Abstract
This chapter deals with postindustrial workers inhabiting the spaces of flexible production with a special focus on groups of workers vulnerable to social marginalization, especially the precarized unskilled casual workers employed under the terms of flexible production in factories of the so-called new industrial zones, and living mostly at workers dormitories. These workers depend on unstable wage labour that is manual, routinized, unqualified, temporary and usually underpaid.
Being subjected to the changing needs of flexible production, "relative surplus" workers have only limited ability to achieve material prosperity and a dignified social and symbolic status. They have been rendered invisible and disposable in terms of politics, economics and sociocultural belonging.
Concentrating on the time-space aspects of unskilled labour, this chapter seeks to present the mechanisms contributing to the reproduction of relative social "surplusness". Still more and more scholars based in various disciplines have been stressing the unprecedented manner and scope in which postindustrial societies produce groups of people who have been framed surplus, disposable, expendable, or redundant within the emerging international regimes of flexible work.
For these groups, the work time-space is compressed into rigid timeframes structured by flexible and unpredictable work-plans operating in solid workspaces, creating an unsettling arrhythmia. The worker who seeks a normal and balanced polyrhythmia has to submit and synchronize his or her life with the needs of the processes of flexible production, experiencing the shrinking of time horizons up to the moment when there is nothing but the present.
The representation of the worker as disposable constitutes an efficient strategy of disciplination through uncertainty as she chooses docility over being relegated to the status of "permanent surplus".