synchronise their working time to the temporal order demanded by the schedule of corporate executives (Sharma, 2014); or cleaning services provided at night when executives offices based in the financial districts of London, New York or Toronto are mostly free (Sassen, 2017). Both these workers and corporate executives–though at other ends of the labour market–are engaged in and subordinated to corporate capital development. However, in the unequal capitalist relations of production and accumulation, nightworkers are the seeming misfits. They are an army losing battles with the precarity of their nocturnal working lives and sleepless days. They continuously fight sleeplessness whilst awake and working all night and endure the bodily exhaustion that is produced by prolonged physical labour. Moreover, as nightshifting invades their intimate, private lives, they become prone to mental alienation as a result of being isolated from the minds and eyes of diurnals and their social bonds. In the process of ‘creative destruction’, masterminded by the neoliberal capitalists (Harvey, 2005a, 2005b), the night frontier is more like a boundary ‘resisting contamination [with], [and] excluding, deadening’ (Sennett, 2008, p. 231) the marginalised people.

9.4 Under-the-Skin Precarity The skin is simultaneously the borderline and the site of exchange between the foreign bodies of the outside world and the inside of one’s body, with its cells and organs residing under the skin. The skin keeps a living body intact and functional, yet allows the passing of fluids that keep the human body alert, resting or moving, speaking, fighting or working. It is more like a physical border that separates two bodies but allows contact (touch-feel). This biological borderline negotiates between what is harmful or friendly to one’s organism. Moreover, the skin is also the site of resistance, the border or contact zone whereby foreign objects are stopped or permitted to entering, unless sharp objects cut it, hot waves burn it, or it gets bruised when in contact with a heavy dull object. On the contrary, the skin seals and keeps the internal organisms and blood within its boundaries from spilling out. As we travel from the natural to the social realm, and to the specific context of multicultural and superdiverse cities, this borderline condition is both necessary and difficult in the context of bodies crossing borders. Nevertheless, much of what has been written about precarity in migration studies and the social sciences about people crossing borders to work abroad, is skin deep. This book encourages an embodied understanding of precarious working migrants and proposes that the sites of resistance are (also) at the cell membranes level–under the skin.

9.5  Embodied Cooperation

235

Notwithstanding the correctors, the discussion of these corporeal aspects grew out of the fieldwork and from the realisation that globalisation and migration studies offer only sketches of the embodied dimension of precarity and consequently, analyse migrants at an abstract level, as if they could cross borders without their bodies (de Casanova & Jafar, 2013; Jafar & de Casanova, 2013). In other words, most of these studies are disembodied and offer limited explanatory potential for what happens to workers’ bodies and subjectivities. Even the research studies that have focused on people moving across national borders have been similarly limited (de Casanova & Jafar, 2013; but see Molé, 2010 for an exception). This book offers new possibilities for inquiry in migration studies for understanding how human bodies across borders are used and abused in the 24/7 production-consumption-­ accumulation cycle. This emphasis on corporeality is even more important in the case of nightwork. The physical supply of the nightworkers’ bodies translates into stamina to withstand the strenuous work and overall duress. The worker needs to constantly manage their resources in order to perform competitively and to prevent ill-being, of which can consequently lead to the loss of employment. Drawing on my insider experience, I recorded the symptoms that indicated how nightshift workers’ overall wellbeing was gradually and inevitably collapsing. The longer I continued nightshifting, the more evident it became that the duration of my daytime sleep was reducing, that my body was weakening, that I felt increasingly isolated from people close to me, as well as alienated from daily affairs. The body is both the worker’s means and ends for developing and enacting social skills via physical labour. Sleepless workers lack vigour and health. Moreover, as social animals, night workers lack social stamina. They do not have the luxury to exit the trap of nightwork. They become day sleepers trapped between a life on caffeine and other energising beverages and daydreaming about a prosperous future. Night-in, night-out they survive the forces and mechanisms of globalisation developing capital at the expense of their bodies. Despite the workers’ knowledge on their body’s limits and capabilities, the lack of decent working conditions explains the broader implications of the labour regime that magnifies the precarity experienced among ‘people [who] are like dead men walking,’ as one of my co-workers put it. Ontologically, ‘since this life is and is not my own, as authority decided that, how can I make my life valuable when I am a non-life?’ (Butler, 2012). Epistemologically, once we look under-the-skin, as it were, we can articulate a finer, experience-laden concept of precarity and conduct the discussions of our labour system differently.

9.5 Embodied Cooperation In the contemporary political and economic thinking, immigration provisions favour the highly skilled over other migrants (Fernández-Reino et  al., 2020). Upon this backdrop, the local authorities and ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 2010) are expected to act as if all people are alike and capable, and those who cannot perform

236

9  Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork

up to the standards imposed by governments are blamed for being lazy or irresponsible. Additionally, a rigid application of standards can mean an inadequate responsiveness to individual situations. Further, the restructuring of the economy to 24/7 production and consumption increases the demand for workers willing to fit or capable of fitting into the new work-time discipline. Despite these inequalities and the unequal treatment that is embedded in the structural forces and acted out on the ground, the marginalised groups, such as the unwelcome immigrants, are considered undeserving (Zentai, 2020), in contrast with, in some cases, ‘deserving’ refugees (Holmes & Castañeda, 2016). Ultimately, displaced people themselves are blamed for the historical and political-economic structures that created the inequalities in the first places, and even more so if migration-related issues become salient in public opinion. However, as this nightnography has reiterated, in return for a small token of acceptance or appreciation, the marginalised migrants accept these jobs, even if that means de-skilling, experiencing social casualties though a lack of human ties and suffering from their abusive employers. These workers suffer not only from the value-based judgement of undeservingness, but also from the lack of protection from local authorities and management, as well as the lack of labour regulation and inspection. Strikingly, site operators such as CoL give free rein to employers to abuse and exploit nightworkers in highly precarious labour. At New Spitalfields, the constabularies reinforce the market rules regarding low-speed limits, but fail to acknowledge and report cases of abuse and exploitation experienced by many of the nightworkers. The constabularies’ role is to police those breaching the rules and regulations set by CoL. They also have a legal duty to take note of and act on the systematic abuse that some workers allege and report to them. To my knowledge, this has yet to happen. Quite the contrary, as their presence might play a role in eliminating any attempts by workers to organise and fight for decent working conditions. The normalisation of precarious nightwork conditions, the non-action by local authorities to protect the excluded and marginalised workers, and the lack of labour enforcement, as well as regulations and abuse reporting mechanisms implemented by the site management, are all markers of the broader capitalist society that encourages the creation of surplus populations, in the same vein as argued by Tania Li (2010). The destructive presence of these structural forces disrupts capacities for sociality, not only by depleting their bodies and leaving them with next to no energy for maintaining a social life, but also by nurturing competitiveness. The organisation of labour production limits workers’ economic rights and the management is swift in turning co-workers against one another, manipulating them to vie against one another for the smallest benefits and doing so at the earliest opportunity, as well as exploiting their bodily labour power for the company’s benefit. Workers experience a strict regime of discipline and harsh measures, such as extended shift hours without a pay rise or any other contractual benefits. These tactics succeed in producing docile, obedient workers that appear as self-absorbed, that is, interested in their revenues and disinterested in other workers’ precariousness. These vulnerable workers put up personas (masks) to hide their true intents and anxieties, and use bodily behaviour to communicate toughness, masculinity and competitiveness.

9.5  Embodied Cooperation

237

Nightshift workers survive bodily precariousness because they are immune to their co-workers’ needs, and not because they offer and receive mutual support from one other. They are bodies-turned-machines that end up used and spent. Notions of solidarity or cooperation become secondary to their existence and survival in the atomised and competitive work environments. Nightworkers are concerned not with quality-driven work for the common good of their team or company, but with how (and why not) others ‘do or don’t work’, and as such limit the number of interactions they have with co-workers, even when they engage with one another on similar tasks. They evaluate nightly interactions with co-workers and act based on what best serves one’s self-interests. Trivial disruptions usually produce chances for strengthening collaboration among co-workers, but they are too infrequent and short-lived to nurture long-lasting cooperation. However, even in such short-lived instances, cooperation revealed itself as ‘a capacity to live [and work together] … which cannot be erased’ (Sennett, 2012, p.  280). Workers are naturally inclined towards cooperation, but prevented from doing so through the organisation of labour. These types of exchanges allow fragile forms of short collective action at work, but not outside the workplace, i.e., to act and collectively claim their rights to legal and accurate pay rates that loaders and drivers cannot fathom when compared to the salaries of those in the higher echelons at this market (sales, management). These manual migrant workers up and working at night embody a weak form of cooperation during social encounters in the workplace, visible mainly during trivial disruptions. This translates as another salient feature of nightshift work in the glocturnal city that this book puts forward, namely, migrants labour at night together, but not with one another. In this way, political factors, labour disintegration and social exclusion ensure the extraction of labour power without the slightest resistance on behalf of the nightworkers. These factors affect not only possibilities for cooperation on the work floor, but systematically weaken opportunities for nightshift workers to engage in collective action outside the workplace. In being neglected by authorities, having limited rights compared to local workers and living outside of the social arena populated by the mainstream society, how can they seek ‘political support outside of the workplace’ (Zentai, 2020, p. 211)? Put differently, the broken bodies of nightworkers are being churned into bio-automaton workers, used up and spent, and any notions of solidarity or cooperation become secondary to their survival. In earnest, these machine-like human bodies or ‘walking ghosts’ do not co-operate, support each other or show solidarity to one another, but instead compete fiercely to make their own place in the world. This competition is less concerned with ‘doing good work’, as with Sennett’s (2008) craftspeople, and more about ensuring that the next worker is ‘doing his job’. Put another way, we should disavow ourselves from the illusion that a post-­circadian capitalist society provides and nurtures any possibility for cooperation among manual workers. By this token, weakened from within against cooperation and being without the support to integrate into mainstream society, there is little hope that marginalised migrants will ever be united and integrated. Still, this book argues that the little hope that there is, is to be found in their bodies. Performance that is ingrained in the body through rhythms and gestures might facilitate the body’s

238

9  Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork

capability for dialogic behaviour. In other words, hope lies within the episodes of embodied cooperation, regardless of how weak and short-lived they are.

