Fragile synchronicities: diverse, disruptive and constraining rhythms of employment-related geographical mobility, paid and unpaid work in the Canadian context

Abstract

Household, journey-to-work, and workplace dynamics intersect and are diverse and changing. These intersections contribute to gendered, classed, and racialized divisions of labour at home, at work, and on the road. Research on journeys-to-work has generally focused on journeys that happen daily, follow similar routes, at similar times, and involve travel to a single, fixed workplace. Time geography has shared some of this focus in its attention to fixity and constraints that shape these kinds of movements in time and space. However, change and disruption in home lives, journeys-to-work and in the location and scheduling of work are widespread. Feminist intersectional rhythmanalysis may be better equipped to address these. This article draws on insights from a body of Canadian research captured here in the form of 5 vignettes that describe intersecting home, work, environmental and employment-related geographical mobility (E-RGM) rhythms and some of their consequences across diverse groups, sectors and contexts. The vignettes are derived from research among trucking, construction, seafood processing, homecare, and precariously employed urban immigrant workers. We focus on groups engaging in complex, extended and often changing E-RGM to and within work. The vignettes highlight ways diverse gendered, classed and some racialized spatio-temporal rhythms of work, E-RGM, weather and seasons, and household lives intersect to disrupt and, as we move through the vignettes, increasingly constrain the capacity of these diverse groups of workers and their households to achieve even fragile synchronicities, reflecting the extension of coercion beyond the workplace into life at home and work-related mobilities.

Keywords:

• Canada
• employment-related geographical mobility
• journey-to-work
• rhythmanalysis
• time geography

Acknowledgements

The co-authors are part of the On the Move Partnership, a project of the SafetyNet Centre for Occupational Health & Safety Research at Memorial University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council through its Partnership Grants Funding under Appl ID 895-2011-1019; Research Data Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador under Contract Number 5404-1012-104; Canada Foundation for Innovation under Project Number 30295.

Notes on contributors

Barbara Neis

Barbara Neis is a Distinguished University Professor and Sociologist based at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is also the Project Director for the On the Move Partnership, the 7-year research program on employment-related geographical mobility in the Canadian context that supported the various field studies referenced in this article. She has done extensive research on gender, work and health with a focus on rural and remote fisheries communities. Within On the Move, she is one of the lead researchers on the construction and fisheries field components and has published on conceptualizing employment-related geographical mobility as well as its health and family impacts.

Lachlan Barber

Lachlan Barber is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Hong Kong Baptist University where he teaches cultural and urban geography. His academic interests include Gender, Work and Mobilities; Social and Cultural Geographies of the City; and Critical Heritage Studies. Barber’s recent publications include ‘Construction-Phase Extended Commuting and Uneven Regional Development: Work, Households and Communities in Newfoundland and Labrador’s New Extractive Economy’, Extractive Industries and Society (2015); and ‘(Re)Making Heritage Policy in Hong Kong: A Relational Politics of Global Knowledge and Local Innovation’, Urban Studies (2014).

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her Ph.D. research is a comparative study of the employment-related geographical mobility of home care workers living in St. John’s and in Southwest Newfoundland and its relationship to their employment options and occupational health. Kathleen’s research interests include labour mobility, precarious employment, gender and work, and gender and health. Her publication ‘On the Move and Working Alone: Policy Implications of the Experiences of Unionised Newfoundland and Labrador Homecare Workers’, co-authored with Barbara Neis appeared in Policy and Practice in Health and Safety (2015).

Natasha Hanson

Natasha Hanson is a Qualitative Methodologist with Horizon Health Network. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow, with the On the Move Partnership, in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Prince Edward Island. This postdoctoral research qualitatively investigated how truck drivers operating out of Prince Edward Island were affected by employment-related mobility (and how this has changed over time). Her recent publications include: ‘Why here? Immigrant’s decisions to stay or leave Maritime communities’ in Tastsoglou, E., Cottrell, B., and Dobrowolsky, A. (eds.), Is Atlantic Canada a home away from home for immigrants? UCCB Press, (2015); and, ‘Regional mobility strategies and the importance of communal ties’, Dialectical Anthropology, (2013). Her research interests include migration, livelihood, identity, political economy, globalization and health.

Christine Knott

Christine Knott is a recent Ph.D. graduate in Sociology at Memorial University. Her Ph.D. research investigated labour force history and change in seafood processing in New Brunswick from local to interprovincial and international migrant workers. She is interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, corporate change, financialization and the social construction of labour markets. Her most recent publications include ‘Privatization, Financialization and Ocean Grabbing in New Brunswick Herring Fisheries and Salmon Aquaculture’, co-authored with Barbara Neis in Marine Policy (2016) and ‘Contentious Mobilities and Cheaper Labour: Employment-Related Geographical Mobility in a Seafood Processing Community in NB, Canada’, published in the Canadian Journal of Sociology (2016).

Stephanie Premji

Stephanie Premji is an Assistant Professor at the School of Labour Studies and Department of Health, Aging & Society, McMaster University. Her research focuses on inequalities in work and health associated with gender, language, immigration and racialization. In recent years she has published a number of articles on precariously employed racialized immigrants in Toronto, specifically looking at the pathways between precarious employment and health.

Elise Thorburn

Elise Thorburn is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the On the Move Partnership at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is also the Principal Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project Between the Office and the Prison Yard: Mobile Monitoring of Social Life. Her overall areas of research are the interface of digital technologies and social reproduction, and she has published on the use of live streaming video in resistance movements, DIY gynecological technologies as a medium of class composition, and algorithmic shift scheduling technologies as contributing to morbidity in socially reproductive capacities.