The advance of the twenty-first century has meant gains in labour
rights for some populations across theglobe and the increased automation
of manufacture, relieving human labourers from performing strenuous
tasks. It has also brought time-flexibility for some workers. Yet, in
spite of these developments, the realm of labour remains largely
precarious and exploitative due to several factors. One of these is the
systematic exposure of workers to two kinds of temporal pressure: to
work as fast as possible (imminent deadlines), and for as long as
possible (overtime). This induces chronic stress, which leads to various
other health problems resulting from the joint degradation of physical
and mental health (Dickinson, 2023; Navinés, Martín-Santos, Olivé &
Valdés, 2016). The impact of time pressure and work-related stress is
manifest in the alarming rise in burnout, depression, and
karoshi cases across countries where overwork is rife
(Kobayashi & Middlemiss, 2009; Dickinson, 2023; Han, 2015). In
addition, the implementation of ubiquitous electronic surveillance and
logistical technologies in workplaces exacerbates labour precarity since
it allows employers to keep employees on a sort of permanent probation,
making their contracts always liable to termination. Behind this lies a
productivist rationality, which also pushes workers to self-exploitation
through the promise of a self-realisation that they never truly attain.
These are some of the adverse conditions that together constitute what I
more generally designate as the precarious and
exploitative landscape of contemporary labour. I deliberately
use these terms, understood as thick ethical categories (Sayer,
2011), to not only describe but also condemn this specific state of
affairs.
Some theorists have addressed the above issues from discrete
perspectives. Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration centres on
explaining the increasing fast-pacedness of most social spheres,
including work, in relation to the escalatory logics of capitalism
(2013, 2017). Other scholars address the normalisation of overwork and
the persistence of excessive working-hours regimes in corporate
environments, but without correlating this to social acceleration or to
late-capitalist dynamics (Blagoev, Muhr, Ortlieb & Schreyögg, 2018).
Jonathan Crary (2014) critiques the late-capitalist colonisation of
human time, attention and sleep by work, technology, and constant
illumination. Yet he speaks of work in the abstract, and so does not
explain how 24/7 temporalities concretely affect different aspects of
work and different kinds of jobs. Like Crary, Judith Butler writes of
the world becoming increasingly “unlivable” due to the neoliberal
production of precarity. But her account, as I argue below, remains
incomplete because it does not consider the temporal dimension of
unlivability (2018). In view of the partiality of these accounts, a more
rounded and thorough understanding of the constellation formed by
neoliberal forms of government, contemporary time regimes and labour
precarity is still needed.
Acknowledging that contemporary experiences of work are complex,
diverse and temporally mediated, this paper seeks to articulate a
comprehensive account of what makes them precarious, exploitative, and,
sometimes, unlivable. I start by defining the two parallel theoretical
dimensions from which my analysis will unfold: labour precarity and time
regimes or temporalities. I then use these lenses to show, with
examples, how different aspects of work such as work-pace, surveillance,
production quotas, and human-machine interfaces can accommodate
particular forms of what I call temporal unlivability. I
thereby advance four central arguments: first, that although work is
being transformed by multiple, intersecting phenomena, these are all
ultimately correlated to neoliberal capitalist temporalities
given that every aspect of labour is traversed and shaped by time.
Secondly, that the particular forms of temporal pressure and control
imposed by neoliberal capitalist temporalities are a core
component of labour precarity today. Thirdly, that whilst the
continuing acceleration of work enabled by machines extends earlier
practices, it now produces unlivability and a
worsening of precarious working conditions because it proves
impossible for bodies to cope with the speeds imposed on them. Finally,
that these temporalities, the productivist normative code that grounds
them, and their association with the latest technology are not only
perpetuating disciplinary mechanisms of old, but also enabling new
overlappings between various forms of labour precarity and socially
assigned disposability.
Theoretical Foundations
Defining time regimes
I understand time as a social phenomenon, one whose regulation is
as crucial as the regulation of space for any form of power to
consolidate itself (Foucault, 1995; Martineau, 2015). Thus, social and
political formations erect temporal structures as part of their
world-making endeavour. Different theorists have proposed different
signifiers for this idea: Rosa (2013) and Martineau (2015) speak of
time regimes and temporal structures (2013), while
Crary calls them temporalities (2014). I use the above
denominations but also propose the term temporal cartography as
an alternative way of conceiving them. A temporal cartography is the
result of a deliberate exercise to stabilise chaotic, uncharted time
into a normative arrangement. I therefore compare it to what Rancière
calls a distribution of the sensible (2010), which binds
specific material, spatial and, crucially, temporal partitions with the
symbolical order through which a given form of power affirms itself. The
distribution of the sensible functions as a cognitive a-priori insofar
as it presupposes the perceptibility of some things and the
imperceptibility of others. Thus, it takes place across four axes:
Time
Space (Rancière’s “places”)
Kinds of action (Rancière’s “modes of being and doing”)
Utility (Relevance to a set of preestablished values)
The distribution of time starts with the visibilisation of particular
intervals or partitions. The 8-hour workday, the 6-day workweek, and the
financial year are examples of temporal partitions that, having been
instituted as part of political agendas, have a privileged visibility
for people living in contemporary societies. Temporal and spatial
partitions are then correlated to forms of action based on their
perceived utility, which, as Räber identifies, is today determined from
a productivist logic –traceable back to the Protestant work ethic— that
deems actions useful the more they contribute to growth and production
(2023). This happens through the mechanism of the police,
which, in Rancière, is a partitioning that also allocates
functions. The arc of the distribution culminates, following Rancière,
in the allocation of these nexii to specific groups of people
depending on their place in the social hierarchy. I argue we can
interpret the neoliberal capitalist institution and enforcement of
particular distributions of the sensorium as a contemporary instance of
the police.