9.6 Researching Nightwork Communities Thoroughly researching the entire nightwork community of a glocturnal city, together with the historical problems inherent in its unequal labour system and the ongoing demands of today’s post-circadian capitalism, would be beyond the scope of any single book. This book draws upon research that unfolded in accordance with a set of methodological choices. The first of these choices was to focus on migrant nightworkers, rather than on the social relations between migrant and non-migrant workers on the work floor or in a local (British) community outside of the workplace. This could be seen as a limitation of this research as it leaves out potential insights about how the two categories might differ, which could strengthen or modify the arguments put forward here. Despite this methodological choice, I share the conviction that migrant integration and cooperation practices should be investigated from a relational perspective. Although treated differentially, both migrants and local nightworkers are part of and affected by the current unequal labour system. All nightworkers (migrant or locals) are subject to precarity insofar as they need to stay alert during the hours when human bodies are supposed to rest, and suffer from maladjustment to disruptions in their natural, circadian rhythms. However, the investigation shifted away from the dynamics of integration of migrants within local communities and focused on the experiences of precarity that are aggravated for migrant workers, for they, more than the locals, need to accept deskilling jobs and put up with abuse. The second choice was to centre on workers and not on the field of work, although they are ‘mutually constituted’ (Gherardi, 2006, p.  231). The assumption behind this is that cooperation and competition are embodied and manifest in the interactions between several workers’ bodies, not in the field of work practices. Whether bodily interpersonal skills and practical knowledge could be transferred to structured, routinised transactions in organisations dictated by diurnal circadian rhythms and work patterns, is worthy of further investigation by employment relations researchers. The book also opens avenues for future research. Nightshifters are a marginalised group of workers who live on different rhythms to mainstream society. Turner (1977, p. 96) argues that ‘the inferior, marginal, and the outsider’ form ‘comunitas’ that are driven by a ‘sense of humanity’ and not commonality. Turner (1977, p. 131) identifies ‘comunitas’ as constituted of ‘concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals’, yet whom are naturally inclined to cooperate whilst tolerating their differences. Although factors such as bodily knowledge, skill learning and its application to the social realm improve our understanding of cooperation among people who differ. Nightshifters are both men and women. This book recognises the need to better address the gender dimension of nightwork. The unequal gender distribution of

9.6  Researching Nightwork Communities

239

childcare and household duties and the situation of working mothers in the labour market is of high relevance to night studies, too (Fedyuk, 2015). Female migrant care workers become burdened and withdraw, as they are unable to combine the two. Non-waged women who end up doing unpaid housework to pay their migration-related debts fair worse, because many cannot easily move out of precariousness and take up paid, legal employment that guarantees access to decent work (Secretary-General Report, 2017). Equally important are studies of migrant working conditions, which point out how migrant status shapes the conditions in which labour power is used and abused. Experiences of abuse negatively impact on a person’s social life, and physical and mental health (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2015). Although migration policy has positively responded to the gendered dimension of less fair and just migrant worker practices, the ‘gendered gaps in social rights have been overlooked in migration studies’ (Uhde & Ezzeddine, 2019). By interlacing work on migration that utilises a gender lens, future research on women nightworkers could tackle several of the puzzles facing the research community (Bartha et al., 2014). Also important for such research, are studies that analyse European governments’ strategies to integrate migrant women into the labour market on equal terms with men in E.U. countries (Pillinger, 2006). Future studies’ research agenda on structural inequality (Kaneff & Pine, 2011) and the labour integration of migrant women (Fedyuk & Stewart, 2018) could contribute with findings on migrant women nightworkers, who are largely absent from night, new labour and migration studies, including those on the role they have in ‘making the city’ and contributing to evening and nighttime economies2 (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018; Sassen, 2016). Further investigations in this area need to incorporate gender relations vis-à-vis the social requirements of women and men in the nightwork landscape. Such studies could enable an understanding of the interplay between social and cultural identities in the context of nightwork. Men and women at New Spitalfields responded to codes of conduct that may be hidden in plain sight. To unpack how women are expected to ‘perform’ their gender would mean to evaluate how visibilised and invisibilised gendered aspects are negotiated in nightwork, and how precarity and gender intersect in nightwork . Building on scholarly work (Rajaram, 2015; Sahraoui, 2019) that has already recognised that labour regimes create conditions of marginality for migrants, further research on women’s experiences of work and gender relations in urban areas would provide researchers with unique opportunities to explore the factors that affect women’s responses to invisibility and precarity and how they forge spaces of care, support, connection and safety in situations of invisibilisation and precarity (one exception being Arora, Raman and König (2023)). One other research item that could be explored with a gender lens is the examination of how management practices and workplace culture impacts both men and women’s understanding and crafting of their  PRECNIGHTS addresses women’s migrant nightworkers’ marginalisation via precarity and invisibilisation. The primary aim is to visibilise women migrant nightworkers by examining precarity, gender, migration and nightwork, and how each dimension magnifies the lived experiences of the others. Available online. Accessed 18.01.2023. 2

240

9  Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork

self-presentations, whereby they perform specific bodily actions according to the social requirements of night workplaces in food supply chains. Further to this, nightworkers experience different degrees of precarity according to their place on the hierarchy of their organisation. Regardless of this variation, the absence of accountability and lack of involvement from institutions and authorities in monitoring workers’ wellbeing, their economic rights and working conditions perpetuate this troubling precarity. It also makes these institutions and authorities accomplices in creating a structural-based suffering that worsens as the level on the occupational ladder is lowered. The resolve rests with labour organisations, unions, on-site tenant’s associations and the managing authorities. Research-based policy could prevent an escalation of the current inequalities among nightworkers and provide migrants with dignified working lives and workplaces. To take further steps to investigate the formation of sociality between migrants and locals would require scholars to look critically at ‘society as inevitably and irrevocably shaped by migration’ (Hamann & Yurdakul, 2018; apud Zentai, 2020, p. 212). Only then could we envision strengthening the social bonds among migrants and see migrants integrated in the societies where they arrive to work. Ultimately, we want to do something for one another, even when tasks are demanding, nightshifts interminable and where there are structural inequalities that create shibboleths between migrants and mainstream society. Whilst the book has not addressed such considerations in-depth, it encourages researchers to try and see the complexities of ‘visions, ideologies and policy paradigms aiming to respond to differences, belongings and disparities in society’ (Zentai, 2020, p. 203).

9.7 Towards an Embodied Anthropology of Nightwork in Migration Studies Migration literature documents the political, cultural and community practices that shape the working lives of migrants in their everyday acts (Garcés-Mascareñas & Penninx, 2016a, b; Lafleur & Stanek, 2017a, b). Nonetheless, it only considers practices that are pursued in daylight with the exceptions of: Sahraoui, 2019; Zentai, 2020; Shaw, 2022; Duijzings & Dušková, 2022). This is a significant limitation and this study aimed to address this gap with the view that global cities in post-industrial societies demand a constant influx of migrant nightworkers. Alongside valuable anthropological studies of global cities and the localised exploitation mechanisms of vulnerable labour (Rajaram, 2015), this book has sought to enlarge the agendas of migrant labour and integration studies (Penninx & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2016a, b) by putting forth a call for an embodied anthropology of nightwork in migration studies. This call acknowledges a methodological gap, and signals the theoretical implications of recognising, not to mention finding solutions to, the troubling precarity in nightwork. ‘Nocturnal anthropologists’ often prefer to compare cases of activities happening both during the day and night. Currently, these researchers

9.7  Towards an Embodied Anthropology of Nightwork in Migration Studies

241

focus more on illegal or illicit activities at night, leaving the legitimate life in the dark understudied (Galinier et al., 2010). Apart from this, illegitimate activities are certainly not restricted to the night. By responding to this call, migration scholars could reconcile or at least move us towards an understanding of what 24/7 capitalism refuses to acknowledge, that is, that contemporary capitalism downright rejects the essential nature of nightwork, casts nightworkers as expendable and forces them to inhabit the lowest levels of precarity in the labour system. Moreover, migration scholars could bring insights on labour processes and policies, as well as social inequalities into the heartland of 24/7 capitalist societies. As migration and global inequalities scholarship would have it, it is the social factors (e.g., growth of inequalities and the spread of corruption after 1989) combined with political instability that drove post-socialist migration from A2 countries, which has forced A2 migrants to find more viable ways of life in the post-industrial countries, and specifically the U.K. (Kaneff & Pine, 2011). It is worth noting that the socialist economy had nightshifts too, so we might also ask, to what extent is it correct to talk about post-circadian production as a typical feature of capitalism? Is the post-­ circadian capitalist economy exclusively a Western-driven phenomenon? Recent studies (Duijzings & Dušková, 2022) have offered insights into the temporal organisation of labour across political and economic regimes that help us understand that whilst both the East and West, and socialism and capitalism included nightwork in their economic systems, it has been the capitalist drive for capital gains, regardless of the ideological foundation, that has accelerated a 24/7 production and consumption through technologisation and digitalisation. In countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain, these advancements were either much slower or stalled altogether. Whilst among the Eastern-bloc countries the night has been disenchanted, how has the night in Western Europe become increasingly ‘normalised’ and colonised, for example, in terms of production processes and services extending into the night? How would these countries survive without the input of Eastern European migrants since the two E.U. enlargement waves (in 2004, 2007), whose strategic role has been to supply cheap labour to keep the advanced economies going? Both multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on the temporal organisation of labour–the nightshift in different places, political systems and across time (Duijzings & Dušková, 2022)–shows that in the last two centuries the scientific community has been preoccupied with turning human beings once regulated by an inner clock into bio-automatons (half-human, half-machine) now regulated by capital gains through production after dark (Ahlheim, 2022, p. 256). In both the East and West, other modern research has attempted (and thankfully failed so far) to put an end to sleep for the sake of keeping soldiers awake several nights in a row (Crary, 2013). Yet, according to archaeologists of the night, human activities have been part of a long day’s journey into the night as far back as the Classic Maya civilisation, and includes those that entailed water maintenance systems dating back to ‘third millennium BCE (cca. 2600–1900)’ Indus cities, present-day Pakistan and India (Gonlin, 2022; Gonlin & Nowell, 2017; Wright & Garrett, 2017, p. 288). Therefore, an embodied anthropology of nightwork (domestic, paid or unpaid) would provide the means to include in the scholarly agenda, work activities that are

242

9  Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork

equally meaningful from a day or night perspective. Moreover, nightwork is a stand-­ alone form of work. As the traditional labour structure is currently set, ‘nightshift’ is classed as inclusive of daytime work and not as a stand-alone structure. Fixing nightwork out of the traditional daytime structure is a must when tailoring rights to specific night pay rates regardless of categories or types of contracts, or the status of being a migrant or local. For a shift of perspective to occur, migration scholars would need to inquire into the human activities that are structured in the day but conducted in the night, and migrants’ voices included in these conversations. Scholarship could also engage with union campaigns and as this would certainly benefit the most precarious of all, as well as the entire labour structure, a subject developed next as proposals for a Nightwork Charter in the coda of Chap. 10 of this book.

