Youth and hospitality work: Skills,subjectivity and affective labour

Abstract

Hospitality is popularly regarded as unskilled work and the industry relies on a young labour force. This paper examines the role of youth in the way that the ‘unskilled’ status of hospitality labour is defined and contested by workers. Drawing on qualitative data collected with hospitality workers, the paper creates new connections between theories of affective labour, the politics of skills, and conceptions of youth in relation to work. The paper shows that the capacity to be ‘fun’ and produce affects of enjoyment in hospitality venues is essentialised as an attribute of youth, who are regarded as essentially unskilled. Youth is enacted in the social relations of affective labour, including the requirement to produce affects of enjoyment. The paper shows how theories of affective labour can be developed to consider the materialities of low-wage service employment and demonstrates the significance of youthful subjectivities to social relations of hospitality work.

Introduction

This paper contributes to the literature on interactive service work and theories of affective labour (Hardt and Negri, 2004) by exploring the subjectivities enacted through the politics of ‘skill’ in the hospitality industry. Theories of affective labour have been used to explore how value is produced through the creation of sensations and subjectivities in service interactions (Cameron, 2018; Coffey et al., 2018; Dowling, 2007; Farrugia et al., 2018; Farrugia et al., 2023; Kikon and Karlsson, 2009), but a series of important debates have emerged about how the creation of affect interacts with the power relations of low-wage service employment and the role of intersectional inequalities within the labour force (Bolton, 2009; Fortunati, 2007; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Sharp et al., 2022; Threadgold et al., 2021; Whitney, 2018). Engaging with these debates, this paper's contribution is to situate the politics of skill as an aspect of the power relations of affective labour, and to argue that youth and youthfulness are central to the embodied subjectivities that are enacted and exploited in the production of affect through interactive service labour in hospitality. Hospitality is popularly regarded as ‘unskilled’ work and the industry relies on a young labour force, who are tasked with creating affects of leisure and enjoyment to facilitate consumption (Cameron, 2018; Dowling, 2007; Farrugia et al., 2018). Drawing on a programme of qualitative research with front-of-house hospitality workers, this paper argues that the ‘unskilled’ status attributed to interactive service labour is related to the notion of this as ‘work for youth’, and that distinctions between youth and adulthood are critical to the way that workers critically engage with the value and status attributed to their labour. This is connected with the specific affects produced in hospitality venues, in which affects of enjoyment are connected to a capacity to be ‘fun’ that is essentialised as an aspect of youthful subjectivities.

To situate these contributions precisely, the paper begins with a review of debates within studies of affective labour, the politics of skill, and the position of youth and young workers in the labour force as interactive service workers. The paper then discusses research design and methods, describing a programme of qualitative research with front-of-house hospitality workers taking place between 2017 and 2022. The empirical analysis is divided into two sections. The first focuses on the affects and labouring practices of hospitality work, and the second on workers’ critical engagement with the status of hospitality as unskilled labour. The paper concludes by discussing the relationship between affective labour and the politics of skills, situating this as a future research agenda in studies of the service economy.

Hospitality as affective labour: Youth and the politics of skill

Front-of-house hospitality labour such as bartending and waiting is a ubiquitous form of interactive service work in which workers interact with customers to encourage consumption. These interactions are what defines front-of-house work as opposed to other work in hospitality such as chefs or dishwashers, who are ‘back-of-house’ and have no interaction with consumers. Front-of-house workers must serve food and drink, attend to requests and clean up after patrons, all while interacting with consumers in a way that facilitates the kind of consumption experience on offer within a venue – what Dowling (2007) has called the ‘dining experience’. Interactions and sensations – or affects – are therefore critical to the ‘product’ of interactive service work in hospitality. While approaches to affect at work are diverse (Fotaki et al., 2017), use of the concept in studies of hospitality labour is part of the increasing influence of Autonomist Marxism (Hardt and Negri, 2004; Hardt, 1999), in which affective labour describes ‘labour that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004, p. 108). Because the capacity to affect and be affected is basic to subjectivity rather than specific to employment, researchers influenced by Autonomist Marxism also analyse affect and value creation without making distinctions between the inside and the outside of work, or between labour and leisure, arguing instead that ‘life itself’ has become a source of value in contemporary capitalism (Terranova, 2000; Weeks, 2007; Whitney, 2018). This is developed through a Deleuzian (Deleuze and Guattari, 2007) approach to affect as a trans-personal intensity that incorporates and reveals states of life, which is then exploited as a source of value. This approach is increasingly influential across a range of theoretical and disciplinary areas (e.g. Weeks, 2011; Jarrett, 2015), but is also subject to a range of critiques concerning the relationship between affective labour and the power relations of service work.

