Abstract
This article develops concepts of moral economy to show how workers’ notions of justice and practices of social reciprocity contribute to the structural conditions and value relations of precarious service employment. The article draws on a project which interviewed 75 young workers employed in the retail, hospitality and call-centre industry, exploring the normative ideas and social relationships that shape how young workers’ negotiate their conditions. Data shows that young workers draw on lay definitions of fairness, entitlement and obligation, to make critical and reflexive moral evaluations of their workplaces, and form moral communities enacted through everyday social reciprocity. Lay moralities are constitutive of the social relations of labour and processes of exploitation in the service economy, because they determine the social legitimacy of working schedules and wages, and because they are the basis for young people’s reflexive evaluation of their position as workers.
Introduction
This article explores the lay moralities of young interactive service workers, or the definitions of fairness, moral responsibility and right conduct through which they negotiate the social relations of service labour and their position as precariously employed and poorly remunerated workers. With this, the article draws on concepts of moral economy (Bolton and Laaser, 2013; Sayer, 2000, 2005, 2007; Scott, 1976) to make new contributions to studies of youth, work and service employment. Young people’s position as workers is most often approached in terms of ‘youth transitions’ – or biographical pathways through the labour market (e.g. MacDonald, 2011; Roberts, 1968) – and while researchers often make political critiques of issues such as youth unemployment and precarity, the normativities that young workers themselves draw upon to make sense of work remain unexplored. Normative matters are also left unexamined in the emerging literature about young people and service labour (Bessen-Cassino, 2014; Coffey et al., 2018; Farrugia et al., 2018, 2024), and young workers are sometimes described in research as an easily exploitable labour force due to an individualised and depoliticised attitude towards work (Cote, 2014). In contrast, through concepts of moral economy, this article shows that young service workers are engaged in reflexive moral evaluations of the social relations of their work and behave as subjects and agents of moral entitlement, obligation and responsibility. These moral evaluations underpin practices of social reciprocity that they use to negotiate and survive the exigencies of precarious work, such as irregular shift schedules, unpredictable working hours and low wages. However, these evaluative and reciprocal practices are also constitutive of the political economy of service work, representing ongoing and sometimes uneasy moral compromises with the precarity and exploitation of the service economy. Examining how these evaluations and compromises take place, the article therefore shows that notions of justice and practices of social reciprocity contribute to the structural conditions and value relations of precarious service employment.
To do this, the article draws on a study of young people performing customer-facing work in three low-wage service industries: retail, hospitality and the call-centre industry. The aim of this project was to explore how young workers negotiated their status and conditions in the context of limited formal protections. Research questions asked about: 1) workers’ definitions of fair treatment; 2) workers’ practices in negotiating their conditions; 3) relationships of belonging, solidary and exclusion amongst workers; and 4) how these social relationships impact on everyday conditions. With these questions, the project was concerned to go beyond a focus on workers’ increasingly limited legal entitlements to find out how everyday working conditions are shaped by the informal social dynamics of the workplace. Consistent with established literature in this area (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007; Strangleman, 2012) young workers are not guided by a sense of collective identification with an industry or a social class. However, discussing these issues with young workers showed that their expectations and practices are shaped by a series of implicit normative commitments and definitions of just treatment enacted through everyday social relationships, and that these commitments and informal relational practices have a significant material impact upon their working lives. They are guided by feelings of entitlement and responsibility, and definitions of decent social relations amongst workers and between workers and employers. These are enacted in practices of social reciprocity that are shaped in critical ways by the low status of their jobs, the precarious and exploitative conditions they work in, and the subsistence needs of young workers specifically. The concept of moral economy provides a way of theorising this finding by drawing attention to the constitutive role of everyday moral judgements in economic relations (Sayer, 2005) and showing how these contribute to the material conditions of workers’ lives, including the necessity of work for subsistence and wellbeing (Scott, 1976), the shifting exigencies of wages and working conditions in precarious employment, and the moral attributions enacted through exploitation.
The article begins by sketching the field of research on young people and contemporary service work and making the case for moral economy as an approach to young service workers. It argues that the concept of moral economy makes new contributions to studies of youth and service labour by situating moral evaluation enacted through social reciprocity as constitutive of the social relations of labour and exploitation in the service economy. The article then describes the design and methodological approach of the research project that underpins this article, which was a qualitative, interview-based project with 75 young workers in retail, hospitality and the call-centre industry carried out in Australia. Empirically, the article shows that because service employment exposes young people to interactions in which they are treated as morally inferior, basic and routine civility is attributed with a tremendous moral significance such that workers are willing to make significant compromises on their material conditions in return for a working situation in which they are offered basic recognition and respect. The article then examines young people’s judgements of fair financial compensation for work, showing that these are based on notions of justice that come from an evaluation of their own needs as young workers, social comparisons with other workers, and judgements about service labour as necessarily low status work. The article also explores practices that young workers use to support one another in managing the exigencies of precarious work, showing that they act on feelings of obligation and entitlement within a moral community of other workers, but act on these through reciprocal practices that ultimately contribute to their exploitation by extracting extra effort at work and legitimising precarious conditions generally. In this, the article situates young people’s forms of moral reasoning and social reciprocity as aspects of the social relations and working conditions of service labour specifically, emerging from reflexive but highly circumscribed evaluations of the structural conditions they face in relation to their desires for wellbeing and the role of service work in their overall biographical trajectories.