Temporalities, or temporal cartographies, are thus the
four-dimensional territories resulting from a distribution of the
sensible that establishes the legitimate uses of time, space and action
as opposed to the deviant or improper uses. Although temporalities may
be circumscribed to a clearly delimited perimeter, e.g. a
factory or a prison, they are mostly diffuse and discontinuous in their
scope. Temporalities are “alive” in the sense that they undergo slow
changes much like language does; they compete, intersect, and sometimes
merge with others. But although there are still various temporalities in
our world, I claim many of them are being increasingly excluded or
subsumed by the hegemonic set of time regimes today, which I group under
the label of neoliberal capitalist temporalities in view of
their common traits.
Neoliberal capitalist temporalities: a brief
characterisation
Although no one concept will ever be sufficient to capture the
intricacy of our current paradigm, the latter must be named in order to
be theoretically manipulated. I therefore refer to it with the term
neoliberal capitalism, where capitalism is more of an
axiomatics that has found different models of realisation
throughout history than a concrete social formation (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1980, p. 567). Complementarily, I argue, with Callison and
Manfredi, that it is neoliberalism’s “multiple and mutating forms” what give today’s capitalism an
unprecedented degree of plasticity and robustness (2020, p. 2).
Contemporary capitalism thus proves to be singular and plural at the
same time: singular insofar as it has common features worldwide that
differentiate it from previous capitalisms, plural because it manifests
in many guises and recycles its own effects as causes for further
expansion.
Despite its many transformations, capitalism, now as before, is based
on a paradigm of accumulation and valorisation through the exploitation
of underclass groups (Fumagalli, 2011; hooks, 2015). Now, what is
important is that valorisation processes rely on the stealth of workers’
time. Absolute surplus value is produced by the prolongation of the
working day (overtime), while relative surplus value is created through
the acceleration of the worker’s labour (time pressure) so that his
necessary labour-time is contracted as much as possible and the
surplus-labour time is extended, within a workday with fixed length
(Marx, 2015a, p. 220). Acceleration thus proves a fundamental element
for the capitalist production of relative surplus value, for to the
extent to which capital is able to increase the efficiency of its means
of production (workers and machines), it can obtain greater profits. The
link between acceleration and value-production relates more generally to
the structural need for dynamic stabilisation (constant growth
and escalation) that Rosa, Dörre and Lessenich have identified in all
known capitalisms (2017). Crucially, this means that any kind of
capitalist time regime will be oriented towards acceleration, one of the
three mechanisms through which capitalist societies dynamically
stabilise.
In addition to an ever-increasing pace, late capitalist time regimes
are characterised by relentless activity and a resistance to
interruptions. This is underscored by Crary, who argues capitalism
installs a normative model of permanent activity that “requires 24/7
temporalities for its realization” (2014, p. 15). As he argues, the
concern is that it is now humans who are being engineered and
subjectified to better fit into the global infrastructure for 24/7
production and consumption that, as we will see, is based on abstract
time.
Summarising, neoliberal capitalist temporalities are sensorial
distributions structuring the ways in which we articulate time, space,
action, and utility according to the principles of acceleration and
continuous functioning. Rooted in a productivist normativity, they
simultaneously place work at the centre of human life and demand that
this work be performed on a regime of minimal rest and maximum
efficiency, disavowing the need for pause and recovery inherent to all
human exertion. As I now go on to argue, these time regimes produce
precarity and temporal unlivability.
Temporal Unlivability
Various theorists have identified the destructive impetus that
characterises neoliberalism. Lazzarato points to its “techniques of the
minimum” (2009), while Brown comments on its ruthless “dismantling of
the social” (2019). Similarly, Butler attributes the lack of livable
conditions that many people face to neoliberalism’s tendency to
induce precarity and destitution (2018). To make things worse,
she tells us, we are still expected to be economically solvent:
we are morally pushed to become precisely the kind of subjects who
are structurally foreclosed from realizing that norm. Neoliberal
rationality demands self-sufficiency as a moral ideal at the same time
that neoliberal forms of power work to destroy that very possibility at
an economic level (2018, p. 14).
Butler’s subsequent arguments show that this paradoxical structure of
neoliberal rationality asphyxiates not only our economic subsistence but
every level of our existence. She concludes that if we are constantly
demanded to achieve x under conditions that preclude
x, the contradiction that haunts us is that we are living the
unlivable and that we must act without the conditions to act: “The
fantasy of the individual capable of entrepreneurial self-making […]
makes the uncanny assumption that people can, and must, act in
autonomous ways under conditions where life has become unlivable” (2018,
p. 16). Unlivability, hence, designates the presence of an incongruity
between what we are pushed to do, and the absence of the adequate
conditions for effectively satisfying those demands. In other words, it
indexes a tension between the dismantling (by neoliberal capitalist
processes) of the preconditions for livability and the escalating
demands placed on us (by neoliberal capitalist discourses).
While I agree with Butler’s account of unlivability, I contend it
remains incomplete as long as we do not take into account the temporal
dimension. I argue that the neoliberal capitalist production of
unlivability also takes places at the temporal level. Its contradictory
structure appears as a requirement to be temporally self-sufficient
under conditions of collective time-scarcity. It also demands that
we labour as fast as possible, while the workload keeps growing at an
even faster rate. This is what I call temporal unlivability,
but it can also be formulated inversely as the inhabiting of an
unlivable temporality. Having defined the terms ‘unlivable’ and
‘temporality’, the definition of an unlivable temporality now
appears as quite straightforward: it is an ordering of time which
exhibits a contradictory tension between the demands it issues
and the conditions it provides for the satisfaction of those demands,
and which results in a life permanently on the brink of collapse.
Neoliberal capitalist temporalities produce unlivability in different
ways, but nowhere is this most evident than in the realm of work where
unlivability directly translates into the production and allocation of
labour precarity.
