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Mass Transit Workers and Neoliberal Time Discipline in San Francisco
Author(s) -
Fleming Mark D.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.12683
Subject(s) - restructuring , enforcement , neoliberalism (international relations) , public transport , wage , productivity , transit system , public administration , labour economics , sociology , transit (satellite) , economics , political science , political economy , economic growth , finance , law
San Francisco's public transportation system is the slowest major urban transit system in the United States and has one of the worst on‐time performance rates. In this article, I examine how these problems with time—slowness and lateness—are blamed on “unproductive” workers and mobilized as part of neoliberal restructuring strategies in San Francisco. Demands for faster‐moving and more timely transit lead to the implementation and enforcement of impossible‐to‐meet schedules, putting transit drivers in the position of chronic lateness. City officials and civic organizations mobilize chronic lateness to represent the transit system's public sector workers as fundamentally inefficient and in need of labor reform. I here suggest that the enforcement of impossible time demands represents a new use of time discipline. While time discipline has traditionally been theorized as a central technique in the production of the social relations of waged labor, neoliberal time discipline works to delegitimize the wage labor contract itself and to fracture the social arrangements of long‐term, waged employment. [ neoliberalism, labor, urban transportation, time discipline, United States ]