Young workers and the moral economy of service labour
In the most dominant framework used to study young people and work – that of ‘youth transitions’ – employment in the low-wage service economy is understood as representative of the increasing preponderance of ‘lousy jobs’ that make young people’s biographical movement into adulthood more precarious (Goos and Manning, 2007; Jones and Wallace, 1992; MacDonald, 2011; Roberts et al., 1994). While influential, the transitions framework has been subject to a wide range of critiques (Woodman and Wyn, 2015; Wyn and White, 1997), including that it ignores the role of young people as workers (i.e. as value-producing subjects) and broader questions of labour and political economy (Farrugia, 2021a, 2021b; Sukarieh and Tannock, 2016; Yates, 2023). Research on youth and service employment has been an important part of these discussions, exploring how youth identities are enacted as part of the value relations of service labour (Bessen-Cassino, 2014; Farrugia, 2018). However youth have also been described as a fluid and easily exploitable labour force because they see service work as a temporary or ‘stopgap’ part of their working biography (Tannock, 2001). Existing literature also implies that young workers’ relationships with one another facilitate their exploitation, because they experience the service workplace partly as a realm of casual socialisation rather than labour as such (Bessen-Cassino, 2014).
Research about how young workers themselves make sense of their place within political economic arrangements is extremely limited, despite significant normatively driven critique from researchers. Instead, there is a tendency in this field to characterise young people as consenting to precarious and exploitative working conditions as a result of depoliticised attitudes towards work (Cote, 2014, and see France and Threadgold, 2016 for a critique of this tendency). Young people are here described as suffering from an ‘epistemological fallacy’ in that they adopt individualised orientations towards social and structural issues (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007). Researchers have been critical of the role of neoliberal discourses and exploitative labour arrangements, but have tended to compare these to the social arrangements in place to support working-class youth during the heyday of the post-war welfare state, rather than to the normative orientations of young workers (for example Furlong and Cartmel, 2007; Roberts, 2012, and see Farrugia 2021a, 2021b for a critique). This is a significant omission, because normative or moral sentiments are constitutive of social and economic relations and processes of exploitation, for example in the case of definitions of justice or proper conduct amongst people in unequal economic positions (Scott, 1976). In other words, lay moral sentiments must be included in research that wishes to interrogate structures of precarity: ‘[c]ritiques of domination, exploitation, misrecognition, abuse and the like imply notions of well-being, equal moral worth and common capacities for flourishing and suffering’ (Sayer, 2007: 262). The concept of moral economy is designed to theorise the constitutive role that moral sentiments play in social and economic arrangements, including in the hierarchies that facilitate workers’ exploitation.
Moral economy
A moral economy perspective originated in the work of authors such as Thompson (1971) and Scott (1976) as a way of understanding how peasants and workers responded to established and changing forms of labour exploitation, including the extraction of agricultural surplus and labour from peasants in pre-capitalist economies, and the imposition of increasingly stringent techniques of market discipline and exploitation on what was to eventually become the capitalist working class. This early work emphasised that the legitimacy of economic arrangements was established not according to abstract political ideologies, but through socially embedded and relationally enacted definitions of ‘decent social relations’ (Scott, 1976: 41) – moral sentiments, entitlements and obligations enacted through reciprocal but highly unequal relations amongst workers and between workers and landowners or capitalists. These socially embedded ‘lay moralities’ (Bolton and Laaser, 2013) are theorised as constitutive of political economic arrangements, interacting in critical ways with structures of exploitation and value relations. However, they also reflect the material conditions that workers confront, and the shared interests and needs that emerge from these conditions.
For example, Scott’s (1976) work in agrarian contexts described a ‘subsistence ethic’, in which definitions of economic justice were based first and foremost on material need, and in which arrangements were regarded as unjust when they did not meet subsistence requirements that varied according to (for example) family size. This reflected the very real risk of starvation that agrarian peasants confronted, which operated as the key touchstone for assessments of justice. According to the subsistence ethic, objectively exploitative arrangements were regarded as just so long as they came with the guarantee of a certain level of material subsistence that would be maintained regardless of the size of a harvest or fluctuations in the market for agricultural goods. This was accompanied by reciprocal practices which required peasants to support one another in an ongoing (if sometimes contested) give and take, and in which landowners were required to use some of the surplus they expropriated to support workers and peasant communities in times of need. This normative and structural context gave rise to socially embedded definitions of ‘fair value’ which may be highly exploitative, but which also underpinned resistance to shifting economic arrangements that threatened the subsistence ethic (such as market-driven commodification). As in this example, moral economy therefore offers a theory of exploitation that encompasses the ‘relational and exchange quality of social relations, the shared human needs that social actors expect. . .[and] the actual notions of “fair value” that prevail’ (Scott, 1976: 165).
