Control,camaraderie and resistance: Precarious work and organisation in hospitality

Introduction

In February 2018, casual dining chain, TGI Fridays, introduced a new tipping procedure which reallocated 40% of waiting staffs’ tips paid via card to workers in the kitchen. This move stripped waiting staff of a significant portion of their earnings and simultaneously utilised the tipping regime to top up the low pay offered to kitchen staff; strategically, it also represented a divide and rule tactic aimed at opposing the interests of back of house and front of house workers. By May 2018, TGI Fridays workers in two outlets had engaged in their first ever strike as members of Unite. This was a strike led predominantly by young women in precarious low-waged work in an overwhelmingly un-unionised industry. Their struggle coincided with similar campaigns taking place at McDonald’s and Wetherspoons and culminated in joint action, along with Uber/UberEats and Deliveroo workers in October 2018, representing a broad range of unions, campaigns and organisational approaches (Cant 2018). This article provides a brief account of a years’ worth of research as a hospitality worker, activist and member of Unite’s London-based Bar and Restaurant workers branch throughout this period.

What follows is an insiders’ ethnography in the form of a ‘workers’ inquiry’, drawing on a tradition from Marx to the Italian workerists of the 1960s onwards (Haider & Mohandesi 2013; Woodcock 2014) as well as contemporary examples (Murray 2014; Woodcock 2017). In order to distinguish it from mere participant observation or a close-at-hand longitudinal methodology, this approach specifically utilises an analysis of class composition, a discourse synonymous with workerism, which concentrates on the behaviour and structure of workers within specific processes of production (Wright 2017), examining the relationship between class composition and working-class organisation (Cleaver 2000). The research itself took place between October 2017 and September 2018 and was in large part situated among members of Unite’s Bar and Restaurant workers branch, many of whom were organising at TGI Fridays. It also involved continual dialogue and observations alongside other hospitality workers, organisers and activists more broadly, as well as within the cinema bar and restaurant where I worked. It formed a process of simultaneous research and action intent on sharing and reflecting experiences and struggles in order to better understand and attempt to facilitate collective organisation. The primary focus of this inquiry involved customer-facing front of house hospitality work, meaning that the conditions of work analysed throughout are those that involve direct interaction with customers as an integral component of the labour process. This will first involve addressing the affective, communicative or emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) of customer service work. Second, it will address the standardised, controlled and material aspects of the work that serve to drive the precarious conditions of employment. Finally, the social nature of the work and working environment will be explored, specifically with regard to workers’ collective resistance, using the TGI Fridays strike as a key example.

Affective labour and customer service work

For many, the emotional, communicative or affective labour involved in manufacturing the customer service experience may seem fairly intangible in terms of the value it creates. However, a customer service worker’s smile, connection with others and personality forms an intrinsic part of the commodity on sale. Hospitality worker adverts often make this point explicit. For example, McDonald’s (2018) require ‘A genuine smile and an ability to connect with others’, while TGI Fridays request ‘showmanship, witty stories, magic tricks and flair’ (TGI Fridays 2018). Both stress the importance of personality and sociability. As has been noted elsewhere, personality in this instance is clearly seen to add value to a product or service, therefore increasing its worth as an aspect of labour power (Cremin 2003). For hospitality workers, the greater part that personal interaction and communication plays in the customer service experience, the greater the value created by the emotional labour required.

A complex picture emerges of workers’ relationship to hospitality work. While some may seek enjoyment from the social nature of the job, or develop an interest in the skills required (cocktail making or latte art, for example), this enthusiasm becomes functional to the exploitative conditions of employment and the surplus value they create, as workers are stretched to provide this labour under difficult conditions for low pay. Being short staffed and overworked, as well as mentally and physically drained after shifts, were common complaints from workers. Just as workers are alienated from their physical labour, so too from their emotional labour (Brook 2009; Hochschild 1983).

In addition, customer abuse often acts to relieve workers of many assumptions about the personable nature of the labour process. Many workers reported customer, as well as managerial, abuse as regular occurrences in one form or another. This abuse can often take the form of sexual harassment, which, as Unite’s Not on the Menu survey demonstrated, is rife within the industry (Topping 2018). As others have pointed out too, within many hospitality workplaces ‘value is produced in affective labour through gender in ways which rely upon the heterosexual matrix of desire’ (Coffey et al. 2018: 741). Workers also reflected upon the fact that when they did report customer abuse, customers were often pandered to by management in order to keep them happy. This plays into the notion that the customer is ‘king’, or ‘the customer is always right’, as the saying goes. Customers’ expectations and concomitant scrutiny of workers can operate as a disciplinary method, ensuring compliance; the surveillance provided by customers, including through forums such as Tripadvisor, FourSquare and Google Reviews, acts as modern panopticons for the hospitality worker, the customer assuming a position in a ‘machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it’ (Foucault 1991: 201). While they may be the consumer of the ‘genuine connection’ produced by hospitality workers, customer sovereignty is often revealed as a myth (Korczynski 2003), especially when they are challenged, or when their requests cannot be fulfilled. The ‘genuine connection’, as well as the ‘lovingly prepared’ food and drink on offer, all operate as part of what Fisher (2009) described as capitalism’s PR-Production. In truth, large parts of the labour process are often standardised, strictly controlled, rushed and performed under pressure.

