Working All Night: Modernity, Night Shifts and the Temporal Organization of Labour across Political and Economical Regimes (Prague, 14–16 November 2019)

192 HISTORIE — OTÁZKY — PROBLÉMY 1/2020 věd), která hovořila oproměnách generace dětí vyrůstajících na Slovensku ve dvou nedemokratických režimech vletech 1938–1953. Vzávěrečné diskuzi bylo zmíněno několik podnětných myšlenek aotázek pro budoucí výzkum tématu, snimiž se vrůzné míře setká každý, kdo se této problematice věnuje. Například: jde ovýzkum jednoho, nebo více dětství? Jaký je význam genderu vdětství? Lze na základě pramenů, které psaly děti samy, rekonstruovat jejich svět? Koneckonců velkým badatelským problémem je sám fakt, že většina pramenů týkajících se dětství pochází od dospělých— jak tedy zachytit dětskou subjektivitu? Navíc například vpřípadě ego-dokumentů platí, že je nepsaly zdaleka všechny děti (nemluvě otom, zda se všechny dochovaly), ale spíše ty nadprůměrné nebo ty, které ktomu byly vedené. Navíc psaní deníků bylo po dlouhou dobu charakteristické hlavně pro měšťanské prostředí. Větší diskusi pak vyvolala teze, že dětství je vlastně samo osobě kategorií, jako například rasa či pohlaví. Program konference byl velmi intenzivní, navíc konferenčními jazyky byla němčina aangličtina. Bylo proto občas těžké udržet koncentraci. Takže ikdyž bohužel nedorazilo několik referentů, bylo možné využít získaný čas kpůvodně neplánované přestávce vyplněné vycházkou do blízkého okolí bavorského alpského podhůří. Nicméně itakováto forma odpočinku asoučasně socializace může vlastně dost dobře podtrhnout význam konference. Konferenční setkání totiž nemusí sloužit nutně pouze kvýměně zajímavých odborných informací, ale rovněž kosobnímu seznámení se zajímavými kolegy aknavázání kontaktů. Myslím, že účastníci akce mohli zFischbachau odjíždět spokojeni asřadou podnětů kpromýšlení jejich další práce. Jan Jiráň Working All Night: Modernity, Night Shifts and the Temporal Organization of Labour across Political and Economical Regimes (Prague, 14–16 November 2019) The night has almost universally represented aspecial, “liminal” or “out of the ordinary” temporal zone with its own meanings and social implications. It is only since modernization that the night become somewhat “normalized”, for example in terms of production. This workshop co-organized by the Charles University and the Graduate School of East and Southeast European Studies aimed to explore emergence and proliferation of the “night shift”. The participants focused on how the political and economical actors, agencies and stakeholders in different regimes across time conceptualized and intervened in the discussions around the “night shift”. The workshop started with akeynote by Prof. Hannah Ahlheim (University of Giessen) focused on the history of working and waking in the 20th century. She mentioned ways how the technical development and the availability of electric light altered the everyday life in modern societies. Through examples, she focused on the issue of how the idea of staying awake and working around the clock influenced our understanding of labour, time, human body and the society as awhole. The first session of the workshop, dedicated to the night work and working class entering the modernity, started with apresentation by Rosa Maria Fina (University OPEN ACCESS MaRTIn PÁcHa 193 of Lisbon). Her paper focused on the first factory night-shifters in Lisbon (1890–1915). Fina introduced her research on how the urban society responded to these new workers and how the workers themselves managed to maintain their bare minimum of life conditions. Second presentation in this session by Arun Kumar (University of Nottingham) was dealing with the nights of Bombay workers in the textile industry (1870–1920), with focus on night schools and the night life of the workers. He argued that night was the time that allowed the male workers to unfold their emancipatory dreams about the social promotion. On the other hand, the situation of female workers was different because of their double labour as awife or amother at home and as afactory worker. Last presentation in this session by Jakub Rákosník (Charles University) was dealing with the issue of night labour and overtime employment in the interwar Czechoslovakia (1918–1938). His paper was considering different reactions at the prohibition of the overtime employment in 1918 by the Act of the Eight-hour work. He analyzed the different reactions of male and female workers, as of the employers. He also addressed the question of the attitudes towards the night shift as atool to explore what society considered normal, and what (gender) stereotypes it shared. The second session of the workshop was dedicated to the experts’ view on the night shifts. It started with apresentation of Malte Müller (Institut für Zeitgeschichte München). He focused on the issue of the continuous-shift workers in societal and sociological debates of West Germany in the 1960s–1980s, and especially on the double stress that these workers faced. He concluded with the statement that even though the living conditions of the shift workers were addressed and discussed, just alittle has actually changed and despite the fact these workers knew about the impacts of the night work on their individual health, their social lives and their families, they still opted for the continuous shift system, as they were dependent on the increased income the shift system provided. Second paper in this session by Vítězslav Sommer (Charles University), was focused on management, expertise and female labour in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s–1980s. He presented his research on Czechoslovak management studies and research on industrial labour in the reformist 1960s and during the “consolidation regime” after 1968. He showed how female labour was ablind spot in the concept of reform of the “socialist