More recent perspectives have developed in particular through the writing of Andrew Sayer and those engaging with his work (Bolton and Laaser, 2013; Galam, 2019; Laaser, 2016; Sayer, 2000, 2005, 2007), influenced by Sayer’s critical engagement with Bourdieusian social theory and critical realism. This work continues the emphasis on moralities as constitutive of, rather than separate from, economic structures, but adds new concepts and lays more emphasis on workers’ reflexive assessments and evaluative practices. The emphasis in the work of Sayer and others is less on bare survival, and more on happiness and personal flourishing pursued as an aspect of reflexively managed biographical life projects. Workers’ lay moralities are theorised as definitions of fairness and appropriate behaviour, responsibility and obligation, and issues of respect and social or anti-social practices. Workers themselves are regarded as engaged in an informal, everyday and reflexive moral evaluation of their situation according to these lay moralities and in relation to their own desires for wellbeing and flourishing. In these reflexive evaluations, workers compare their situations with normative expectations, desires for wellbeing, personal aspirations, the situations of comparable others, and expectations about what they owe and are owed by socially situated others. These lay moralities are theorised as constitutive of the everyday encounters, social relations and political economic arrangements of labour. They are enacted in what has been described as ‘moral communities’, or bonds of solidarity and mutual respect that form amongst workers and that are sometimes strengthened by working arrangements that impinge on workers’ wellbeing (Laaser, 2016). Lay moralities also extend to property relations, and are part of how exploitation is enacted and legitimised, for example when workers increase their efforts to avoid increasing the workload of others (Sayer, 2007). In this, Bolton and Laaser (2013) argue that a moral economy perspective connects the concerns of radical political economy – such as the social relations of value and exploitation – with the everyday relationality of contemporary working situations.
As well as ethnographies of peasant and working-class moralities cited above, concepts of moral economy have been used to study the working relationships of a diverse range of employment situations. These studies have tended to focus either on the moral bonds amongst workers, or on the role of moral obligations in exploitation processes. On the one hand, studies of special needs teachers (Bolton, 2020) and bank employees (Laaser, 2016) have emphasised the morally driven motivations behind performing certain kinds of difficult and low-status work, and the significance of community, mutuality and care for others in responding to unfair demands from employers (cf. Sanghera and Iliasov (2008) on the moral motivations of doctors). On the other, work with apprentice seafarers has shown that exploitation processes including unpaid labour are enacted as moral obligations to employers in a difficult and dangerous form of work (Galam, 2019). These studies have emphasised the constitutive role of moral obligation in employment hierarchies, and have also demonstrated that difficult working conditions create specific kinds of moral relationships enacted in everyday give and take and critical to the social legitimation of exploitation.
This article addresses both aspects of the issues raised in this empirical literature, that is the significance of morally driven social reciprocity, and the role of moral obligation in constituting exploitation processes. Throughout, the article will situate young workers as reflexive normative evaluators operating through tacit and socially embedded definitions of just conduct that are part of specific material configurations – employment conditions, value relations and exploitation processes. This includes how desires for wellbeing and everyday relationality are intertwined with and shaped by political economic arrangements and the disciplinary requirements of service labour. In this, it examines how justice, legitimacy, obligation and entitlement are defined and negotiated in everyday social reciprocity at work, arguing that reciprocal practices are both supportive of one another and constitutive of exploitation because they responsibilise workers for dealing with the consequences of precarious employment. It therefore situates the social relations of labour and exploitation as outcomes of moral evaluation and compromise. These moral evaluations are critical to future research aiming to interrogate how workers respond to the exigencies of precarious employment and the disciplinary requirements of service labour.
Research design and context
This project was carried out in Australia and funded by the Australian Research Council. Conditions in the Australian service economy are analogous to those in similar economies in the Global North such as the United Kingdom and the United States in that these workers are some of the most poorly remunerated and precariously employed in the economy generally. Participants were typically casually employed with variable shift times and limited formal entitlements. Casual workers are not entitled to paid time off work for any reason and employers can informally dismiss their staff at their discretion by simply no longer giving them shifts. However, wage rates in these industries are higher in Australia than in the United Kingdom or the United States, and tipping is not an expectation in industries such as hospitality (although neither will hospitality workers refuse tips). Some workers are also entitled to higher wages on weekends, public holidays and late at night. These ‘penalty rates’ are not universal, and have been challenged by employer groups and conservative governments, but they nevertheless remain a common public expectation. As I write this article in mid-2025 there are also significant public discussions about Australian ‘cost of living’ pressures. The price of basic groceries and housing has increased relative to stagnant wages, and discretionary spending in sectors such as retail and hospitality appears to have declined. These conditions should be borne in mind when reading workers’ own evaluations of their working situations below. The project received ethics clearance from Deakin University’s HREC (approval no. 2023-092) and all names used are pseudonyms.
This article analyses data drawn from interviews with 75 young workers aged between 18 and 28 years old conducted in 2023 – an age-range that reflects discussions in the sociology of youth concerning the lengthening of the youth period and the increasingly culturally ambiguous notion of ‘adulthood’ (Blatterer, 2007; Woodman and Wyn, 2015). Thirty-four participants were retail workers, 32 worked in hospitality and nine worked in call-centres. Forty-five participants were students. All worked in ‘front of house’ roles, in other words roles that involve interactions with customers such as table waiters, retail shop assistants or customer service call-centre operators (rather than chefs, warehouse workers or human resource managers). Forty-eight participants identified as women, 26 as men, and one as non-binary. The Australian service labour force is ethnically diverse, reflecting relatively high levels of migration and large numbers of students from overseas working in the service economy while studying in Australian universities. Reflecting this, 10 participants were from India and nine were from China or South-East Asia.