References Ahlheim, H. (2022). 12 expanding the limits. Towards a history of working and waking in modern societies. Working at night, 255–270. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753592-­012 Aneesh, A. (2021). Nightly rhythms of global work. Contexts, 20(1), 64–65. https://doi. org/10.1177/1536504221997874 Arora, P., Raman, U., & König, R. (2023). Feminist futures of work. Nieuwe Prinsengracht 89 1018 VR. Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463728386 Bartha, A., Fedyuk, O., & Zentai, V. (2014). Gender equality and care choices in the light of population ageing. Budapest. http://www.neujobs.eu. Beaumont, M. (2015). Nightwalking: A nocturnal history of London. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (53). Verso Books. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324. 004. Butler, J. (2012). Can one lead a good life in a bad life? Adorno prize lecture. Radical Philosophy, 176, 9–18. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/can-one-lead-a-good-life-in-a-bad-life. Accessed 19 June 2023 Çağlar, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2018). Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372011 Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late capitalism and the end of sleep. Verso Books. de Casanova, E.  M., & Jafar, A. (Eds.). (2013). Bodies without borders. Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137365385 Duijzings, G., & Dušková, L. (Eds.). (2022). Working At Night. De Gruyter. https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110753592 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. (2015). Severe labour exploitation: Workers moving within or into the European Union. States’ Obligations and Victims’ Rights. Vienna. https://doi.org/10.2811/342416 Fedyuk, O. (2015). Growing up with migration: Shifting roles and responsibilities of transnational families of Ukrainian care workers in Italy. In M. Kontos & G. T. Bonifacio (Eds.), Migrant Domestic Workers and Family Life. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1057/9781137323552 Fedyuk, O., & Stewart, P. (2018). Inclusion and exclusion in Europe: migration, work and employment perspectives. ECPR Press and Rowman & Littlefield International. https://cir.nii.ac.jp/ crid/1130288435721023128.bib?lang=en Fernández-Reino, M., Sumption, M., & Vargas-Silva, C. (2020). From low-skilled to key workers: The implications of emergencies for immigration policy. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 36, 382–396. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/graa016

References

243

Galinier, J., Becquelin, A. M., Bordin, G., Fontaine, L., Fourmaux, F., Ponce, J. R., et al. (2010). Anthropology of the night: Cross-disciplinary investigations. Current Anthropology, 51(6), 819–847. https://doi.org/10.1086/653691 Garcés-Mascareñas, B., & Penninx, R. (2016a). Integration processes and policies in Europe: Contexts, level and actors. Springer. Accessed 16 July 2023. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-21674-4 Garcés-Mascareñas, B., & Penninx, R. (2016b). Introduction: Integration as a three-way process approach? In Integration processes and policies in Europe, IMISCOE research series (pp. 1–9). Springer. Accessed 16 July 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21674-4_1 Gherardi, S. (2006). Organizational knowledge: The texture of workplace learning. In J.  Child & S. Rodrigues (Eds.), Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (Vol. 53). Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Gonlin, N. (2022). Ancient maya nights. Anthropology News, 3–8. https://www.anthropology-­ news.org. Accessed 29 Dec 2022. Gonlin, N., & Nowell, A. (Eds.). (2017). Archaeology of the night: Life after dark in the ancient world (1st ed.). University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.5876/9781607326786 Hamann, U., & Yurdakul, G. (2018). The transformative forces of migration: Refugees and the reconfiguration of migration societies. Inc, 6(1), 110–114. Harvey, D. (2005a). The new imperialism, 275. Accessed 6 January 2023. Harvey, D. (2005b). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Holmes, S. M., & Castañeda, H. (2016). Representing the “European refugee crisis” in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death. American Ethnologist, 43(1), 12–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12259 Jafar, A., & de Casanova, E. M. (Eds.). (2013). Global beauty, local bodies. Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137365347 Kaneff, D., & Pine, F. (2011). Emerging inequalities in Europe: Poverty and transnational migrations. In Global connectins and emerging inequalities in Europe. Anthem Press. Lafleur, J.-M., & Stanek, M. (2017a). South-North migration of EU citizens in times of crisis. (J.M. Lafleur & M. Stanek, Eds.) library.oapen.org. Springer International Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­39763-­4 Lafleur, J.-M., & Stanek, M. (2017b). EU migration and the economic crisis: Concepts and issues (pp. 1–14). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­39763-­4_1 Li, T. M. (2010). To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations. Antipode, 41, 66–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­8330.2009.00717.x Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-level bureaucracy, 30th anniversary edition: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. Russel Sage Foundation. Accessed 19 June 2023. Patel, R. (2010). Working the night shift: Women’s employment in the transnational call center industry. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (1st ed.). Stanford University Press. Molé, N. J. (2010). Precarious subjects: Anticipating neoliberalism in northern Italy’s workplace. American Anthropologist, 112(1), 38–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-­1433.2009.01195.x Penninx, R., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2016a). Analysis and conclusions (IMISCOE Research Series). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21674-4_11 Penninx, R., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2016b). Integration policies of European cities in comparative perspective: structural convergence and substantial differentiation. Migracijske i etničke teme / Migration and Ethnic Themes, 32(2), 155–189. https://doi.org/10.11567/met.32.2.1 Pillinger, J. (2006). Introduction to the situation and experience of migrant women. Dublin. Accessed 9 June 2021. Rajaram, P.  K. (2015). Common marginalizations: Neoliberalism, undocumented migrants and other surplus populations. Migration, Mobility, & Displacement, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.18357/ mmd11201513288 Sahraoui, N. (2019). From everyday racist incidents at work to institutional racism: migrant and minority-ethnic workers’ experiences in older-age care. In S. Hinger & R. Schweitzer (Eds.), Regimes of Dis-Integration (IMISCOE) (pp. 81–99). Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-25089-8_5

244

9  Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork

Sassen, S. (2016). The global city: Enabling economic intermediation and bearing its costs. City and Community, 15(2), 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12175 Sassen, S. (2017). Predatory formations dressed in wall street suits and algorithmic math. Science, Technology and Society, 1(2017), 0971721816682783. https://doi. org/10.1177/0971721816682783 Secretary-General Report. (2017). Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. http:// www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=E/2017/66&Lang=E Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. Allen Lane. Yale University Press. Sennett, R. (2012). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of co-operation. Aging (Vol. 7). Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke Universtiy Press. Shaw, R. (2022). Geographies of night work. Progress in Human Geography, 46(5), 1149–1164. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325221107638 Standing, G. (2012). The precariat: From denizens to citizens? Polity, 44(4), 588–608. https://doi. org/10.1057/pol.2012.15 Turner, V. (1977). The ritual process: The structure and anti-structure. Cornell University Press. Uhde, Z., & Ezzeddine, P. (2019). Transnational migration: Borders, gender and global justice challenges. ceeol.com, 20(1), 3–17. https://www.ceeol.com/content-­files/document-­812192. pdf. Accessed 30 May 2021. Wright, R. P., & Garrett, Z. S. (2017). Engineering feats and consequences: Workers in the night and the Indus civilization. Archaeology of the Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World, 287–306. https://doi.org/10.5876/9781607326786.C014 Zentai, V. (2020). Conclusions: perspectives and puzzles in researching politics of (dis)integration. In R. Schweitzer, & S. Hinger (Eds.), (pp. 201–217). Springer International Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­25089-­8_11

Chapter 10

Coda–Essential Yet Invisible, Pandemic or Not

Nightworkers who move in the night as a means of earning a living, remain largely unnoticed by mainstream society. By labouring six nights per week alongside migrant workers at London’s New Spitalfields night market, I was able to document the precarity of their working conditions. In the coda of this book, I bring this research into the present to show how the overall effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has further amplified the precarity of migrant nightwork. To do this, I draw upon conversations with Basrí and Lexa, two of the protagonists of this book, who lost their jobs during the pandemic. I also add the experiences and concerns of two other behind-the- scenes migrant workers, John and Eleana, who worked during the pandemic but felt unprotected and disregarded. Their fears, uncertainties and acts of courage are revealing of what it means to be mobile in these (pandemic) times of immobility. In our conversations, Basrí often mentioned a feeling of being trapped by his lack of job prospects outside of the night market. ‘If I wanted to work in day jobs, I would need to speak English better’, he explained. ‘But because I have not improved my language skills, I will continue doing the nightshifts. We’ll see for how long’. Earlier in 2020, before the pandemic lockdown was implemented, I met with Basrí. At that time, he reflected that, ‘I’ve been saying the same thing all these years. And I am still working at the market, no matter how many times I tried to find work elsewhere. But this is the last year I am working nights’. There was a sense of exasperation in his eyes as he admitted this. Exhaustion had been mounting for nearly a decade. Migrants like Basrí may initially perceive nightwork as a lucrative way to make money quickly and return to their home countries. Nightwork is better paid than the kinds of daytime work for which they have the necessary skills. However, many never return home and must deal with the negative impacts that manual nightwork has on their health and social lives. Estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization (ILO) show that work-related diseases and risk of stroke are accelerated by those ‘working 55 hours or more per © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_10

245

246

10  Coda–Essential Yet Invisible, Pandemic or Not

week’ in comparison to those working on standard contracted hours (35–40 hours per week). This study reports that between 2000–2016, 745,000 people died globally, from overworking and that a third of work-related diseases were also caused by overworking (Pega et al., 2021). Just before the first lockdown came into force in the U.K., Basrí lost his forklift driver’s license when he was caught exceeding the speed limit on the market’s premises. At the same time, due to COVID-19 the night market was reducing its activity, catering as it does to many sectors that have been considered non-essential in the pandemic. Under these conditions, with less daywork and activity in the wider economy, Basrí’s nightwork was rendered extraneous and he lost his job at the market. As a result, his chances of finding work elsewhere became even more limited than before the pandemic. Basrí’s situation would most probably resonate with workers in the hospitality and accommodation industries, sectors that relied heavily on foreign-born workers and were hit most heavily by layoffs during the pandemic. As many as 25% of foreign-­born workers in these sectors in the U.K. have been affected by the disruptions (Fernández-Reino et al., 2020). These workers have been deemed non-­essential and furloughed; some lost their jobs altogether and did not receive any government support. This non-essential workforce have been left to their own devices, often without family support or savings, and away from public attention. Other nightworkers were able to keep their jobs. To learn about such experiences, I reached out to two migrant workers, John and Eleana, who both worked late evenings and nightshifts during the pandemic. John is originally from Kenya and has been driving buses in London for over 12 years. Eleana does night outreach to support vulnerable women selling sex on the street. They both undertook shift work throughout the pandemic and have struggled to adapt to their new pandemic-led working conditions. Our online conversations took place on the backdrop of fears that the second wave of COVID-19 was nearing a third nation-wide lockdown, which was still in place at the time of writing these pages. John has been driving a double-decker since the economic downturn in 2008. Born in Kenya, for over 15 years he was the national coach for the women’s volleyball team before he travelled to the U.K. with the team in 1997. He could not return to his birth country due to ethnic clashes that were occurring. He has been working throughout the pandemic, on day and late evening shifts into the night. As he recounts: As a driver, I am locked for the whole shift in that cage. My box, where I sit to drive, must be shut all the time. The way we used to work has changed since the pandemic. I cannot breathe! Many people died. So, it’s very frightening! It feels like being imprisoned while I work to serve the public. It has been hard for me to work during the pandemic because I knew, if I don’t work, I won’t get money for my mortgage, for my family. That’s another kind of fear. Not having money to support your family pushes you out of the door, pandemic or not. And for one reason or another, during the pandemic, migrants were the ones working, doing essential work to keep London moving. Overall, us migrants are not appreciated for the work we do. We are the minority that works hard for the majority. I think that we’re not

10  Coda–Essential Yet Invisible, Pandemic or Not

247

really appreciated for the work that we do for the powerhouse of England. I feel that the government has let us down. Eleana is an experienced outreach development worker who supports street sex workers. Some of the outreach happens at night. As an outreach worker, Eleana explains that part of her job role is to do ‘hand holding–I do a lot of talking on behalf of the women while liaising with various community services’. The age of these women ranges between 20 and 50, many have migrated from different regions of the world, and are of mixed cultural and ethnic backgrounds, including African, black Caribbean, Eastern European and Brazilian. A lot of them live ‘hand to mouth’–they go out to find punters, sell sex and buy drugs. Some could move in and out of their shelters and go up and down the road all night for as little as £20. Eleana says that sex workers, whether they are migrants or British, ‘are suffering because they might be homeless, sexually abused or they are living with mental health issues or drug dependency. They face different but complex needs, most often enhanced by discrimination and social exclusion’. Sex workers are closely watched by their pimps, sitting in the car parked on the road, which is called ‘the beat’–an area of the street that punters and sex workers exchange sexual services for money. If Eleana stays too long to chat to a sex worker, the pimp summons her. Eleana knows very well that when that happens that she and her colleague need to leave so that they are not interfering with the woman who needs to be constantly on the move. Eleana explained more about how the outreach service operated during the pandemic: [We] increased the number of weekly outreach hours so that they could reach out to as many sex workers as possible to provide updates on COVID-19, the kinds of symptoms they should watch out for and to liaise with shelter services to offer housing to the homeless women. Surprisingly, we met women in greater numbers than before the pandemic, and many were new faces. We helped them to find (temporary) accommodation to reduce their chances of contamination. Despite the increase of sex workers on the street, the pandemic forced us to change the way we work, by reducing vital face-to-face support and replacing it with phone contact. Workers like John and Eleana were thrust into the spotlight and classified as ‘essential’ during the pandemic and as a result, some changes in public perception of migrant workers have ensued. For instance, several media accounts have cast (im)migrants doing essential work, in a positive light. Thus, as reductive as the category of ‘essential’ may be, the COVID-19 crisis has served to draw two previously distant conceptual categories close– that of the migrant and that of the valued worker. Yet Lexa’s situation shows the limits of this discursive turn. After 4 years, Lexa stopped working full-time at the New Spitalfields night market. As of 2019, she was self-employed as a rideshare driver, mostly working nights. I last encountered Lexa face-to-face in early 2020 before the lockdown to arrange an interview with a national television channel. When we met, she told me that she was happy with how things were turning out for her and her daughter. However, once the lockdown started, taxi driver jobs were also deemed non-essential. By April, Lexa’s situation had changed drastically. She explained that, ‘I stopped working since the COVID-19 situation and I have lots of bills to pay. I took a three-month reprieve on my car loan, but the rent still needs paying. It’s been really tough!’ The last time we spoke, she

