The rise of on-demand platform work punctuates a decades-long shift from standard employment relations toward contingent work. Without employment protections or stable temporal or spatial boundaries, platform workers shoulder more risk. Yet other workers have long faced temporal and spatial instability at work. How do time and space matter for work experience, and for inequality?

My book project, Stretched Thin: Weathering Unstable Work in Urban and Rural America, draws on 120 interviews and follow-up research with agricultural and oilfield workers in Texas and adjuncts and on-demand delivery workers in New York City. Across these “old” and “new” kinds of work and rural and urban landscapes, workers do not know when, for how long, or where they will have work. I call this “positional uncertainty”—repurposing an oilfield term for the inability to pinpoint precisely where one is at any given point in time in the drilling process. The project identifies the short- and long-term consequences of conflicts between the rhythms, plans, and pathways of workers’ lives and the temporal and spatial demands of their work, and how they actively maneuver these conflicts: working to get by, to bring meaning to the present, and to anticipate and move toward a coherent future.