Interviews were semi-structured and conversational, open to participants’ spontaneous reflections and narratives about what mattered to them at work. They started with general questions about participants’ workplace (‘what is it like as a place to work?’) and covered their everyday working experiences, including how these accorded with their expectations about conditions and fair treatment. Interviews also covered participants’ social relationships and interactions with customers, other workers and managers or employers, their critical reflections on the social dynamics of their workplaces, and their aspirations for work now and in the future. Participants were specifically asked about the fairness or unfairness of different aspects of their jobs when this emerged as relevant to their narratives about their everyday working life, and they were also asked whether and how they responded when they felt they were being treated unfairly at work. Issues of fairness and unfairness also emerged spontaneously especially in discussions about working relationships, which revealed strong beliefs about moral entitlement and responsibility to others that were taken for granted but clearly articulated and widely held across the participant sample.
Interviews were analysed inductively according to established principles of thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Analysis found that young people’s moral attributions were related to the disciplinary requirements and material conditions of precarious service work, and the role that this played in their biography as young people. Rather than straightforward reflections of demographic or household characteristics (for example their level of education or class position), the key moral issues were shared amongst service workers performing similar kinds of labour, because they share experiences of moral degradation and precarious and unpredictable employment conditions. In other words, these are sentiments and evaluations that these workers hold in common due to the structural exigencies of their work. The analysis that follows is organised into three issues that emerged inductively as sites of moral evaluation, negotiation and compromise, analysed as part of the material conditions of precarious labour, the social relations of service workplaces, and the relationship between work and participants’ biographies as young workers. They include the moral significance of routine civility at work, the ‘fair value’ (Scott, 1976) of labour and its relationship to wages, and the fair allocation of work, including the practices of social reciprocity this entails. Themes are defined by distinct normative assumptions and definitions of what matters morally, processes of social comparison and evaluation, and practices of normatively driven social reciprocity. Together they constitute the beginnings of a moral economy of service labour from the perspective of what matters to young workers – the experiences that leave an impression on them as particularly morally significant, and the evaluative practices they used to make sense of, negotiate and sometimes justify their exploitative working arrangements.
Civility, respect and moral compromise
One of the critical issues raised across interviews and also documented in previous literature (Bolton and Boyd, 2003; Farrugia, 2024; Farrugia et al., 2024) was that interactive service workers are frequently treated as morally inferior or worthless in routine interactions at work. This is recognised as an aspect of the generally low status of interactive service work, which is based on notions of consumer sovereignty and definitions of ‘good service’ that require an accommodating and deferential attitude from workers (Pettinger, 2011) – what one participant in Farrugia (2024: 521) describes as having to ‘eat shit’. It is therefore fundamental to the power relations of labour and consumption as they are enacted in service interactions and workplace relations. Participants described many instances in which customers and managers treated them with sometimes breathtaking incivility of a kind that is highly unusual in everyday public life. These interactions transgressed participants’ definitions of what constitutes decent social relations even between unequal participants – for example the right way to go about a service interaction given the structural inequality between a consumer and a service worker, or the right way for a manager to treat their staff. The frequency and intensity of demeaning interactions means that feeling degraded and morally affronted is a routine part of young people’s everyday experiences at work. This is critical to the overall moral economy of service work, the lay moralities enacted by workers, and their eventual conditions, because it makes basic civility into an important part of the moral evaluations and compromises that workers make when assessing their situation.
Almost all participants were able to tell stories in which they were treated poorly in this way. Narratives about being screamed at or crying at work were not unusual and were discussed openly by participants with very little prompting as a routine part of service employment. Rohan was a 27-year-old hospitality worker who had worked in a range of service jobs and was working in a restaurant run by a charity organisation. He had worked in several restaurants in the past before he started at his current venue, and characterised a past job in the following way: I was working on the floor at a bistro and the coworkers were entirely teenage girls who seemed traumatised by the management. . .They’d clearly been screamed at about so many tiny little details. . .I got the wrong table number at one point and went out to the table with the food and it was the wrong table, so I came back and said, ‘It’s the wrong table.’ She just started screaming. . .I was like, ‘I don’t know what is happening right now. I don’t know why you’re yelling at me’. . .they were like that all the time.
Participants frequently felt upset or humiliated by the way they were treated by managers – in other words they felt that they had a moral entitlement to basic civility, and that a failure to respect this was a routine part of the power relations between managers and their staff. Isobel, a 22-year-old retail worker, talked about her first job as a teenager in a shoe shop in which she had been verbally abused by a manager and had not been supported afterwards: I was fitting school shoes and one time I got it half a size wrong, half a size too big, and she yelled at me. It was a little bit intense and I was quite upset by that because I’ve never really been yelled at in that way before, and I thought it was quite a minor mistake for that reaction. . .I think it is pretty poor form that no one checked on me to see if I was okay afterwards, a manager or an assistant manager or anything.
Feelings about being treated unfairly were commonplace, but in articulating these workers did not draw on formal political beliefs about how work should be organised, but on lay moralities – everyday judgements about their own wellbeing and that of their co-workers based on informal assumptions about the recognition and respect owed them within a decent social interaction. When asked about ‘fairness at work’, these issues of civility and recognition were what workers emphasised the most. For example, for Jane, a 22-year-old retail worker, fairness means a manager who does not scream at or abuse their staff: Our manager is pretty fair in terms of she treats us good. Even if we do something bad, she’ll explain to us why and how we need to do better and whatnot. There’s no screaming or name-calling or being passive-aggressive or anything.
