Mobilities, 2015

Vol. 10, No. 1, 119–135, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2013.848583

Embodying Flexibility: Experiencing

Labour Flexibility through Urban Daily
Mobility in Santiago de Chile

PAOLA JIRÓN & WALTER ALEJANDRO IMILAN

Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Instituto de la Vivienda, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

ABSTRACT This paper’s objective is to contribute towards understanding the relationship

between mobility practices and labour flexibility. Focusing on the case of Santiago de Chile,
it argues that an extremely flexible labour market, as in the Chilean case, affects the everyday
lives of inhabitants which are compelled to ‘weave’ dispersed workplaces, articulate
multiple-employments within a workday or use mobility time-space for tele-working. From an
ethnographic perspective, we show how labour flexibility in Santiago de Chile is experienced
and embodied through daily mobility practices. The article presents ethnographies in which
flexibility changes mobility practices, giving rise to a specific time-space that becomes an
intrinsic, yet seldom recognised dimension of the economic production process.

KEY WORDS: Daily mobility, Experience, Flexible employment, Labour precarity,

Everyday life

Introduction
The neoliberal path that Chile has undertaken in the past 30 years has produced
significant transformations in the country’s economic, social and spatial structures.
These reforms, as experienced by many other countries with similar processes,
resulted in reductions in public spending, increase in goods and services taxes,
privatisation of state companies, pension reforms, subsidiarisation, promotion of
private health and education provisions, commercial liberalisation and infrastructure
concessions. This path has also involved an important participation in the
globalisation process and incorporation of international trends including increased
employment in the retail and service sectors, technical specialisation of labour force,

Correspondence Address: Paola Jirón, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Instituto de la Vivienda,

Universidad de Chile, Portugal 84, CP 8331051, Santiago, Chile. Email: pjiron@uchile.cl
An earlier version of this article was presented at the ‘Labour and the city: work, employment and urban
life’ Session, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 24–28 February 2012, New York
City.
Based on FONDECYT funded Project No 1090198 ‘Urban Daily Mobility and Urban Social Exclusion
in Santiago de Chile’. www.santiagosemueve.com

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

120 P. Jirón & W.A. Imilan

part-time and flexible employment, outsourcing and the massive incorporation of

women to the labour force.
These reforms have also provided significant social transformations. Poverty levels
have decreased from almost 40% in the 80s to less than 15% today (PNUD 2009).
Employment indices reveal that, despite the global economic crisis, the levels of
unemployment are below 7% (INE 2011). Transformations in the education system
have allowed large segments of the population to access university education. Based
on these trends, Chile is seen as an economic success in the context of other
developing countries, particularly in the rest of Latin America, and very close to
becoming a developed country in terms of GDP per capita.1
These transformations have also been accompanied by an inevitable desire for
cities like Santiago to become global cities. This transition has generated a series of
urban interventions that substantially change the structure and functioning of the city.
Producing in turn a functional and interconnected super specialisation, which
translates into multiple specialised centres – be they commercial, industrial, service
oriented or residential – that respond to different processes in themselves but that are
related to complementary, interdependent, connected and discriminating configura-
tions of networks of special functions (De Mattos 2002, 2004). This has translated
over the past 20 years into important investments in selected areas of the city and in
the construction of urban highways that link up these specialised centres.
However, the above-mentioned trends say little about the way urban residents
experience these transformations or how they live them on a daily basis. One
strategy to approach the daily experience is to bring forward the relationship between
flexibility in the labour market and daily life in the city. Labour, its forms and
concepts have radically changed over the past decades, and workers endure this
transformation on a daily basis. Generally, research in Chile that links flexible work
and daily experience concentrates on the formation of new subjectivities, that is,
how the experience of flexibility gives rise to concepts like self-perception and
processes of identity construction in the context of a new labour culture (Cárcamo
2005; Fardella and Sisto 2008). Little attention has been given to the diversity of
practices that individuals carry out in order to participate in a flexible economy, and
how the notions of production, place of work, private and workspace, among others,
are constructed from these practices.
Moreover, urban transformations and flexible employment are often observed from
a macro perspective, dismissing their imbrication in the individual experience. When
this relationship is contemplated in this manner, the city emerges as a scenario of
fixed points where labour activities are carried out, as if the concept of location had
not suffered any transformations in the post-Fordist era.
Nevertheless, the way people link the city through their own mobility within these
economic dynamics is becoming increasingly significant. The consolidation of a
flexible economic model in Chile has given birth to a series of employment forms
including multiple-employment, fluctuating working hours and workplace dispersion,
among others. These forms of labour organisation demand of workers the ability to
develop new mobility practices within the city. These trends locate daily mobility at
the centre of production, as it allows the weaving of dispersed workplaces, articulat-
ing multiple-employment within a single workday or using mobility time-space for
tele-working. It is precisely this relation between flexible economy and urban daily
mobility that has remained scarcely explored, particularly its impact on urban
residents’ daily life.
 Embodying flexibility 121

