1. Introduction
In the chapter ‘Baloga’ of Ben Judah’s This is Europe, the Romanian truck driver Ionuț discovers his cargo has been stolen while he has been sleeping in his truck. Despite language barriers, he tries to report the theft to the French police, but feels like he is being treated as a second-class European by the officers. Throughout the chapter, we follow Ionuț in his reflections on his life choices, the dangers and risks in his job: traffic accidents and the threat of being robbed, the stressful nature of his work, and – somewhat incongruously – his criticism of the behaviour of people from Eastern Europe.
The experience of being looked down upon, treated unequally and without respect as an ‘Eastern European’ recurs in several contexts throughout the chapter – for example, when Ionuț is assigned a dirty and disgusting truck cabin; when, for financial reasons, he avoids safer parking areas for overnight stays; and when, during his free time, he walks the streets of Paris and feels that everything there is expensive and out of reach.
Another recurring theme is his reflections on life as a long-distance truck driver on EU roads (pre-Brexit). It is the story of driving a heavy vehicle while being so tired that he becomes a danger to himself and others, of the stress of reaching the destination and delivering the cargo on time, of the conditions for sleeping, cooking, eating and attending to basic physical needs at parking areas along the motorways, of being away from family and loved ones for long periods and what that means for relationships. Later, the story tells how Ionuț meets Cami, his current partner. They were already truck drivers before they met, and they started driving, working and living together in the same truck.
Although the story largely focuses on hardships, it should also be emphasised that not everything is tragic and dark. There is joy and warmth in the description of driving the truck through the Alps, in organising a spontaneous birthday party with colleagues, and in the fact that Ionuț and Cami have and care for each other. While the story is relatively detailed in some parts, there is much about their working and personal conditions that we can only guess at. As far as possible, for this article, I have tried to avoid speculation and assumptions, and based the analysis that follows on the information that can be drawn from their story. However, drawing some conclusions from the untold has been unavoidable.
Without judging or diminishing, it can still be stated that life as a long-distance truck driver comes with a cost. That price includes increased health risksFootnote 1 and, in many cases, a social cost. Both Cami and Ionuț were divorced when they met. At least in Ionuț’s case, his divorce was due to his job and the time he spent away from home. Therefore, in this article, my aim is not to draw conclusions about the positive or negative impact of the relevant legal rules. I do not believe this is necessary or even appropriate, since this article is about Ionuț’s and Cami’s perspectives on the law, not mine.
I can imagine how they may have an ambivalent relationship with having their working hours and rest periods regulated in detail – that they might see it as necessary to ensure proper rest and safe driving, while at the same time feeling frustrated by the rigidity and lack of flexibility. For example, perhaps there are times when they would prefer to drive a longer shift to get home earlier and sleep in their own bed. Nonetheless, I cannot know more than what is conveyed in the story, and I will strive not to put words in their mouths.
In the introduction to this symposium, Loïc Azoulai and Jack Meakin describe a disconnect between the EU legal project and the specific conditions of existence of people living in Europe.Footnote 2 The legal backdrop to the ‘Baloga’ chapter is the complex configuration of rules that coincide, overlap, and interact in the EU road haulage sector. This configuration becomes even more intricate when read against the background of the market rationale. The result, as described in this article, is an extensive structuring of where and how individual truck drivers spend long periods of their lives.
This interplay of rationales and rules ultimately becomes so complex that advanced logistics software is used to calculate how each individual should drive, rest and sleep in order to maximise profit within the system. At the other end of the system are the mandatory tachographs installed in every truck – sophisticated devices that record when, where and by whom the vehicle is driven, enabling the authorities to monitor compliance. In this way, the law has a highly concrete impact in these workers’ everyday lives, while at the same time a disconnection emerges: individuals can scarcely grasp or gain overview of the underlying basis on which they drive, rest and live.