The extremely low status that service workers occupy, and the fact that workers are frequently denied basic recognition as morally relevant social participants, means that routine civility is a critical factor in their evaluations as to whether or not their workplaces are, on balance, fair places to work. Indeed, when participants did feel that they were treated according to their lay definitions of civility, they would compromise on other working conditions, for example access to time off work or weekend penalty rates. This means that the routinely degrading nature of service employment makes basic civility part of a series of moral evaluations and compromises that also include material benefits – money and a convenient working schedule. These evaluations can ultimately increase workers’ objective material exploitation, even as it makes their workplaces appear more fair. For example Rose, a 19-year-old student and retail worker employed as a casual shop assistant, was not permitted to take (unpaid) holidays and her manager was uncompromising about staff schedules, but while Rose was aware that workers in other retail outlets enjoyed more flexibility with regards to their shifts, she said that she was treated fairly because she had generally respectful and supportive interactions at work. Eleanor, a 20-year-old student and waitress, describes a similar sense of moral compromise in relation to what she is paid, weighing up the fact that she is not paid penalty rates against what she sees as relatively fair treatment in relation to staff taking time off work:
Do you get paid more on Sunday?
I don’t. I get the same rate.
Happy with that?
Not super thrilled. I prefer to be getting the time and a half or whatever it is on Sunday. I think because my boss is pretty cool about everything, I don’t feel super confident in asking for the time and a half, just because he’s like good with everything else. . .Like the few times that I’ve had to call in sick, he hasn’t really been too, like, I don’t want to say like threatening or whatever, but I know some other workplaces can have that where if people call in sick too many times, they’ll start not giving as many shifts and that sort of thing.
Like Rose, Eleanor does not simply accept the fact that she is not paid penalty rates – she recognises that some other workers in the industry do receive more money on weekends and compares her situation against these socially relevant others. However, she feels that her employer has met other (again very modest) moral requirements, for example in relation to everyday civility and allowing her to take (unpaid) time off work without threatening to reduce her shifts, and that means she feels less confident about her moral entitlement to more money on weekends. She is therefore engaged in a highly circumscribed form of moral evaluation made in the context of the generalised precarity of the sector, in which employers have very limited formal obligations to their workers. Eleanor makes less money than she might prefer based on her comparison with others, but she receives basic civility from her employer, and on balance she judges her employer to have met their moral obligations towards her as a worker and a subordinate.
What workers articulate here can be seen as a kind of ‘civility ethic’ which, if followed, legitimises poor conditions in other aspects of work. The often degrading nature of interactive service labour means that decent social relations are those that involve this basic sense of routine civility, which is a highly sought after quality of a ‘good boss’. The enormous discretion that employers are able to exercise as to the conditions of their staff also forces workers into a position where they must evaluate various competing entitlements, for example to penalty rates, convenient working hours, alongside their desire for decent, respectful interactions. These reflexively evaluated moral tradeoffs are therefore critical to the way that workers experience, negotiate and morally justify their precarious employment conditions, unpredictable shift schedules and poor wages. This ethic of civility is therefore constitutive of the social and structural conditions of low-wage service employment even though it is routinely transgressed. It underpins a series of reflexive social comparisons and moral evaluations that take place in relation to the low status and precarity of the work. In what follows this article delves deeper into these forms of moral evaluation focusing, in particular, on the ‘fair value’ of the wage, and the specific forms of moral evaluation and social comparison that definitions of a fair wage entail.
A fair wage? The fair value of labour
Participants described a series of moral evaluations connected to their financial compensation for work, including a series of reflexive judgements about what would constitute a ‘fair wage’. Like the peasant ‘subsistence ethic’ described by Scott (1976), the level of objective exploitation that they were subject to was not a significant factor in these evaluations. In other words, they did not say that they should be paid more if their employer’s profits were to increase. Instead they assessed what they needed to live on (analogous to the subsistence ethic) and also made a series of further reflexive evaluations about what workers like them deserved, which included judgements about the social status of service labour and social comparisons with those in similar circumstances. Moral evaluation and compromise in relation to wages show that notions of fair value are critical to how exploitative relations of service labour are constituted.
When talking about money, workers’ assumption is that their jobs will necessarily be poorly paid, and many participants did not seem resentful of their poor remuneration. There was a widespread acceptance that interactive service work is ‘unskilled’ (although see Farrugia et al., 2024 and Bolton, 2004 for critical discussions of this designation) and that it would therefore be poorly paid. As Iskender (2021) has argued, ‘skills’ are constructed as such when they are recognised as alienable from the body, and at least in the service economy, capacities such as ‘teamwork’ do not qualify, being an attribute that has long been constructed as essential to feminised service workers’ bodies (Bolton, 2004). However, workers made sense of the notion of unskilled work not simply in terms of the duties allocated to them or the effort required, but in terms of the role of service labour in their overall biographies as young people. As the literature on moral economy stresses, lay moralities are enacted within biographical projects, that is in relation to reflexive assessments of desired futures (Bolton and Laaser, 2013; Sayer, 2005). In young people’s moral evaluation of their wages they assumed that their engagement with service labour would be biographically temporary, and that they would eventually move on to other work. Critically, this contributed to their definitions of reasonable need and to something analogous to a youthful subsistence ethic: since they were young, they had limited financial responsibilities and in some cases were still supported financially by their parents. For this reason, they felt that their needs were modest, and so their modest wage was morally justified. For example, Brooke, a 24 When I started this job, I looked at it and I was, oh my God, that seems a lot just for doing retail sales casually. If in the long term, I guess, because I know that this job’s temporary, I feel it’s quite fair because I’ve never thought of retail as something that pays like an adult wage. I think, now I view it as, oh yes, I’m being paid fairly for what I’m doing now and for the flexibility of things. . .I know. . .if I was doing this for a long period of time and trying to have my kids in daycare and stuff, it would not be sustainable at all. I’m just lucky that I’m currently living with family and trying to work on my course and everything like that. It’s a stepping stone rather than a long-term solution.