This article explores, from an ethnographic perspective, three cases of workers’

mobility in the city of Santiago, in which they negotiate time and space on a daily
basis in order to participate in the job market. Each worker is shadowed (Jirón
2010b) in his/her daily mobility routine, that is, each worker is accompanied at all
times by a researcher in the attempt to grasp as closely as possible his/her experience
of moving throughout the city. The article shows how labour flexibility is not only
experienced at the workplace, but also while accessing it, while moving towards it.
It is argued that, in the context of flexible economies, daily mobility practices
become a relevant dimension, intrinsic to the production process, and workers
embody flexible working conditions through their daily mobility practices.
Moreover, when observed within broader trajectories, these practices reveal the
possibility of considering daily labour mobility as a potential agent in shaping the
economic landscape, rather than a passive victim of spatial restructuring processes
(Castree et al. 2004).

Mobility and Labour

The factors of production refer to the resources used in the production of goods or
services in order to make an economic profit; in classical economics, these include
land, labour and capital;2 current debates also include human capital.3 As one of the
main factors of production, labour refers to all of the work that labourers perform at
all levels of an organisation, except for the entrepreneur. Within this, mobility of
labour – referring to the ease with which labourers are able to move around and
within an economy and between different economies – becomes crucial to sustain
any mode of production, particularly in the context of service economies based on
permanent innovation. Two primary types of labour mobility can be distinguished:
Geographical and Occupational Mobility. The first refers to the movement from one
place to another and also to a worker’s ability to work in a particular physical
location; it may be from villages to towns, from one town to another or from one
country to another country. Occupational Mobility refers to a worker’s ability to
change job type.
In the context of increased international mobility, particularly in terms of transna-
tional migration, mobility of labour becomes an important factor to consider when
optimising factors of production (ILO 2010). This area of study receives consider-
able attention in international debates on free trade, migration and international
labour laws (Malecki and Ewers 2007; Castree et al. 2004; Wills et al. 2010).
One area, in which labour mobility receives little attention, is the everyday
mobility involved in the contemporary models of production. Research in this area is
particularly dedicated to workers’ employment access (Cervero, Rood, and
Appleyard 1995; Cervero, Sandoval, and Landis 2002; Raphael and Rice 2002;
Sanchez, Shen, and Peng 2004; Cebollada 2009); housing location in relation to
employment opportunities (Cervero, Sandoval, and Landis 2002; Martinez 2005); or
the trends in workplace and housing location and workers’ mobility patterns
(Scheiner and Kasper 2003; Escolano and Ortiz 2006; Lucas 2006). Much less
research is devoted to the implications of daily mobility in contemporary modes of
work in cities or to employers’ responsibility in valuing daily mobility issues and
employment, issues which need to be placed at the centre of the debate about the
current production model’s success.
122 P. Jirón & W.A. Imilan

Labour Flexibility, Precariousness and Informality

According to Castells (1992), the organisation of the post-Fordist enterprise is based
on labour flexibility and horizontal production integration. The concept of flexibility
has a polysemic character to it, as there is a diversity of definitions based on the
different disciplines and perspectives that approach it. In general terms, labour
flexibility is understood as part of a firm’s flexibility and, as suggested by OCDE
(1986), flexibility would be a set of elements geared at providing the competencies
for a firm to deal with constantly changing economic situations.
Work flexibility places special emphasis on the capacity to adapt, which greatly
depends on personal abilities based on positive attitudes towards change and work-
ers’ qualifications (OCDE 1986). This leads to the formation of a ‘flexibility culture’
or a ‘new labour culture’ or the idea that flexibility ‘humanizes work’ (Sarfari and
Kobrin 1992), because it allows for more flexible relations between working life and
personal life. Adaptability emerges as a value in the new labour market. According
to OCDE (1986), flexibility is conceived as the capacity of individuals and
institutions to break free from established ways and adapt to new conditions. Such
adaptation capacity will depend both on personal aptitude (talent, personal
qualifications and willingness to change) as well as on the economic, social and
political climate.
From the perspective of organisation of an enterprise, flexibility can be internal or
external. The first refers to the hiring of employees to carry out chores with a
specific temporality, which supposes workdays and work contracts with varying
durations. In Chile, flexible work is the norm in contemporary labour markets;
currently only 39% of workers have a so-called ‘protected employment’, that is, an
indefinite contract that covers social security and unemployment insurance
(Fundación Sol 2011).
The second type of flexibility refers to the externalisation of ‘non-essential’
functions of the company, including specific services usually associated to security,
cleaning, storage, design, sales, etc. This type of flexibility determines the way in
which a company may organise production, so that it may closely link horizontal
integration to the different production stages; the best-known expression of this is
represented by the maquila.
While flexibility is indicated as the main cause of increasing labour precarity
(Tangian 2007), as it impacts the way in which workers experience the relation with
their employer and the concept of work itself, in the case of horizontal integration, it
also has consequences in the way entrepreneurship should be conceived. This
precarity is often linked to labour informality.
In general, informality in urban areas is studied in two ways: one is related to the
informal city (in housing, transport, etc.) and the other to urban informality. Urban
informality is generally understood as informal economy and the public policies
aimed at improving it; always linked to poverty or to excess urban labour. Informal-
ity in the context of late capitalism is closely linked to flexibility in labour laws and
occurs not only in underdeveloped countries but in developed ones as well. In many
contemporary cities, what is deemed as informality starts to take place in the context
of reasonably formal cities. Thus, more than differentiating between formality and
informality, what matters is how they both coexist in a simultaneous, parallel and
continuous way in people’s lives. Today it is not simple to discriminate between a
formal or informal situation, thus, urban informality studies refer to workers that can
 Embodying flexibility 123