Labour Precarity
There is no labour precarity in the singular, but rather different
kinds of it. When enough of these overlap, it is customary to
speak of ‘precarious work’. But because, as Lorey argues, precarity and
insecurity are now “normalized at a structural level”, even jobs that do
not strictly qualify as precarious often bear one or more types of
labour precarity (2015, p. 63). Rodgers and Rodgers (1989) propose to
think of labour precarity along four dimensions:
Temporal: low certainty over the continuity of
employment
Organisational: lack of workers’ individual and collective
control over working conditions, working time and shifts, work
intensity, pay, health and safety
Economic: insufficient pay and salary progression
Social: lack of legal, collective, or customary protection
against unfair dismissal, discrimination, and unacceptable working
practices; and social protection (access to social security benefits
covering health, accidents, unemployment insurance).
The lacks listed here respond to the contradictory structure of
unlivability outlined above: for instance, if workers are demanded to
work long hours, under time pressure, and be highly productive but the
underlying conditions are poor pay (poor nutrition), and insufficient
recovery time, their entire bodies come under unsustainable levels of
stress; they are trapped in an unlivable situation. It is important to
think of these conditions both in terms of unlivability and of
precarity. While the first term foregrounds the discrepancy between
capacities and demands, the second highlights that this condition of
heightened exposure to injury, violence, poverty or death is
induced (Butler, 2018) by neoliberal forms of governmentality.
The problem becomes even more insidious when multiple forms of precarity
start to become normalised and to overlap, for they reinforce each other
and place workers in a position of extreme vulnerability. I will return
to this point with some examples.
For Rodgers and Rodgers, the temporal dimension of work precarity
refers to the low certainty a worker has over how long they will retain
the job. This uncertainty and the increased risk of being made redundant
for no particular reason signal the predominance of the neoliberal logic
according to which workers are treated as dispensable, replaceable human
resources. The utilitarian approach to the making and breaking of
employment contracts is also spurred by the rise of “outsourcing and new
forms of flexible employment (such as part-timework, telework and
on-call work)”, which increasingly free employers from forms of
responsibility towards their employees and from accountability towards
third-party regulatory agents (Jain & Hassard, 2014).
Now, although Rodgers and Rodgers label the second dimension of
precarity “organisational”, this one is just as markedly determined by
temporal variables as the former. The difference is that, while the
first dimension relates to workers’ futures, the second dimension bears
on workers’ everyday experiences of time and space according to
the rules imposed by their management. It also involves the materiality
of their working conditions, where the existence or nonexistence of
health and safety protocols signifies a greater or lesser degree of
labour precarity. In cases where the organisational dimension is a
source of precarity, workers have little control over the
‘hows’ of work: how it is to be performed, for how long, how
intensely, etc. It is at this level that workers are often assigned
unreasonable workloads, leading them to work under time pressure and /or
overtime in what effectively are forms of exploitation.
Different workers overwork for different, sometimes combined,
reasons: sweatshop and undocumented workers, for instance, do it for
their mere survival. Workers with better but still precarious contracts
are often pressured to work under stress and do overtime due to
insufficient legal protection, or to remain competitive and prove their
commitment to their employers (Kobayashi and Middlemiss, 2009). People
who have “extreme-jobs” (Hewlett and Luce, 2006), on the other hand, are
forced into overwork due to the fast pace, high demands and high stakes
of their jobs. As I mentioned earlier, the dimensions of precarity
identified by Rodgers and Rodgers frequently come tied together:
exploited workers are forced to consent to organisational and temporal
kinds of precarity because economic and social kinds of precarity keep
them in a disadvantaged position vis-à-vis their employers. Workers’
lack of collective bargaining power, of outlets through which to safely
report unfair demands, and the absence of sanctions for employers
prevent workers from overturning their situation and securing fairer
contracts.
Work under Neoliberal Capitalism
The argument I now put forth is that neoliberal capitalist
temporalities are producing unlivability, aggravating preexisting forms
of work precarity and introducing new ones into the global labour
market. I build the support for this argument in four phases: after
introducing abstract time as the basis for the capitalist
rationalisation of labour aimed at maximal productivity, I show how
automation and logistics are two key infrastructural drivers of the
rationalisation of work qua acceleration. I subsequently
analyse two examples where the creation of labour precarity appears
clearly associated with productivism, neoliberal time regimes, and the
technological devices enforcing them. Finally, I discuss some of the
consequences this has on workers’ overall health.
Abstract time
Throughout his historical investigation of the rise of capitalism,
Martineau argues that the introduction of clock-time produces an
abstract concept of time composed of equal and interchangeable segments,
as opposed to the unequal hours of varying lengths that were traditional
in medieval societies (2015, p. 61). Martineau takes the distinction
between abstract and concrete time from Moishe Postone
who, in turn, derives it from the Marxian postulate of labour’s dual
character. Clock-time also brought a shift from what E.P. Thompson calls
a ‘task-oriented’ approach to work to a time-oriented one
(ibidem).
The spread of abstract time is not incidental to the
development of the capitalist system. Rather, capitalism and abstract
time exist in a relation of mutual constitution and dependency. The
progressive implementation of clock-time as the standard time-measuring
system has been crucial to the development and expansion of capitalism.
This is due to the centrality of abstract time to processes of
value-formation and appropriation. Abstract time, Martineau explains, is
at the basis of value because the notion of abstract labour relies on
abstract time as the objective frame where labour-time is measured
(2015). The reduction of what Martineau calls “radically different forms
of labour” to abstract labour can only be achieved through the notion of
abstract time; for it is only in terms of abstract, identical time-units
that concrete labour can be quantified and thereby assigned a price in
the market. Abstract time, therefore, makes labour exchangeable. More
generally, the capitalist instauration of rationalisation as a general
scheme for social functioning (aimed at the ubiquitous extraction of
surplus value) cannot be conceived without, first, rationalising time
into a grid-like temporal continuum. Abstract, rationalised time is
therefore a central precondition for the neoliberal capitalist
configuration of the temporalities that regulate labour time today.