Participants also made comparisons between themselves and similarly situated young workers, and judged their wages to be fair if they were roughly equal to (or greater than) what others in their situation were receiving. This was particularly clear in interviews with students from overseas who were in Australia to study. Visa restrictions make these students a particularly vulnerable labour force, and they have been part of public controversies about illegal working conditions (Schneiders and Bonyhady, 2020). Amir, a 22 Basically, in my college, I have told all my friends, so I got to know how much they get paid and then how much I’m getting paid. If I compare them, I’m getting more than my friends. That’s why I think that I’m getting paid fairly.
This is a highly circumscribed definition of fair value, established in the context of Amir’s heightened labour market vulnerability and the prevalence of illegal working conditions for student migrants in Australia. Amir’s moral evaluations are based on his reflexive assessment of the working situation for ‘people like me’, and on a general awareness that whilst his retail job only barely covered his expenses, things could very easily be much worse. Nevertheless, it leads Amir to a sense of fair value for his labour, at least for now.
If participants were unhappy with their pay, their sentiments were based not on a critique of exploitation, but rather on the civility ethic – part of the moral tradeoffs described above in which the low status and sometimes degrading nature of service work makes routine civility an important factor in definitions of fairness. Essentially, workers argued they should be financially compensated for the requirement to accept abuse at work. Mary, a 21
How do you feel about the pay?
It’s not just calling people. It’s like putting up with the bullshit they give you. It’s like cold calling, which is really hard. . .you get abused by callers or respondents and you just have to take it. . .To be honest, I even think it’s a little bit underpaid, as in, I’m sure a lot of people who would start this would quit because it’s so harsh, and it’s so harsh on you mentally. It’s like, usually you’ll go to your job, do your job, come home, and then you’ll turn off. Here it’s like you’ll think about what they said to you.
Working in a call-centre, Mary is required to accept poor treatment in order to meet her performance indicators, and as a result she struggles to simply ‘turn off’ after work, instead mulling over the abuse she has received while working. For this, she feels that she is a ‘little bit underpaid’, articulating a sense of moral entitlement to compensation for the effect that work has on her wellbeing. For Mary, her wage represents a kind of moral compensation for accepting affronts to her sense of decent social relations, that is her entitlement to everyday civility and respect.
Of course, these workers actually have very little actual capacity to change or negotiate their wages even if they did regard them as unfair. Examples of workers asking for more money were unusual and generally unsuccessful, and the only consistent strategy available to them was to move to another employer. However, what matters here is that the wage is a moral good that is assessed according to workers’ standards of fair value. What emerged from interviews was less a sense of resignation as to the poor pay, and more a series of socially embedded moral evaluations within a reflexive assessment of the role of service labour in the biographies of themselves and similarly situated others. In these lay moralities, hours worked, effort, and broader political economic considerations are secondary. What matters is whether a wage pays the bills for now, given other sources of support, and whether it compares favourably with socially similar others who may be worse off. This also reinforces the moral value of everyday civility that runs throughout participants’ narratives. In all cases, wages represent something other than simply a material reward for hours worked and effort applied, but rather are evaluated through lay moralities which situate wages within the moral evaluations and compromises that young people make as part of their reflexive assessments of their position as workers. Issues of exploitation simply do not figure into these assessments – employers are entitled to make a profit from their labour so long as their workers can get by and they are nice to them.
Working hours: Sharing the load
The third morally significant issue for workers was working hours – access to the right amount of work at the right time, access to time off when needed, and access to breaks. Working hours are a constant concern for young service workers, who are precariously employed and often unsure of how much they will be working. Working hours are also a site for moral evaluation and negotiation based on lay moralities of obligation and entitlement, enacted through routine social reciprocity amongst workers. Participants frequently complained about wanting more shifts, or about being allocated more shifts than they were able to reasonably take on. This reflects employer strategies to maximise staffing flexibility in a fluid labour force, which according to workers frequently amounted to maintaining a convenient pool of available workers who then worked at a minimum level of staffing. However, participants also made evaluations of their shift allocations on the basis of judgements about what they and their co-workers were reasonably entitled to in the context of the overall allocation of work within their workplaces, and in the context of their relative level of material need. Acting on these evaluations, workers swap shifts, step in for another, give up shifts so others can make money, work while sick and skip breaks, all so that their co-workers can make a reasonable living amidst the unpredictability that they all face in their working hours. These sentiments and reciprocal practices amount to a feeling of moral community (Laaser, 2016), in which workers formed social ties characterised by feelings of mutual respect, responsibility and obligation which help them to negotiate the impact of precarious work schedules, but which can also contribute to their exploitation. In this way, workers’ morally driven social reciprocity becomes constitutive of the social relations of precarity.
