Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the gendered politics of shiftwork and the role of women in mining labour precarity in a Queensland coal town. I explore the intersection of the temporality of labour with the pursuit of individual and familial life projects, in particular the rise of long-distance commuting.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from fieldwork in a Central Queensland coal mining town, Moranbah, this paper examines the gendered politics of shiftwork and the complex role of women in mining labour precarity. I explore the intersection of the temporality of labour organization with the pursuit of individual and familial life projects, in particular, the ways in which shift work encourages long-distance commuting such as fly-in-fly-out arrangements. The stories of young women show how the organization of labour intersects with life projects and familial priorities such that, beyond merely responding to the demands of capital, people's desires, morals, and affects also feed back into such structures (Bear et al. 2015; Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]). Such insights have particular consequences for the analysis of precarity, particularly the gendered implications of post-Fordist labour transformation in contemporary extractive economies and its social effects. Although increased precarity has been linked to the feminization of labour (Standing 2016) through the rise of flexible schedules, this is quite different to the type of flexible labour demanded by the rotating shift schedule of mines. Instead of allowing for the maintenance of social relations and particularly childcare— 'relational autonomy' (Millar 2014)—the new form of precarious labour in Moranbah does not allow for flexible work arrangements. Rather, rigid work arrangements demand flexible people, thus upsetting established household organization and gendered divisions of labour. However, the paper will show that these are always a co-constitutive result of personal desire and familial life projects within structured policies and preferences of extractive capital.