Logistical life: hyper-mobility and the crisis of social reproduction in UK truck driving labour

This article brings feminist political economy’s concerns with social reproduction into dialogue with mobile work, through a focus on the hyper-mobility demanded in occupational auto-mobility, specifically truck driving in the UK. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with senior management and transport planners in haulage firms, site visits to haulage company offices, and longitudinal interviews with recent entrants into truck driving, we show how logistically-governed mobile work and career progression in UK road haulage rests on drivers’ capacity to be hyper-mobile. Here, hyper-mobility assumes the position of the nomad and is defined by time-space elasticity, resulting in everyday work-lives characterised by high spatio-temporal uncertainty. Hyper-mobility presupposes an ‘unencumbered’ worker with high levels of embodied endurance and the externalisation of care responsibilities. We demonstrate how normalised expectations of hyper-mobility funnel workers with care responsibilities and constrained physical abilities to the ‘secondary’ labour market, characterised by insecurity, low pay and weaker protections. Hyper-mobility, therefore, underscores labour market inequalities. Further, we demonstrate how road haulage capital’s demand for hyper-mobility reduces drivers’ capacities for social reproduction, resulting in burn-out and eventual quitting. We argue that a crisis of social reproduction for workers is indicative of a potential crisis in the reproduction of logistical labour regimes.