One common complaint was that workers did not receive as much work as they would like. However, workers were often reluctant to ask for more work because they felt that if hours were limited, their co-workers could have an equal or greater moral claim on shifts. For example, Carla, an 18-year-old hospitality worker, talked about wanting more shifts than she was allocated, but did not raise this issue with her employer because she did not want to ‘take shifts away’ from her co-workers: I would like to be consistently working three shifts a week as opposed to two, but I am conscious of the fact that there are a certain number of people and there aren’t a million trillion shifts. The amount of people that we have at the moment means that everyone tends to get two shifts a week, which is fair. . . I would like the extra work. I know that the only way he could give me shifts is by taking shifts away from other people. . .it’s a give-and-take situation as opposed to just like, if I wanted more, more would be there to have.
Whilst Carla’s assessment of this as a zero-sum game is an outcome of the way that her employer has staffed their venue (i.e. with many flexibly employed staff working relatively few shifts each), her response is based on sentiments of moral obligation towards her co-workers, whom she recognises as having just claims to scarce work. These evaluations were also based on an assessment of subsistence needs. Kelly, a 21-year-old student and waitress, also negotiated her shift times with her co-workers’ needs in mind, as well as considering how her own financial needs compared with those of her co-workers. Kelly worked in a relatively upscale restaurant and said that recently bookings in her venue were sometimes lower than her employers felt was sustainable, part of the decline in discretionary spending currently taking place across the Australian hospitality industry. When bookings did not meet expectations, Kelly’s employers would sometimes cut their employees’ shifts at the last minute. The way that this took place drew their workers’ moral obligations towards one another directly into the shift allocation process: It’s understandable [to cut shifts]. I don’t know so much about fair, but the way that they do it that I do respect is that we have a group chat. They say, ‘Hey, does anyone want the night off?’ So they’ll take volunteers before they kick someone off the roster. . .it’s become less stable because of those things affecting the restaurant’s business. Maybe [my friends], they’re going out. . .Maybe if someone puts in the group chat, ‘Hey, we need someone cut tonight’, you’ll be like, ‘Yes, I guess I’ll take the night off and go hang out with my friends’,. . .Or ‘Maybe I don’t need the extra money this week. I’ll take it’, kind of thing. Instead of just picking someone and you might end up picking the exactly wrong person to cut type of thing. I have a less precarious situation than some people because I’m a student and I live at home until I’m done studying, which I’m very grateful for. I definitely have a much less precarious situation than some people. . .If it comes down to it, I’m looking at who’s on and I’m like, that person really needs it. No one’s volunteering, I’ll do it.
While asking for ‘volunteers’ places the responsibility for managing over-staffing on their precariously employed and poorly remunerated young workers, for Kelly this practice accords with lay normativities of deservingness enacted through comparisons between what she and her co-workers need to survive. Kelly is in the final semester of a university degree and living with her parents, meaning that she can afford to have shifts cut more than co-workers she is aware of who live independently and have more significant living expenses. She will occasionally volunteer to be cut, sometimes to go out with her friends and sometimes because she knows that her co-workers are struggling financially, living independently, and therefore need the work ‘more’ than she does. Carla had similar sentiments, saying that taking shifts when others had more significant living expenses than her ‘seems like a dick move when it’s not like I’m living out of pocket or anything. . .’. In other words, when shifts are scarce, young workers will evaluate who deserves to work on the basis of what they need to support themselves, and act according to these moral evaluations when the responsibility is placed upon them. It is in this way that the social relations of precarity are enacted through workers’ feelings of responsibility and obligation towards one another.
Another example of this is the way that workers behave when they are unwell or need time off work. Workers are of course cautious of how much time they take off as they are aware that their employers may stop allocating shifts to them if they are deemed unreliable (although threatening workers in this way was seen as unfair and characteristic of a ‘bad boss’). However, in considering whether to call in sick or take time off work, workers were also concerned with the wellbeing of their co-workers, who may have to work at times that were inconvenient to them, or who would have to work harder than usual in order to make up for a staffing shortfall. Ellie, a 21-year-old retail and hospitality worker, articulated these kinds of sentiments, saying she was reluctant to take time off work even when she was unwell because of the impact it would have on her co-workers: It relies so much on everyone being present. If some people are away, we would be like, ‘Oh, we’re down 10 hours.’ We need to work 10 extra hours as hard to catch up to what the workload could be because there’s a lot of deadlines.
It seems like you feel bad about the other people that work in a similar role to you in the supermarket having to do more.
Yes.
Moreover, while participants were resentful of managers or employers who did not allow them to take their allocated breaks during a shift, they were willing to skip or postpone their breaks when their workplaces were busy so that their co-workers did not have to make up for their absence. Of course, when they attend work while sick or skip breaks to support their co-workers, they maximise their output for employers who are aiming for the lowest number of staff for adequate work operations. Participants’ moral obligations to their co-workers are thereby visible here as critical aspects of the social relations of exploitation, motivating them to work harder and longer. Moreover, workers were most likely to act on these feelings of obligation when they were treated with the everyday civility and respect, since that meant that they evaluated their workplaces as generally fair, at least on balance. When they felt their employer was being ‘reasonable’ in allowing them to take (unpaid) time off work when needed, participants might also feel grateful and obliged to work harder at other times or make up the time when their employer needed more staff at short notice. Rakesh, a 19-year-old student and retail worker, shared these kinds of sentiments: It shows the boss that we’re grateful in a way. Let’s say your boss is giving you consistent days off just for not working. In a way, you are showing him that you can actually work as well. In a way of thank you. Thank you for letting me take the day off. Now I’m just paying you back in return by working a bit to cover up that amount.