be semi-formal or semi-informal, classifications that are impossible to separate, as

there are many intersections among them. A more relevant approach is to consider
that there is no need to classify, but to unveil the importance of the structured city in
this type of work.
Moreover, informality is closely linked to precarious labour. In general, precarity
is seen in terms of labour conditions related to un- or under-paid jobs, which are
normally on the fringe of legal regulations and affect mostly migrants and women
who work in sectors of the economy that include care-work, house-work, farm-work
or call centres. However, precarity can be observed from another perspective, one
that does not have to do with specific jobs, production logic or a specific social
group, like the notion of precariat (a mix of precariousness and proletariat)
suggests. Moreover, precarity arises across several labour practices integrating
precisely precarious relations. In fact, precarity is not a characteristic of specific
labour markets but of the relationships between them: fleeting, temporary and
contingent relations (Rossiter and Neilson 2005).
These unstable relationships are embodied by workers through everyday life. In
this sense, precarity can be conceived as a way to experience flexible working
relations.
Indeed, flexibility blurs the borders between work and private spheres, and as
some scholars point out (Tsianos and Papodopoulos 2006), precarity would mean
exploiting the continuum of everyday life.
Precarity operates primarily on the level of time: it transforms time management.
It also reconfigures the meaning of what non-productivity is. Labour regulation
under the Fordist model of production ensured work not only in directly productive
times. Under this schema, it anticipated and protected illness time, accidents and
unemployment, among others. Regulations considered the periods when workers
were not productive. This form of time management was dramatically transformed
with the post-Fordist model. Nevertheless, if we observe these transformations on an
everyday level, we can argue that the post-Fordist model actually changes time as
well as space management. Indeed, in the same way in which the notion of produc-
tive time changes, productive space (or space for production) does too. Labour is not
only carried out by the worker within a specific physical location, but through mobil-
ity, the very notion of workplace or work location becomes blurry. Division between
private (non-productive) and working places is undermined in flexible production.
Time and space become, under flexible conditions, precarious embodied experi-
ences. Some of its characteristics are expressed by: (a) vulnerability: the experience
of flexibility without any form of protection; (b) hyperactivity: the imperative to
accommodate constant availability; (c) simultaneity: the ability to simultaneously
handle the different times and speeds of multiple activities; and (d) recombination:
the crossings between various networks, social spaces and available resources
(Tsianos and Papodopoulos 2006).

Everyday Mobility
Under this mode of production, mobility becomes a crucial aspect of labour as a
factor of production. However, this mobility does not only refer to international
mobility of labour, but also to the movement of people from one place to another in
the course of daily life (Hanson 2012) and to the daily mobility conditions necessary
for current production to take place. The mobilities paradigm (Sheller and
124 P. Jirón & W.A. Imilan