2. Some Starting Points for a (European) Law of the Everyday Perspective
What does ‘the European law of the everyday’ mean to me? In his inspiring article ‘Is this Europe?’,Footnote 3 Floris de Witte sets out to find and construct a new approach to research on European law and how it affects ‘ordinary people’. In itself, this ambition is not new: it has occupied socio-legal scholars for decades. What appears refreshing about de Witte’s article, however, is how he formulates a perspective shift. This perspective is certainly ‘bottom-up’, but it would be an over-simplification to leave it at that. De Witte also argues that the focus should be on what EU law actually does, rather than what it says it does: ‘how it shapes, renders and is mediated by the bio-physical, spatial, infrastructural, or cultural reality upon which it acts’.Footnote 4
Kymäläinen describes how the intriguing aspect of everyday law is its ordinariness, and how law makes its presence felt in this ordinary everyday.Footnote 5 This approach corresponds well with how I understand and find my interest in the law of the everyday. In the context of the chapter about the truck driver from Baloga, my interest is not primarily on how the law is written or how it should be interpreted by courts or authorities, but rather on how it appears to Ionuț, Cami and their colleagues, how it affects their lives and how they adapt their everyday working lives to it. In other words, I strive to look from the perspective of Ionuț and Cami, while looking through the scholarly lens.
Ben Judah’s book aims to depict diverse European lives. Despite this, as noted by Irina Muñoz Ibarra, it presents a narrow, cropped image that excludes non-migrant Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC).Footnote 6 The chapter ‘Baloga’ confirms this heavily restricted perspective. Few or no non-migrant BIPOC appear in the chapter, and if they do, they are described in terms of nationality. In other respects as well, the picture presented in ‘Baloga’ is severely limited. Despite their widespread presence in the European road haulage sector,Footnote 7 no drivers who are third-country nationals appear in the text.
Even when it comes to workplace relationships – with colleagues, employers or supervisors – the perspectives remain individual. What is described are the individual’s problems and the individual’s stress. Collective aspects appear only in a private context, between Cami and Ionuț, or between Ionuț and his friends and colleagues, but not in relation to the dynamics of the employment relationship with managers and employers.
Although the selection of study subjects – that is, the content of Ben Judah’s book – can be criticised, for this article I have chosen to base my analysis on what has been presented as the material for study, rather than what has been omitted. This delimitation may seem insufficiently critical, but in this case, I believe it best aligns with my approach of adopting Ionuț’s and Cami’s everyday perspective.
3. Spatial and Temporal Dimensions
My reflection on and analysis of this chapter have been inspired by the works of Iossa,Footnote 8 Iossa and Selberg,Footnote 9 and Rocca and Deverson,Footnote 10 who apply spatial and temporal dimensions as a lens for analysing worker mobility.Footnote 11 However, with my interpretation of ‘law of the everyday’, I will adopt a somewhat different perspective than these sources of inspiration. In contrast, my perspective is not that of the legislator or legal practitioner, but strives for a kind of bottom-up perspective – one that considers how the daily life of the individuals in the story – Cami and Ionuț – is profoundly shaped by the law.
Iossa finds that the posted worker is legally constructed and defined through the simultaneous workings of both a spatial and a temporal scale, and that spatial and temporal elements are at the core of the EU regulatory framework for cross-border posted work.Footnote 12 However, regarding long-distance cross-border road transport, additional layers of spatio-temporal elements are provided by the combination of specific rules on the posting of workers who are drivers in the road transport sector, road haulage and cabotage, and driver working and resting times (altogether these rules are referred to as the ‘Mobility Package’ – see Section 5).Footnote 13 These additional layers provide further reasons why this lens can offer interesting perspectives on the story of the truck drivers from Baloga.
As I show below, time and space are decisive for which rules become applicable and what restrictions apply to the mobility of drivers and vehicles. The mirror image of this is that the same time and space can be navigated by transport undertakings to use vehicles and drivers in the most economically beneficial way possible. This includes navigating the rules of the Mobility Package, often related to driving at specific times in specific geographical areas, combined with applying timely precision in accordance with the needs and demands of the value chains. In this way, the questions of when and where Ionuț and Cami live their everyday working lives seem to become mere ‘side-effects’ in this balancing act.
Since I have chosen to focus on the rules of the Mobility Package specifically for this article, I will not devote much attention to aspects of labour law that may apply to the drivers’ situation – for example, questions concerning work environment, pay or rights to consultation and information.
4. Logistics in a Highly Competitive Social Market Economy
The ‘Baloga’ chapter, as I read it, is a story of two people who are small but very concrete cogs in a larger system: the highly competitive social market economy of the European Union. That is where this article finds one of its legal anchoring points. The other anchoring point is in the Mobility Package, as the legal framework that is likely to have the most significant influence on their everyday working lives. These two anchoring points should be understood as operating on different levels, both in their actual formal form of legislative acts and in their levels of abstraction. Nonetheless, even though the Mobility Package puts into action the balancing of social and competition aspects, both anchoring points have concrete implications for the experience of everyday law in the Baloga chapter.
