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

The article locates contemporary night work in Social Reproduction Theory. It makes an empirical contribution, illuminating Fraser’s conceptual ‘crisis of social reproduction’, rooted in worker experience and invigorated through testimony. Drawing on interviews with night workers, largely from the rail and postal sectors, it evidences the compression of social reproductive time. Firstly, night work undermines the replenishment of the human body and labour power and the qualitative nature of time for life as a social being. Secondly, workers’ preference for night work to facilitate caring responsibilities confirms the withdrawal of state and employer support for childcare and capitalism’s impulse to lower the cost of the reproduction of labour. Those who cannot afford to pay for childcare absorb these costs at an individual level by working unsocial hours where they struggle to combine productive and domestic labour within the 24-hour day – the subjugation of social reproduction to production under neoliberal capitalism.