The acceleration of work through automation and
logistics
As we have established, late capitalism is primarily geared towards
the maximisation of productivity. In concrete terms, this is achieved
through rationalisation, which theorists essentially understand as the
application of a method to make things calculable and predictable
(Weber, 2012; Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002; Lukàcs, 1971). Rosa conceives
rationalisation as that which allows one “to achieve more in less
time” (2013, p. 50). He therefore argues rationalisation can be
understood “as an acceleration process that aims at the accelerated
realization of ends through the minimization of the necessary steps or
an increase in the effectiveness of the means employed” (ibid).
Drawing on Weber, we can condense rationalisation into four key
principles: efficiency (more in less time),
calculability, predictability and mastery (or
‘control’) (Habermas, 2007, p. 159). These are precisely the four
principles Ritzer argues are dominating more and more sectors of the
world as it becomes McDonaldized. Particularly, he critiques the
increasing standardisation of labour into McJobs, which involve
a series of simple tasks in which the emphasis is placed on
performing each task as efficiently as possible. Second, the time
associated with many of the tasks is carefully calculated [...] Third,
the work is predictable; employees do and say essentially the same
things hour after hour, day after day. Fourth, many non-human
technologies are employed to control workers and reduce them to
robot-like actions (Ritzer, 1998, p. 60).
McJobs require little training and usually provide minimal job
security and benefits to workers. This makes them convenient for
employers, which is why they have proliferated across the globe. The
standardisation of human action is thus a vital requirement in the
rationalised acceleration of work.
Another crucial element for the contemporary rationalisation of
productive activities is the development of automation technology.
Although it has several implications, two important consequences of
automation are that human labour is cheapened and that the workday
does not shorten. In The Grundrisse, Marx explains how
even though machines drastically reduce the necessary labour-time of
workers, their working hours per day do not decrease because the saved
time is immediately converted into surplus labour: “Capital employs
machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker to work
a larger part of his time for capital” (2015b, p. 701). Machines
therefore only save time for the owners of the means of production. In
this way, Marx shows how the machines’ diminishing of necessary
labour-time, which is a creation of free time, immediately becomes
re-captured as surplus labour-time.
Many countries have reached a point where their actual productive
capacities can meet their population’s short and medium-term subsistence
needs. This would be true for all countries if they were self-sufficient
monads with equal amounts of resources and technological development.
Globalisation further complicates matters; in particular, the fact that
the nature and proportion of the economic flows that move between Global
North and Global South is unequal. Yet despite this global
interdependence and the colonial dynamics that still mark the uneven
distribution of working hours across the planet, technological
development in general means that what we needed years to build can now
be done in months, and what took months now takes days. And
yet, people continue to work artificially long hours all over the
world. On this subject, Graeber contends:
Keynes predicted that, by the century’s end, technology would have
advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United
States would have achieved a fifteen-hour workweek. […] In technological
terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead,
technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make
us all work more (2018, p. 9).
Concurring with Graeber, Lewis argues: “the link between automation
and freedom cannot and will not be facilitated without adequate policy
intervention” (2019, p. 28). Automation therefore does not in itself
guarantee a shorter working day; far from this, because it is embedded
in a productivist normative code, automation is often another driver of
overtime.
The other significant change brought by automation is that it
modifies the speed at which humans are now expected to work. As Klaess
notes, today “advanced robotics, collaborative automation, and more
sophisticated software” allow “humans to work more intimately with
machines on assembly lines than ever before” (2021, np). This
unprecedented intimacy means that humans must be perfectly synchronised
with machines. Companies ensure this through the establishment of
production quotas in the form of items processed per time-unit
for workers to attain. This metric thus serves as a standardisation
device to make sure that, as Marx once wrote, one worker during an hour
is equal to another one, and to all others on the factory floor.
Although automation was a big step in the acceleration of work and
production, it could not have reached its current degree of efficiency
without logistics. Indeed, it was through the coupling of automation and
logistics that modern goods production became truly systematised into a
seamlessly connected series of protocols where no component is idle but
rather always contributing to the whole. Whereas automation was the
golden asset from Ford to McDonald’s, it was logistics which, as the
“newly dominant capitalist science” (Harney and Moten, 2013) based on
ICTs and satellite technology, marked a new era in the intertwined
histories of work and production. By aggressively targeting delays and
interruptions, this approach enabled the minimisation of transfer times
between phases and allowed for simultaneous processing.
Logistics translates “real-world systems and behaviours into
quantifiable variables and models” (Archer, 2020, p. 10). Objects and
processes are therefore first reduced to variables that can then be
entered into formulas, the formula par excellence being the
efficiency-measurement, given as items processed per timeunit. Examples
of this metric are number of parcels or chicken carcasses processed per
minute, number of hamburgers or toys manufactured per hour, or cars
assembled per day. The particular nature of items is irrelevant and thus
effaced as they become translated into the cybernetic language through
which logistics organises production. For the logistical system, it
matters only how many x items are being produced by y
per hour. Logistical rationality is most prominent in contemporary
assembly lines, which are long, extremely complex systems designed to
ensure the maximisation and uniformity of production. Here, it is
crucial to acknowledge that abstract time is the primary quantitative
variable in any logistical model. As the territorialised temporal
continuum where different processes can be simultaneously scheduled and
tracked, abstract time provides the foundation for capitalism’s pivotal
rationalising instruments: automation and logistics.
I have sought to shed light on how the answer to the productivist
search for efficiency above all else was a thorough rationalisation of
production processes, from the ways in which labouring bodies ought to
operate, to the introduction of automation and logistical technologies.
