What We Owe the Night Shift

She was not unusual. About one worker in six in this country does some of their regular hours between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.: nurses and cleaners and bakers, security guards and long-haul drivers, crane operators at the container port, the people who stock the supermarket shelves and sort the parcels and keep the servers cool.^* Elsewhere in this issue, my colleagues spend a night with a village baker, with hospital porters and their stubborn pagers, and with a port town whose council now meets after midnight. What strikes me, reading their stories, is how little of the night’s infrastructure was ever designed. Nearly all of it is improvised, by night workers themselves, out of whatever the day left behind.

A city built for daylight

Consider transport. Last month I rode the N4 night bus in Halbridge, from the container port to the Infirmary and back, between midnight and five. It comes once an hour. Its passengers that night included two cleaners finishing at an office tower, a security guard with a thermos, three nurses, a man on his way to the fish market, and a young woman in a high-visibility vest who fell asleep before we had left the depot and was woken, very gently, by the driver at her stop. The driver, Gerrit Haas, has driven nights for 14 years. He knows most of his regulars by name and some by their sandwiches.2 “The day buses carry commuters,” he told me. “I carry the people who make commuting possible.” If he runs late, they miss the start of a shift. If he runs early, somebody waits 59 minutes in the dark.

Consider food. At my mother’s hospital the canteen closed at eight in the evening and reopened at seven in the morning, so that for 11 hours the only hot food available to the people keeping the building alive came from a vending machine on the ground floor that took exact change.3 Night workers eat at the wrong times and often eat badly—not out of ignorance but because the only places open at three in the morning were built for drunks and truckers. My mother carried a cold supper in a plastic box for 28 years and ate it standing up at the nurses’ station, usually around three, usually in four or five bites between call bells.

Consider health, which is the hardest part to write about without sounding alarmist. The body is not indifferent to the hour. People who work nights for many years run higher risks of sleep disorders, digestive trouble, and metabolic and heart disease, and the risks climb with the number of years and the irregularity of the schedule.^† None of this is news to the workers. What is striking is how little of it has been translated into the way their lives are organized: schedules that rotate forward instead of lurching back and forth, protected sleep, proper light in break rooms, health checks timed to when people are actually awake.

The courtesy we forget

And consider manners, which is where the night shift is most completely forgotten, because manners are where a society keeps the assumptions it has never bothered to write down. We telephone at two in the afternoon. We schedule school meetings, doctors’ appointments, deliveries, and roadworks for the hours that suit the majority, and we treat the night worker who asks for something different as difficult. We say “good morning” to a woman on her way to bed. Our noise laws protect sleep only when it happens at night. Nobody designed that rule to exclude my mother. It simply never occurred to anyone that she existed.

I want to resist, though, the temptation to turn the night shift into a population of victims. Many night workers chose it and would choose it again. My mother liked nights. She liked the quiet of the wards at four, the competence of a small team trusted to get on with it, the absence of managers. “No one in a suit after ten,” she used to say, as though describing a climate. Gerrit prefers the night routes because nobody shouts at him. There is a culture to the night—a solidarity, a dry humor, a set of shared understandings about who needs a lift and who needs to be left alone—and the night workers I talked to were more often proud of it than sorry for themselves. What we owe them is not pity. It is design.

There is also an uncomfortable fact about who makes the night shift. Some of it is unavoidable. Babies are born at three in the morning, ships dock when the tide allows, and fevers do not keep office hours. But a growing share of the night economy exists because the rest of us want things at odd hours and see no reason we shouldn’t have them. Every time I order something at midnight to arrive by noon, I am, in a small way, hiring someone to be awake. The convenience is mine; the cost is theirs. If our appetites built the night, it seems only fair that our cities should build for it.

What we could do

None of this requires anything very radical. Night buses could run every 20 minutes rather than every hour, on routes drawn around hospitals, depots, and ports rather than around nightclubs. Workplaces that run all night could keep a canteen open all night. Clinics, banks, and public offices could hold one evening a week that begins after day sleepers wake. Noise rules could let a registered day sleeper ask for the same protection at noon that everyone else takes for granted at midnight; Westmere tried a version of this in 2019, for 63 households, and reports no great hardship to anyone. And public life could meet people where they are, as the port town in this issue discovered when it moved its council meetings past midnight and watched attendance triple.

The rest is courtesy, and courtesy costs nothing but attention. Ask a new acquaintance when they sleep before you ask when you can call. Learn which of your neighbors work nights, and knock softly, or not at all. Notice who was awake so that the shelves were full and the floors were clean and the bus was waiting, and understand that the ease of your morning was made, in large part, out of someone else’s night.

My mother retired nine years ago. She sleeps at night now, mostly, though she still wakes at three, as if to check on someone. The card from our front door lives in a kitchen drawer, its lamination gone cloudy. I asked her recently whether she had minded, all those years, being wished good morning on her way to bed. She thought about it. “Not really,” she said. “I always said good night. Most people didn’t hear it.” Then, after a moment: “The ones who did always said it back.”