The rhythm of the night: night work and the destabilisation of social reproduction

The paper locates the experiences of night shift workers in Social Reproduction Theory, specifically Fraser’s ‘crisis of social reproduction’. Drawing on interviews with night workers from five trade unions it evidences the compression of social reproduction, undermining the rejuvenation of the human body and labour power, while destroying the qualitative nature of time for life as a social being. It finds that the withdrawal of state support for childcare, in line with capitalism’s impulse to lower the cost of the reproduction of labour, means those who cannot afford to pay for childcare absorb these costs at an individual level by working unsocial hours where they then struggle to combine productive and domestic labour within the 24 hour day - the subjugation of social reproduction to production under neoliberal capitalism