Control, resistance and precarious work

Du Gay and Salaman (1992) suggested bureaucratic forms of control are too oppressive and alienating to encourage the quality service customers expect. However, the vision of a horizontally organised workplace, where the crew or teams pull together to satisfy the will of the customer, seems quite stretched from my research. While customer-facing hospitality work cannot be atomised and scientifically managed in the Taylorist manner envisaged of industrial production lines, the ‘separation of conception from execution’ (Braverman 1974: 114) in the labour process often prevails, and the very material interests of stock and labour costs are managed in highly controlled and formulated ways.

Although many participants and co-workers expressed an appetite for flexibility in their work, something with which union organisers often struggled to grasp, the vast majority of hospitality workers also noted how this flexibility is captured and exploited by management. As standard procedure in many hospitality workplaces, total labour costs (i.e. wages) are calculated and set so that it must not exceed a specific percentage of total sales revenues; these targets may be set for the month, week or even by the day. The level of reactivity expected between labour cost and total sales, and the burden placed on managers to achieve it, is palpable, and managers’ bonuses often depend on these figures. Zero-hour and low-hour contracts mean that when this total labour cost to sales ratio is falling in favour of the wage bill, management will seek to be as reactive to this as possible and reduce staffing levels accordingly. Many workers are explicitly aware of this, as well as the tactics managers employ: ‘to hit your bonus structure often means stealing money from your staff by clocking their hours back so that you hit labour targets’ (restaurant worker interview, June 2018).

My observations within the hospitality sector found food and drink recipes prepared to strict stipulations and measurements, as well as sophisticated point of sale systems which collected and calculated precise data for stock control, allowing management to undertake close supervision. This in itself has certain similarities with the principles of Taylor’s (1919) scientific management, gathering together traditional workers’ knowledge and ‘reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae’ (p. 36). Many parts of the personality or human element of the service encounter can often be standardised too, in an effort to ensure quality (Warhurst & Thompson 1998). Conversations and interviews with other bar and restaurant workers would often reveal the feelings of infantilisation and frustration this lack of agency would elicit, some comparing it to feeling like being back at school.

Given that Marx (1976) argued, ‘The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist’, there are many inventive ways hospitality workers rob the capitalist and express a level of agency: wasting time when unobserved, elongating smoking breaks or time away from work and so forth are all regular occurrences (p. 342). Whether these acts can incubate a more general refusal of the conditions of the work is open to doubt. However, the common practice and observation appears at least to represent a certain level of collective understanding among workers.

Camaraderie and collectivity

The decline of the Fordist mass worker is often directly connected to the idea that modern, tenuously employed workers lack the occupational and class identities that bound unionised workers together in the past (Holgate 2013). Taken further, precarious workers have been characterised as those in ‘careerless jobs, without traditions of social memory, a feeling they belong to an occupational community steeped in stable practices, codes of ethics and norms of behaviour, reciprocity and fraternity’ (Standing 2011: 14). While much of this may be true in terms of unionisation and fragmented workplaces, Standing’s (2011) assumption about the lack of norms of behaviour and reciprocity within precarious workers’ occupational communities is problematic. A very different picture emerged among the hospitality workers involved in this research.

The majority of my co-workers and participants regularly spoke about their colleagues as their friends. Some even described them as their family, in an interesting shopfloor mirroring of the ‘the Friday’s Family’ jargon promoted by TGI Fridays management. Nearly all the hospitality workers who participated in the research spoke about how their workmates quickly became their significant social circle: ‘you’re together from the morning until the night, you’re on a different schedule to anyone that works in an office or has a normal job’ (restaurant worker interview, June 2018). In addition, many were living, or had lived, in shared accommodation with other hospitality workers. What emerges could be seen as a specific form of collective habitus, which, as Bourdieu (1992) outlined, results from a homogeneity of conditions that enables certain practices to be harmonised without prior calculation. What became clear is that the social ties between workers appeared to result in the normalisation of practices that were vital to the labour process. Workers’ often told stories about staying late, picking up shifts and going the extra mile, essentially increasing their work effort in a manner that only increased the exploitation of their labour. Without any tangible immediate benefits to the workers involved, how does this seemingly novel form of ‘manufactured consent’ (Burawoy 1979) operate? As one worker articulated, ‘you feel you owe your colleagues something, not management, but you definitely don’t want to screw over your colleagues’ (restaurant worker interview, June 2018). This feeling is clearly a valuable asset to management; just as the camaraderie among colleagues often serves to help create the illusive friendly customer service environment that employers require, managers will encourage their ‘family’, ‘team’, or ‘crew’ members to pull together in specific ways. Co-workers will sometimes compete to show their knowledge and ability. An obvious example of this is in the flair which is often required, and demonstrated, by bartenders. Much of the training in these skills, such as learning cocktail recipes, takes place in workers’ free time and outside of paid work. Another distinct way in which this camaraderie appears to operate is as a buffer against customer and managerial abuse, communally internalising and, therefore, containing grievances. Workers often appeared to seek comfort by expressing their anger or upset among each other at instances of being belittled or abused, frustrated and hurt, representing what others have described as a community of coping, common among customer service workers (Korczynski 2003). In summary, the camaraderie and sociality of communities of workers within hospitality work can act as a vital resource to employers in a largely low-paid, precarious and difficult sector. It ensures the smooth running of shifts, can create friendly atmospheres even under considerable strain and can drive enthusiasm in the product, as well as helping to contain and deflect abuse. But what if it were different? What if this resource of workers’ exploitation was a resource of solidarity and resistance?