Urry 2006; Urry 2007) or mobility turn (Cresswell 2010) is useful to understand this
process. The mobility turn is understood as the way increasing levels and forms of
mobility, which characterise contemporary living, impact social sciences. It is
related, among others, to the multiple and diverse connections of being present or at
a distance, the variety of things that move (humans, things and ideas), the complex
assemblages of interdependent mobilities (corporeal, physical, imaginative, virtual
and communicative) and the embodiment of such mobilities, the pervasive impor-
tance of co-presence, the various practices of mobility, the problems of territorial
distance, the heterogeneity of social life, the infrastructures required for circulation
and the inequalities that these generate (Elliot and Urry 2011). In this view, given
the insufficient consideration of urban daily mobility as a factor of production, this
dimension needs to be incorporated in analysis and valuation in terms of time,
money, distance and speed. This cost is generally ignored or underestimated by
employers and completely assumed by workers.
Urban daily mobility refers to the ways in which moving in the city impacts daily
life and the way in which people relate to movement – socially, economically,
culturally, politically, etc. This involves more than just types and forms of transport,
as it involves analysing mobility practices including routines or trajectories, the
experiences they generate, and the consequences of trips (Jirón 2010a). The way
these experiences are embodied by individual travellers requires understanding
embodiment as the process by which ‘the individual body is connected to larger
networks of meaning at a variety of scales, it refers to the production of social and
cultural relations through and by the body at the same time as the body is being
“made up” by external forces’ (Cresswell 1999, 176). The movement of the body in
and through space provides key understandings of the situation of being in the world
for men and women. Through the embodiment of mobility practices we can detect
the specific meanings that these practices provide to daily travellers, and observe
how social differences can be recognised in/through travellers’ bodies. Mobility is
not just about the individual, but about the individual embedded in and interacting
with the household, family, community and larger society (Hanson 2012).
A closer look at mobility practices to access work reveals the diverse and multiple
ways in which workers cope with the barriers present and the agency involved,
which is the intention and practice of taking action for one’s own self-interest or the
interest of others (Castree et al. 2004). In this context, urban workers as travellers
show an incipient, precarious, informal, yet effective agency to move through the
city. This agency relates to strategies that, as mentioned by Datta et al. (2007), not
only involve labour-related decisions but are broader life and family related.

Approaching Research on Mobility Experiences and Labour

The study of complex situations, such as mobility experiences in metropolitan cities
like Santiago, requires methodological approaches that can capture such complexity.
Traditional methods to study mobility – mainly from transport studies based on
origin and destination analysis – leave out a great part of the meaning and
experience of the journey itself as well as how and why daily mobility takes place,
and its consequences, for instance, in economic, social, cultural or spatial terms.
Penetrating such realms of urban travellers requires posing research questions that
can only be answered using methods that can reach the possible answers. In this
case, ethnographic work is deemed as an adequate tool.4
 Embodying flexibility 125

The research which underlies this article aims at understanding how inequality is
experienced through mobility within the city of Santiago. Through this research, it
was possible to observe that mobility is indispensable for labour in the contemporary
flexible production mode. Workers move considerably within the city, and this has
important implications in the nature of work.
The research is based on ethnographic work of mobility experiences of daily
travellers in Santiago, where travellers were shadowed in their daily activities from
the beginning to the end of their daily routine. This technique provides an adequate
way of capturing experiences of urban daily mobility in Santiago (Jirón 2010b), as it
is seen as the most appropriate way to describe the everyday mobile practices of
individuals, given its flexibility and possibility of penetrating, through thick
description, into the daily routines of mobile urban dwellers, offering a ‘deep’ and
‘multi-faceted’ description. Shadowing also allowed understanding of how different
kinds of relationships occur during these trips.
Shadowing involves accompanying participants in their daily journey from the
moment they leave their houses until they consider their journeys have ended for the
day. In total, over 70 cases from various parts of the city of Santiago were shadowed
over a period of 18 months. The cases were selected firstly according to residential
location in the city of Santiago (central, pericentral, peripheral and extra peripheral)
and then according to socio-economic characteristics, gender and age.
This article presents three cases of workers’ travelling experiences in Santiago.
The three cases present different flexible work modes – weaving dispersed
workplaces, articulating multiple-employment in one workday or using mobility
time-space for tele-working – and reveal the different strategies to access work and
variations of their precariousness and agency implications.

Embodying Flexibility on the Move

The City as a Conveyor Belt
Carlos, a university-trained teacher, is married and has three children, with whom he
lives in La Florida, a South-Eastern middle income district in Santiago. He was a
high school teacher until he realised that he could make more money by working
independently. He set up a formal/informal business that produces school uniforms
for children; for which he buys fabric and supplies in downtown shops and then
takes the material to be cut, sewed, embroidered, etc., to various informal workshops
located in different areas of Santiago. His wife is a nutritionist and although her
main job is at a hospital in Santiago, she also has private patients two days a week,
as well as a company that sells food for patients being released from the hospital.
Together, they make over CLP$2000,000 (US$4000), enough money to be consid-
ered within the 9th decile of population income, that is, the middle high-income
group.
As an entrepreneur, Carlos saw new opportunities in the textile industry. Up until
the 1980s, the textile industry in Santiago employed thousands of workers under
one-roof-factories. This industry was one of the first economic victims of market
liberalisation during the implementation of neoliberal reforms. While the time for
large factories was over, small and mono-functional textile workshops – scattered
throughout the city – emerged (Frías, Echeverría, and Herrera 1990; Martini 2001).
Carlos takes part in this process.
126 P. Jirón & W.A. Imilan

