Unsettled Times: The Contestation and Reproduction of Flexible Scheduling in Pandemic-Era Restaurant Work

Abstract

Flexible capitalism fosters the organization of worker time around demand, with challenging consequences for precarious and low-wage workers. I examine how this paradigm of work time fared in a context of economic and social disruption, namely the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a qualitative study of restaurant work in the U.S., I argue that shifts in power over work time interacted with the moral and relational nature of time, resulting in both contestation and continuity of the flexible time paradigm. This paper has implications for understanding factors shaping change and stability in flexibly organized and precarious work.