Temporalities of vulnerability: Unemployment tactics during the Spanish crisis

Investigating tactics to fill empty time

Before developing my conceptual framework, let me begin with a quote that illustrates the general meaning of time in unemployment.

[...] when I had just lost my job [...] and was having a beer with some unemployed friends, a couple of them said to me: “Get up late, mate, to make the day shorter. Because if you get up early, it goes on forever”. But I have to take my daughter [...] to school [...] I had to get up earlier than when I was working. So they said: “Hah! You’re screwed then!” That’s a lot of hours to fill. (Long Term Unemployed men group)

The term ‘to fill time’ is useful because it can be understood in opposition to the ‘emptiness’ that unemployment leaves in everyday life, and it expresses attempts to restructure the time stripped of content following loss of employment. In these abnormal circumstances, time is not used as a resource that each person exchanges freely in any given situation, but becomes an environment (Ramos, 2007). As Jeffrey (2010) has described the timepass in India, it can be said that it is the day that spends the person, not the person who spends the day Or as Pierre Bourdieu writes,

The empty time that has to be 'killed' is opposed to the full (or well-filled) time of the 'busy' person who, as we say, does not notice time passing -whereas, paradoxically, powerlessness, which breaks the relation of immersion in the imminent, makes one conscious of the passage of as when waiting. (Bourdieu, 2000: 224)

In practical terms, when unemployed subjects indicate that they are more or less able to ‘fill’ time, they are speaking of their capacity to create an environment in which at least some of their surplus time can be used meaningfully, which Bourdieu had eloquently referred to as ‘escaping from non-time’ (2000: 222). In order for this escape to be possible, subjects require certain collective and subjective conditions (Bourdieu, 1999; Ezzy, 2001) that allow them to construct daily rhythms and order meaningful activities in daily, weekly, monthly or yearly sequences, actions that demand a significant investment of social and subjective energy. Thus, rather than referring to strategies carried out offensively, it is more appropriate in this case to speak of tactics (Certeau, 1988: 29–42), because unemployment is a time of waiting and absence, and therefore actions tend instead to be defensive.

By contrast with a strategy […] a tactic is a calculation action determined by the absence of a proper locus. […] This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offering of the moment and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment. […] In short, a tactic is an art of the weak. (Certeau, 1988: 36–7)

Thus, the expression temporal tactics denotes the practices that unemployed people engage in to create meaningful or full moments within their empty time.

Socio-temporal conditions of tactics

In fact, really to break with the universalistic illusion fostered by analysis of essence […], one would need to describe the different ways of temporalizing oneself, relating them to their economic and social conditions of possibility. (Bourdieu, 2000: 224)

I will clarify the meaning of the different types of tactic by using four socio-temporal conditions that yield a better understanding of their greater or lesser potential for success or failure: first, the subject’s temporal socialisation in a rigid or flexible work norm; second, the short- or long-term nature of unemployment; third, the subject’s rigid or flexible domestic relationship and gender role; and fourth, the subject’s social class and access to economic resources. Now I will reference several significant studies that focus on these conditions. I have selected them for their special significance in the Spanish context as well as for its direct relation with the socio-temporal perspective – as far as I know there is no other research that has specifically selected these four conditions at the same time.

As regards the first condition, it should be stressed that from a temporal perspective, unemployment in Spain in recent years differs from that during crises in previous decades. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the labour market underwent unprecedented change in terms of its temporal norms (Fagan et al., 2017) as I pointed out in the introduction, and thus the contrast between employment and unemployment must be addressed in the current context. In Spain, fewer and fewer unemployed people have been socialised in the Fordist norm; that is, in an ‘8/8/8’ organisation of the day – 8 h of work, 8 of sleep and 8 of leisure and home life – and a ‘48/48/48’ organisation of work in the life cycle – 48 h/week, 48 weeks/year and 48 years (Hewitt, 1993: 2). Therefore, one of the hypothesis of this study is that those whose work socialisation is more closely linked to the Fordist norm will probably experience greater difficulties in structuring their unemployment time, and in general, one could thus predict that the vulnerability resulting from unemployment factor will be greater in men than in women (Vosko et al., 2009), in adults than in young people (Facchini and Rampazi, 2009; Jeffrey, 2010) and in workers previously in stable employment than in those who have held insecure jobs (Kalleberg, 2018). I do not mean that adult men socialized in the Fordist employment norm are more vulnerable in general, but more vulnerable to the effects specifically attributable to the situation of unemployment.