Hospitality workers on strike: lessons from TGI Fridays

I think it’s just the absolute fire attitude of my colleagues: they’re hired because of our passion and personality and I think they’ve lost a lot over the last five years. They’ve lost time and a half, they’ve lost shift meals, they’ve lost even breaks on shift. (Restaurant worker interview, June 2018)

This quote is illustrative of the feelings expressed among many of the TGI Fridays strikers, as well as other hospitality workers who were attempting to organise in their workplaces. What emerged from these conversations and interviews was just how workplace communities of coping and camaraderie have acted as nascent forms of collective self-organisation and, in the face of mounting grievances, have been mobilised into communities of solidarity. For the TGI Fridays workers, it appeared that their sociability and camaraderie had initially, like for so many other hospitality workers, been so absorbed as a functional element in workers’ own exploitative conditions of employment, and a profitable resource for management. However, it was the outgoing, personable and social nature demanded of TGI Fridays employees, which consequently served as tools for collective self-organisation. In contradiction to some characterisations of low-waged precarious workers (Standing 2011), what this research found was a distinct kind of workplace-based occupational community among TGI Fridays workers, as well as a depth of fraternity in the solidarity shown by those taking strike action.

The camaraderie of this community of workers at TGI Fridays, serving as a nascent basis for collective struggle, was mobilised as a result of mounting grievances into a tangible force in advance of union membership. Methods of communicating among colleagues and establishing links store to store were processes that were led from the bottom up, utilising social media to establish communication among workers across various sites (Townsend 2019). What was clear was that, as TGI Fridays workers joined the Bar and Restaurant workers branch of Unite, they were intent on organising towards strike action. The push towards combative action came from the workers themselves, and rather than union recruitment being the central focus, workers’ grievances were at the forefront of the campaign. This naturally grew membership as the intent to take action was demonstrated, supporting the claim that strikes facilitate union recruitment (Hodder et al. 2017).

There were definitely certain tensions between the workers and union officials, representing a more intrinsic contradiction (Darlington & Upchurch 2011), and workplace activists were critical in pushing the union into backing a ballot for strike action. What the union provided was the knowledge, ability and means for workers to challenge management; managers who were often very ill informed on employment law themselves, as was regularly reported to be the case by other hospitality workers. For younger precarious workers with minimal knowledge of unions, their initial experience of agency within union campaigns can be vital. As others have noted, unions may adopt a higher level of centralised control over the campaigns of young workers, seeing them as ‘blank slates’, in order to socialise them into union structures (Hodder et al. 2018). The danger here is the tendency to reproduce existing institutions by socialising younger workers, rather than empowering them to enable renewal (Tapia & Turner 2018). Conversations with union organisers reflected on some of the past failures of organisation within the hospitality sector, where the union has appeared as an external institution to workers. In addition to this, conversations with workers often reflected on the lack of agency they felt within union campaigns. In this instance at TGI Fridays, where the union equipped workers with the tools for further self-organisation, strike action was achieved in what was initially an almost entirely un-unionised workplace. What became apparent is that in an industry where workers regularly experience abuse, precarity and a lack of respect in their work, collective struggle must inevitably articulate itself as an expression of workers autonomy in a push back at the ‘frontier of control’ (Goodrich 1975).

Conclusion

The self-organisation that led to the TGI Fridays strikes, as well as organisation elsewhere within the hospitality industry, such as at Picturehouse, McDonald’s and Wetherspoons, represents small pockets of collective struggle. In such a diverse sector, it is very difficult to draw generalisations from specific cases for the composition of workers and the labour process itself can differ vastly, for instance, between a fast-food restaurant and a late-night bar. Nonetheless and in terms of workers’ organisation within the hospitality sector, the dispersed nature of workplaces as well as fragmented shift patterns and anti-union practices appeared to be common hurdles faced. Likewise, divisions within the workforce along various grounds can be utilised by employers to undermine collective solidarity. However, by taking an approach which focuses both on workers, as well as the conditions of work and the labour process, we can begin to see how these features can begin to inform the generation of certain forms of organisation. The specific demands of affective or emotional labour, the social nature of the workplace, as well as the operationalisation of control and precarity in work, can elucidate this. This article has pointed towards some significant communally practiced forms of coping, engaging and resisting within the labour process, as well as highlighting how workers’ camaraderie and sociability is utilised in the creation of surplus value. Furthermore, as control and precarity advance, such as in the case at TGI Fridays, this article has shown how this very camaraderie and community can serve as the basis of workers’ collective solidarity, struggle and combative organisation.