By imposing speeds, time frames and output ratios, the latter are the
technological means through which neoliberal capitalist temporalities
are effectively instituted and enforced. I will illustrate this with two
examples where the time-regime imposed on the worker corresponds to the
condition of temporal unlivability. Although they represent extreme
cases, I argue they are not exceptional: the rationality that underpins
them is to be found across all sorts of work environments, involving
both manual and cognitive labour. As we will see, there is an
unbridgeable gap between what the machine or the company is asking of
the human worker and what the latter can effectively do with their
biological capacities in terms of speed. I will then analyse how this
tension yields specific forms of labour precarity.
The Amazon workplace: humans treated as robots
Amazon’s hyper-complex supply chain and its reliance on advanced
logistics is a clear example of how having to closely collaborate with
machines pushes humans to work at inhuman tempos. In his report on the
“unsafe and grueling conditions” at Amazon’s warehouses for The
Guardian, Sainato describes the unreasonable demands that the
company places upon its workers as it aims for ever faster shipping. He
starts with the case of Rina Cummings, an employee who
has worked three 12-hour shifts every week at Amazon’s gargantuan New
York City warehouse, called JFK8 [since] 2018. As a sorter on the
outbound ship dock, her job is to inspect and scan a mandated rate of
1,800 Amazon packages an hour –30 per minute– that are sent through a
chute and transported on a conveyor belt... (2020, np).
The mandated rates, which are euphemistically called by Amazon
managers “performance expectations”, are monitored by computers, which
“write employees up” when these rates are not met, regardless of
accidents (ibidem). Sainato interviews some ex-employees who
confirm having had the same experience and openly complain about
Amazon’s stressful and unsafe work environment. Raymond Velez, who “was
required to pack at a rate of 700 items per hour”, says “workers are
regularly fired for missing rates” (ibid). Juan Espinoza, in
turn, narrates, “I was a picker and we were expected to always pick 400
units within the hour in seven seconds of each item we picked. I
couldn’t handle it. I’m a human being, not a robot” (ibid).
Ilya Geller’s words, in turn, reveal the unforgiving nature of the
surveillance Amazon uses to ensure productivity rates are met:
“You don’t get reported or written up by managers. You get written up
by an algorithm,” said Geller. “You’re keenly aware there is an
algorithm keeping track of you, making sure you keep going as fast as
you can, because if there is too much time lapsed between items, the
computer will know this, will write you up, and you will get fired”
(Sainato, 2020).
Together, the conveyor belt (which, ideally, should always be moving)
and the algorithm can be conceived as a logistical disciplinary
assemblage insofar as they broadcast what Foucault calls a “collective
and obligatory rhythm, imposed from the outside” (1995, p. 152). In this
way, Amazon’s tracking algorithm imposes a 24/7 temporality, and sets
the benchmark for a correct use of time and a correct way of
functioning.
Time pressure is not just a coincidental downside of having a job at
Amazon, it is a central part of the contract. In another article,
Sainato reports how Amazon delivery drivers are also subjected to
time-pressure and surveillance, to the point that they have to renounce
normal bathroom breaks for fear of being sanctioned or fired:
“Fourteen-hour shifts were common […] and the pressure to meet delivery
rates meant Meyers used a plastic bottle to go to the bathroom on a
daily basis” (2021). These drivers are being forced to postpone or
abbreviate beyond reason and dignity what is a biologically
indispensable human need: the need to empty their bladder. They need to
drink water in order to stay alive and function, but the system opposes
what this action entails: to discharge it, because it consumes part of
the time they have already purchased from the worker. Thus, it is the
‘concrete times’ (Martineau, 2015) of biological needs what the tracking
systems disavow and what Espinoza’s statement “I’m a human, not a robot”
reclaims.
This shortening and monitoring of work-breaks is one of the features
of contemporary work precarisation. Whereas in previous decades, break
times were included in workers’ shifts as part of their normal
activities, labour precarity today consists in externalising those
pause-times as temporal costs that fall upon the worker: the lunch break
and the toilet break are barely accounted for in the worker’s daily
schedule. Temporal unlivability here means that the worker is forced to
finding ways of fitting them in a twelve or fourteen-hour workday with
no respite, and the longer the breaks she takes, the more she will be
penalised with a reduction in wage or a missed delivery order.
If the Amazon universe is governed by a neoliberal capitalist time
regime, this is one where the sensorium (Rancière) has been
reconfigured to revolve around the efficient processing of
Amazon packages. This is Amazon’s definition of ‘utility’, toward which
all action in time and space must be oriented. For workers, time is
measured not in hours but in ‘scanned-packages-per-hour’, or
‘delivered-packages-per-day’. The combined operation of logistical and
surveillance systems is key here, for it serves two purposes: it
institutes Amazon’s orthodoxy of time-use, its obligatory workpace, and,
it obtains worker efficiency and compliance with this exploitative work
regime through sanctions and the production of job insecurity.
Workers are made aware of the possibility that any of them may be fired
at any moment, without warning, under the pretense of a few minor
shortcomings. Job insecurity, the “temporal” kind of precarity for
Rodgers and Rodgers, is thus turned into a coercive tool so as to then
impose a second sort of precarity: the organisational one,
where workers have no say over the speed and intensity at which they are
demanded to work. Hence, the awareness of being constantly watched and
the implicit threat of being fired, manifesting as “a heightened sense
of expendability or disposability” (Butler, 2015, p. 15), are what truly
force workers to endure stress and strive for the mandated hourly rates.
Far from being restricted to the Amazon warehouse, this phenomenon has
become the norm in many workplaces today. Indeed, Lazzarato elucidates
how the production of insecurity, as well as of inequality and of
individualisation, are the strategies used by neoliberal forms of power
to influence—here, to accelerate— the conduct of subjects
(2009).
The lack of adequate toilet breaks and job insecurity used to be
associated only with sweatshop labour, but they have now become
normalised practices in places like Amazon, which are supposed to be
Western, legally-compliant firms that pride themselves on fostering
their employees’ “self-development”. This normalisation is further
evidenced by Amazon’s contempt for worker safety, which became apparent
when the injury rates at JKF8 were “found to be three times the national
average for warehouses” (Sainato, 2020). Precarious working conditions
are therefore no longer the mark of the peripheral “third-world”
sweatshop; they exist almost everywhere across the globe and, I
reiterate, the temporal pressures that characterise them are not
accessory but constitutive of them.
