Embodying Flexibility: Experiencing Labour Flexibility through Urban Daily Mobility in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

This paper's objective is to contribute towards understanding the relationship between mobility practices and labour flexibility. Focusing on the case of Santiago de Chile, it argues that an extremely flexible labour market, as in the Chilean case, affects the everyday lives of inhabitants which are compelled to 'weave' dispersed workplaces, articulate multiple-employments within a workday or use mobility time-space for tele-working. From an ethnographic perspective, we show how labour flexibility in Santiago de Chile is experienced and embodied through daily mobility practices. The article presents ethnographies in which flexibility changes mobility practices, giving rise to a specific time-space that becomes an intrinsic, yet seldom recognised dimension of the economic production process.

Picturing precarity through occupational mapping: Making the (im)mobilities of long-term unemployment visible

“…Occupational mapping served to elicit visible and invisible aspects of people's mobility and how this shaped their daily routines. This method enabled us to consider within our data generation Jirón and Imilan's (2015) assertion that urban daily mobility encompasses more than forms of transportation and analysis should, therefore, consider people's practices of mobility, such as their routines and trajectories.…”

“…For example, Ludwig-Mayerhofer and Behrend (2015) focused on spatial mobility as a key aspect of activation and workfare policies, manifested in the expectation that unemployed persons ought to accept relocation or long commutes in order to gain employment. Jirón and Imilan (2015) examined how labor flexibility was experienced and embodied through daily mobility practices of people engaged in flexible economy work. Following these studies, this article contributes to the wider examination of how precarity is spatially experienced within the situation of long-term unemployment as reflected in people's (im)mobilities and occupational engagement.…”

Mobilizing social reproduction: gendered mobility and everyday infrastructure in Abidjan

“…In mobilizing SRT, my aim is to illustrate the ways that social reproduction does not 'just stay at home,' as the transport planner had it, but takes place beyond domestic spaces through a range of movements shaped by the affordances and limitations of popular transport systems. These movements are never solely individually determined strategies but are themselves mediated by both transport infrastructures and the intersecting norms of gender, race, class, and other axes of social inequality (Jirón and Imilan 2015). Read together, research on everyday mobilities and social reproduction reveals both the extent to which social reproduction relies upon a variety of mobility practices and infrastructures and the ways in which reproductive work, care in particular, becomes a form of infrastructure that sustains urban life.…”

Commutes and Co-Workers: Complicating Individual Journeys through Workplace Relations

“…To the extent that this link has been examined, this has focused on formal workplace mobility plans, and their -often limitedcapacity to trigger behaviour change among employees to promote sustainable commuting practices (Van Malderen et al, 2012). It is generally assumed that the organisation of the commute, at least to some extent, is a reflection of spatial, temporal and economic constraints directly imposed by employers and managers, as well as the specific demands of a job itself (Ge et al, 2018;Jirón and Imilan, 2015;Schwanen, 2006: 891). Indeed, it can be expected that whether a commuter catches a particular train, or leaves work at a particular time, is at least partly the result of explicit demands placed upon them in terms of work and working hours.…”