The operation of these textile workshops involves informality, small size and
fragility (Reinecke 1997). In Chile, there is no clear definition; most small compa-
nies have some level of formality. Regulations establish a maximum of nine workers
in order to be recognised as a textile workshop. Even though these workshops are
legal, irregular tax payment, incomplete local government authorisation and lack of
compliance to labour laws are some of the factors which help shape a continuum
between informality, partial formality and total formality (Reinecke 1997). Accord-
ing to estimates, over 80% of workshops are located in private residences and
employ mainly women (Cárcamo 2005). Although there are neighbourhoods that
concentrate dressmaking and textile workshops (like the Patronato area in Santiago),
workshops tend to be distributed in peripheral districts, as a strategy to avoid direct
competition and to maintain low salaries.
These workshops operate mainly as subcontracted companies. The production
chains in which they are articulated present an extremely diverse repertoire of
configurations, as these workshops produce for numerous clients, and in many cases
they have their own products (Martini 2001). Carlos is one of these clients.
The car is an important factor in Carlos’ production chain. During the day, Carlos
visits a series of textile workshops, in each one he hires different dressmaking
processes for his school uniforms, and his car plays the role of an assembly line. To
save money, he does not use toll-paid highways; he mainly drives through secondary
roads. During his days, he is also in charge of purchasing the various items
necessary for the household.
Wearing jeans and a polo shirt, Carlos dresses comfortably to undertake his jour-
ney. It is 8:00 am on an early autumn morning. After dropping off his wife at work
and visiting one of her patients, he goes to the North of the city (Independencia dis-
trict) to buy supplies: fabrics, buttons, zippers and Velcro. He carries the fabric rolls
to his car and makes them fit in the back seat. He then goes to an embroidery work-
shop close by to drop off shirts that require embroidering a school logo. These
embroidery shops are small, informal businesses, with one very good computer and
embroidering machines.
Carlos then drives to the South of the city (La Florida district) to Pedro’s material
cutting workshop, located at the back of his social housing home. Pedro used to
work at a major textile manufacturing company, after the company closed down he
bought the main cutting machines and installed them at home. Since then, he cuts
fabric on demand. He cuts according to the models brought by Carlos, and keeps a
log sheet with the details of each piece according to shape and size. Carlos takes the
sleeves, fronts and backs of 50 sweatshirts of different sizes that are ready for
sewing.
He then drives to Mrs. Trini’s sewing workshop located in the garage of another
house close by. His drive lasts about 10 min; he parks his car in front of the house
and goes into the garage, where five women are sitting behind their sewing
machines. They work for Mrs. Trini all day and get paid per sewn unit. The women
usually bring their lunches and eat while sitting at their stations. Their working hours
vary according to the season, very early in the morning and late at night during sum-
mer months and later on in the morning in winter. The facilities inside the workshop
look precarious, a small room with limited ventilation and small windows, leaving a
sensation of dense warm air inside. The rolls of fabric and pieces of clothing are
gathered inside big boxes. Carlos takes the cut material from his car and hands it to
Mrs Trini, giving her specific instructions. The exchange does not last more than a
 Embodying flexibility 127

couple of minutes, Carlos hops back in his car, settles in the driver’s seat and drinks
a few sips of water from his bottle. He then travels 15 more minutes through traffic-
less avenues and arrives at another workshop. After parking, he takes out a sandwich
from a bag and eats it within a few minutes: his lunch snack. Inside the workshop,
there are only a couple of women working. When he finishes with the workshops, it
is time to pick up his children at school, he parks in the parking lot, opens the trunk
of his car, and moms quickly gather to buy school uniforms.
Mobility is an essential part of Carlos’ production chain, and what used to be
carried out in a single factory now takes place on the streets. Like a conveyor belt
(see Figure 1), Carlos turns the production chain of specific informal processes in
the context of a highly fragmented industry dominated by various forms of
flexibility; the final product is assembled through his travels in his car. The car
becomes a mobile factory.
This situation unveils the mobility experiences of a self-employed businessman,
dealing with a city that is hardly aware of the production taking place; highways,
streets, stoplights, are not built with these productions in mind, but meant for other
forms of production. Self-employment is an increasing trend in Chile, as data indi-
cate that in 2008 13.4% of the Chilean population was involved in entrepreneurial
activities, which is 46% more than in 2007 (Harris 2008). However, little of this
reality is incorporated in contemporary urban planning processes.

Figure 1. Carlos’ journey.

128 P. Jirón & W.A. Imilan

His independent mobility and capacity to weave through the city provide him with
the agency to sort the obstacles he faces, improvising as he goes along. A contradic-
tion arises though, in this type of work he finds ease to make a living and provide
for his family, within the freedom he has to create and move. However, this leaves
him under precarious conditions in terms of him lacking employment benefits, health
insurance and facing constant risk while he moves about the city.

