#leisure time

cristabel-oct:

cristabel-oct:

would love to see people including cleaners + customer service workers + workers who have other such precarious jobs with very early/very late working hours in chat about restructuring the working day to avoid having to go to/from work in the dark. but alas it is all about the 9-5 mon-fri 30k+ a year to send emails crowd, as ever

it’s not that i think office workers with stable, salaried jobs shouldn’t be advocating for their labour rights, or that those sorts of jobs aren’t exploitative; it’s the fact that embedded within this discourse there is always a process of naturalising certain notions of ‘legitimate,’ visibilised labour vs invisibilised labour rendered automatised; and, invariably, these conversations fall down hard on this process of naturalisation.

when we talk about “the” workday as though we all have one shared collective understanding of what “the” workday entails, we relegate the sorts of jobs i listed above to the background – to the realm of automation where they are at once excluded from a discourse of so-called 'legitimate’ labour organising because the organising in question is so unbelievably myopic & they maintain the social infrastructure needed for the highly fetishised 'leisure time’ to be made possible in the first place. there’s already a case being made for the four-day work week on the basis that it would 'stimulate’ the economy of the leisure sector – ie. put more pressure on customer service staff. this is what these discourses miss – have you considered the ways in which more leisure time for you impacts the work of the people whose labour is at once necessary for this leisure time and reduced to systematic invisibilisation and dehumanisation? ofc not lol.

btw if you don’t believe me about the automation thing try and pay attention to how office workers talk to eg. coffee shop staff :)

and like – this discourse should be about us first, sorry. we’re the ones who often can’t afford the cars and public transport that make travelling to/from work in the dark safer. we’re the ones with jobs that often can’t be done in constant daylight hours. you may want to shorten “the” work day, sure, but what about the infrastructure that you want to be in place outside of your work hours? what about the people who have to work in your bars, pubs, nightclubs, theatres, cinemas, etc etc, until long after dark? what about people who work night shifts, what about people who work early mornings? all of this labour is invisibilised so the discourse elides it completely; and a shorter work day for office workers means harder conditions for non-office workers with no financial compensation for the fact.

to use an anecdotal example – i’m a cleaner, i work early mornings, sometimes i have to come in even earlier than usual because the building where i work might be hosting a late-morning event so they need me done and out of the way by, say, 9:00am. i work relatively short shifts (as do most cleaners) and i live a 40 minute walk away from my workplace, so i generally walk to work because public transport is expensive where i live and the ratio of money spent on bus to money earned on an individual shift is not sustainable. (the buses also don’t run early enough for me to even get them to work on weekends, and the days when i need to be in at pisstake o’ clock are always saturdays, lmao.) in the summer, this is fine – in the winter, i can expect to be walking through poorly lit residential areas in the pitch black at 5am, 6am, five or six days a week, which is not pleasant and not safe! a politics of labour organising that advocates for my transport to be paid for by the company that hires me, for example, could alleviate this. or, to get wildly imaginative, we might even put pressure on businesses to organise their little events around making sure their cleaners have access to public transport at the time they’re being asked to come in such that they can get to work safely. but when we create a discourse where there are “legitimate” working hours/working days and there is labour that happens invisibly in the background that scaffolds both these legitimate working hours and the leisure outside of them, people slip through the cracks. you can get to work at 10 instead of 9, but i can’t. what are you going to do for me?

what it boils down to for me, is – could you, right now, tell me the name of your office cleaner(s)? do you know their pay, when they work, if they have fixed or zero-hour contracts? does the company you work for arrange their cleaning staff such to make unionising impossible? does your company hire its cleaners directly or are they hired through an external cleaning company, and do you appreciate the difference that that makes in terms of workplace alienation? i go to cleaning as an example because it’s what i do, but the same is true of other labour forces – what are the labour practices of the cafés and pubs and bars and restaurants you frequent? how do you treat the staff when you go in? do you tip? do you know where your tips go? do you ask? if you’re not going to stick up for the people who clean your workspace when their hours are precarious and unsociable and their pay is unlivable and their work is invisibilised to the point where people forget they exist, then i’m not clear on why i should be sticking up for you.

anyway, i guess in closing i would just say to take all of this with a big grain of salt labelled 'i think the proletariat should own the means of production anyway’ should you so wish, i guess.

STAN LEVIATHAN FOR CLEAR SKIN