Work, Rest, Play... and the Commute

ABSTRACT

While there has been considerable philosophical attention given to injustices surrounding work, there has been much less on those injustices that pertain specifically to workers’ commutes. In this paper, I argue that commutes are important parts of people’s working lives, and thus deserve attention as sites of potentially considerable injustice. I evaluate commutes in terms of their impact on people’s work, their rest, the control they exercise over their lives outside of work, and their ability to meet the demands of democratic citizenship. In the second half, I offer some proposals that could reform commuting, while recognizing the ways in which commuting injustice is not incidental to structures of contemporary capitalism, especially with regards to housing, but is rather a structural and constitutive feature. As a result, remedying the injustices of the commute might require a more radical restructuring of current modes of urban development.

KEYWORDS:

• Commuting
• working
• free-time
• suburbs
• urban development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Commuting may or may not also include time spent between workplaces for cleaners, nurses, roofers, plumbers, etc. It would seem arbitrary to describe only the first and last of these journeys as commutes. Traditionally, however, commuting refers to journeys between house and work.

2. Miners did have to ‘commute’ between mine-shaft and coalface. This distance, unlike ‘the City man’s daily ride in the Tube’, was crawled, for sometimes three miles (Orwell, 2001, p. 25).

3. This might be only contingently true. The Covid 19 pandemic has proven it is possible for people to work without having to go anywhere. Nevertheless, where commutes do or must exist, it is because work requires them.

4. One recent exception to this neglect is Lior Glick (2020).

5. Something else, finally, to take into account with respects to the relationship between health and commuting is the age of commuters. Lack of sleep, for example, has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and old age generally tends to reduce the quality of a person’s sleep. As a result, older people need more sleep to gain the same benefits enjoyed by younger people who have less sleep (Walker, 2017, p. 157). Mandatory retirement might, as Dan Halliday and Tom Parr argue, be ‘arbitrary, unfair, and/or discriminatory’, but working arrangements – including commuting-arrangements – for older workers must consider the basic biological limitations of the human body (Halliday & Parr, forthcoming).

6. Alan Ryan argues suburbanization can also drive wedges into possibilities for workplace organizing (Ryan, 1998, p. 324).

7. In addition, increased distances between households also mean additional costs are incurred between divorced households sharing childcare duties. Both the caring and the logistics of coordination take time (Goodin 2009, 9–13).

8. Culinary preferences might be expressed.

9. How commuters, as a ‘(proto)class in the making’, might become a ‘class for itself’, is not something I can consider here. However, just as workers more generally can be recruited into the ranks of class formations through some particular group’s prior articulation of a certain set of demands, so too might the banners of commuting justice perform a similar function.

10. Although as I have shown above, such moves could conceivably garner support from sympathetic employers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Jenkins

David Jenkins a lecturer in political theory at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research interests focus on issues such as work, recognition, housing and urbanism. Jenkins has published articles inSocial Theory and Practice (2015), The European Journal of Political Theory (2016), Ethical Perspectives (2016), American Political Thought (2019) and The Journal of Social Philosophy (2021).