Empirical work on affective labour has until recently been limited, but recent years have seen the emergence of a developing literature that uses this concept to analyse the co-production of sensations or atmospheres through service interactions, and the hospitality industry has become a significant part of these discussions (Coffey et al., 2018; Cameron, 2018; Dowling, 2007; Farrugia et al., 2018; Farrugia et al., 2023; Kikon and Karlsson, 2009; Kolehmainen and Makinen, 2021; Sharp et al., 2022; Threadgold et al., 2021). However despite the increasing influence of affective labour on this literature, a series of important critiques of the concept have highlighted a failure to engage with the materialities and disciplinary requirements of work that underpin the creation and valorisation of affect. For example, feminist work has long recognised gendered divisions within service workplaces, in which women are enrolled into the labour force through the assumption that good service reflects a ‘natural’ feminine propensity for care (Adkins, 1995; Hochschild, 1983). Autonomist Marxism's failure to recognise or engage with this feminist literature has been positioned as an aspect of a broader failure to understand the role of intersecting inequalities in the production of affect and the power relations and disciplinary requirements of low-wage service work (Jarrett, 2015; Weeks, 2007; Oksala, 2016; Bolton, 2009; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Fortunati, 2007; Whitney, 2018). Researchers working in this area have engaged productively with these critiques, and recent empirical work explores the classed aesthetics of gentrification (Threadgold et al., 2021), sexual harassment and the reflexive deployment of gendered embodiment (Dowling, 2007; Coffey et al., 2018) and normative definitions of acceptable queer embodiment (Sharp et al., 2022) as aspects of the social relations through which affect is produced and attributed with value within hospitality venues.

This paper contributes to this literature by drawing new connections between these critical engagements with affective labour and literature on the politics and social construction of ‘skill’. These connections have not been made previously, perhaps because Autonomist approaches to affective labour understand value to be produced through subjectivity in a general sense rather than through the effortful and reflexive deployment of cultivated capacities, and because low-wage interactive service employment is popularly taken for granted as ‘unskilled work’. However, debates about the social relations of affective labour are mirrored in those about the notion of skill in the sociology of work, and about the politics of skills in the service economy. As feminist approaches to service labour have long observed, the low status and poor remuneration characteristic of interactive service work (and other traditionally feminised forms of work) is connected to the essentialisation of workers’ capacities as innate attributes rather than effortful and reflexive labour (Hochschild, 1983; Fortunati, 2007; Jarrett, 2015). Service employment has been regarded as unskilled for this reason (Bolton, 2004). However, as a number of studies have shown, hospitality workers deploy their interactive styles at work in ways that are deliberately and reflexively attuned to the aesthetics, branding strategies, clientele and modes of consumption on offer in different venues (Dowling, 2007; Farrugia et al., 2023; Threadgold et al., 2021). Nevertheless, hospitality labour is popularly regarded as entry-level work suited for young, inexperienced workers (Tannock, 2001).

‘Skills’, or distinctions between skilled and unskilled work, are therefore not simply related to the technical requirements of labour, but rather reflect processes of construction and recognition in which certain subjectivities are defined as more or less skilled (Baum, 2008; Grugulis & Vincent, 2009; Warhurst et al., 2017). In a wide-ranging analysis of the construction industry, Iskender (2021) argues that the category of ‘unskilled’ work is deployed in ways that categorise labouring bodies themselves across gendered and racialised lines, rather than only specific labour practices. Iskender goes on to argue that to be recognised as such, skills must be regarded as separate from the body of a worker – something that is possessed and alienable, as opposed to an innate capacity. Service employment is an important and highly visible example of this. As traditionally feminised labour, it has long been seen as a natural expression of feminine relational competence (Adkins, 1995; Bolton, 2004), and while workers of all genders now work in hospitality, the notion that interactive service labour is something that ‘cannot be taught’ persists within the industry (Sherman, 2007).