Flexible, Just-In-Time and Invisible

Sofia lives in the district of Colina, to the North of Santiago. She is a single mother
of a 12-year-old boy. Flexible working hours greatly ease life for women like her, as
she needs a job that allows her to manage her time and be flexible enough to be
present when her son gets home around 16:00 every afternoon. She works as a
supermarket stocker, a job that she considers quite flexible and convenient. She is
hired by a company, itself subcontracted by the supermarket chain, to re-stock paper
towels, toilet paper and napkins for two specific brands. She works daily at two
supermarkets during the mornings and until after lunchtime.
Her type of employment is called ‘independent subordinate’, meaning she is a
subordinate employee that does not have a regular wage expressing formal
dependency (Páez 2011). The increase of this type of employment corresponds to an
increase in a type of worker of distressing precariousness: low education level,
working in low productivity occupations, without any sort of protection, with highly
sporadic and unstable activities (Ibid), and mostly women.
There has been an increase in outsourcing services in Chile, while in 1998 20% of
companies outsourced services to other companies or persons, today 41% do so
(Harris 2008). Only 16% of women have a high standard protected employment in
contrast to 26% of men. Although women’s labour insertion in Chile has increased
over the past decade, from 24% in 1986 to 37.8% in 2010 (INE 2011), highly flexi-
ble and precarious jobs are the basis of this process (Yañez 1999). About 58% of
women workers are employed in under-qualified jobs, in services or as sales persons
in markets and overall commerce. Sofia belongs to this group.
Sofía leaves around 8:30 in the morning from Colina, a district in the northern
outskirts of Santiago (see Figure 2). Although Colina is part of the Metropolitan
Area of Santiago, it is still not adequately connected through public transport; there-
fore, she needs to take inter-provincial buses and then Santiago’s public transport
system, Transantiago, thus paying two fares. She travels standing in an overcrowded,
overheated bus for 25 min, passing by an industrial landscape that characterises the
city entrance when accessed through the highway. She gets off at the main bus
terminal and takes a Transantiago bus to her first supermarket. When she gets off the
bus, she finds dirty streets with broken sidewalks, treeless roads, drunk or drinking
men sitting on the curb and dozens of stray dogs strolling on the streets.
From the front, the supermarket looks clean and attractive. From the back, where
she enters it, dirt and informality lurk. She heads to the warehouse and changes from
her jeans and t-shirt into her overalls, working boots and safety helmet, and goes
inside to restock shelves for a couple of hours. She comes out dishevelled, with her
old clothes on, to the same dirty streets. She says she ate a sandwich inside, and
comes out with a single cigarette while she sits down. She is scared of stray dogs. A
few weeks ago she got bitten by one and had to pay for the doctor herself. The
supermarket does not take responsibility for the stray dogs outside its warehouses.
 Embodying flexibility 129

Figure 2. Sofia’s journey.

She heads to a non-existent bus stop, only habitual passengers know of its use,
hops on another bus and heads to a second supermarket. After riding for 20 min, she
gets off at a similar location, with dirt and a foul smell floating in the air. Sofia goes
in to change and works for another couple of hours and comes back out, smokes
another cigarette and prepares to head back home. Around 14:00, she goes back
home to pick up her son, and spends the rest of the day with him.
From the front of the supermarket, very little is known about what happens in the
back, or the efforts made by stockers to get their tasks done and stock products
just-in-time. For the supermarket to work, she and others like her play an invisible
role, imperceptible to shoppers.
Despite the inconveniences, she finds this job suitable, as she can do it at her
convenient times and has enough time to get back home to be with her son.
Although she does not make much money (almost the minimal wage) and works
Mondays through Saturdays, the flexibility is ideal for her.
As shown in Sofia’s case, daily mobility practices have particular consequences on
personal and social lives. Incorporating the way mobility takes places in the context
of flexible jobs can be particularly relevant when looking at gender issues linked to
mobility practices; this requires deeper discussion as suggested many years ago by
Law (1999). Adding a mobility input to look at female employment sheds light on a
double gender inequality: in mobility and in work.
Sofia presents a level of agency as a single mother to be able to work and still take
care of her son, this allows her to be present and move freely to a job that grants her
freedom and flexibility, yet precariousness in working benefits and the risks involved
in the locations she goes to. In Santiago, women travel shorter distances and carry
out more modal changes, their travelling purposes are multiple and mobility in itself
provides an alternative to staying at home and not making an extra income. Mobility
in this context becomes an active agent of gender. Mobility is empowering, yet the
130 P. Jirón & W.A. Imilan

possibilities and risks are still precarious; it is a means to access opportunity (Hanson
2012) enabling access to places, activities and relations. In some cases, mobility is
enabled by hiring someone to look after the household (Ibid), if not, as in the case
of Sofia, the conditions are limited and precarious, with long commutes and multiple
risks.