Turning to the second condition, the vulnerability derived from unemployment is strongly linked to duration, and not only to objective duration but also to its lived meaning. It is therefore important to distinguish between those in short-term unemployment due to frequent job changes, and those in long-term unemployment (Nielsen et al., 2021). The precise boundaries between short-term and long-term are blurred, but an individual’s capacity to endure longer or shorter durations depends on the socially expected duration (Merton, 1996) and the extent to which he or she maintains what I shall call pre-unemployment rhythms – activities that were performed with some frequency before job loss and were relatively independent of said job.

In the case of the third condition, unemployment time cannot be properly understood without examining the space that acquires greater centrality: the home and the domestic relationship. Although family forms have multiplied, the present study focused primarily on unemployment in the context of normative family households with children (Gough and Killewald, 2011; Komarovsky, 2004), finding that the contrast between before and after was marked by the subject’s gender role in the household and by his or her rigid or flexible adaptation to a new context in which the burden of domestic activities has probably increased. As is well known, the leisure time associated with the male employment norm is quite different from that experienced in the female double shift (Hochschild and Machung, 2012); consequently, vulnerability in unemployment tends to differ between men and women in accordance with different rhythms of participation in domestic activity and the meaning given to this (Fauser, 2019; Henneke and Pappe, 2022; Rao, 2020: 145–206).

Lastly, the social class of the unemployed subject can be understood in terms of what Bourdieu calls a social power over time (1984: 71), which is basically related to inherited or acquired economic and cultural capital that materialises as a class habitus and enables effective – or ineffective – investment of time and money. In terms of economic capital, the amount and duration of unemployment benefits and the amount of income, savings and debt of the household as a whole will predict the intensity of the effects of declining economic power on time use, as Jahoda et al. (2017: ch. 6) described in the classic study of Marienthal, where small differences in income can make huge differences in forms of vulnerability.

In brief, this conceptual framework provides tools for understanding the basic relationships between certain social conditions in unemployment time, the greater or lesser quantitative and qualitative presence of one or another type of tactics, and the meaning of these tactics from the point of view of the vulnerability experienced. For this purpose, it is important to note that any unemployed person may engage in several types of tactics for filling their time. This approach seeks not to homogenize the experiences of unemployment. Then, categories of tactics will correspond not to individual or cultural types but instead to practices that are more or less typical according to the dynamic social conditions in which an unemployed subject might be immersed at any given moment ¹

Uses of unemployment time in Spain according to the time use survey

Here, I shall briefly map the use of unemployment time. Table 3 shows the Mean Daily Duration (MDD) spent by the official unemployed population on different activities on an average day, the percentage of the unemployed population that engaged in an activity on an average day and the Mean Daily Duration spent by those unemployed who participate in the activity.

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Table 3.

Mean Daily Duration per activity and proportion of the total day spent by the unemployed population and mean time spent by those participating in the activity on an average day.

Activities	MDD of total unemployed population	% Total	% active a	% Participation in the activity b	MDD of those who participate	Sphere of time
0 personal care	11:48	49%	X	100%	11:46
1 Job seeking	0:27	2%	4%	14%	3:10	Work of competing for work time
2 Study	0:23	2%	3%	10%	3:45
3 Home and family	3:53	16%	32%	88%	4:24	Reproductive time
4 Voluntary work and meetings	0:22	2%	3%	15%	2:31	Potentially superfluous time
5 Social life and entertainment	1:12	5%	10%	61%	1:59
6 Sports and outdoor activities	0:53	4%	7%	44%	2:02
7 Hobbies and computers	0:46	3%	6%	33%	2:20
8 The media	3:05	13%	25%	91%	3:24
9 Travelling and other	1:11	5%	10%	84%	1:25
Total	24:00	100%	100%

These quantitative data were used to establish the main categories with which to order the multiplicity of temporal tactics in unemployment. ‘Job seeking’ and ‘study’ practices were categorised as time spent competing for work, which accounted for a total of 7% of daily active time. ‘Home and family’ practices were included in reproductive time, which accounted for 32% of total active time. The remaining categories, from ‘voluntary work and meetings’ to ‘travelling’ accounted for 61% of active time, and although under normal working conditions these activities would be experienced as leisure time, their main meaning in unemployment was instead that of potentially superfluous time or superfluous time, as I will show later.

Temporal tactics to combat vulnerability in unemployment

Having shown the map of the quantitative time distribution in unemployment, I now turn to the analysis of the temporal tactics of the unemployed trying to fill their empty time. And as I will explain in the conclusions, the order of presentation of the tactics does not describe a linear sequence of vulnerabilisation in unemployment, but rather some of the possible forms that this process can take.

Work of competing for work time: the tactic of investing time

This first tactic is characterised by filling unemployment time with training, job seeking and networking for employment. Let us start with the first issue.