The meat industry: production speed placed above worker
safety
Since early industrialisation, every step in the meat-production
chain has been steadily accelerating: from the breeding of animals to
their slaughtering, processing and packing. The US meat industry, in
particular, pioneered faster breeding techniques:
Producers discovered that animals could be kept inside, and fed
grain, and could be bred to grow more quickly and get fatter in the
right places. Since 1925, the average days to market for a US chicken
has been reduced from 112 to 48, while its weight has ballooned from a
market weight of 2.5 pounds to 6.2 (van der Zee, Levitt & McSweeney,
2020).
In this respect, the genetic modification of both animals and plants
has to a great extent been guided by the goal of producing organisms of
the same size, weight and that need less time to
attain full growth. Likewise, meat factories were among the first ones
to incorporate automated production lines and remain, to this day, one
of the sectors most heavily reliant on them (Berger, 2021, p. 108). The
use of automation in meatprocessing plants “has led to significant
increases in line speed for beef, pork, sheep, poultry and fish
operations” (Barbut, 2013, 1). These increases follow from the tireless
lobbying of meat producers to push the evisceration line speed limit
higher and higher. For instance, although a few years ago the Trump
Administration’s approval of the 175 birds per minute (bpm) limit was
controversial, this limit has now again been updated to a vertiginous
250 bpm. At least, this is the case in the various countries where the
multinational Marel sells its products, for its integrated “processing
solution” of 15,000 bpm remains, since 2019, one of the fastest and
best-selling lines today. Genoways reports that US pork processing
plants have also witnessed a dramatic acceleration of their
operations:
in 2002, Hormel’s production lines were running at 900 pigs per hour;
by 2007, they were running 1,350 pigs per hour. That’s a 50% increase in
five years, but the number of workers on the line increased by only
about 15%. So, obviously, everyone is working harder, working faster,
and mistakes occur (2014).
Berger explains that the rationality behind line speed legislation in
Canada, whose history is similar to the US’s, is primarily oriented
towards ensuring “the microbial safety of consumer products” (2021, p.
101). She notes that the OECD’s 1993 definition of ‘food safety’ as
merely the absence of microbial hazards is highly deficient as it is
defined negatively, and exclusively from the perspective of consumer
well-being (p. 102). For Berger, this results in “a failure to account
for other tangential harms, societal or environmental, associated with
production methods” and in a dismissal of the risks for workers and
animals as “outside of the assessment’s jurisdiction” (p. 103). Most
alarmingly, not even the mandate to neutralise microbial risks for
consumers is being respected with the implementation of high line
speeds: Genoways reports that company-employed inspectors were found to
overlook copious amounts of contamination due to the speed of the chain
(2014).
Most relevant for our purposes, worker safety is also impacted by
line speeds in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, in relation
to which Berger affirms: “occupational risks are well-documented,
including injuries related to repetitive movements, holding awkward
postures for extended periods, and working in extreme temperatures (hot
and cold) surrounded by fast-moving, sharp instruments” (p. 100).
Indeed, it has been statistically proven that “people who work at any
meat-packing plant for five years have a nearly 50-50 chance of
suffering a serious injury” (Genoways, 2014). The primary reason why
this risk is so elevated is because it is directly proportional to the
high speeds at which the machines operate. While it is a risk that could
be minimised by reducing line speeds and processing quotas, companies
are clearly more interested in making profits than in protecting the
limbs of their workers. The risk of suffering a serious injury is
another case of organisational labour precarity. But to this kind of
work precarity becomes attached to this: the social dimension of work
precarity that Rodgers and Rodgers define as lack of legal protection
against unacceptable working practices. This is the case of the many
legal and illegal migrants that work in American and Canadian
meat-processing plants:
[A]n extensive study of packing-house workers conducted by the
University of Iowa in 2008 suggested that the number of injuries may be
significantly under-reported. The study found that the large numbers of
undocumented workers from Mexico and other parts of Latin America are
almost half as likely to report an injury or job-related illness as
their white counterparts (Genoways, 2014).
Latin American workers are less likely to report an injury, to
unionise, or to denounce unfair labour practices for fear of losing
their jobs or of being deported. Representing a large percentage of the
workforce in American slaughterhouses, they confirm the portrayal of
slaughterhouses as places of marginalisation where, “[i]n the words of
Chas Newkey-Burden, […] vulnerable animals are often slaughtered by some
of society’s most vulnerable humans” (Berger, p. 110). Meat industry
workers are not particularly well remunerated for dealing with animal
carcasses all day long, do not always have job security, and regularly
work under time pressure. The heightened risk of losing a finger or limb
due to breakneck line speeds, or of developing neuropathy from dangerous
machinery (Genoways, 2014), —compounded by inadequate healthcare,
compensation, and convalescence leave—demonstrates that meat-processing
plants elevate conventional labor precarity to an extreme level. Like
sweatshops, meat-processing plants are able to get away with unfair
wages and unsafe working conditions because, for them, there is an
inexhaustible supply of human resources in financially desperate
situations that will settle for any job.