According to the Treaty on European Union (TEU), Article 3(3), one objective of the Union is to be a ‘highly competitive social market economy’. Each of these five words can be discussed and dissected for its meaning, both individually and in combination with the others, and the concept may have different interpretations depending on the national or academic context.Footnote 14 For this purpose, I will use the term in its most basic literal sense: an economy based on market principles that balances the goal of being highly competitive with the need to address certain social objectives.Footnote 15
At the heart of this highly competitive market economy lies ‘the science of organizing the circulation of goods, materials, and people to reduce costs and increase profit’ – in other words: logistics. The Commission has summarised the importance of the EU’s transport system as ‘essential to the smooth movement of goods, people, and services – the essential and underlying freedoms of the single market’.Footnote 16
Business developments in recent decades have led to an increase in the development of production and value chains, and greater specialisation to improve efficiency, exploit labour cost differentials and reduce the costly need to keep goods stored on shelves. Iossa summarises the significance of logistics as ‘the faster a product moves, the more profit it generates’.Footnote 17 An additional aspect of logistics is that it not only enables profiting from labour cost differentials between countries in the production of goods or components of goods. Cross-border transport also makes it possible to take advantage of differentials in the cost of labour for transport and logistics services.
5. Balancing Social and Competitive: The Content of the Mobility Package
The term ‘Mobility Package’ usually refers only to the EU legislation on road transport that was adopted in 2020,Footnote 18 which amends or specifies already existing legislation in this area. However, for the purposes of this article, I have also included the pre-existing legislation and I use the term for the whole body of legislation.Footnote 19 The Mobility Package consists of three different but related areas of regulation. Two of these areas concern the conditions under which the driver performs work (working/resting time and posting), while the third (cabotage) concerns how the vehicle is used.
The purpose of the Mobility Package – both the 2020 legislation and earlier measures – is summarised as aiming to create a road transport sector that is ‘safe, efficient and socially accountable’, and that ensures improved working conditions for drivers, undistorted and fair competition between operators and road safety for all road users through rules that are ‘clear, proportionate, fit for purpose, and easy to apply and to enforce’.Footnote 20 The rules also aim to take into account that employees are generally the weaker party in the employment relationship, and therefore aim to prevent situations where employers restrict drivers’ rights or dissuade them from claiming those rights.Footnote 21
With my ambition to take an everyday law perspective in this article, I will provide only a very brief summary of the substantive rules that apply to international road transport. What I consider to be most important in this context is how the rules are presented and perceived by Ionuț and Cami, and how their everyday working lives are impacted. Therefore, in a later section I outline some of the rules of the Mobility Package in relation to their story.
From the everyday law perspective, rather than giving a detailed outline of the legislation, I find it more relevant to consider how the rules are presented, for example by the European Labour Authority in its leaflets. These leaflets are available in 35 different languages, and are directed specifically at the drivers concerned. They aim to explain the various rules on working and rest time, posting and cabotage in a correct but easily accessible way.Footnote 22 In my opinion, these leaflets provide a rich illustration not only of the complex body of rules, but also of the multiple spatial and temporal elements involved:
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• Working and resting time. A driver is only permitted to work and drive for a certain number of hours per day and week. Drivers have the right to breaks during work, as well as a specified amount of rest per day and per week. This regulatory system specifies when the driver must take breaks, how long they must be, alternative calculation methods and when the driver is entitled to return home.
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• Posting of workers. These rules determine which employment conditions apply during the period when work is performed in another Member State. Whether a driver is legally considered posted or not is determined by the strength of the links between the driver’s work and the Member State where the employer is established or the (host) Member State where the work is carried out. If the worker is legally considered ‘posted’ and if certain specified conditions, such as wages and remuneration, are more favourable in the host Member State, those conditions must apply during the period of the posting.
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• Cabotage. In the EU law context, cabotage refers to situations where domestic road transport within one Member State is carried out by a vehicle of a transport undertaking registered in another Member State.Footnote 23 Cabotage is permitted under certain conditions within the EU, but there are restrictions, which are primarily aimed at ensuring fair competition for transport sectors in Member States where wages and other costs are higher.Footnote 24 For a cabotage operation to be permitted, the foreign vehicle must enter the Member State with the purpose of delivering an international load. Once that load has been unloaded, the vehicle is permitted to carry out up to three cabotage operations within seven days. After that, the vehicle must leave the Member State. After such a cabotage period, a four-day ‘cooling-off’ period is required, during which the haulier cannot carry out new cabotage operations with the same vehicle within the same Member State. (However, the vehicle may carry out cabotage operations in another Member State during that time.)