According to the Time Use Survey, the 10% of unemployed people who study on an average day spend a mean of 3 h and 45 min per day. This significant amount of time spent in studying provides these subjects with an important tool for structuring their daily time. From the point of view of maintaining a daily rhythm, for as long as they continue to use this form of filling time, such subjects remain at high levels of temporal intensity. By engaging in training, the unemployed optimally offset the absence of employment and often reproduce their own fixed weekly working hours, despite the fact that this time is not formally remunerated.

For unemployed people who predominantly employ this tactic, their training opens up the possibility of accessing more attractive jobs, and, as Poveda has argued, unemployment can be experienced as an opportunity or as ‘retraining time’ (Poveda, 2006: 104). Typically, these practices are deployed by people in transition between jobs or for whom dismissal has not been traumatic, who have intermediate or higher level qualifications, or who do not have a very stable link to the labour market, such as young people with few responsibilities outside work. Their personal projection into the future has not been shattered and thus they feel that they can rebuild their lives if their investment in competing for a job is successful. Their domestic relationship is often characterised by a partner with some level of job security and care burdens that are manageable and compatible with their new activities.

I’m going to start a master’s degree in design, which I thought might be something I’d enjoy and might also fill the professional void I’m experiencing at the moment, as well as studying English and being with my son, which is important to me. (women group 1)

Besides investing time in training, such people may also engage in the practice of networking, associated with the accumulation of social capital. Networking is a type of activity that is often linked with other practices and can have an ambivalent meaning between training time and leisure time. An illustrative case is that of Marisa: aged 37, with a husband in stable employment and children, she has spent most of her free time writing a blog on which she promotes, unpaid, the marketing products of companies with which she ‘collaborates’. This has enabled Marisa to make contact with companies and individuals, and has provided the opportunity to distribute her CV. Therefore, this is time spent investing in social capital, and although no remuneration is involved, it cannot be considered as leisure time either. As this time resembles working time, albeit unpaid, it has the capacity to structure her days:

I’ve spent all this time working on the webpage I’ve made, on my little blog, [...] as an escape valve. I have to do something. ...] When I go out to deliver, I take my CV. And well, “There’s a shop that needs people”, so I leave my CV. It’s putting myself out there. (Marisa, STU, children)

As Marisa implies with the expression ‘putting myself out there’, in economic terms, such time is aimed at maximising the chances of finding a job or getting an interview, and in this sense it is not devalued, at least in the phase of short-term unemployment. In such cases, therefore, everyday temporal management is geared towards offsetting the absence of employment and regenerating social capital: ‘I still get up at eight in the morning, I’m still going out on the streets, trying, well, friends, friendships, colleagues, people you met when you were working’ (STU men group), or ‘because friendships now, you have to keep them, you never know, to see if they can give you a job, or where the opportunity of a lifetime might be’ (Jorge, STU, children). Among the unemployed who predominantly used this type of tactic, scarcity of money did not emerge either explicitly or implicitly as a significant problem, suggesting the existence of savings or margins of disposable income, that is, a middle-class status.

In these circumstances, temporal tactics fulfil the conditions for transforming empty time into full time, and thus the experience of vulnerability is usually negligible. However, once several investment attempts have failed to yield concrete opportunities, time starts to lose its meaning and becomes monotonous and repetitive:

You just don’t know what to do anymore... I send out between 30 and 32 CVs every day... I have a university education, I have other qualifications, I’ve done courses, I have languages... I’ve done all kinds of things, I change it every day, I change its colour... I change it... I remove qualifications, I add qualifications, I remove experience, I add experience... no-one calls me, I’ve been called once... twice, this year... (women group 2).

Thus, short-term unemployment can become medium- or long-term, increasing the experience of vulnerability, as I shall describe later. In this way, the problem of vulnerabilisation throughout unemployment is not only a matter of short or long duration in quantitative terms. In this case, as long as the rhythms and the meaningfulness of the tactics of investing time are updated, it will be possible to maintain the hope of finding a job and potentially recover temporal normativity.

Reproductive time in male unemployment: the domestic hyperactivity tactic

In the category of ‘home and family’ noted above, it is important to distinguish mean times by gender in order to understand the meaning of reproductive time. According to the 2009–2010 Spanish Time Use Survey, unemployed women with an employed male partner and a child under 25 spent 7 h and 28 min per day on domestic and care work. Meanwhile, unemployed men who lived with an employed woman spent 4 h and 50 min per day, indicating that unemployed women spend 54% more time on these tasks than men, a major difference with consequences for the experience of time.