The fact that, by working at meat-processing plants, undocumented
workers are disproportionately exposed to serious injury and that they
are also unlikely to report it or demand compensation is a perfect
illustration of how inequality is produced and perpetuated through what
Butler calls the differential distribution of precarity. With
Athanasiou, Butler distinguishes a fundamental precarity(or
‘precariousness’) understood as “an existential category that is
presumed to be equally shared” from a second-degree precarity, which is
“a condition of induced inequality and destitution” and which exploits
the existential condition (2013, p. 20). Thus, while precariousness is a
condition that we all face as living beings, precarity in the second
sense refers to the fact that some groups of people are markedly more
exposed to harm than others. Athanasiou brilliantly condenses this
latter meaning as follows: “In describing the politically induced
condition in which certain people and groups of people become
differentially exposed to injury, violence, poverty, indebtedness, and
death, ‘precarity’ describes exactly the lives of those whose ‘proper
place is non-being’” (2013, p. 19). In more recent work, Butler connects
this disparity between the protection of some populations and the
abandonment of others to “the differential ways that populations are
valued and disvalued” by specific “forms of power that establish the
unequal worth of lives by establishing their unequal grievability”
(2021, p. 56). From this perspective, the repeated increases in line
speeds represent increases in indifference towards workers’ health and
wellbeing; they are a statement of the disposability of their lives (and
the replaceability of their bodies in the workplace). The correlation
between high line speeds, a high serious injury rate and informally
employed workers is no coincidence; rather, it follows the logic of the
differential assignment of disposability upon which the neoliberal
production of precarity relies:
This is indeed related to socially assigned disposability (a
condition which proves fundamental to the neoliberal regime) as well as
to various modalities of valuelessness, such as social death,
abandonment, impoverishment, […] workplace injuries (Butler and
Athanasiou, 2013, p. 19; my emphasis).
Through its “differential ways of assigning disposability”
neoliberalism produces inequality and perpetuates it at a structural
level (ibidem, p. 20). Here, again, meat-production plants
resemble sweatshops; these are places where the lives of workers have
little or no grievability. But if these places were already dangerous
and precarious, with the advent of Covid-19 they became even more so.
During the peak of the pandemic, several meat-packing plants across the
world refused to close, resulting in hundreds of thousands of their
workers contracting Covid-19 and a number of them dying (Berger, 2021;
Reid, Ronda-Pérez and Schenker, 2021; Saitone, Schaefer and
Scheitrum, 2021; van der Zee, Levitt & McSweeney, 2020). We
could conceive of this allocation of injury or health risks as part of
the prescriptive operation through which, in the Rancièrean framework
presented earlier, the police assigns functions and places to
specific groups of people as it institutes a distribution of the
sensible.
The trends above described represent a new combination of various
kinds of labour precarity, one that did not exist twenty years ago
because integrated line technologies did not allow such processing
speeds. The regulation of line speeds is thus not merely a logistical
dilemma focused on balancing out the maximisation of profits with
consumer safety. Rather, it also fundamentally involves ethical and
political questions on the value and entitlements of the lives, human
and animal, inside the processing plant. The case of meat industry
workers is a compelling example of how modern technology’s ability to
satisfy capitalism’s appetite for relentless and faster production
enables the onset of new and perversely overlapping forms of labour
precarity.
Consequences of stress and overwork on worker health
I have argued neoliberal capitalist temporalities, fuelling and
fuelled by a productivist ethos, yield different forms of labour
precarity and unlivability in the world of industrial production, to the
point of threatening workers’ physical integrity in cases of extreme
social vulnerability. But neoliberal time regimes are pernicious for all
workers today, not just for those risking their safety at warehouses or
slaughterhouses. The reality is that workers from all kinds of
industries—including the attention, service, and knowledge economies—
are increasingly exposed to dangerous levels of stress and overwork due
to the pace and demands of their jobs (Basso, 2003). Some white-collar
workplaces exhibit a truly toxic and stubborn overwork culture, as has
transpired from research on investment banking, where “both employees
and managers reported feeling ‘trapped’ in a regime of working up to 120
hours per week for years” (Michel, 2011 in Blagoev, Muhr,
Ortlieb & Schreyögg, 2018, p. 157). Surveillance, here too, plays an
important role in creating time pressure. For instance, most corporate
offices and call centers are endowed with monitoring devices that
measure screen time, performance quality, and number of tasks completed
(Hill, 2015). 24/7 ICTs have, of course, further exacerbated overwork by
blurring the distinction between ‘office hours’ and private time. I must
underscore that, while I discuss specific phenomena such as overwork or
time pressure, the object of my critique is not just these but, more
generally, the entire time regime and logic of which acceleration and
the normalisation of overwork are but two aspects. Let us now examine
how the consequences of accelerated overwork have a traceable impact on
the health of workers, regardless of their occupation.
As has become more and more evident, the combination of chronic
stress and overwork is what makes today’s work culture so toxic and,
literally, unlivable. Mexico, Singapore, China, Turkey, the US, and the
UK are among the top countries where these have become a large-scale
health problem (John, 2017; Kobayashi and Middlemiss, 2009). Commenting
on the Mexican case, where 43 per cent of workers suffer from
work-related stress, Villavicencio-Ayub deplores the normalisation of
bad working conditions over the past 20 years and affirms their impact
on health is sweeping and, often, irreversible:
An unhealthy diet; gastrointestinal disorders; increased coffee,
alcohol and tobacco consumption, muscle pain, migraines; frequent
illnesses; insomnia; mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and
neurosis; abstenteeism; distant interpersonal relationships […] are all
consequences of those bad working conditions (2019; my translation).
Villavicencio’s enumeration of ailments corresponds to what Brennan
terms ‘bioderegulation’ (2003). Brennan proposes this term to name the
erosion “of the internal constraints protecting” a human body that
overworks itself, sacrificing its health, to meet “the pace and demands
of production” (2003, p. 22). Brennan’s work is marked by an awareness
of the widening “gap between the speed at which natural resources and
human beings are used up” under global capitalism and “the time they
need to regenerate” (13). It is precisely in this unsupported gap, in
this place of ongoing tension between capacities and demands, that the
condition of neoliberally induced unlivability, as we defined it
earlier, emerges. And it is in the survival-driven attempt to bridge
that gap that human workers fall into bioderegulation, which takes place
as a macro-process where various micro-processes aggravate each other.