Micro-coordination on the Move

The last case is Andrés, a professional technician who works for a subcontracted
consulting firm at SERCOTEC (Servicio de Cooperación Técnica – Technical
Cooperation Service), a government office dependent of the Ministry of Finance,
Development and Tourism. This office is in charge of advancing and supporting
initiatives to improve micro and small enterprises’ competitiveness and strengthen
entrepreneurs’ management capacities (SERCOTEC 2012).
SERCOTEC has various programmes, Andrés is directly linked to a Seed Capital
Entrepreneurship Programme which grants money to microenterprises to set up their
businesses. His role is to help each entrepreneur put together a business plan and
provide assistance in the initial stages of their businesses. On the day Andrés was
shadowed, he had to meet with four entrepreneurs in different places in the city in
order to purchase in discount and wholesale shops the specific goods that they need
for their businesses.
He leaves his house in the southern district of Puente Alto, right after 9:00 am
(see Figure 3). He dresses in a suit, with ironed trousers and a clean white shirt,

Figure 3. Andrés’ journey.

 Embodying flexibility 131

carries a briefcase and a bulge protrudes in one of his pockets; it is money, he

mentions later, CLP $1000,000 (US$2000) for his clients’ purchases, which the grant
provides them with. He walks to Protectora de La Infancia Metro station and heads
towards the North of the city. He steps into the metro wagon, quickly finds a com-
fortable seat, as rush hour has already passed, opens his briefcase and starts operat-
ing his Blackberry. He immediately starts to arrange his itinerary for the day: first he
will meet Esteban at the Central Metro station, they agree on a time and he opens
the next file. Soon new passengers get on the metro, his ‘office’ becomes smaller
and he cannot use the seat next to him any more. His phone rings, it is his girlfriend
Patricia asking him where he is. During the day, this scene repeats itself; they call
each other over 10 times during the day to tell each other how much they miss each
other and to coordinate their activities for later that evening. Before he gets off at To-
esca Metro station, after a forty-minute trip, he has made four micro-coordinations
with his clients for the day; some have been left open, depending on specific events.
He gets off at República Metro station and heads to his formal office, a place
downtown where he coordinates his activities with his boss, but he does not go there
every day, most of his work is on the streets. He greets some colleagues, picks up
forms and quickly heads out again, walks to the bus stop and rides a Transantiago
bus for a few minutes. He says he does not like sitting on the buses because the plas-
tic seats make his trousers shiny, and he does not like that. He gets off at the corner
of a main street and heads straight to a specific shop where he agreed earlier to meet
with Esteban, his first client. Esteban is in the dog and cat feed business, thus they
go to a specific area of town where they sell it in bulk; they buy three sacks of dog
food and Andrés pays, they sign papers and then they say goodbye. He gets on the
bus again to meet his next client, Astrid, who is hoping to develop an accessories
shop, and they meet at Central Metro station where wholesale China-made goods are
sold. They do not find what they are looking for, so they decide to meet again by
the end of the week. It is nearly lunchtime and he stops at a local diner for lunch.
The sun is bright and the air is hot; Andrés walks close to buildings seeking shade.
He takes the metro again and heads to Cal y Canto Metro station to meet Carla,
another one of his clients who is opening a hair salon. They buy hair products, do
the necessary paper work and say goodbye. He meets his final client, Javier, at
18:00 h. He heads to the convened meeting place at Rondizzoni Metro station, but
Javier does not show up.
He stops at a quiet place on the street, makes a few phone calls and by 19:00 h he
is ready to call it a day. His girlfriend Patricia is his final phone call; they arrange to
meet outside the metro station where they will go to a religious gathering. They meet
and walk to the venue hand in hand. By 21:30 h they leave and he takes her to her
bus stop. He then gets back on the metro and gets off at Protectora de la Infancia
Metro station, finally home again.
Andrés needs his smartphone all the time. The use of internet is a central part of
his labour activities while he moves through the city. Today, there are over 1.3
million active smart phones in Chile, out of 17 million mobile phones in the country,
representing 15% of the market (SUBTEL 2011). Despite using technology, Andrés
is a semi-precarious subcontractor because he has a contract, but his working
conditions are limited, his job requires multitasking on the move, micro-coordinating
with his clients while on the metro and bus. He has a mobile office: on the metro
and on his mobile phone.
132 P. Jirón & W.A. Imilan

