ILPC 2026

 

How do contingent workers confront different tempos of uncertainty in work and earnings? What role do “customers” play in these experiences?

Beginning in the 1970s, global economic changes have facilitated an increase in precarious work, with employers shifting risk onto workers across different sectors (Smith 1998, Kalleberg 2009). This has corresponded with an increase in service work in the global North. Evidence suggests that contingent workers, who lack a fixed employer and long-term position, experience time differently than “standard” workers. Without a permanent employer sheltering them from the market, these workers may experience a blurring between “work” and “free” time (Barley and Kunda 2004) as the risks they have acquired under flexible capitalism force them to be constantly prepared for the unexpected (Snyder 2016).

Departing from foundational insights on how workers become alienated (Braverman 1974) and how the self is constituted through work (Burawoy 1979), labor process scholars have explored how customers mediate service employment relationships (Leidner 1993, Sherman 2007, Sallaz 2009). In games that displace worker conflict from employers, obscuring exploitation and generating consent to the conditions of capitalism (Burawoy 1979), customers can play a key role. Yet labor process theory has focused little on contingent work and temporal experience; scholarship might explore how workers in both “new” and “old” contingent occupations experience uncertainty and what role customers play across contexts.

This paper uses data from 20 semi-structured interviews with adjunct university instructors and platform delivery workers in New York City, data from the author’s ongoing dissertation research. I examine workers’ reflections on unstable schedules and analyze the role of the “customer” (the student and the delivery recipient, respectively). I identify a dual role for the customer in each kind of work: on the one hand exercising disciplinary control through ratings and evaluations, and on the other playing a social part in labor processes marked by spatial and structural isolation. Further, both adjunct instructors and platform delivery workers experience time struggles connected to uncertain future earnings and a drive to work as much as possible. Many adjuncts strive to produce their own work to improve their status in academia (the long game), while platform delivery workers seek to maximize deliveries and therefore earnings in the face of unpredictability (playing to win). Customers can work both with and against workers in these efforts. This paper contributes to the literature on contingent work and the labor process by examining temporal experiences of contingency and unpacking the role of customers in workers’ experiences.

 

 

 

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