248

10  Coda–Essential Yet Invisible, Pandemic or Not

reassuringly said to me that, ‘It will work out somehow’. Since our last in-person interview, in April 2020, Lexa has been driving her taxi at night. To prevent the spread of the infectious coronavirus disease, all governments implemented ‘social distancing’ measures. These have been contested by the critical public, scholars and the media who were aware, for instance, of Germany’s import of disposable seasonal workers when most E.U. countries’ borders were closed, and of the US and the U.K.’s heavy reliance on migrant workers in key occupations. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.K. government would not have considered migrants as essential workers because the nature of their work has not traditionally been linked to production effectiveness. Since the pandemic, some at least, have been classed as ‘key’, ‘essential’ or ‘critical’ in the U.K., the US or E.U. classifications of work sectors. This is an unexpected, but positive turn in the political rhetoric and media attention towards some groups of migrants–at least, for those classified as essential. The U.K. Cabinet Office and Department for Education (2020), US Department of Homeland Security (2020) and the European Commission (2020), for example, have issued various stakeholders with classification guidelines of key or essential workers (Fernández-Reino et al., 2020). Post-industrial societies rely on invisibilised migrant labour in low-wage occupations 24/7, which is carried out by workers like Basrí, Lexa, John and Eleana. When dayworkers go to sleep, migrant nightworkers carry the burdens of the night on their bodies. They have done so before the pandemic and will continue to do so long after it, somehow managing to balance their incomes, expenses and social lives despite the categories imposed on them. The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated reflections about what essential work means (European Commission 2020; Fasani & Mazza, 2020), and had led to, for instance, some low-wage occupations being re-categorised as ‘essential’ (Alcorn, 2020). However, the designation of daytime labourers as frontline and essential continues to implicitly cast those who work atypical hours and shifts and through the night as expendable. The darkness of night leaves them under-served and out of sight. Whilst precarity is not restricted to nightwork alone, being a migrant and working at night magnifies precarity by several degrees. Even though Basrí and Lexa’s work is no less indispensable during exceptional times, the triple bind of migrant nightwork has resulted in their classification as expendable. This coda aims to correct this limitation. Nightworkers are essential workers whose hidden labour makes other sectors of the economy possible, in the time of a pandemic or not. In the U.K. alone, more than one in nine workers work in the nighttime economy, amounting to some 3.25 million people. London has the country’s second largest contingent of nightworkers after South East England, where care workers, nurses and midwives account for the majority of nightworkers (TUC, 2015, 2019a, b). Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted migrant workers more than any other group, highlighting their precarious conditions. In Europe, many migrant workers have been laid off or furloughed and left without financial support or savings. Work as they knew it, has disappeared (Burke et al., 2020). However, the disposable E.U. migrants still travel for work throughout Europe under special

10.1  Nightwork Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic

249

agreements between E.U. states, risking their lives to harvest fruits and vegetables or pluck turkeys for Christmas, depending on the seasonal demands. In this way, work as they know it, continues (Bejan, 2020; European Migration Network, 2020; Fana et al., 2020; Güell & Garcés-mascareñas, 2020, 2021; Matusz & Aivaliotou, 2020). Nightworkers are often migrants for they are more likely than locals to accept unskilled jobs on precarious working terms, that is, without a work contract and at unsociable hours. This coda emphasises that this new context even further challenges the E.U.’s regimes of migrant labour and integration.

10.1 Nightwork Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic The COVID-19 crisis presents an opportunity to recognise the essential nature of migrant nightwork and to reflect on its current placement at the lowest level of our labour system. Not unlike the spatial axis of exclusion that has rendered domestic labour invisible under capitalism (Weeks, 2011), nightwork foregrounds a temporal axis that results in a parallel process of invisibilisation. The failure to recognise the essential nature of nightwork must be understood as one reason for its continued, troubling precarity. As countries across the world gradually ease the social distancing measures introduced during lockdown, and while others continue to face serious implementation issues and rising numbers in deaths, it is important to reflect on what this health crisis has taught us–that is, that our societies depend on all workers, day as well as nightshifters, highly skilled as well as low-skilled manual workers in low-wage occupations, and both locals and migrants. Domestically and internationally, low-­ paid and precarious migrants were exempted from travel [and other] restrictions so they feed the nation, deliver parcels to the people’s doors, transported the people to hospitals. Where social scientists and artivists had marginal effects in being able to shift the misrepresentations of migrants by the media, the COVID-19 pandemic succeeded (even if temporary) to ‘highlight the long-standing tension between the critical role some play in the day-to-day functioning of societies, despite their low status’ (McAuliffe & Triandafyllidou, 2021, p. 156). Many work sectors include nightwork. At different stages of lockdowns in the U.K., the British Government categorised ‘shutdown sectors’ as non-essential, including hospitality, accommodation, non-essential retail, gyms and leisure, and nightlife workers (Women and Equalities Committee and House of Commons, 2020, p. 21). Whilst these sectors rely on nightshift workers, locals and migrants alike, they have been left without any government protection during lockdowns when the ‘essentials’ were put on furlough or offered social welfare support. Therefore, the problem rests with the ‘non-essential’ category. Whilst it is possible that these migrant nightshift workers (essential or not) may only face a global health crisis once in their lifetime, during ‘normal’ times nightshifters travel at night to work when day shifters retire to their homes to have dinner, do homework with

250

10  Coda–Essential Yet Invisible, Pandemic or Not

children and sleep. Therefore, they cannot be expendable and left to ‘make live or die’ (Li, 2010). If in ‘times of crises’, migrant night shift workers are essential in serving key infrastructures and saving lives, then night shift workers are also indispensable to the mainstream society during ‘normal’ times. The dare is to overcome the scorn against the waves of migrants fleeing conflict zones, environmental disasters, poverty or economic crises and to rather than seeing them as health tourists or as stealing jobs from locals, embrace them as a bountiful resource to the societies where they settle, live and work, beyond this pandemic. The U.K. government and stakeholders benefitting from the migrant nightshift workers who serve the U.K.’s nighttime economy, need to remember that they are essential not only in times of crisis but also because they provide their manual labour, with sweat and tears, all year round, which benefits the entire society. Equally important is that the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic will alter the newly implemented immigration policy that restricts as many as 46% of essential workers, who were otherwise putting their lives at risk during the pandemic. Since January 2021, a new point-based immigration system came into force as a result of Brexit (the U.K. leaving the E.U.). Therefore, migrants in manual work no longer qualify for visas to work in the U.K. as they do not meet the new income threshold. Lastly, COVID-19 does not know who it attacks or kills. Yet, is it racist? British government reports, local council reports, public and mental health articles, and recommendations from Inequalities Commissions, reveal worrying figures and findings showing that the pandemic has resurfaced the systematic inequalities faced by migrants, with Black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds (BAME) working in the frontline or backstage (Greenberg et  al., 2020; Kapilashrami & Bhui, 2020; Khunti et al., 2020; Kirby, 2020; Pareek et al., 2020; Women and Equalities Committee and House of Commons, 2020; Begum, 2021; Phiri et  al., 2021). To ensure that governments and the current labour system do not reproduce and further the existing inequalities, I propose that a Nightwork Charter based on the following principles is introduced to recognise the contribution of nightworkers to 24/7 societies and to the maintenance of cities.

10.2 Nightworker Charter The world of nightwork is in urgent need of transformation. Yet, you cannot transform anything until you find out what needs to be repaired and renewed. No deep transformation happens without reparation.

The Nightworker Charter1 was launched on 1st March 2022 to coincide with the United Nations’ (UN) Zero Discrimination Day–a global observance of the  This is a slightly revised version of the Nightworker Charter press release published on the Society for the Anthropology of Work. Online at: https://bit.ly/SAWpressrelease Accessed: 19.01.2023 1

10.2  Nightworker Charter

251

unwritten law that everybody counts in our societies, regardless of their skin colour, gender, skill level, education or beliefs.2 This Charter stresses the need to recognise the contribution of nightworkers in our societies, many of whom are migrants and thus, put nighttime workers on equal footing with their daytime counterparts. Hence, the Charter upholds the strategic role that nightworkers have been playing in keeping societies going around-the-clock. More importantly, Zero Discrimination Day is symbolised through wearing a butterfly as a sign of change, hope and renewal–that is, transformation. The Charter seeks to transform night workplaces by upholding the basic rights of nightworkers to live and work in dignity. Think of Nightwork  Nightwork has been part of many industries and services, such as transport, communications, fire brigades, police, the army and hospitals. Working in the evenings or at night is not a new phenomenon, yet it is an essential form of work to the functioning of our around-the-clock societies. Nevertheless, the current labour system in developed societies has been designed for daytime work. That explains why nightwork is erroneously thought to be a supplement to daytime labour and why the problems with nightwork are rarely fixed. Recognising that nightwork is its own form of work with specific dynamics and problems, especially in post-industrial countries, is long overdue. Think of Nightworkers  There are millions of people–including migrants, women and People of Colour–who work ‘graveyard’ shifts and because of it, experience tremendous health impacts, isolation and exclusion from mainstream society. Nightworkers are the ‘other’ workers in relation to the ‘9-5ers’ (Bianchini, 1995). ‘Blue Mondays’ in 9-to-5, day jobs, are a grind, but waking up in the evenings or in the middle of the night to go to work is simply dreadful. Eating fast food due to a lack of nighttime eating options is unhealthy, and working all night disrupts the circadian and biological rhythms that let us to know to sleep when it is dark and to stay awake during daylight. Not being able to socialise with friends during the daytime and evenings marginalises nightworkers even further. Moreover, nightworkers frequently live on the margins of mainstream society, which makes them unavailable to attend family events and absent from the minds of those in government who tackle problems in other forms of work. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown across the E.U. and in the U.K., how despite their strategic roles in the functioning of national economies, nightworkers have been excluded from political agendas and public debates about who is or who is not an ‘essential’ or ‘key’ worker. Nightworkers deserve a better social contract–better food, sleep, remuneration, transport and rest places when they toil at night. These ‘other 9-5’ workers should represent more to developed societies than bio-­ automatons. Their bodies are left spent and exhausted by the merciless 24/7 demand for manual labour that keeps the world going around-the- clock, even in times of