Whether or not front-of-house hospitality work is actually skilled or unskilled work is not our focus here, although this issue is debated in labour process analyses of the hospitality industry that have focused on issues such as workers’ autonomy, or their varied capacities to discern and perform the kind of interaction required of them by different consumers (Bolton, 2004; Baum, 2008; Lloyd and Payne, 2009). For our purposes here, these debates are significant in terms of the way that interactive service workers are positioned as labouring subjects: Iskender (2021) suggests that in the world of work, skills are a measure of personhood, and that while skilled workers are regarded as reflexive individuals to be recognised and heard, those designated as unskilled are positioned simply as bodies to be deployed and used. This insight offers a new perspective on the power relations of affective labour, situating service work as an arena of tension in which the personhood of employees is at stake. Affective labour can therefore be situated as a practice through which the distinction between skilled and unskilled labour is enacted in the creation of subjectivities at work. However, while this process is primarily recognised as taking place along gendered lines, our empirical research will suggest that in a diverse but predominantly young labour force, the notion of youth has become central to the way that value and status is attributed to interactive service labour in hospitality.

Du-Gay (1996) identified both women and young people as important sources of labour to the expanding service economy almost three decades ago. Studies of young service workers have shown that they are assumed to adopt a temporary, stop-gap or unserious approach to work, likely to be transient and hence relatively less invested in improving their working conditions (Mizen, 2004; Tannock, 2001). While the hospitality labour force disproportionately includes women (60% of hospitality workers in the UK and 67% of Australian hospitality workers are women (Calinaud et al., 2021; National Skills Commission, 2022), arguably the key defining characteristic of the hospitality workforce is now its youth. The average age of a front-of-house hospitality worker in Australia is 22 years old, well below the workforce average of 40 (NSC, 2022), and in the UK the average age of a waiter or bartender is 26 and 28 respectively (Statista, 2024). Involvement in low-wage service work is now a normative experience for young people (Tannock, 2001), and is actively promoted by employers as a fun, temporary way for young people to earn money (Tannock, 2001; Bessen-Cassino, 2014).

Recent research suggests that a certain kind of young worker is being positioned as of particular value to certain hospitality venues – those that aim to offer consumption interactions that are ‘fun’ and that take place in a context branded as culturally cutting-edge. The cultural association of ‘youthfulness’ with up-to-date style and spontaneous enjoyment means that young people who can mobilise these qualities at work contribute enormously to the image and branding strategies of employers who are aiming to position their products and venues as fun places to consume (Farrugia, 2018). It is for this reason that young people who participate in music scenes and other kinds of taste cultures can be found working in the night-time economies of ‘bohemian’ and gentrifying inner-city areas (Lloyd, 2010) – they ‘look good and sound right’ (Williams and Connell, 2010). In this context, recent developments of Autonomist Marxist approaches to affect have situated ‘youthfulness’ itself as an affect produced through service labour that circulates to attribute value to workers, service interactions and consumption experiences (Farrugia, 2018). Rather than an (increasingly ambiguous) biographical period, youthfulness is thereby approached as an attribute of service interactions, hospitality venues, consumption experiences and subjectivities in the context of the social relations of service labour. Approaching youth and youthfulness in this way means that, analogous to studies of gender and sexuality in service labour (e.g. Adkins, 2000), youth is reconceptualised from an essential characteristic to a product of work that is mobilised in the labour process. In this way it becomes possible to analyse how this process relates to the social relations and disciplinary requirements of affective labour, and to the politics of skilled as opposed to unskilled work.

Bringing discussions of affective labour, skill and youth together, in this paper we develop an analysis of how distinctions between skilled and unskilled work are enacted in the production of affect in hospitality venues. In our data, hospitality workers critically and reflexively engage with the idea that front-of-house hospitality labour is unserious or frivolous work analogous to leisure or play, because it involves affects of spontaneous enjoyment produced through ‘fun’ relationalities. They suggest that for this reason, hospitality work is seen as suited to young workers – due to capacities for spontaneous leisure and ‘fun’ that contribute to the atmosphere of enjoyment within a venue. It is in this way that hospitality is designated as unskilled, that is, with reference to youthful bodies who contribute to affective labour processes through their intrinsic bodily attributes rather than reflexively deployed skills. This interacts with gendered distinctions in the way that affects of enjoyment and conviviality are enacted and relationally produced. This discussion takes place below after a description of method.

