With its thriving nocturnal economy, London can be a cornucopia of post-modern fantasies and pleasures, or a breeding ground of anxiety. The latter takes many forms—straddling concerns with danger, crime and privacy on one hand, and security and surveillance on the other. In its attempt to conquer sleep, London has enabled private capital to be productive 24/7. The non-stop operation of the urban productive workforce thus unleashed threatens to subject the people who make it run to a form of enslavement.
In 2021 Autonomy—an independent research organisation that focuses on the future of work—published Working Nights: Municipal Strategies for Nocturnal Workers. The result of our investigation into London’s lesser-known work landscapes, the report examined the challenging conditions of work that takes place between 6pm to 6am. Often praised for its benefits to businesses and consumers, the Night-Time Economy’s (NTE) financial and urban agenda seems ever-expanding.
But night workers themselves remain significantly less acknowledged, much less protected. The traditional government discourse around NTE tends to sideline issues of workers’ welfare, focusing instead on economic output, conditions for businesses, opportunities for consumers, and issues relevant to policing and crime. While recent research has brought to light issues faced by night workers, neither substantial analysis nor concrete propositions to ameliorate these is readily available. For instance, London’s 24-hour vision launched in 2017 by Mayor Sadiq Khan promoted strategies to turn London into a leading 24-hour global city, but only cursorily mentioned worker safety, wages and workplace rights.
London’s NTE is worth GBP26 billion—40% of national night-time revenue. One in eight jobs in the city is done at night, with 68% of night workers being male, and the remaining 32% female labour force more likely to receive lower wages. Notably, about one-third of the city’s Black, Asian and ethnic minority workers work at night.
To better understand and tackle the complexity of the Night-Time Economy, Autonomy’s research focused on four types of night workers: gig-economy food-delivery riders, sex workers, care workers and warehouse / retail workers.
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London’s NTE is worth GBP26 billion—40% of national night-time revenue. One in eight jobs in the city is done at night, with 68% of night workers being male, and the remaining 32% female labour force more likely to receive lower wages. Notably, about one-third of the city’s Black, Asian and ethnic minority workers work at night.
The massive influence of platform technology companies at the forefront of the gig economy is undeniable. Working for companies like Eat, Deliveroo and UberEats, food delivery riders are often independent contractors whose work experience is defined by what is perhaps the most novel aspect of the platform-mediated gig economy: they are managed not by other people, but by the algorithm of an app.
Demand for delivery riders’ services peaks in the evening, often leading to late-night shifts regardless of weather conditions. However, because they generally lack any form of labour protection, riders only receive a low “piece” rate, whatever the hour or climate. Another significant issue night-time food delivery riders face is a lack of shared facilities. For example, between orders and during quieter periods, the more than 15,000 Deliveroo riders across the UK are encouraged to wait at “zone centres”—centralised points that keep the riders close to the zones they are hired to service. Although riders congregate in these zones, the zones themselves lack common facilities where riders could rest indoors, eat, use toilets, take shelter from bad weather, change clothes, store belongings or charge the phones and bike lights they rely on to complete orders.
Such conditions shape the work experience for many other night workers across London, including the city’s estimated 32,000 sex workers. Encompassing a wide variety of commercial sexual services categorised by location (i.e., indoors/brothel or outdoors/street); mediation type (i.e., marketed and arranged digitally or through more analogue forms); and employment type (self-employed/independent or via an escort agency), sex work itself is not illegal in the UK.
That said, the illegality of many accompanying activities—such as soliciting in public or brothel-keeping—makes sex work more precarious, and prevents the creation of legal infrastructure for both solicitation and provision of sexual services. As such, outdoor workers in particular are forced to use informal public spaces—nocturnal liminal zones—in which rules are blurred. By effectively denying sex workers a legal workplace in specific settings, spatial inequality is embedded into this NTE, which is then managed mainly through the criminal justice system. As a result, the needs of sex workers, the problems of their reproductive labour and the challenges they face are excluded from urban night-time policy and addressed solely from a public order perspective.
Meanwhile, and perhaps not unrelated to the above aspects of criminalisation that sex workers must contend with, the migration of sex work online has changed not only how workers advertise and interact with clients and one another, but the entire underground sex market more broadly. According to some studies, digital technologies facilitate and support traffickers exploiting sex workers. Forcing sex work into the shadows contributes to trafficking—the trade’s most sinister component. In 2017, 1,115 women were identified as victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation in the UK, a number the National Crime Agency (NCA) says represents just a fraction of those trafficked into the country.
Sex work is not the only NTE where traffickers operate. Anti-trafficking organisations recently raised the alarm on the increasing exploitation of care workers, as witnessed by the rise in the number of cases reported to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM, a framework for identifying victims of human trafficking or modern slavery). Comprised of about 406,000 workers, care work constitutes the highest percentage of all-night work in the UK, much of which is done by migrant workers. In residential care homes or private residences, most live-in work is performed by migrant workers (between 16,000 to 19,000 Overseas Domestic Worker visas are granted annually). The extreme isolation of live-in migrant care workers can translate into confinement, enabling exploitation that includes being pressured into working longer and unpaid hours with little rest or time off, and sometimes without even a suitable place to sleep. The blurred line between the tasks of care and domestic work also results in domiciliary care workers being expected to take on the workloads of both roles, primarily tending to the vast number of older people whose needs continue around the clock.
In addition to the more visible labour already discussed, a huge part of the NTE is made up of warehouse and retail workers: the people stacking shop shelves and working in the airports, ports and warehouses that together facilitate the circulation of the commodities that are an essential part of London’s global economy. Mostly employed on a shift-work basis, warehouse and retail workers often labour for up to 12 hours at a time, their jobs frequently involving heavy lifting and other labour-intensive activities performed in often-poor working conditions accompanied by severe sleep deprivation.
In undertaking this research, Autonomy started to better understand how existing policy frameworks addressing cities at night fail to understand the crucial yet precarious nature of night-time work, and the need to develop practical, real-world approaches to address the root causes of the inequalities embedded in night work. What then are the alternatives to reverse the exploitation of night-time workers and democratise the night-time economy?
Built atop the insights and work of countless other organisations, individuals, researchers and scholars, our work asks what support and involvement from local and regional governments could look like. Focused at the municipal level, our approach first aims to develop a coherent, supportive sense of community between night-time workers themselves. That is, we believe that making space for workers’ needs and their ability to organise together should be a central concern of municipal and public bodies. As such, our proposal suggests action on both the policy and infrastructure fronts.
On the policy front, local municipalities should facilitate the formation of “Night Time Assemblies”,
or groups tasked with managing infrastructure that serves and supports night-time workers. A Night Workers Equity Commission involved in shaping NTE policy and protections for workers should also be established, as should the codification and implementation of a Night Wage, which ensures a living wage is paid to all night workers. Furthermore, public bodies and night worker community groups should jointly develop policing strategies that focus on the safety of night workers instead of perpetuating the punitive approaches that define night-time policing today.
On the infrastructure front, we propose that cities prioritise investment in “Nocturnal Commons”. Providing free essential support services and basic infrastructure to night-time workers, these citywide spaces would allow night-time workers to meet, rest, socialise and build community. Geared towards enabling night-time workers to govern processes of community wealth-building where they live and work, Nocturnal Commoning will require collaboration between multiple sectors, and an embrace of the values of economic democracy and radical forms of municipalism. That is, a willingness to identify new paths and practical steps for building municipal urban governance to improve conditions for the city’s night-time workers. Democratising the night is a fundamental component of the struggle against the erosion of the right to the city.
