Abstract
In Nightshift NYC authors Russell Leigh Sharman and Cheryl Harris Sharman introduce their readers to a subterranean world where working-class heroes toil from dusk until dawn in the all-night diners, subway terminals, bodegas, and convenience stores of New York, the city that never sleeps. In the midnight hour, immigrant laborers from all over the world—Bangladesh, Egypt, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, the Dominican Republic—flip cheeseburgers in Brooklyn, check passports at JFK International Airport, sweep the concourse of Pennsylvania Station, and guard the apartment dwellers of Upper West Side high-rises. Nurses keep constant vigil over newborn babies sleeping in the neonatal intensive care units of local hospitals. Cabdrivers drive the streets of Manhattan in search of passengers. Outreach volunteers distribute winter coats to the city’s vulnerable homeless population.
In a literary style reminiscent of that of the great Chicago chronicler Studs Terkel, Nightshift NYC catalogues the personal experiences of these sleep-deprived workers, recording their tales of the city at night. Taken together, these nocturnal slices of life reveal the dark underbelly of the 24/7 postindustrial economy, a world of nighttime service employment in which midtown cleaning crews, late-night food deliverymen, and early morning train operators keep the city’s wheels of global commerce chugging along. On Sunday nights at the Hunts Point Market in the South Bronx, fishermen and their vendors lift piles of fluke, porgies, and tuna with metal hooks dripping with blood and ice. Deckhands escort late-evening commuters riding the Staten Island Ferry across the Upper Bay. The touching oral narratives of these hardworking immigrants and other lonely blue-collar characters, many of whom work the nightshift to support relatives still residing in their countries of origin, are accompanied by stunningly reproduced photographs of the urban spaces where nightshift work takes place: container ships, gentlemen’s clubs, taco stalls, bakeries, 24-hour delis and Laundromats.
As the authors illustrate, the demands of these nocturnal jobs take a severe emotional and physical toll on their workers. Many live under the same roof with spouses and children they rarely see while awake; others give up personal relationships with family and friends altogether. Nightshift work disturbs the human body’s natural circadian rhythms which control everything from blood pressure and respiratory function to urine excretion and hormone secretion. In addition to the obvious stresses of working in isolation while the rest of the city slumbers, nocturnal workers often suffer from severe insomnia during the daytime, which further contributes to their overall sleep deprivation. A lack of sleep leads to workplace fatigue, decreased concentration levels, and short-term memory loss, all of which may account for a variety of otherwise preventable occupational errors and accidents that regularly occur on the nightshift.
At times writing beautifully, Russell Sharman and Cheryl Sharman give their readers a real flavor for the pungent grittiness and numbing tedium of the city’s most thankless and demeaning nightshift jobs; however, the maintenance of these atmospherics sometimes prevents the authors from reporting on urban workplaces that lack the requisite grimy residue of proletarian authenticity. For example, the global postindustrial economy employs untold numbers of white-collar workers in New York who endure the same sleepless nights as cabdrivers and janitors: they include call-center operators, legal proofreaders, journalists, Web sites managers, and other IT specialists. Yet these similarly melatonin-deficient workers go ignored by the authors, presumably because an over-caffeinated paralegal squinting over a transcript in an air-conditioned conference room does not provide the same photo-op as an apron-clad waitress in a neon-lit, greasy-spoon diner. Likewise, late-evening shift workers in New York’s world-famous entertainment service industry—bartenders, cocktail servers, bouncers, DJs, musicians—remain absent from Sharman and Sharman’s ethnographic landscape.
Meanwhile, the authors direct a seemingly limitless excess of moral outrage toward the city’s nightlife glamour zones and their affluent patrons. These barhopping consumers are alternatively caricatured in the book as either sexually depraved floozies stumbling through the meatpacking district wearing stiletto heels and little else or as hyperaggressive, drunken thugs who harass food vendors and vomit in public. In bouts of finger-wagging that grow insufferable by the book’s final chapters, Sharman and Sharman demonize these nightclubbing thrill-seekers, perhaps as a means of augmenting the sacrifice and humility endured by the blue-collar vendors who serve them chicken kebabs and soft pretzels at night’s end.
This is a shame, because by reducing these nightlife revelers to little more than stereotypes of ginned-up lounge lizards and bimbos, the authors miss an important opportunity to evaluate seriously the interconnectivity among participants in the city’s nocturnal ecology. This is a problem throughout the book: as readers we are introduced to the intimate lives of nurses but not patients, boatmen but not commuters, cabbies but not passengers, short-order cooks but not diners, airport personnel but not international travelers. The book needed more details about exactly who (besides besotted party girls and their boorish dates, of course) patronizes late-night eateries and hails taxis at four in the morning, and rides the Staten Island Ferry back from Manhattan at daybreak. Nevertheless, Sharman and Sharman have done an exceptional job profiling the men and women who bravely have traveled from all corners of the globe to work the nightshift in New York City, in search of the American Dream.