2016/09/30 by Mark D. Fleming · 1 citation
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Digital Economy and Work Transformation #Economic growth #Economics #Employment and Welfare Studies #Enforcement #Finance #Labor Movements and Unions #Labour economics #Law #Neoliberalism (international relations) #Political economy #Political science #Productivity #Public administration #Public transport #Restructuring #Sociology #Transit (satellite) #Transit system #Wage
paper · doi:10.1111/aman.12683
openalex publication_date 2016/09/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
ABSTRACT 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 ]