In the eyes of a growing segment of young Pakistanis, the workday starts when the rest of the country turns off the lights.
Most people in Lahore are asleep by 11 at night, but it is still early morning for Ahmed, who is busy getting ready for work. He bustles around, preparing tea, making sure his headset is charged, and signs on to a call queue that connects him with customers in Ohio and Texas during their lunch break. Mother is up making breakfast, and his younger siblings are getting ready for school by the time he’s done with his shift at seven in the morning. He sits down with them to eat; sometimes, he sleeps in a house that is awake before him.
This is the form of work for a relatively large and growing segment of Pakistan’s young population, not the working day their parents envisioned, but a job coordinated exclusively around another person’s work schedule. Call centres for American and British customers. Freelance websites with clients from various time zones expecting them to get a reply within the same day. Security guards on night duty. Hospital personnel working at night. Customer support for apps and platforms offering 24/7 assistance. It all needs to be done by an alert, conscious body while the rest of the social world is sleeping.
It’s an appealing proposition, and it’s primarily a monetary one. Shift work and jobs overseas are also often better-paying than day-shift jobs in the local area, sometimes much better-paying, because they are tied – directly or indirectly – to dollar or pound economics rather than local wage floors. The math doesn’t add up for a college young adult seeking to pay their own tuition, or for a recent graduate financing a family. A night shift can offer a month’s worth of pay for what a similar job in this area would cost in two months.
However, the numbers don’t cover the body’s repayment. Sleep researchers have long observed that when people sleep when they’re supposed to be awake, and they work when they’re supposed to be asleep, it has real physiological consequences, such as poor digestion, poor immunity, increased anxiety and depression, and a general sense of fraying that is not apparent at first instance but compounds over time. There’s also the social cost, which is more subtle but not any less tangible. When you’re stuck at home, while your friends are out having fun, friendships dwindle. Bridges are strained when one spouse is awake on a different day from the other.
Safety is also a concern, especially for young women in this profession. Commuting home at dusk or being picked up by a company van in the middle of the night is a risk profile that is different from a nine-to-five job, and it influences whether families are willing to let their daughters have these jobs or whether girls have them at all, since the pay is worth the risk.
The night economy reflects the limited opportunities available during the day. Not many young Pakistani people prefer to work at night; it’s where the money is, where foreign clients pay in currencies more valuable than local ones, and where the formal economy during the day just hasn’t been able to create enough well-paying entry-level jobs. The night shift, as such, is not some kind of anomaly in the labour market; it is a pretty good inversion, except that it is illuminated by the glow of the monitor, instead of the light of day, and it is operating on a clock that would be set in someone else’s morning.
Well, that’s something I’m getting used to, Ahmed says, mostly. What he’s not accustomed to is the quiet – being the only person awake in a house that, in a few hours, will be buzzing with sounds he can’t handle.