6. Mobility Rules Applied to Baloga
I will endeavour to illustrate how the rules of the Mobility Package may impact the workdays of Ionuț and Cami. Their story gives us only limited detail about how or where they drive, although we know they are out on the road for several weeks, and sometimes months, at a time. Ionuț describes how they typically drive nine hours each per day.Footnote 25 This corresponds with the central premises for this sector that these transport operations are carried out over long distances without transloading or changing drivers beyond what is strictly necessary. It presupposes that individual drivers remain on assignments for prolonged periods, far from home and their social environment. In Ionuț’s case, the social cost becomes evident in the breakdown of his first marriage, and in his account of sending almost all the money he earns to his children, who he rarely has the opportunity to see.Footnote 26
The rules on working time and rest time apply to the individual driver, whereas the cabotage regulations concern the use of the vehicle. This means there can be incentives to create highly complex logistical schedules in order to extract maximum profit from both the vehicle and the drivers. For the driver, the interplay between rules for the individual and for the vehicle also has personal implications: if the vehicle is used for cabotage operations, the driver is considered to be posted and thereby subject to other rules regarding pay and working conditions.Footnote 27 The determining factors include whether the international transport involves the Member State in which the employer is established, or solely takes place in other Member States. We are told that Ionuț and Cami are away on assignment for long stretches of time and that they drive in parts of Europe that are far from Romania. Whether all of their transport routes start or end in Romania is not made clear.
Driving nine hours per day before shifting corresponds with the typically maximum allowed driving time. Twice a week, it is permitted to exceed this limit and drive for up to ten hours per day.Footnote 28 As Ionuț explains, they are off-duty at the same time for only a few hours each day (‘You’re left with less than five hours where you’ve got to wash, eat and sleep’).Footnote 29 The maximum allowed driving time is 56 hours per week, but no more than 90 hours may be driven over any two-week period.Footnote 30 This means a week with the maximum allowable driving time must be followed by a lighter week. At the same time, they are not permitted to drive more than four and a half hours without having at least a 45-minute break.Footnote 31 Since the other driver must normally take eleven hours, but under certain circumstances at least nine hours, of uninterrupted daily rest, the vehicle likely has to be stationed during that time. However, the daily rest period can also be split into one uninterrupted period of three hours and another of nine hours.Footnote 32 In that case, they could possibly alternate and pass over the wheel during breaks, but the vehicle would then need to stay parked for a longer period later, when both drivers’ periods of daily rest overlap.
Ionuț’s account also offers glimpses into the particular working environment of truck drivers. He speaks of the recurring back pain caused by spending most of his working days seated behind the wheel – nine hours of driving time per working day, seated yet required to remain constantly alert. There are long driving periods without breaks. Ionuț expresses his concern that Cami may lose concentration when she becomes fatigued. He is aware of colleagues who have died in accidents due to mistakes because of exhaustion, and he also refers to drivers who attempt to counteract sleep and loss of concentration in other ways: colleagues who display clear signs of amphetamine use.Footnote 33
Drivers have the right and obligation to take at least 45 consecutive hours of weekly rest.Footnote 34 This rest period cannot be taken in the vehicle; instead, the employer is required to pay for and provide suitable accommodation with adequate sleeping and sanitary facilities.Footnote 35 At least every third or fourth week, the driver has the right to return for the weekly rest either to their place of residence or to the employer’s operational centre in its Member State of establishment.Footnote 36
The chapter offers the reader only brief indications of the psycho-social price of working in this sector: the sense of confinement, the sleep difficulties and the loss of appetite during long periods of living in the truck. It reveals the ever-present stress that arises not only from the pressure to reach the destination on time or more quickly, but also from carrying cargo that is valuable and attractive to thieves. The business model of the sector is premised on drivers living under these conditions.Footnote 37 The 2020 Mobility Package has introduced certain alleviations to this situation, notably the right to spend the regular weekly rest period in accommodation other than the vehicle, and the right to return home every third or fourth week. Nevertheless, the majority of both working time and rest time continues to be spent in the cabin of the truck.
