Work-time technology and unpaid labour in paid care work: A socio-legal analysis of employment contracts and electronic monitoring

How is unpaid labour established in the UK homecare industry? This chapter is focused on homecare workers’ internal notions of time and defines zero-hours employment contracts and the electronic monitoring of service provision as technologies of time. It shows how time is materialised through labour. Technologies of time impact on care workers’ temporal consciousness by fracturing notions of clock time across four separate dials and economically subordinating care-giving according to nature’s time. Hence labour apprehended in nature’s time materialises as unpaid work, and labour in clock-time materialises as partially paid work. This is a challenging temporal environment for labour law since legal protections frequently accrue by a measure of clock time according to a single dial which is also presumed to measure paid time.