 You can read about the Nightworker Charter online, attached to this blog or via this link: https:// bit.ly/NightworkerCharter Accessed: 19.01.2023 2

252

10  Coda–Essential Yet Invisible, Pandemic or Not

crisis. There is a pressing demand for a new set of arrangements that address the problems specific to nightwork. That is why you should take interest and assist this open, democratic process to improve the lives of nightworkers. Let us together repair a broken labour system that causes suffering for millions of nightworkers and their families and friends. The task of this Nightworker Charter is to offer fresh and concrete guidelines on dealing with the problems of nightwork including on what to address, how to recognise the issues and who can and should be engaged in repairing these matters. What Is the Nightworker Charter? The Nightworker Charter seeks to improve the working conditions of nightworkers. The Charter gives nightworkers the voice and tools to gain recognition for their many contributions to national economies. What Does the Nightworker Charter Do? The Nightworker Charter offers practical solutions to improve nightworkers’ working conditions on the basis that all relevant stakeholders: 1. Recognise the problems specific to nightwork 2. Address the multi-layered precarity associated with nightwork 3. Make nightwork a stand-alone form of work in legal terms. Why Is the Nightworker Charter Relevant Now? Nightworkers play a crucial role in supporting nighttime economies (NTE), day workers and national economies throughout Europe. Yet today we still face a health crisis. This Charter represents solidarity with nightshift workers, be they the frontline or even the ‘non-essential’ workers who have helped us get through this awful period. The Charter begins a reparation process that defends nightworkers’ rights embedded within current constitutional arrangements but are hardly ever implemented. Why Initiate this, and How Did the Nightworker Charter Come About? For the past decade, I have reached out to the many people who inhabit the night. I have done this in my various capacities as a nightnographer, migration scholar, outreach worker and collaborator with NGOs which work with vulnerable groups. I do this because I care about the vulnerable migrants and locals who do hidden, yet essential labour–and that is why I think you should help. The ideas behind this Charter have developed through my conversations with individuals and organisations who also care about those working the invisible nightshift. The Charter remains open to collaboration with individuals and organisations pledging to improve conditions for those who work nights. How Can You Get Involved? Individuals and organisations are invited to sign this Charter and to invite others to do the same. Recommend the charter to unions, labour organisations, employers, local and regional councillors, and health and safety organisations. In solidarity with nightshift workers.

References

253

References Alcorn, C. (2020). Essential for whom? Paid domestic work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Society for the Anthropology of Work. https://doi.org/10.21428/1d6be30e.52d1fd78 Begum, A. (2021). Black, asian and minority ethnic inequalities commission report and recommendations. London. https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/community_and_living/ Inequality-­Commission/Black-­Asian-­and-­Minority-­Ethnic-­Inequalities-­Commission.aspx. Accessed 25 Jan 2023. Bejan, R. (2020). COVID-19 and disposable migrant workers. VerfBlog, 22(April), 1–4. https:// verfassungsblog.de/covid-­19-­and-­disposable-­migrant-­workers/ Bianchini, F. (1995). Night cultures, night economies. Planning Practice & Research, 10(2), 121–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459550036667 Burke, R. M., Midgley, C. M., Dratch, A., Fenstersheib, M., Haupt, T., Holshue, M., et al. (2020). Active monitoring of persons exposed to patients with confirmed COVID-19 — United States, January–February 2020. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 69(9), 245–246. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6909e1 European Commission (2020) Communication from the Commission on Guidelines concerning the exercise of the free movement of workers during COVID-19 outbreak 2020/C 102 I/03. Available at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52020XC0330(03). European Migration Network. (2020). Impact of Covid-19 pandemic on voluntary and forced return procedures and policy responses. Series of EMN OECD informs on the impact of Covid-19 in the migration area. https://doi.org/10.2760/686549 Fana, M., Tolan, S., Torrejón Pérez, S., Urzi Brancati, M. C., & Fernández-Macías, E. (2020). The COVID confinement measures and EU labour markets. JCR Technical Reports. https://doi. org/10.2760/079230 Fasani, F., & Mazza, J. (2020). Immigrant key workers: Their contribution to Europe’s COVID-19 response. European Commission – Joint Research Centre, (JRC120537), 1–17. Fernández-Reino, M., Sumption, M., & Vargas-Silva, C. (2020). From low-skilled to key workers: The implications of emergencies for immigration policy. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 36, 382–396. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/graa016 Greenberg, N., Docherty, M., Gnanapragasam, S., & Wessely, S. (2020). Managing mental health challenges faced by healthcare workers during covid-19 pandemic. The BMJ, 368. https://doi. org/10.1136/BMJ.M1211 Güell, B., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2020). Agricultural seasonal workers in times of Covid-19 in Spain (No. 3.3). Barcelona. Güell, B., & Garcés-mascareñas, B. (2021). The advancing alternative migration governance agricultural seasonal workers in times of Covid-19 in Spain D3. 3 Paper country cases: Spain Berta Güell and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, (February). Home Office. (2020). The UK’s points-based immigration system: Policy statement. Home Office Policy Paper. Kapilashrami, A., & Bhui, K. (2020). Mental health and COVID-19: Is the virus racist? British Journal of Psychiatry, 217(2), 405–407. https://doi.org/10.1192/BJP.2020.93 Khunti, K., Singh, A. K., Pareek, M., & Hanif, W. (2020). Is ethnicity linked to incidence or outcomes of covid-19? The BMJ, 369. https://doi.org/10.1136/BMJ.M1548 Kirby, T. (2020). Evidence mounts on the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on ethnic minorities. The Lancet. Respiratory Medicine, 8(6), 547–548. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S2213-­2600(20)30228-­9 Li, T. M. (2010). To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations. Antipode, 41, 66–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­8330.2009.00717.x MacQuarie, J.-C. (2023). Nightworker charter: A yearly pledge to advance special arrangements for invisible workers in nightshift cities. Cork. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7696947 Matusz, P., & Aivaliotou. (2020). Circular and temporary migration in PolanD during COVID-19 (No. Deliverable 3.2). Wroclaw. Accessed 1 June 2021

254

10  Coda–Essential Yet Invisible, Pandemic or Not

McAuliffe, M., & Triandafyllidou, A. (2021). World migration report 2022. United Nations. Pareek, M., Bangash, M. N., Pareek, N., Pan, D., Sze, S., Minhas, J. S., et al. (2020). Ethnicity and COVID-19: An urgent public health research priority. The Lancet, 395(10234), 1421–1422. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(20)30922-­3 Pega, F., Náfrádi, B., Momen, N. C., Ujita, Y., Streicher, K. N., Prüss-Üstün, A. M., et al. (2021, December). Global, regional, and national burdens of ischemic heart disease and stroke attributable to exposure to long working hours for 194 countries, 2000–2016: A systematic analysis from the WHO/ILO Joint Estimates of the Work-related Burden of Disease and Injur. Environment International, 106595. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2021.106595 Phiri, P., Delanerolle, G., Al-Sudani, A., & Rathod, S. (2021). COVID-19 and Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities: A complex relationship without just cause. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.2196/22581 TUC. (2015). Britain’s 3 million night workers need fair rights to work-life balance. Trade Unin Congress Analysis. https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-­analysis/reports/britains-­3-­million-­night-­ workers-­need-­fair-­rights-­work-­life-­balance. Accessed 1 June 2021. TUC. (2019a). Older workers powering an increase in night working. Trade Unin Congress Analysis. https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/older-­workers-­powering-­increase-­night-­working-­tuc-­ analysis-­reveals. Accessed 1 June 2021. TUC. (2019b). Zero hour workers twice as likely to work “health risk” night shifts. Trade Unin Congress Analysis. https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/zero-­hour-­workers-­twice-­likely-­work-­health-­ risk-­night-­shifts-­tuc-­analysis. Accessed 1 June 2021. United States Department of Homeland Security. (2020). Guidance on the essential critical infrastructure workforce. US Department of Homeland Security. Weeks, K. (2011). The problem with work: Feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-­problem-­with-­work. Accessed 31 May 2021. Women and Equalities Committee, & House of Commons. (2020). Unequal impact? Coronavirus and BAME people. London. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/ cmwomeq/384/38402.htm. Accessed 25 Jan 2023

Correction to: Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London

Correction to: J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­36186-­9 The original version of this book was published without an Acknowledgement. The book has now been revised with the inclusion of the “Acknowledgement”.

The updated version of this book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­36186-­9

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9_11

C1

Appendices

Appendix 1 This appendix includes definitions and prevalence (%) of shift work that includes night work in Japan, the US and in E.U.27* countries, including Bulgaria and Romania, since 2007. Adapted from (Kubo, 2013). Sources: Fourth E.U. Survey on working conditions for E.U. countries; Survey on State of Employees’ Health 2007 for Japan; US Bureau of Labour Statistics 2004 for the United States (Table A.1).

Appendix 2 Out of the total number of respondents (56), the author audio-video recorded 31 interviews over the course of fieldwork, and only 6 were women. This list of interviewees includes demographics by gender, position, nationality, and ethnicity. To prevent identification their names have been anonimised in the text and removed from this table. Some interviewees performed more than one job roles (e.g., buyer-­ driver, sales-manager); others changed job positions during the time the author did fieldwork (e.g., loader, porter). This descriptive data excludes the empirical material collected via informal conversations had with the other 25 participants or via non-/participant observation method (Table A.2).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9

255

256

Appendices

Table A.1  Definitions of nighttime/work and night worker in European countries © IARC Working Group (2010)

Country Austria

Belgium

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Ireland

Nighttime/night work Night work: period between 22:00 and 05:00 Night work: a period, generally of 8 hours, between 20:00 and 06:00 Night work: Work carried out between 23:00 and 06:00 Night time: a period between 22:00 and 05:00; Night work: whichever work period between midnight and 05:00 Night time: a period of 8 hours which includes the period between 22:00 and 06:00

Night worker The workers who work at least 3 hours between 22:00 and 05:00 on at least 48 nights per year (EU-Nachtarbeits-­ Anpassungsgesetz 2002) Loi du 17/02/1997 et Loi du 04/12/1998: Act of 17 February 1997

Prevalence (%) of shift work that includes night work℥ 13.2

13.2

24.3 Night shift refers to a work shift with at least 3 hours of duty between 23:00 and 06:00 (Working Hours Act 605/1996) 14.9 Any employee working usually at least 2 times per week for at least 3 hours over the period defined as night work (Loi 461/1998)

A worker who during night time works at least 3 hours of his/her daily working time or a worker who has to perform night work for at least 726 hours of his/her annual working time (Presidential Decree n. 88/1999) Night time: a period A worker who during night time works at least 3 hours of his/her daily working time of 8 hours which includes the period or a worker who has to perform night work between 22:00 and for at least 726 hours of his/her annual working time. 06:00 (a) an employee who normally works at Night time: period least 3 hours of his/ her daily working time between midnight and 07:00 during night time; (b) an employee whose working hours during night time, in each year, equals or exceeds 50 per cent of the total number of hours worked during the year (Statutory Instruments n. 485/1998)

15.7

13.0

12.0

(continued)

Appendices

257

Table A.1 (continued)

Country Italy

Japan

Nighttime/night work Night work: the activity carried out in a period of at least 7 consecutive hours comprising the interval between midnight and 05:00

Prevalence (%) of shift work that includes night work℥ 18.1

Night worker (a) any worker who during the night period carries out, as a normal course, at least 3 hours of his/her daily working time; (b) any worker who during the night period, carries out part of his/her daily working time as defined by collective agreements; in default of collective agreements, any worker who works at night at least 80 working days per year (D.Lgs. 66/2003) The workers who engage night work at least 17.9 4 times per month on average during 6 months.