Ionuț expresses an economic inferiority compared with Western Europeans (‘Maybe if I were a German driver and paid like one I could afford to stop in one of those car parks’; ‘He might be in Stuttgart but he was still on a Cluj salary’).Footnote 38 In legal terms, this issue is also affected by the EU’s rules on posting of workers, and a key factor is where and how the driver carries out their work. If Ionuț’s work, either in whole or in part, meets the definitions for being considered a posted worker, then he would instead be entitled to a German salary while posted in Germany.
Since this article discusses the relationship between the highly competitive market economy and social aspects, it should also be noted that the legislation within the Mobility Package includes additional rules that may be directly relevant to this relationship. Transport undertakings are prohibited from applying any forms of driver pay calculation based on distance travelled, speed of delivery, or the amount of goods carried, if such pay schemes encourage drivers to violate rules on road safety.Footnote 39 Similarly, there is a legal obligation for transport undertakings to organise their operations in such a way that their drivers can perform their work while complying with the rules governing working hours and rest periods.Footnote 40
7. The Spatial and Temporal Dimensions in Baloga
Although the spatial and temporal aspects are fundamental to the Baloga story, they are not clearly expressed in more than just a few sentences. Much more is conveyed implicitly. I have focused on situations where time and space are used to balance the requirements in Article 3(3) TEU, or become a source of exclusion and inferiority.
The story provides some examples of how demands are expressed: ‘Pile-ups. Coordinators yelling. Phoning him. Orders: More, fast, get to the depot. Superiors giving him a piece of their mind: Too late, too slow, Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Get there faster. Fleshy-faced men who never cared about you and only about how much money they were making out of the company. Ionuț would only nod’.Footnote 41 There are also examples of how rules are broken to ease the stress and satisfy those demands: ‘His shift stretching out. Not the official nine: but ten, eleven, twelve hours’.Footnote 42
The ‘feeling of stress and always being in a hurry’, particularly combined with complying with rules, as described by Ionuț, illustrates the underlying dimension of time and space: the need to get somewhere within a specific time, preferably as fast as possible. Certain limitations are imposed on this ‘as fast as possible’; some are, of course, purely physical limits to how fast matter can move under given circumstances, while others are legally defined: speed limits and rules on driving and rest times. Regarding legal restrictions, responsibility can fall on the transport undertaking (the employer) and the individual driver:
When Ionuț drove, she would sleep; nine hours at the wheel and then they’d switch over. Then he would try and sleep as Cami drove … The truck was often still for less than five hours a night. It felt like snatches: what they had together … It’s relentless. It’s continuous. It’s one day like this after another … Our daily work stretches up to almost twenty hours, nine hours each, out of which you’re left with less than five hours where you’ve got to wash, eat and sleep in the end. For months …We’re mocked and made fun of with such conditions, treated like sub-humans.Footnote 43
The reason why Ionuț and Cami began working together in the same truck is not explained in the story, but there could be both social and economic reasons. Instead of being separated for long periods while working, they can spend much of their time together. A truck that is on the move for as many hours as possible is more economically profitable: the rules on driving and resting times apply to drivers, not to vehicles. We are, however, not provided with information about the basis for their pay calculations, and whether they, or only their employer, have economic incentives for the vehicle to stay parked for as few hours as possible.
The feeling of inferiority and being treated worse as an Eastern European likely has multiple explanations rooted in 20th-century history, economics and outright racist attitudes. Nevertheless, even in this case there are certain connections to time and space. One of the ‘structural elements’ behind the EU’s free movement is to enable companies to take advantage of differentials in labour costs between Member States.Footnote 44 These opportunities to exploit wage differentials have, to some extent, been mitigated through measures such as the rules on posting of workers, adequate minimum wages and the Mobility Package. Nevertheless, significant differences remain, as illustrated by Ionuț’s account.
Wage differentials cannot be understood solely as an opportunity for companies to maximise profits; they are also as a means of subordinating workers. As Piore has explained through the concept of the ‘dual frame of reference’,Footnote 45 such differentials may lead migrant workers to accept lower wages and poorer working conditions than residential workers in the country of work because the alternatives available in the country of origin are less appealing.
Such differences in what various workers may feel compelled to tolerate can in turn produce further consequences – for example, with regard to the environments in which they are able to spend the night. As Ionuț describes, when compared to those of resident workers, these may involve an increased risk of robbery and reduced access to healthy food and hygiene. They may also affect workplace hierarchies and the exercise of managerial prerogative – such as who is directed to a dirty and uncleaned truck cabin and, conversely, who is able to hand over such a vehicle without consequences from the employer, who is harassed by a logistics coordinator, and who is ordered to drive longer or faster than the law permits.
