The Shift

We built civilization for one shift and staffed it with two.

societyhumanity

Till Roenneberg called it social jetlag. The term is precise, biological, and wrong --- not in its observation but in its register. Naming it as a health condition puts it in the register of medicine, where it becomes a thing that happens to individuals, trackable in odds ratios, measurable across cohorts. The Nurses’ Health Study tracked 46,318 nurses for twenty-four years and found that women who worked rotating night shifts for a decade or more had twenty-one percent decreased odds of reaching healthy old age. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified night shift work as probably carcinogenic since 2007. Nineteen years of that classification. No policy response.

A meta-analysis of twenty-three cohort studies covering 3.3 million workers found night shift work associated with a thirteen percent increase in cardiovascular disease incidence and a twenty-seven percent increase in cardiovascular mortality. Each additional five years of exposure raises cardiovascular risk by seven percent. The dose-response curve is linear. The body does not adapt.

These are important findings. Within the medical register, they are complete. The cause is identified. The dose-response is quantified. The mechanism is understood. What the medical register cannot do is ask the next question: what kind of exclusion is this?

Veronica Lagunas cleans office cubicles in a downtown Los Angeles high-rise. She arrives after the workers leave and finishes before they return. The KCET documentary Nightshift, which follows five Angelenos through a single night and day, introduces her as a nighttime janitor --- one face among the thousands who move through the city’s office buildings between dusk and dawn. Outside work, she is a workers’ rights activist and a self-defense instructor for female custodians, who face disproportionate rates of sexual harassment during the hours when the buildings they clean are otherwise empty.

She is anonymous inside the building she maintains. She is visible in the activism she conducts during the hours her body is supposed to be asleep. The double invisibility is structural, not chosen. Night janitors do not overlap with the occupants of the spaces they clean. They enter after the daytime workers leave. They move through offices whose inhabitants they will never meet. The anonymity is not incidental. It is a feature of the temporal arrangement. If you staff the cleaning at night, the cleaners are invisible by design.

Julius-Cezar MacQuarie, who conducted a year-long night ethnography at London’s New Spitalfields market in 2014—2015, working alongside the workers he studied, called them “invisible denizens” --- economically present, socially absent. They experienced what he described as isolation, sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, and mental alienation. Not because they were withdrawn. Because they were awake when everyone else was asleep.

Here is the question the medical register cannot reach.

What happens when every institution in a society runs from nine to five, and you work the other twelve hours?

The bank is open when you are asleep. The school holds parent-teacher conferences in the evening --- the start of your shift. Government offices close at five. Healthcare appointments are overwhelmingly daytime. The infrastructure of democratic participation --- public hearings, city council meetings, town halls --- convenes during business hours. The people who staff the night are not barred from these institutions. They are scheduled out of them.

This is not deliberate exclusion. No one designed the banking system to keep night workers out. No one scheduled parent-teacher conferences to prevent custodians from attending. The exclusion predates the decision to staff the night. Civic infrastructure was built when the civic population and the daytime population were the same population. Government offices opened at nine because citizens were available at nine. Clinics ran during the day because patients came during the day.

Then the twenty-four-hour economy needed people at night. It hired them. It did not rebuild the institutions they could no longer reach.

Roenneberg named a medical condition. What he described is a civic one. Social jetlag is not a disorder of the circadian system. It is the experience of living inside institutions that were not designed to include you, running on a clock that does not account for your existence, maintaining a civilization whose civic architecture faces the sun.

The fix is its own contradiction. To extend healthcare into the night requires clinicians working nights --- who then bear the same circadian cost. To keep government offices open around the clock requires night-shift civil servants. Every remedy for temporal exclusion requires more people working against their own biology. The only way to include the night shift is to enlarge it.

We built civilization for one schedule and staffed it with two. The people on the second shift keep the first one running --- they clean the offices, guard the buildings, stock the shelves, nurse the patients, drive the trucks. Without them, the daytime world they are excluded from would stop. We classified this arrangement as probably carcinogenic nineteen years ago. We have not classified it as what it is: a civic architecture that requires the temporal exclusion of the people who maintain it.

Sources

- Solen