Particularly, the intertwining of physical and mental health causes one
to degrade the other, and viceversa (O’ Sullivan, 2016).
When the body stays in a state of bioderegulation for too long, what
was a tired but functioning body starts to experience burnout syndrome.
Although associated with the occupational context, the phenomenon of
burnout must be understood as stemming from the gigantic pressures of
what Byung-Chul Han calls achievement society, pressures that
indeed go beyond the professional realm and construe achievement in a
broader sense as an always-incomplete life-project. Characterised by
“exhaustion and increased mental distance from one’s job”, burnout thus
designates the frontier of human functionality (WHO, 2019). The
experience of it is well captured by Cohen, who describes it as “the
urge to shut down” altogether (2016). Byung-Chul Han sees burnout and
depression as two interrelated and unmistakably contemporary illnesses.
More particularly, he understands them as the consequence of “neuronal”
or “system-immanent” violence (2015, p. 7). Han’s argument is that our
late-modern societies produce an excess of positivity, in the form of
too-much-of-the-same: overproduction, overachievement, and
overcommunication (p. 5). We can thus group burnout syndrome,
work-related stress, anxiety, and depression under the label of neuronal
violence. Albeit catalogued as separate mental illnesses, they share
several symptoms and are de facto linked with each other
(Khammissa, Nemutandani, Feller, Lemmer, & Feller, 2022). They all
manifest as reactions to task overload, job insecurity, and toxic work
environments. Han sees depression as a state preceding burnout: “it
erupts at the moment when the achievement-subject is no longer able
to be able” (p. 10). With this sharp formulation, Han shows how
depression is a kind of violence that affects one at the most
fundamental level: at the level of being capable of having the capacity
to act. The fact that anxiety and depression are the world’s most
prevalent mental health disorders, with 301 and 280 million people
respectively suffering from them in 2019 (WHO, 2022), confirms Han’s
thesis about their epochal nature.
According to Han, the violence of achievement society, as opposed to
that of disciplinary society, manifests primarily as exhaustion
and inclusion (p. 48). Neoliberal subjects, he tells us, stand
“under the injunction to achieve”: they must (can and
should) do everything and get involved everywhere, for which
they must act as fast as possible. Han’s recasts this injunction as the
duty “to maximise performance” or “to increase productivity”. As we
established earlier, these are precisely the productivist imperatives
that drive our capitalist societies and that normatively structure our
relationship with the sensible world, time and space. Although he
acknowledges the weight of internalised norms as a form of subjection,
Han’s qualification of self-exploitation as predominantly “voluntary”
seems to obscure the triple bind of sheer necessity, exacerbated
precarity and the internalisation of a productivist ethos as a strategy
to remain competitive. There are thus voluntary (for instance,
self-entrepreneurs) and involuntary (e.g. financially desperate people
with multiple jobs) forms of self-exploitation coexisting with classical
allo-exploitation.
Demographically, work-related mental health disorders have reached
such alarming proportions that they have become a public health problem
hindering productivity and costing a lot of money (Kobayashi and
Middlemiss, 2009, p. 139). Likewise, the Health and Safety Executive in
the UK estimates that 17.9 million working days were lost to stress,
anxiety, or depression in 2019-2020 (2020). In other words, the
pressures of neoliberal capitalism are backfiring on the system itself.
The disastrous effects of burnout, which are palpable at the individual
level as much as at the societal one, must therefore not be
underestimated. As Rosa (2019) argues, this is symptomatic of a broader
and deeper psychological crisis that perhaps originates in the realm of
labour but certainly overflows it, and which seems merely kept at bay,
but not truly addressed, by the endless prescription of antidepressants
everywhere in the globe.
Conclusion
I have presented the various ways in which the contemporary landscape
of work is still notoriously marked by forms of precarity, unlivability
and exploitation for many people around the globe. In order to do this,
I first argued it is necessary to acknowledge the role of time regimes
in the regulation of social life at large. Building upon Rancière’s
theses, I proposed to think of temporalities as distributions of the
sensible that configure time, space, action and utility into specific
normative arrangements and that are assigned to specific groups of
people. In a parallel vein, I sought to complement Butler’s arguments by
insisting that there are not just socio-economic but also (bio-)temporal
conditions beyond which human life becomes unlivable. I then drew a
closer focus onto the nature of contemporary time regimes, which stand
in a symbiotic relationship to late capitalism, and the impact they have
on different aspects of labour by inquiring what the concrete
manifestations of the principles of acceleration and continuous
functioning are in present-day work environments. I identified the
increasing rationalisation, standardisation and surveillance of labour
as developments aimed at heightening productivity by accelerating work.
Likewise, I recognised logistics and automation as two important
mechanisms through which neoliberal capitalist temporalities and their
productivist agenda are routinely enforced. I also underscored how all
of these rationalising processes depend on a model of abstract time
within which calculations are projected.
Analysing labour from the perspective of the temporal pressures and
norms that workers regularly encounter allowed me to identify that the
control of workers’ time is a nodal point from which various forms of
labour precarity derive. The two examples I presented not only show how
labour precarity is a temporal matter, but also illustrate how excessive
speed requirements can make labour precarities of different
types overlap and create forms of extreme vulnerability. In these cases,
the prevalence of absurdly fast processing speeds has a direct
correlation with the degree to which a workplace is deliberately made
safe or unsafe, and the degree to which workers’ lives are valued or
devalued. Finally, I endeavoured to show how temporal pressure is a form
of violence whose effects extend across all areas of a worker’s life.
Through a brief examination of the health impact of work-related stress
and burnout, I laid bare how destructive productivism and its associated
time regimes really are. Because they have sedimented at a structural
level, combatting the unlivable, precarious and exploitative dimensions
of work I have here highlighted will require radically challenging not
just workplace policies and supranational legislation, but the very
logics behind neoliberal capitalist temporalities and their governance
of our navigation across time.
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