Drivers who are classified as ‘posted workers’ are entitled to the same pay and compensation as drivers in the Member State where the work is carried out. Ionuț’s statement – ‘He might be in Stuttgart but he was still on a Cluj salary’ - was made before the 2020 Mobility Package came into force. But even now, with the updated rules on posting, there are still many boxes that must be ticked before a driver will be legally recognised as a ‘posted worker’. Almost all these boxes relate to where the driver is driving and during which times,Footnote 46 something that can be controlled by the employer through how they plan transport routes and exercise their prerogative to direct the work.
Should the driver’s assignments be organised and carried out in such a way, highly dependent on when and where the rules on posting of workers become applicable, then additional spatio-temporal elements come into play: provided the driver does not perform their posted work in the same country throughout the entire pay calculation period (monthly wage, weekly wage, etc.), the wage will vary depending on where and for how long the driver is posted. For example, one can imagine that a driver can be posted in more than one Member State during the same pay calculation period, or that the work is performed partly as posted and partly as non-posted. Where and when the work is performed would thus make a very tangible difference to the worker’s private economic situation. In the same way, these differences in pay would give the employer, through their managerial prerogative, room to organise the work – again based on spatial and temporal factors – so the cost of labour becomes as advantageous as possible for the employer.
8. Concluding Remarks
The fundamental principle in Article 3(3) of the TEU, the balance between social objectives and competitiveness within the framework of a market economy, says nothing about the level of detail required or that this balance must be achieved through the spatial and temporal dimensions. This regulatory design has been added further downstream in the process of putting these words into action.
There are significant economic values to be extracted from transport and logistics. These meet and conflict with the values of worker protection, protection of citizens and society (particularly in traffic), and fair competition.Footnote 47 To balance this conflict of interests, the regulatory model chosen by EU legislators has been to enact detailed and comprehensive rules, which have the potential to significantly intrude into the everyday working lives of the workers concerned.
The everyday experience of law for a truck driver from Baloga is therefore likely to be ambiguous. It offers protection from the rawest forms of exploitative forces of a highly competitive market economy and the logic of logistics, but at the cost of a rigorous body of detailed legislation that meticulously specifies when and where the driver or vehicle must move or remain stationary.
From this, certain fundamental priorities of the EU law-maker can be discerned. The first is the fundamental premise that market interests serve as the baseline from which worker-protective exceptions and derogations may be granted. The second is the prioritisation of a protective method, relying on detailed, comprehensive and potentially intrusive rules that significantly intervene in the everyday working lives of these workers.
The protection of drivers in long-distance road transport is commendable for all the reasons outlined above. The aim of this article has not been to question the urgency or legitimacy of these goals, but rather, from the perspective of everyday law, to highlight how such regulations affect the daily working lives of drivers. The logistics sector, including road transport, is a highly distinctive part of the labour market. This distinctiveness stems partly from the sector’s central role in production and distribution, and partly from the fact that its workforce is highly mobile.Footnote 48 As a result, flowing from these particular factors, the sector inherently contains strong spatial and temporal dimensions. The legislator aims to increase the level of control over this sector, and does so by adding further layers, through protective legislation in the Mobility Package, introducing additional spatial and temporal elements. A sector of the labour market that is already distinctive thus becomes even more so.
This article has examined how work and the requirements for its performance, as determined by legislation and by direction of Ionuț’s and Cami’s employer, permeate their lives in even small details. In this symposium, as in Ben Judah’s book, work is a recurring element in the narratives. At times, work is in the foreground; in other instances, it remains in the background as a natural precondition of the story. In an examination of the everyday, anything else would be strange. Work, or sometimes its absence, constitutes an essential part of most adults’ lives – spatially, temporally, economically, socially and as a source of identification. The example of Ionuț and Cami provides a concrete illustration of the significance of work in a person’s everyday. Reading the ‘Baloga’ chapter through a spatio-temporal lens helps draw attention to the law’s influence on work as a constituent element of the everyday.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the reviewer of this article for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts. The author is also grateful to Professor Azoulai, Professor Meakin and all participants in the seminars preceding this symposium, with particular thanks to Tereza Kanova and Judith Bauder for their invaluable inspiration and constructive discussions.
Data Availability
No datasets were used or generated in the preparation of this article.
Funding
This work received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing Interests
The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.
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