In general therefore, young workers approach the allocation of shifts and working hours through sentiments of moral obligation and responsibility, including judgements of who ‘needs’ work and what impact their absence from work will have on their co-workers. However, they do this also because their position as precarious workers makes them responsible for issues such as fluctuations in demand for their employer’s products (such as when Kelly volunteers to have shifts cut when there are insufficient bookings in her restaurant). Their feelings of obligation and responsibility amount to a sense of moral community in which their co-workers are included in evaluations of who is most deserving of shifts (to support them financially) or of time off work, but they also facilitate last-minute changes to staffing levels that benefit their employers. These lay moralities also encourage feelings of obligation and even gratitude when their employer allocates shifts in ways that workers feel are fair. The moral community constituted in these practices of social reciprocity therefore supports workers in managing the exigencies of precarity, but also contributes to the effectiveness of employer staffing strategies that maximise flexibility whilst making workers responsible for supporting one another’s basic subsistence.
Conclusion
This article has aimed to situate young workers as subjects of moral evaluation, entitlement and responsibility, and thereby to theorise the constitutive significance of moral sentiments in the social relations and exploitation processes of service labour. Unlike the agrarian peasants described in Scott (1976), it is not possible to identify one cohesive ethic encompassing and explaining the way that these young workers make sense of their workplaces. Rather what emerges here is a set of reflexive practices evaluating the moral significance of sometimes competing priorities in a generally precarious landscape. What comes to matter in these reflexive evaluations and reciprocal practices reflects the disciplinary requirements and structural conditions of service labour, and the impact that this labour has on participants’ wellbeing. In particular, the article has highlighted the critical moral significance of routine civility as the basis for participants’ moral evaluations. While the peasant’s subsistence ethic reflects their risk of starvation, this ‘civility ethic’ reflects the fact that service labour is routinely demeaning, and comes from workers’ collective needs for respect and recognition. In this context, and given the fact that material conditions are poor across the industries studied here, everyday civility emerges as fundamental to workers’ moral evaluations of their jobs. However, as well as civility, workers also recognise the significance of subsistence needs, for example when they evaluate the fair value of their work in relation to their relatively modest needs as young people, and when they support their co-workers by swapping shifts within a zero-sum game of shift scarcity created by their employers. These constant evaluations are made necessary by the unpredictability of precarious work, in which responding to the changing availability of work necessarily requires workers to evaluate what they are entitled to and what they are obliged to do to support others. Given this constant renegotiation, workers do not simply settle on a sense of fairness at work, rather they must reevaluate and negotiate with others as part of an ongoing process of moral critique and compromise that is forced upon them by the precarity of their employment.
With this in mind, this article also makes theoretical contributions to studies of young people and work. First, the article is supportive of previous suggestions that young workers are relatively vulnerable to exploitation because of a ‘stopgap’ approach to work (Tannock, 2001), and also of the observation that in general, young precarious workers in the Global North do not articulate a political or structural critique of exploitation at work (Bessen-Cassino, 2014; Cote, 2014). However, what this article shows is that despite their biographically temporary engagement with service labour, they nevertheless form moral communities with other workers in which they support one another to get by. It is not simply that they do not care about their conditions because they regard them as temporary, or that the frequently unfair nature of their conditions is somehow unclear to them, but rather that the role of service labour in their overall biographical life projects is a factor in their moral assessments of entitlement and responsibility towards others. This means that through a series of moral compromises they arrive at evaluations and reciprocal practices that contribute to their exploitation, but also fulfil their moral obligations to others whose needs they recognise and whose situations are just as precarious as their own. Their evaluations are therefore specific to their relationships and interactions with co-workers and managers at work, and to their own material position as young workers with limited financial obligations and in some cases access to parental support. Their objections to service labour are therefore not political but moral, with an ambivalent and constitutive relationship to the hierarchies of exploitation that make up the service economy, and to their overall position within the political economy of service labour.
Finally, this article suggests that while young people’s normative orientations to work are not necessarily critical of exploitation in the objective sense, they offer an important normative position for future research into young workers and vulnerable workers generally, including that which aims to interrogate the hierarchies and value relations of service labour. Service workers’ legal entitlements and formal protections are increasingly limited, but it is in this context that everyday normative evaluation becomes so critical for their eventual conditions, including their wages and working hours. Moral economy is therefore a useful lens for understanding how working conditions are actually negotiated in the absence of formal collective representation. Workers’ narratives situate issues like everyday civility, respect, kindness and social reciprocity as central to working life. They show that workers form communities of reciprocal support even when labour forces are precarious, fluid and temporary, and that morality is critical to the way that these communities operate. Moral economy is therefore a useful lens for future research on worker solidarities, and on the political economy of service labour, situating reflexive and evaluative practices in an ambivalent, tense but nevertheless constitutive relationship with power relations and structures of exploitation.
Footnotes
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was funded by the Australian Research Council under the Future Fellowship scheme (FT2201000737).
Ethics statement
This project received clearance from Deakin University’s HREC, approval number 2023-092.