Night work: work which covers all or part of the period from 22:00 to 05:00 Netherlands Night work: work which covers all or part of the period from midnight to 06:00 Portugal Nighttime: a period (a) any worker who works at least 3 hours between 20:00 and during the night period; (b) any worker who during the night period, carries out part of 07:00 its daily working time as defined by collective agreements (Decreto Lei 73/1998) Spain Nighttime: a period A worker who at night carries out at least which includes the 3 hours of his/her daily working time (Real Decreto Lei 1/1995) interval between 22:00 and 06:00 Sweden Hours between A worker that works at least 3 hours of his/ midnight and 05:00 her daily work during nighttime, or a worker that most likely will work at least 38% of his/her annual work during the night (Working Hours Act 1982) U.K. Nighttime: a period A worker who, as a normal course, works at lasting not less than least 3 hours of his/her daily working time 7 hours, and which during nighttime, or who is likely, during includes the period night time, to work at least such proportion of his annual working time as may be between midnight specified for the purposes of these and 05:00 Regulations in a collective agreement or a workforce agreement (Statutory Instrument No.1833/1998). US E.U.27*

11.8

22.2

16.0

15.4

14.8 17.3

258

Appendices

Table A.2  Appendix 2 describes the sample of respondents who participated in this study Total number of respondents Females Males Number of respondents interviewed Job Role (Full-time position first) Buyer-Driver Buyer-Driver Buyer-Driver Buyer-Store manager

56 6 50

Country (Nationality) Turkey (TR) Turkey (TR) Turkey (TR) United Kingdom (U.K.) Buyer-Store manager Romania (RO) Cafe owner Turkey (TR) Cafe server Romania (RO) Cafe server United Kingdom (U.K.) Cafe server-Front counter cashier Romania (RO) Café server-Kitchen assistant Romania (RO) Check man (Goods outwards controller) Romania (RO) Check man (Goods outwards controller) Pakistan (PK) Driver Turkey (TR) Loader Romania (RO) Loader Turkey (TR) Loader Romania (RO) Loader Romania (RO) Loader Turkey (TR) Loader, Porter (Forklift driver) Turkey (TR) Loader, Porter (Forklift driver) Bulgaria (BG) Manager-Salesman Turkey (TR) Operations manager United Kingdom (U.K.) Porter (Forklift driver) Romanian (RO) Porter (Forklift driver) Turkey (TR) Porter (Forklift driver) Romania (RO) Salesman Turkey (TR) Salesman Turkey (TR) Salesman Turkey (TR) Salesman Turkey (TR) Salesman-Manager United Kingdom (U.K.) Stock controller Turkey (TR)

Ethnicity (Followed by nationality) Kurdish-Turkish, TR Kurdish-Turkish, TR Kurdish-Turkish, TR British, U.K. Non-Roma Romanian, RO Kurdish-Turkish, TR Roma-Romanian, RO Turkish-British, U.K. Roma-Romanian, RO Non-Roma-Romanian, RO Roma/Turkish Romanian, RO Pakistan, PK Kurdish-Turkish, TR Non-Roma-Romanian, RO Kurdish-Turkish, TR Roma-Romanian, RO Roma-Romanian, RO Kurdish-Turkish, TR Kurdish-Turkish, TR Roma/Turkish-Bulgarian, BG Kurdish-Turkish, TR Kurdish-Turkish/British, U.K. Roma-Romanian, RO Turkish, TR Romanian, RO Kurdish-Turkish, TR Kurdish Turkish, TR Turkish, TR Kurdish-Turkish, TR Turkish-British, U.K. Kurdish-Turkish, TR

Appendices

259

References Kubo, T. (2013). International comparison of the definition of night work – Promoting health care of shift workers, 35, 163–168. Macarie, I.-C. (2012, September 4). Romanian nationals working in London’s night economy: A consequence of Europeanisation? (MRes (Masters of Research)). University College London. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/82389184/Romanian_Nationals_Working_in_ London_s_Night_Economy_A_Consequence_of_Europeanisation Macarie, I.-C. (2014). Half-in, half-out: Roma and non-Roma Romanians with limited rights working and travelling in the European Union. INTEGRIM Online Papers, 8. http://bit.ly/1fzVoFu Macarie, I.-C. (2017a). Invisible denizens: Migrant night shift workers’ fragile possibilities for solidarity in the post-circadian capitalist era (No. 4). Centre for Policy Studies. Budapest. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.13770.06084 Macarie, I.-C. (2017b). Invisible denizens: What possibilities are left for solidarity amongst migrant night workers in the nocturnal city of London. Euxeinos, 22(03), 63–78. MacQuarie, J-C. (2022a, April 1). Nightwork scenes. Anthropology News. https://www. anthropology-­news.org/articles/nightwork-­scenes/#citation. Accessed 29 Dec 2022. MacQuarie, J-C. (2022b, April 26). Midnight dispatch: Night workers’ voices from the UK and Romania. Eurozine. https://www.eurozine.com/midnight-­dispatch/. Accessed 29 Dec 2022.

Index

A A2 Bulgaria and Romania, 7, 82 A8 2004 E.U. accession of 8 Central and Eastern European states, plus Malta and Cyprus. This expansion included Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Hungary (see European Union (E.U.)) Accumulation by dispossession Harvey, D. (2003), 130, 132 Activists, 17, 79, 80 Agustín, L.-M. Sex at the margins, 17 Analysis, 11, 21, 25, 28, 33, 35, 49, 56, 71, 85, 101, 116, 132–134, 156, 157, 175, 196, 197, 203, 212, 213, 232 push-pull (see Migration scholarship) Anthropology, vi, 17, 23–26, 34, 35, 47, 52, 56, 57, 59, 73, 130, 157, 185, 240–242 Any form of cooperation fragile and secondary to the purpose of surviving, 35, 202 Authority, 3, 16, 104, 112, 162, 165, 172–174, 193, 198, 206, 207, 209, 218, 220, 232, 235–237, 240 B Baldwin, M. nightwork (see United States (US)) Billingsgate

Corporation of London (CoL) (see City of London; London; Market) Bio-automatons ‘half-humans, half-machines’ (see Disposable bodies) half-man, half-machine (see Dead people walking) Biological clock, 26, 31, 116, 134–136, 139, 151, 214, 219 Bodies across borders, 235 Bodily, vi, 21–23, 25, 29, 31–34, 46, 48, 49, 55–57, 62, 65, 66, 69, 71–73, 93, 95, 116, 130, 134, 139, 144, 151, 155–158, 161, 164, 165, 171, 174–178, 182, 185, 187, 190, 195, 196, 198, 199, 202, 203, 211–214, 216, 218–221, 223, 225, 228, 231, 234, 236–238, 240 Bodily postures uncomfortable, but precise, 220 Bodily precarity precariousness (see Butler, J.; Lorey, I.; Subjectivation) Body collecting data, 23 ‘first and most natural tool of man’ (see Body techniques; Mauss, M.) research tool, 72 Body notes embodied, bodily, body, 21, 33, 62, 67–68 Body techniques, 25, 32, 161, 174, 178, 199 Borders, see Migration; European Brain drain, 6, 67, 95, 156, 159, 193 Brexit, vi, 7, 12, 63, 85, 94, 250 Brexit referendum, see Hostile environment

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-C. MacQuarie, Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36186-9

261

262 Britain’s nightworkers, 19, 30, 90 Bulgaria and Romania, see A2; Countries; Eastern Europe Butler, J., 31, 66, 171, 182, 194–197, 235 C Café server females (see Gender; Inequality) Capitalism, 10, 11, 13, 14, 26, 28, 30, 33, 35, 36, 79, 95, 129, 133–137, 139, 151, 156, 195, 202, 228, 231–233, 241, 249 Capitalism nurtures competition, 35, 201–228 Capitalist, see Capitalism Care domestic care (see Care work; Women) Chefs China Town (see Migrant workers; Working at night) Cities, vii, 9, 14–16, 18, 26–31, 33, 35, 77, 79, 80, 87, 90–96, 116, 129, 133–136, 138, 139, 143, 151, 196, 197, 210, 227, 233, 234, 240, 241, 250 City of London, 2, 5, 17, 18, 25, 103, 104, 121, 173, 232 Citizenship, 7, 9, 10, 23, 59, 79, 85 Cleaners financial district (see Working at night) Coda, vii, 36, 242, 245–252 Collective bargaining, 83 Colonial, 11, 121 Communicating research, 61 Communication industries, 89 sectors of work with migrants, 90 Communities, 9–11, 15, 20, 28, 32, 48, 61, 83, 89, 133, 217, 238–241, 247 Commuting at night lack of safety, 31 Competition socially nurtured, 32 Construction, see Migrant workers; Working at night Contribution of migrants to the modern capitalist societies, 36, 84 Control of their sleep and work time, must tame their bodies, sleep and rest, 34, 125 Convent Garden London Victoria (see Cities; Market) Conveyer belt, 116, 123 Cooperation

Index practising of (see Physical labour) Cooperative naturally, 32, 202 Corporation of London CoL (see City of London; Square mile) market authority, supra-structure, 104 Countries, vi, 3, 6–18, 30, 34, 50, 52, 63, 77, 78, 80–87, 90–92, 94, 95, 105, 109, 116, 121, 124, 131, 133, 135, 138, 140, 141, 143, 147, 151, 183, 197, 214, 226, 239, 241, 245, 246, 248, 249, 251, 255–258 home (see Migration) Creative destruction a Harveyan sense, the neoliberal-backed development of, 35 of neo-liberalisation, 131 Cultural capital multi-language speakers, 29 Cyber, 65–73 Cybernotes, 21, 66 D Data collected, 71, 105 Day/awake-night/sleep circadian rhythms (see Bodily; Physiological) Daytime and nighttime labour regimes discrepancies and disconnects, 35 Daytime cleaners, 1, 30 Dead people walking, 130 Deliver food and drinks (see Hierarchy) Demand migration, see Migration Denizens precariat (see Standing) Differential inclusion, see Exclusion Disposability and that of invisibility production of, 36 Disposable bodies agents who are products of similar conditions and conditioning that produce compliant automatons, 130 Dispossessed populations (see Li, T.M.) Dissemination, 55, 61 Diurnal anthropology dominant, 34 DNA social strands of, v, 20 Domestic work, 90 Drivers