entrepreneurship”, focused only on men. In the second part of the paper, he showed that even though the Communist Party elites announced the plan of “homogeneous” society, female workers in Czechoslovak industry usually received lower wages and worked as unskilled labour force. Representation in the culture was atopic covered in the third session. Antoine Paris (Paris-Sorbonne / Université de Montréal) approached the topic from ametaphorical perspective through the Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians. According to him, this biblical metaphor describes aworld where working at night is not abnormal, however it remains impossible or difficult without the appropriate technical infrastructure. Paris concluded with aprovocative question if this biblical text prepared the ground— on the anthropological level— for the homogenization of time by capitalism. Martin Pácha OPEN ACCESS 194 HISTORIE — OTÁZKY — PROBLÉMY 1/2020 Second presentation by Anja K.Peters (Neubrandenburg) focused on the perception of night nurses in popular fiction, and specifically in the comics of the 20thcentury. She showed how night nurses are showed as amixture of agenie in abottle and the object of desire. On the one hand, nurses are showed as autonomous, skillful, omnipresent and omnipotent beings while at the same time sexually available, subservient and obedient object of desire. She concluded that the context of the night reinforces the gender-based stereotype of nurses as sexual objects and at the same time as providers of love and protection. Third presentation of this session was given by Lucie Dušková (Charles University). Applying the method of contextual analysis of the mass production movies, she showed how the night shifts gained symbolical attributes in the socialist public space. She focused especially on the period of the establishment of the first fiveyear economic plan and afterwards until the institutionalization of the extra-pay for thenight shift (1949–1961). In her paper, she explored the images of the night shift that theCommunist cinema, the main mass media of the time, communicated to thepublic. She showed how these images suggested to the public the arguments for entering the night shifts. She concluded with the notion that despite the fact that most of the workers were initially enthusiastic about the work mobilization, especially from 1950 onward their poor conditions led to many protests. After 1953, thetranscendental image of the night shifts disappeared from the mass culture. The common topic of the last session was the precarity and the 24-hour economy. In the first paper, Bridget Kenny (University of the Witwatersrand) presented her research concerning with the late working time in Johannesburg (1907–1970), focusing on shop hours and female retail workers. She showed how the question of the opening working hours and the issue of the social and family life functioned as aterrain of struggle. This sector obtained aregularization of the shift work long after other sectors of economy. Despite the regulations, female workers in retailing continued to have evening hours threatened and extended in ways which raise questions about ideologies of race and work across settler colonial economies. The second paper by Hanna Lena Reich (Bayreuth International Graduate School), summarized by Julius-Cezar MacQuarie, addressed aquestion whether the city of Nairobi can be considered as the centre of the sub-Saharan 24-hour urban economy. Her research is concerned with current trends of transforming Nairobi into one of the first African 24-hour city economies. Through the method of interviews and field work, the paper showed who are the late workers— not only the class nightshift workers but also people who, for example, participate in illegal trash dumping, etc.—, why they chose to engage in night work and what consequences their jobs have on their health and private life. The topic of the third paper by Asya Karaseva (European University at St.Petersburg) and Maria Momzikova (University of Tartu— European University at St.Petersburg), presented by Karaseva, addressed the issue of the implications that have the central Moscovite time on the workers, and more generally on the inhabitants of the Far-Eastern Russian cities. They illustrated their research by interviews with the inhabitants of two Far-Eastern cities Magadan and Vladivostok. They concentrated on the strategies and tactics of people dealing with the time-centralization OPEN ACCESS MaRTIn PÁcHa 195 for their work and other activities. The paper claimed that night work should be analyzed in the broader context of reasons of being awake at night, which shapes life of not only employees, but of the most part of the educated citizens who communicate with their professors, colleagues, relatives, friends or follow the major national events streaming. The authors consider these types of night wake to be product of spatio-temporal inequality. Last paper of this workshop by Julius-Cezar MacQuaire (Central European University) was focused on threats to well-being through bodily exhaustion of the migrant night workers. His research was based on anocturnal ethnography of transnational migrant workforce in highly precarious working environment in today’s London fruit and vegetable market Spitalfields. With an extensive field research, he showed how night workers experience hardships and precariousness in their everyday life and how they deal with them. The workshop gave to the participants possibility to share their current research and to discuss it. It also offered possibility to discuss the temporal organization of labour and the dominant perception of modernity. The workshop showed that the topic of night work, in the past largely ignored by labour history, is apparently aliving theme with interdisciplinary range and potential to be developed further. Martin Pácha OPEN ACCESS