October 18, 2025 | 3 minute read
In the Meantime, Chapter 2 – Temporal Labor and the Taxicab
by Sarah Sharma
Critical Analysis
Temporal Labor is an experience of “laboring within a temporal infrastructure while being cast outside it.” Taxi driving is a form of temporal labor: drivers have little to no autonomy of the way their time is spent or saved, yet time is one of the most important defining qualities of their job and of the infrastructure of travel. An experience of time has edges and centricity, and a participant in an experience has a “horizon of possibility” to their engagement with time. That horizon changes for taxi drivers, and is largely out of their control, yet ironically, when interviewed, drivers continually claim control over their working schedule as the largest benefit of the job. This works “almost as a technology in itself,” as a thing that one can do to themselves in order to achieve a certain way of being. There is a pull and push of control, with a perception of control as a “coping mechanism” on behalf of the driver, and a reality of out-of-control forced on by the entire machine of travel and city-work. The driver exists in a “state of exception” to the temporal order.
Bourdieu is referenced as describing the power implicit in ownership of time, as “waiting is one of the privileged ways of experiencing the effect of power.” Making people wait is an exertion of power; waiting is to be powerless. Taxi drivers attempt to reclaim that power through modes of “time maintenance,” such as waiting in a space with similar people, waiting for similar things. But the majority of the technology of self as related to time is “synchronizing to the time of others.” This is a necessary capitulation to the tempo of time that is “neither an equitable or egalitarian rhythm.”
The negotiation of power in time is conditioned. Time, “as it is constrained in terms of power, must be acknowledged as differential, relational, and tangled.”
Research Value
The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:
- Presents time as a currency of power
- Shows that time is unique in contexts of working