Index taxi (see Manual work; Working at night) Duijzings, G. social anthropologist, 17 E Early-career and senior researchers methods for (see Anthropology; Embodied research; Migration) Eastern Europe Romania (see Europe) Eastern European Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, and Poland (see Countries; Migrants) Economics, vi, 6, 7, 10, 11, 26, 29, 46, 50, 51, 57, 78, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87, 89, 92, 95, 96, 102, 121, 132, 149, 151, 165, 166, 171, 195, 216, 227, 235, 236, 240, 241, 246, 250 Ehrenreich, B., 17, 28, 163 poverty (see United States (US)) Embodied anthropology in migration scaffolding for an, 35, 181–199 Embodied research, 19, 65, 68, 196 Embodied study of precarity, 35, 155–178 Entertainment economy ENTE (see Night-Time Economy (NTE)) Entrapment, see Working at night Essential work, see Work Ethnically related, see Hierarchy Ethnicities ethnic, 6, 9, 12, 13, 18, 23, 27, 32, 50, 52, 58, 65, 92, 101, 102, 114, 116, 117, 119–122, 124, 125, 202, 203, 208, 210, 246, 247, 250 ethnicisation (see Ethnicities) Ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender intersecting hierarchies, 34, 101–126 Ethnography in-person participant observation, 20 E.U. labour market, see Fortress Europe Europe Britain, 5–7, 11, 17–19, 28, 30, 52, 63, 83–85, 90, 104, 132, 135 Eastern Europe, 8, 17, 34, 80, 95, 119, 124, 125 European Eastern European (see Ethnicities) societies (see Brain drain; Sedentarian) European politics, 7 European Union (E.U.), vi, 7, 8, 11–14, 18, 19, 21, 28, 34, 36, 63, 78, 82, 83, 85–87, 90, 92, 94, 133, 140,

263 146, 167, 239, 241, 248–251, 255, 257 migrants, 11–13, 83, 87, 90, 94, 248 E.U.–U.K. migration brain and physical labour drain, 34 Evening and Night-Time Economy (ENTE), 28 Exclusion, 27, 31, 33, 65, 78, 79, 133, 181, 232, 237, 247, 249, 251 F Feeding a nation food distribution (see Essential work; Fundamental; Work) Female, see Gendered Females, 6, 46, 54, 82, 106, 117, 119, 125, 148, 155, 157, 159, 161, 176, 183, 193, 239, 258 Fieldnotes observations (see Body notes; Cybernotes; Notes) Fieldwork, v, 16–18, 20, 21, 24, 31, 46–49, 51, 52, 54–57, 60, 62, 65–69, 72, 84, 104, 107, 109, 162, 185, 187, 188, 193, 203, 204, 212, 219, 222, 223, 235, 255 Financial district, 15, 93, 232–234 Findings and its contribution, 36, 231–242 Focus on fundamental form of work–feeding a nation, 36 Forced migration push factors (see Migration) Fordist, 28, 137 Foreman male (see Hierarchy) Forklift driver male (see Manual work) Fortress Europe, see European Union (E.U.) Fragmentation vs. Cooperation fragile, 33 Freedom of, see Control Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies monograph (see Holmes, S.M.) Fruit and vegetable market, v, 89 nourishing (see Essential work) Fundamental form of work–feeding a nation, 36 G Gender, vi, 21, 26, 27, 32, 34, 101, 106, 133, 238, 239, 251, 255

264 Gendered males in top positions, women at the bottom (see Females) Gendered work, 9, 78, 239 Gender inequality, 133 Global of capitalist development (see Global city; Glocturnal) Global city polarisation (see Cities; 24/7 city; Glocturnal) Global economy demands of, 35 Global inequalities relevant topics in migration, 34 Global Nighttime Recovery Plan: Sustaining Nightlife Scenes nightlife (see Nightlife; Nighttime; Non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) Global North customer, 27 Global South customer centres, 27 Glocturnal, 30, 33, 35, 36, 95, 116, 130, 134, 138, 139, 151, 197, 232–233, 237, 238 Glocturnal city importance of locality, global mechanisms, polarisation and bodily labour extraction, London, 35, 232 key location (see Post-circadian capitalism) The ‘graveyard’ shift, 3, 5, 12, 17, 28, 46, 66, 88, 90, 144, 150, 164, 251 See also Nightshift Guestworker program, 6 H Half-permitted, see Economics Health migrant health, 24, 26 Healthcare, 8, 12, 18, 30, 78, 89, 93, 131, 165, 212, 234 Hierarchy, 5, 6, 16, 24, 50, 94, 101, 106–111, 113, 117, 122, 123, 125, 146, 148, 161, 167, 173, 175–177, 185, 205, 240 intersected, multi-level, 34, 101–126 Highly skilled better/desired (see Professionals) Holmes, S.M., 7–9, 11, 18, 22, 26, 27, 31, 86, 101, 122, 125, 157, 185, 199, 214, 221, 236 See also Migrant fruit pickers

Index Hostile right-wing (see Hostile environment) Hostile environment immigration policies, enforced via the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts and followed by the 2016 Brexit referendum (see Brexit) I Illicit activities burglaries, sex work (see Night; Work) Immigration, see Migration Industries Information and Technology (IT) (see Work) Inequality, vi, 9, 12, 13, 15, 29, 34, 77, 79, 80, 82, 86, 95, 96, 101, 105, 110, 122, 133, 137, 163, 171, 195, 207, 236, 239–241, 250 Informal conversations, 23, 31, 56, 60, 66, 67, 105, 255 Innovative, 74 Intensification of labour day labour into the night, 35, 130, 134–136 International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), see Research against cancer International Labour Organisation (ILO), see Labour; Labour organisation; Research Invisibilisation, 15, 16, 33, 36, 94, 239, 249 Invisible, see Precariousness Invisible denizens Macarie (see MacQuarie, J.-C.) Invisible migrants from the public debates and political agendas, 36, 56, 83, 84, 251 L Labour labour migration (see Migrant labour) See also Work Labour extraction, 19 Labour Force Survey (LFS) regulatory body (see Authority; Labour; Regulator) Labour migration complicated issues of, 23 Labour organisation, 16, 123, 199, 240, 252 Labour process manual labour (see Conveyer belt; Fordist; Labour; Lonely process; Manual; Work)

Index Lack thereof, see Control Language, see Skills Layered precarity embodied experiences of, 35, 96 Leyton New Spitalfields (see Market) Li, T.M. disposable lives (see Precariousness) Lived experiences to understand better how tolerate and internalise the kind of terror that turns these bio-automatons (half-humans, half-machines) into obedient individuals, 36 Loader job as a (see ‘Low-skill’; Manual worker; Migrants) lowest in the pecking order, 36, 110, 121, 124, 125, 172, 205 male (see Manual work) London City of London (CoL) (see Cities) East London (see Cities) research site (see 24/7; Glocturnal city; Night research) See also Cities Lonely process, 21, 47, 155 Lorey, I., 31, 66, 156, 171, 195–197 ‘Low-skill’ worse/undesirable (see Manual work) M Macarie, I.-C., 85 MacQuarie, J.-C., vii, 64, 86, 93, 203 Mainstream, see Society Male, see Gendered Malinowski, B. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (see Fieldwork; Methods) Management male (see Gender inequality) Manager male (see Gendered) Manual, 1, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 26, 29, 32, 33, 45, 54, 55, 57, 61, 66, 72, 79, 83, 87, 93–95, 102, 105, 116, 125, 137, 139, 144, 155, 157, 161, 183, 184, 188, 189, 192, 202, 212, 231, 250, 251 Manual labour, 26, 29, 32, 55, 57, 66, 79, 87, 125, 144, 161, 202, 212, 250, 251 Manual work, 150, 174, 176

265 Manual worker, 5, 15, 21, 24, 52, 56, 78, 89, 94, 105, 110, 112, 116, 172, 174, 175, 177, 212, 228, 231, 237, 249 Marginalisation, 13, 15, 73, 79, 94, 96, 132, 212, 239 Market New Spitalfields, 1–3, 5, 6, 15, 18, 19, 22, 32, 34, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 59, 69, 72, 78, 87, 89, 92, 93, 95, 102–107, 109, 114, 117, 121, 140–144, 148, 156, 157, 161, 163, 173, 176, 181, 182, 198, 201–204, 207, 223, 233, 236, 245, 247 Mauss, M., see Anthropology Meagre living let die, 29 Mechanisms production of disposability and invisibility, 33, 36, 139, 232 Media Novara Media (see Communicating) Meta-level perspective migrant bodies, precarious, women (see Gendered) Methodologies, 52, 66 Methods, 20–22, 25, 26, 34, 55, 61, 62, 64–67, 69–74, 113, 150, 167, 177, 178, 206, 255 Migrant bodies social suffering of (see Bodies across borders; Global bodies; Migration) Migrant fruit pickers, 31 Migrant labour/labourers, 8, 23, 26, 27, 33, 46, 47, 49, 51, 81, 86, 93, 101, 232, 240, 248, 249 Migrant organisation, 20, 50 Migrants diaspora (see Communities; Migration) guestworkers (see Work, labour) half-permitted (see Migrants; Migration) half-rejected (see Migration) health tourists (see Eastern European) illegal (see Migration) immigrant (see Migration) Indians, 6, 7, 9 lives, work, movement, v, 33 neither here, not there (see Migration) nightworkers (see Migration; Working at night) up and working at night (see Nightworkers) worker (see Migration) See also Migration

266 Migrants Organise, see Migrant organisation; Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) Migrants rights, vi, 18 Migrant Voice Migrant organisation (see Migrant activism; Non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) Migrant women, see Eastern European Migrant workers, 6–19, 26, 29, 34–36, 48, 58, 63–65, 77–96, 102, 116, 124, 125, 134, 139, 145, 175, 182, 196, 197, 211, 232, 237–239, 245–248 Migration pull factors (see Forced migration) Migration and labour studies, 28, 31, 35, 61–65, 74, 77, 79, 125, 130, 196, 202, 234, 235, 239–242 Migration scholarship, see Piore, M.J. Migration, work, 26–28, 31, 32, 35, 79, 95, 202, 234, 239, 252 Mobilise, see Collective bargaining Movement forced movement (see Migration) Multi-disciplinary literature workers’ subjectivities and socialities (see Cooperation; Sociality) Mumbai pink collar night workforce (see Gendered work) N National Health Service (NHS), v, 18, 49, 121 Nationalities, 6, 34, 54, 60, 101, 105, 106, 112, 114, 117, 122, 124, 140, 142, 146, 170, 174, 203, 210, 255, 258 New Spitalfields night market, 1–3, 5, 15, 21, 34, 52, 59, 63, 69, 92, 109, 113, 115, 121, 125, 139, 140, 143, 144, 148, 151, 156, 161, 166, 167, 176, 181, 182, 193, 207, 223, 233, 245, 247 research site (see Ethnography; Nightnography; Research) workplace (see Fruit and vegetable market; Research site) New York City (NYC) finance district, 30 Night, 1, 45, 78, 101, 129, 156, 181, 201, 233, 245 Night auditors, see Working at night

Index Night cultures European, 29 Night ethnographer, 23–25 Night ethnography, 20, 161 Nightlife nighttime economny (see Nightlife workers; Nighttime) Nightlife workers, 249 Nightly, see Working at night Night market hard labour, 21, 25, 34, 232 Nightnographer Research in the night (see Night ethnography) Nightnography experimental nature of, 34, 66 multi-modal approach (see Bodily; Cyber; Night research) night ethnography (see Anthropology; Night ethnographer; Night research; Nocturnal anthropology; Research at night) novel research (see Innovative; Methodologies; Methods; Night) portmanteau of ‘ethnography’ and ‘night’, 20, 34 Night research, 46 Nightshift, v, vi See also Shift work Nightshift work, see Shift work Nightshift workers migrants, manual workers, males, female, vi, 5, 6, 14–16, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33–35, 46, 48–50, 52, 55, 57, 61–63, 65, 72, 73, 78, 79, 86, 89, 93, 94, 96, 101, 105, 110, 112, 116, 125, 129, 139, 151, 155, 162, 172, 174, 175, 177, 198, 199, 202, 212, 228, 231, 237–242, 245, 248–250 Night studies emerging field of, 24, 27, 47 Nighttime, 9, 13–15, 26–28, 30, 31, 35, 46, 51, 71, 90, 94, 104, 130, 135, 138, 139, 151, 181–183, 218, 232, 239, 248, 250, 251, 256 Night-Time Economy (NTE), 13, 15, 26, 28, 30, 51, 90, 94, 130, 138, 239, 248, 250, 252 Nightwalks walking (see Night research) Nightwork labourers, 18 physical toil of, 22, 32, 35, 54–56, 198