When the tactics of competing for work do not occupy sufficient time, in the case of men this can result in a tactic of domestic hyperactivity to avoid boredom:

That was the last time I was unemployed, I painted the whole house. […]. I gave plants to my father, to dig. [...] This week I went to the village to help my father plant some tomatoes. […]. I can’t just do nothing... it does my head in. (Antonio, 30–39, partner + children)

As this quote illustrates, unemployed men often fill their time with a particular type of domestic activity; the ‘repairs’ typically associated with the male gender. According to the Time Use Survey, within the category ‘Home and family’ there is a subcategory ‘construction and repairs’ in which there are significant differences in participation between men (5.2%) and women (1.2%) in general as well as among unemployed men (7.1%, 2 h and 34 min a day on average) and unemployed women in particular (the survey did not obtain representative data in this category, which indicates the little participation of unemployed women in this still masculinized activity).

Then, this way of filling time enabled Antonio to distract himself from a significantly uncontrollable situation and stop it ‘doing his head in’, in his words. In these situations, it is a possibility within the sexual division of time in the home for a man to put pressure on a woman who is used to carrying the burden of care to delegate this to him, not so much for the explicit purpose of assuming responsibility for the care as such, but rather to prevent hours from being lost in ‘doing nothing’ or ‘thinking about it’. This is how Carmen described her intervention with her unemployed husband:

[...] I just used to do it: “Leave it, I’ll do it, leave it, I’ll do it, leave it, I’ll do it” (the wife is performing the unemployed husband expression), OK, you do it then, fine. I also have to give him something to do, I have to keep him occupied somehow, because a man sitting down, getting up and sitting down, just going round in circles in his head, is no good. (Carmen, employed wife of LTU man)

As can be seen, one of the necessary conditions for a man to adapt to the new situation in the home is flexibility in the domestic relationship and in the gender roles of both parties, because otherwise it will be difficult to renegotiate the assigned activities.

For unemployed parents, childcare is a fundamental practice that gives rhythm and texture to daily activity. Rather than simply representing a time burden, childcare often emerges as the condition that gives meaning to their existence for unemployed men and women alike, because it obliges them to get up early in the morning, to take their children to school, to make lunch and overall to share with their children an everyday life in a more intensive way (what is more difficult to do when there is working time pressure). So childcare rhythms enable them to distinguish weekdays from weekends, for example. In contrast, difficulty filling time is much more typical in men without childcare responsibilities, as we will see later, in our study I can interpret that for older unemployed men increasing inactivity can intensify the experience of emptiness and vulnerability.

Reproductive time in female unemployment: The domestic work rejection tactic

So I can’t imagine life without work because for me it’s a scenario that complements me as a person, so when I saw myself at home with a baby and housework, I said: “My God, this will kill me”. So, let’s say I reinvented myself (women group 1).

When unemployed women with expectations of work suddenly find themselves unemployed and their life space becomes restricted to the domestic sphere, many cannot bear the thought of being trapped, especially young unemployed women. Although women’s entry into the work force has seemed irreversible in recent decades, many unemployed women now find that the labour market has closed its doors to them again. For many women workers, unemployment has shattered the temporal relationship with employment that was still in the process of becoming consolidated in their lives. Thus, the female ‘reinvention’ cited above denotes the tactic of rejecting and avoiding a return to the domestic sphere. Consequently, although these women had a profile of high dedication to care, they rarely referred to it as a central pillar around which they structured their daily lives, and subjectively tended to reject domestic issues.

I see housework as part of my own survival, so just as I don’t talk about when I shower or how long I shower for, or how often I wash my hair, neither do I talk about housework because it’s not important (women group 1).

Thus, some unemployed women who do not want to feel trapped in the home do not give semantic density to domestic work, which is often rendered invisible and automatic in order to dilute it as much as possible in the temporal experience.

In the case of women already fully socialised in the labour market, these subjective tactics enable them to feel that they are shortening time, which can be interpreted as a defensive response to stop unemployment sucking them back into the centrality of the home, a lifestyle more typical of their mothers and grandmothers. However, for all that they avoid references to domestic work, responsibility for a high care burden can sometimes lead to the experience of ‘being confined’ to the home. Take, for example, the case of an unemployed woman with four children who finds it almost impossible to downplay the subjective importance of the domestic sphere: ‘...but four [children] means 6 hours a day that you have to do, my husband helps me a bit, but it has to be done, it’s not that I’m going on about it, it’s just that someone has to do it’ (women group 1). This return of women to the domestic sphere may be fostered by rigid gender roles in the home, where the woman’s unemployment legitimises the transfer by her partner of a greater burden of care. In addition, the lack of economic resources and rising costs of public services entailed in the context of crisis further reduce the possibility for unemployed women of deploying other tactics that would enable them to distance themselves from a central focus on the domestic sphere. All this contributes to significant experiences of distress and vulnerability arising from frustrated attempts to remain subjects whose central focus is on waged employment.

