Right Here, Right Now Rapid avocados, gig work and temporal justice

Maro Pantazidou

You can get an avocado delivered to your door in under 15 minutes via three taps on your phone. A few more taps and you have booked someone to walk your dog for 20 minutes this afternoon. What do such app-enabled services do for your time? How do they transform social time?

It’s hard to answer these questions because it’s difficult to wrap our heads around time – and especially around how time, far from being some abstract medium through which we live our lives, is produced every day through our interactions with technology and fellow humans. Common sense – or, to put it another way, capitalist temporality – creates time as a neutral currency (an hour is always an hour), a fungible asset and above all an individual resource to be protected, accumulated, budgeted, invested and, of course, lost.

The proliferation of smart calendars and productivity apps both codify and perpetuate the concept of time as individually owned and conquerable, casting attempts to be in time, on time or just present as a “personal quest”. What gets obscured in the process is the relational dimension of time – or as media theorist Sarah Sharma put it, the architectures through which the time demands of some become the time vulnerabilities of others.

Platforms and the pandemic

Let’s get back to that rapid avocado delivery. The pandemic has marked a steep rise in food delivery apps. In what the media half-ironically termed a “grocery revolution”, I can now use an app to get two bananas, some ice cream and a can of tuna delivered by a gig worker in 15 minutes, even on a Sunday. And it’s not just food: platforms such as care.com can get you a babysitter or a dog walker at your home the same day, and for “gigs” of care work as short as 30 minutes.

Gig work, as platform capitalism’s signature mode of labouring, has been at the heart of academic critique on, and workers’ struggles over, the changing nature of labour relations in the 21st century. The business models ushered in by the likes of Uber and Deliveroo, in which companies claim to simply act as matchmakers between consumers and contractors, have restructured, in legal as well in sociological terms, what it means to have a job.

But how is platform work restructuring our temporal logic – in other words, the “socially legitimated” norms and processes that orient how individuals “should operate in and through time” in any given era? How is gig work reshaping time for workers, consumers and time culture?

Power relations in the gig economy

The temporal experience of gig workers has been studied empirically, including through collaborative research with workers themselves. It’s defined by the contradiction between the advertised autonomy – the idea that you can start and stop when you want – and the lived experience of time being controlled by untransparent, algorithmic modelling.

For example, social scientist Rebecca Schein has documented how Uber algorithms use carrot-and-stick incentives to make freelance drivers work longer and stay on the road in non-lucrative hours or locations. For drivers or delivery riders it translates into pressure to remain available even when low demand means they have little to gain. For the company, as Schein wrote, it means turning unpaid time into idle time: “More idling (unpaid) drivers means increased capacity to meet consumers’ expectations for quick response times.” For consumers, it means they can seamlessly receive the just-in-time labour that the gig economy business model relies on.

So what is the problem with consumers’ relationship with just-in-time labour? Following Sharma’s theory of power chronography, much of the gig economy can be understood as an architecture of temporal coordination between groups of differential power.

The services of the gig economy are popularly cast as something that resource-rich yet time-poor people use so they might never have to “lose time” going to the corner store again. On closer inspection, the dichotomy between time-rich and time-poor is not just simplistic, and sustaining it obfuscates the complex power relations in the everyday production of time.

Gig workers’ time-pressures – to work longer, to remain available, to be just in time – sketch a direct line to the “seamless” satisfaction of consumers’ time needs. Lacking time might be a generalised ailment, but it needs to be understood not only as a matter of distribution (who has more or less of the precious commodity), but also as matter of interdependence and relational justice (who syncs up to whom, or who has higher temporal worth, to use Sharma’s terms).

Whose time matters?

The meaning we assign to time matters greatly – it opens certain questions and forecloses or undermines others. Perceiving time as a collective creation rather than an individual resource moves us from asking “How do I manage my time?” to “Who maintains me in time? What architectures create time for me?”

This kind of time-creating labour is not new, of course. An underpaid, invisible, racialised and feminised workforce has already been maintaining the macro temporal order, be it office cleaners who clean workplaces in the night to make the nine-to-five possible or hospitality workers labouring on New Year’s Eve to make holiday time possible.

Gig work at its core is not novel either. If anything, it is a resurgence of piece work and other casual forms of as-needed labour that were historically common. What is different is that the gig economy infrastructure has first codified and then amplified contemporary logics about the quantitative control of time (notions of timeliness, efficiency and optimisation) and the qualitative (such as trends surrounding the pursuit of “meaningful” and “slow” time).

Time as a collective resource

Seeing the gig economy this way exposes it as a system of temporal micro-coordination, where one person’s on-demand hurry creates another’s slow work, only for this choreography to be repeated in myriad depersonalised daily interactions across people and technologies. Along the way, how we see and do food, transport and even care, which is harder to commodify and fit into neat time grids, is changing too.

Work (habits) and time (culture) go hand in hand under capitalism, and now gig work is normalising a new aesthetic of sorts, not only towards work but also towards time. The meme “our grandparents had jobs, we have projects, our children have gigs” captured the transition from an industrial time with set intervals of work and leisure, to a post-industrial “project” time where any activity can be repurposed as work. Now, as work can be made of digitally mediated disconnected bits, gig time is ever more fragmented and unintelligible, and harder to give meaning to.

The more we lack the vocabulary and everyday tools to live and speak time as something other than a resource to be owned, we risk someone owning our future, too – to borrow a powerful image from another piece in this Magazine. Perhaps sociology should do more to help us get to know time as social differential (demarcating inequities between groups) and power relation (produced through constant, if unacknowledged, temporal negotiations).

If we were to see time as a collective resource, how would we live (in) it differently? This is more than a question of a fairer distribution of time, but of time recast as a shared project.

References and further reading

  1. Apostolidis, P. (2019). The Fight for Time. Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190459338.001.0001

  2. Mazmanian, M., Erickson, I., & Harmon, E. (2015, February). Circumscribed time and porous time: Logics as a way of studying temporality. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 1453-1464). https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675231

  3. Schein, R. (2021). From free time to idle time: Time, work-discipline, and the gig economy. In Research Handbook on Law and Marxism. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788119863.00029

  4. Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke University Press.

  5. Stanford, J. (2017). The resurgence of gig work: Historical and theoretical perspectives. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 28(3), 382-401. https://doi.org/10.1177/1035304617724303

  6. Wajcman, J. (2019). How Silicon Valley sets time. New Media & Society, 21(6), 1272-1289. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818820073

  7. Woodcock, J. (2021). The Fight Against Platform Capitalism: An Inquiry into the Global Struggles of the Gig Economy. Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies. London: University of Westminster Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1ktbdrm