Index work opportunity (see Migration; Pay) See also Industries; Work; Working at night Nightworkers, see Nightwork NightWorkPod podcast (see Communicating research) 9-5ers the other (see Nightworkers) Nocturnal nighttime production (see Nighttime) Nocturnal anthropology, 240 Nocturnal fieldwork nightnography (see Night research) Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), vii, 20, 252 Migrant Voice, UK and Nighttime.org, Migrants Organise, 20 Normalisation of nightwork remains under-researched, 35 Norman, W. nightwork (see Britain’s nightworkers) Notebook fieldnotes, 21, 23, 33, 54, 67, 68, 71, 111, 186, 187 Notes, v, 12, 20, 21, 23, 54, 66–68, 71, 80, 92, 116, 186, 187, 205, 236 O Observation thick participant observation, 23 Observations hyperreal (see Self-observations; Site observations) Office for National Statistics (ONS) statistics, 19, 90, 233 One level down, see Work hierarchy Open Doors healthcare, sexual advice, sexwork (See National Health Service (NHS)) Opposite rhythms, 15, 129, 149 Organisation hierarchy, 6, 175, 177, 240 Owner male, 105 Owner and manager top of hierarchy, 22, 34, 57, 101, 106 P Paradigm, see Analysis Participant observations, 19–23, 60, 61, 68, 162

267 method, anthropology, 20–22, 68, 225 Participant observer observation (see Anthropology; Fieldwork) Patel, R. (2010) pink collar night workforce, Mumbai, 30 Pay, 5, 8, 15, 17, 26, 31, 46, 55, 66, 79, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112–115, 118, 119, 124, 125, 129, 133, 140, 141, 143, 145, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 170, 171, 173, 176, 195, 199, 204, 206, 207, 209, 220, 223, 226, 236, 237, 239, 242, 247 Photoshoot visual event, photography (see Visual methods) Physical labour, 21, 24, 32, 33, 56, 58, 69, 175, 212, 218, 223, 232, 234, 235 Physiological, 14, 16, 31, 33, 54, 56, 66, 69, 134, 135, 151, 194, 215, 231, 232 Piore, M.J., 116 Platform platform work (see Sharing economy) Podcast Being Human Show, Royal Anthropological Institute Podcasts; Connected CityLab (see Communicating) Contrasens (see MacQuarie, J.-C.; Nightshift; Nightwork) Podcasts and blogs communicating (see Public engagement) Policies immigration policies (see Hostile environment) Political half-rejected, 6, 10, 86 Politics, see European politics Porter male (see Manual work) Post-circadian capitalism today’s capitalism, vii, 20, 26–27, 30, 33, 35, 36, 79, 129, 131–137, 150, 151, 231, 232, 238 Post-circadian capitalist’ era today’s capitalism, 26 Poverty, see Forced migration Precarious, see Precariousness Precarious jobs migrants who vie against one another for, 13, 26, 35, 113, 182 Precariousness, vi, 10, 15, 31, 33, 62, 66, 116, 123, 139, 171, 181–199, 202, 211, 228, 236, 237, 239

268 Precarity deep within the body, 11, 13, 16, 19, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30–36, 46, 49, 50, 55–57, 61, 66, 67, 69, 72, 73, 79, 87, 94, 96, 102, 109, 110, 113, 121, 139, 141, 143, 145, 150, 151, 157, 160, 163–167, 173, 194–199, 206, 227, 228, 231, 232, 234–235, 238–241, 245, 248, 249, 252 See also Precariousness Problems with Work esp. nightwork, 15, 16, 18, 28–30, 33, 61, 74, 129, 150, 151, 188, 232, 238, 249, 251, 252 Production and consumption 24/7, 28, 136, 139, 236, 241 Professionals diasporic people (see Work migration) experts, 9, 18, 50, 51, 59, 64, 80, 90, 132, 138–140, 176, 217, 218 Highly skilled (see Migration, Work) privileged (see Migration) propertied citizens (see Migration) Project research (see Nightnography; Nightwork) R Racialized sorting, see Hostile environment Rajaram, P.K., vi, 15, 28, 50, 132, 156, 239, 240 Reached out, 246, 252 Receptionists, see Working at night Regime of discipline regimes (see Labour extraction) Regulator, 18, 87, 94, 165 Repeated movements grabbing, lifting and loading, 29, 54, 184, 190 Research Night research (see Nightnography) Research against cancer, 22 Research site, 18, 52 Rethoric anti-Romani (see European Union) Rhythms circadian rhythms (see Biological clock) Richard Sennett’s sociology on modernity, labour and subjectivity to post-circadian capitalism, 35 Rickshaw drivers, see Manual work Rights to access healthcare, 12 live and work, 12

Index Rob Shaw geographer Roma ethnicity, see Ethnicities Romanians, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 15, 18, 23, 24, 32, 50–52, 56, 58–60, 63, 82, 83, 85, 92, 106, 112, 117, 118, 121, 122, 140–142, 146, 159, 163, 167, 168, 170, 174, 183, 206, 207, 209, 210 Roma ethnics (see European) See also Nationalities Round-the-clock, see 24/7; 24 hours a day; Seven days per week; Non-stop Run the business, see Work S Salesman male, 35, 110, 149, 169, 175, 209, 258 Salespeople male (see Gender inequality) Sandhu, S. novel, 17 Saskia Sassen’s notion of the ‘global city’ relevant topics in migration, 34 Sassen, S., see Global city Scheper-Hughes and Lock mindful body, 25, 47, 67, 157, 213, 214 Schmoozing Small talk (see Informal conversations; Methods) Sedentarian, 51 Seven days per week (7 days per week), 18 Sex industry, see Work Sharing economy, 195 Sharma, S. expendable bodies (see Financial district; Time; Toronto’s taxi drivers) Shift work, 13, 14, 90, 94, 134, 135, 246, 255, 256 Shopfloor, 4, 56, 58, 147, 193 Skills English language skills (see Social mobility) Sleep, 5, 14, 16, 19, 21–23, 26, 28, 31, 34, 47, 54, 56, 59, 66, 69, 71, 72, 92, 106, 108, 109, 113, 119, 125, 130, 134, 135, 137, 138, 142–146, 149–151, 157, 160, 162, 163, 165, 185–188, 191, 201, 202, 214, 215, 218, 226, 231–233, 235, 241, 248, 250, 251 control of, 5, 34, 106, 109, 124, 125, 135, 137, 214 Sleep and work time

Index lack control, 31, 34, 66, 72, 130, 151, 226, 233 Smithfields meat market (see City of London; Market; Nightwork) Sociability, 15, 52, 92, 120, 134, 135, 137, 225–227 collective, 226, 227 embodied, 21, 56, 227 physical, 21, 56 Sociality, 33, 120, 232, 233, 236, 240 Social mobility, 106, 123, 125 Society, 7, 15, 19, 29–31, 33, 47, 56, 57, 65, 73, 83, 85, 86, 90, 93, 94, 101, 102, 116, 129, 133, 136, 137, 139, 150–152, 196, 197, 218, 227, 231–233, 236–238, 240, 245, 250, 251 Some public acknowledgement migrants’ contribution to their host societies, 36 Square mile, 103, 104, 233 Standing political economist, Guy Standing (2011, p. 3), 116, 137, 195, 197 Strathern, A. Body Thoughts, 157 Straw, W. urban media studies scholar, 27, 47, 130 Study research (see Research nightworkers) Subjectivation precarity, precarisation, precariousness (see Butler, J.) Subjectivities bodily experiences, 14, 21, 32, 196, 235 T Tactic participant, 22 Taxi drivers, 15, 30, 93, 116, 117, 227, 234, 247 Techniques of the body tool (see Ethnographer; Nightnographer; Research tool) A temporal axis nightwork, 33, 232, 249 Tenants and trading companies owners and traders, 34, 101 Time regimented to fit the demands of the global economy, 35, 91, 233 Toronto’s taxi drivers, 15

269 Tourism at night, 28 Trajectories, see Migration Transitional controls, see Fortress Europe Trapped, see Precariousness Travail in the food supply chain in the U.K. Eastern European migrants (see Eastern Europeans; Manual labour; Migrant labour/labourers; Nightworkers; Women) Turkish Kurdish-Turkish (see Ethnicities) 24-hour biological clock circadian clock, 134 24-hour period day and night (see Round-the-clock) 24 hours a day, 18 24/7 London (see Global city; Glocturnal; Round-the-clock) societies (see Cities; Round-the-clock; 24-hour) 24/7 city, 17, 26, 27, 89, 91, 138, 152, 233 See also Glocturnal; Non-stop; Round-the-clock 24/7 demand round-the-clock work, 26 24/7 post-circadian capitalist economy, 35, 129–152 Two levels down, see Hierarchy U U.K. England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales (see United Kingdom) U.K. People’s Tribunal organisation (see Migrants rights; NGOs) Under-the-skin, 22, 23, 33–35, 38, 67, 181, 196, 198 precarity (see Bodily; Precariousness) See also Participant observation UNI Global Union/UNI Europa Organisation (see Daytime cleaners; Rights; Union) Union, 15, 83, 240, 242, 252 United States (US) migrant workers, poverty, 17, 132 University College London (UCL) education (see Research; Social mobility) University of Melbourne Connected CityLab (see Communicating research; Nighshift)

270 University of Oxford The Coronavirus and Mobility Forum, COMPAS (see Communicating; Dissemination) Unseen (and undocumented) migrant strategic roles, 34 V Visas, see Guestworker program Visual methods, 21, 61, 62, 64, 65, 73 Voices lack of migrant nightworkers (see Rights (lack thereof)) Vulnerable, see Precariousness Vulnerable labour critical studies on (see Ehrenreich, B.; Rajaram, P.K.) Vulnerable migrants from Eastern Europe, 12, 34, 89, 124, 125 W Wages London Living Wage (LLW), vi, 1, 17, 104, 233 Women bottom of work hierarchy (see Work hierarchy) cashiers (see Working at night) female, cafe servers (see Females)

Index Women at the Market female cafe servers, 46, 54, 119, 125, 148, 155, 159, 183 Work precarious work (see Labour; Precariousness) Worker precarity deep, under-the-skin, 31–34, 67, 234–235 Workers, see Work indentured (see Work) low-skilled (see Migration, Work) Workers turned half-machines written off from the predominant social structures, 36 Workfloor, see Shopfloor Work hierarchy, 173 Working at night, 14, 26, 33, 90, 96, 130, 134, 139, 141 a hidden population, 15, 17–19, 26, 36, 58, 66, 89, 91, 94, 95, 116, 120, 139, 150, 176, 185, 196, 212, 233, 237, 248 Working regimes daytime and nighttime (see Day shift; Night shift; Shift work) Work, labour, 10, 15, 26, 32, 33, 36, 47, 55, 78, 82, 83, 89, 93, 94, 113, 116, 119, 131, 134, 137, 175, 195, 199, 202, 222, 237, 239, 242, 248, 251 Work migration, 26–28, 31, 32, 35, 79, 95, 202, 234, 239, 252