Superfluous time (i): The tactic of constant effort

What I find most difficult... for example, I don’t usually stay at home, almost never; I usually go out, so I have to find somewhere to go the next day. Where to go, what to do today, what to do tomorrow... It takes more effort than my job did, looking for something to do (LTU men group).

As the above indicates, a situation typical of unemployment that begins to be experienced as long-term is that, despite having more time apparently available, carrying out activities in this ‘empty’ time may require more effort than in the ‘full’ time of working life. This type of temporality occurs in people who feel that they are approaching the limit of the socially expected duration of unemployment, and whose circumstances reduce their margins of temporal agency for ‘getting through the day’. Every day requires an effort of planning to successfully engage in meaningful practices and maintain some of the pre-unemployment rhythms: ‘I try to go to the gym, which I’ve always gone to, it’s not expensive [...] and a bit of the old routine keeps me going...’ (LTU men group). Engaging in activities that are ‘not expensive’ also provides a level of temporal texture, even if some days remain monotonous. However, as the repertoire of possibilities gradually diminishes, time begins to be experienced as superfluous, and is mainly marked by routine activities such as walking, watching television or ‘doing nothing’.

As mentioned above, in the case of unemployed men living with employed women, care routines are fundamental in obliging the subjects to maintain a sense of 24 h, and pressure from a partner often prevents the dangers of potential disruption of the rhythm:

If I get up, then “he gets up”, not like other men I hear about, where the wife says “Oh, my husband stays in bed until late and doesn’t want to do anything!” (Carmen, wife of LTU man).

More precarious conditions generate a marked difference compared to middle-class conditions in unemployment. When private savings and public benefits are depleted, the pressure of dwindling resources leads to greater confinement in the home in order not to spend. Whereas the tactic of investing time presupposes available savings, enabling subjects to go out to deliver CVs, use transport or spend money on networking, poverty obliges self-control of spending, which in turn implies a greater degree of uniformity of everyday time. Unemployment time takes on a static rather than a dynamic texture, and in consequence, the intensity of vulnerability may be expressed with increasingly harsh signifiers, as evidenced in this study: you’re nothing, you’re nobody, you’re outdated, shelved, obsolete, non-existent, worthless, sunk, forgotten, marginalised, left over, useless, isolated, traumatised, unwanted, spoilt, wasted, a wanker, abandoned, rusty, old junk, lost, disorganised, discarded.

Superfluous time (ii): Non-tactics.

This last ‘non-tactic’ predominates in subjects who have undergone a process of destructuration of their everyday time and have lost much of their temporal agency. This incapacity does not occur immediately, but only once the duration of unemployment has far exceeded the subject’s own expectations. In these circumstances, pre-unemployment rhythms fade away and little or no activity is left to give meaning to everyday life. The common figure in this situation is the stereotypical unemployed-victim, typically men who prior to unemployment had assumed a traditional male role, who have long been socialised in a rigid or Fordist employment norm, whose home lives are marked by considerable domestic conflict and who are in a position of high economic insecurity: ‘I consider myself pre-destitute. Because I’m very determined and have a lot of drive, but the constraints of my environment are dragging me into destitution’ (LTU men group).

The rhythms marked by caregiving no longer exist or are not sufficiently demanding to give meaning to the day. Meaningful activities are no longer the norm but the exception, and there is ‘nothing’ left in the interval between them. There are no longer any tactics available capable of re-establishing rhythms, especially in cases where subjects do not live with children or partners. Everyday life has lost almost all its texture. The hope of individual or social solutions vanishes and the sequence of processes is not perceived; instead, subjects are simply faced with a practically insurmountable denial:

I can’t do anything, I don’t have anything (Edgar, LTU, children).

This metaphor of a train expresses the constant, dizzying rhythm of the world of work that never rests, and ‘getting off the train’ means not being able to keep up, not having the possibility of getting on the train because its speed has disembodied the unemployed person. These unemployed people have not literally ‘got off the train’; rather, they perceive themselves as having been thrown off and as being desynchronised from social temporalities. They are desperate to hope, and visualise the ‘end’ while expressing their position of survival: ‘I’ll fight to the end’ (Hilario, LTU, no children). The narrative stops at this point, and the subject experiences high vulnerability that is expressed in a temporal blockage and loss of the capacity to project oneself into the future.