Final Remarks
The main current employment trends in Chile involve flexible forms of production.
These have brought about considerable improvements to workers’ salaries and work
possibilities. According to the cases presented, a relationship emerges where, as
labour flexibility increases, mobility experiences become more significant. Labour
flexibility has usually been associated to the administration of work time; however,
our research shows that it also involves the experience of space, making it more
appropriate to talk about flexible time-space.
In the cases presented, the observation of labour practices from a mobility
perspective unveils the ways in which production chains are experienced, showing
extreme flexibility, dispersed workplaces in the city and just in time coordination, as
characteristic of the ‘new flexible work culture’.
Time-space flexibility implies a series of experiences which workers take care of.
This supposes that the conditions to accomplish the paid-for tasks are only partially
covered by employees. It is workers themselves who have to negotiate, through their
mobility practices, how they carry out paid-for tasks. In fact, within this labour
precarity, work success depends on workers’ agency capacity.
Furthermore, as production chains have radically transformed over the years,
understanding location has become essential in this production. However, location in
the traditional way of thinking has also been transformed, factories are no longer
located in a single geographic area, but in multiple, revolving, scattered places, and
someone (usually the worker) has to overtake the responsibility of linking the scat-
tered working places together, generating a sort of diffused notion of workspace.
Those with better abilities to weave scattered working places under flexible times,
will have more success in adapting to the current dispersed and time-demanding
working places and entering flexible working modes.
The experiences which result from these adaptations often imply a specific
time-space management and are generally ignored from various points of view. From
an employer’s point of view, the analysis is predominantly made on how the
company’s production is organised (hiring, workdays, etc.), with little attention given
to the extra time, distance, speed, risks and coordination required by employees to
organise themselves in accord to this way of production. Hence, employers do not
consider the mobility time and space in the wages paid to flexible workers, this cost
is externalised and assumed mostly by employees. The cost involves times, fares,
distances, but also the risks involved in being constantly on the move, without
proper insurance in case of work hazards.
From an employee’s point of view, workers’ experience provides insight on how
time and space is negotiated and the workday and work place becomes central to
their negotiation (dynamic labour workdays and workplaces with diverse locations).
The way this experience is embodied sheds light on the difficulties workers have to
bear in order to make it to work each day. This is particularly so for women, who
often have to endure more precarious working conditions in order to reach the
flexibility necessary to accommodate their lives.
From the point of view of the city, workers’ experience of the city is invisible and
time-space coordination imposed by flexible work is ignored in the transport,
infrastructure and overall urban investment decisions. The precarious conditions of
the city do not contemplate this form of production, showing a phase lag between
urban and infrastructure planning and the way the economy is planned. This does
 Embodying flexibility 133

not just refer to housing location or efficient transport systems provision, but to the
various physical, social, economic, cultural and technological aspects that arise when
complete travel trajectories are analysed. An urban planning challenge remains: to
understand mobility beyond the sole aspects of origin and destination transport.
From a mobility point of view, the overall consequences of precarious flexible
employment provide ideas on the diverse forms of time-space coordination around
an increasingly diffuse workplace. Although in its diverse forms flexibility tends to
transform the concept of physical workplace, making it dynamic and flexible, while
observing mobility practices, the diffuseness generates workplaces on the move.
Workplace is constructed through a continuum between time-spaces of permanence
and movement.
The set of activities that produce value do not distinguish whether they are carried
out in stillness or movement, both are imbricated in a continuum, as in the case of
Andrés. The Metro car, the bus or taxi are transformed into Andrés’ work office, the
use of a smartphone is fundamental to micro-coordinate meetings and carry out his
work during the day. The city as a whole is transformed into his workspace through
the fleeting acts of planning his movements and actions.
From a work and mobility point of view, the challenge is more complex, as
current flexible work conditions in the economy often involve precariousness in the
way it is experienced. Also, workplaces require constant movement to reach them,
as in the case of Sofia. Her work places are stationary; although she works inside
supermarkets which can look like classic work places (with shifts, hierarchies, etc.)
her experience is fragmented and extremely precarious.
Or new forms of production require mobility to stitch specific processes together,
as in the case of Carlos who organises a dispersed production throughout the city by
means of his car trips. The car becomes a mobile workshop which, through his daily
itineraries, transforms the city into a great assembly line.
The new dynamic that emerges requires rethinking mobility practices as a
significant factor of production in the generation of value; value is produced not only
on the job, but also towards or through the job. In this context, mobility practices
are becoming increasingly relevant in current flexible work schemes. However, their
importance remains invisible, making labour conditions progressively precarious.
Workers, as seen in the cases above, have to face this precarity with their own
agency to negotiate time-space. As presented here, observing various experiences of
labour daily mobility allows rethinking the relationship between mobility and
workplace, as well as its implications in urban planning in the context of developing
flexible economies, as is the case of Santiago de Chile.

Notes
1. Since 2010, Chile has become part of the OECD.
2. Materials and energy being a secondary factor of production emanating from land, capital and
labour.
3. There is a debate around whether a fourth factor of production exists. This fourth factor would be
Human Capital which includes skills and education for some, while for others it includes entrepre-
neurship (which includes management and capacity to combine the other production factors).
4. For further information regarding the methodology used see Jirón (2010b).
134 P. Jirón & W.A. Imilan

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