Method

This paper draws on qualitative data gathered through a programme of research conducted between 2017 and 2022. The programme of work examines identity and front-of-house labour in the hospitality industry (i.e. labour that involves direct interactions with customers such as bartending or waiting), focusing on the role of subjectivity in the creation of value and the social relations of the labour process. This programme consists of three projects. The first project was a small-scale pilot project with bar workers in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in 2017. The second is a larger-scale project funded by the Australian Research Council with workers in Melbourne, Victoria and Newcastle in New South Wales, in Australia between 2019 and 2021. The third project was conducted in 2020 and focused on the experience of hospitality workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, again in Melbourne and Newcastle. All projects received ethics approval from [The University of Newcastle Human Research Ethics Committee].

Together, these projects have interviewed 91 workers. These were primarily bar workers, although some also have experience of cafes and restaurants. Thirty-five workers identified as men, 55 workers as women, and three workers as non-binary. Two were trans. We discuss the specific experiences of queer and gender-diverse participants, including the power relations of ‘diversity’, in Sharp et al. (2022). Participants were aged between 18 and 34 years old. Workers came from a heterogeneous range of class backgrounds and we have written about the classed dynamics of this project elsewhere (Threadgold et al., 2021). While Australian vocational training institutes do offer certificate-level qualifications in front-of-house hospitality work, none of our participants possessed such qualifications and some were openly disparaging of them. These participants questioned their relevance on the basis that interactive service work relied on capacities for interpersonal management that they suggested could not really be taught. Participants were recruited through industry contacts, social media advertisements and snowball sampling. As a result of this snowball sampling, bar workers, workers in venues with late-night licences, and workers in bars that also operate as music venues are heavily represented in our sample. So too are workers in venues offering relatively informal consumption experiences (as opposed to more formal experiences such as those associated with ‘fine dining’). Our analysis below should be read with this in mind.

Interviews lasted between 40 minutes and three hours, and discussed biographical experiences of work, the social relationships of the labour process, the relationship between taste, consumption and labour, issues connected with gender and sexuality, and engagement with the labour market. This programme of work has created a large and complex dataset and it is impossible to represent the entire dataset, or the experiences of all participants, in one article. Our analysis here is therefore aimed at offering new theoretical approaches to affective labour and hospitality work, rather than representing the entirety of our dataset or the experiences of all hospitality workers, although it does capture significant themes across the data, including especially how the relationship between subjectivity, labour and value is contested by workers in terms of youth. This paper responds to one of the key concerns articulated by participants across our sample that emerged through our analysis, which is the repeated suggestion that hospitality labour is popularly regarded as unserious or frivolous work. Analysing this claim led us to consider the broader politics of skilled as opposed to unskilled labour in our dataset, and thereby to the role of youth in the way that value and status was attributed to labour. Our analysis approaches youth as a signifier for aspects of the hospitality labour process rather than simply a biographical category. Data was analysed through established qualitative techniques including thematic and narrative analysis (Willis, 2006; Minichiello et al., 2008). All names included below are pseudonyms.

Youth, hospitality and affective labour

In what follows, our empirical findings are organised into two sections. The first section is an analysis of the conditions and affects of work. It shows that according to our participants, the poor working conditions make their jobs biographically transitory experiences best suited to young people. Moreover, the affects produced at work require workers to be ‘fun’ through practices that superficially resemble leisure and that are essentialised as aspects of youthful subjects. In the second section, we connect the affective dimensions of hospitality work to workers’ critical engagement with the idea of hospitality as unskilled work. We show that workers are keen to position hospitality as skilled labour, but this is complicated by the way that youth subjectivities are enacted in the labour process, requiring workers to distance themselves from the ‘fun’ relationalities that are nevertheless a critical aspect of the labour. Youth is therefore analysed as a signifier for essentially unskilled workers who nevertheless contribute to the labour process through a capacity for spontaneous leisure that is essentialised as an aspect of young bodies.

A real job? Hospitality as frivolous labour

Participants’ narratives about hospitality labour were based on a reflexive awareness that their work is popularly regarded as unskilled, low status, transitory and frivolous. They were keen to discuss and contest these meanings, which they encountered in public perceptions and routine interactions, both at work with customers and outside of work. One common point of resentment articulated by many participants was that hospitality work is not popularly regarded as a ‘real job’ – a phrase which many participants returned to in discussing their work. One key reason that hospitality work was not seen as a ‘real’ job is that it is transitory – work that is assumed to fit in around other commitments or that is ‘just for now’:

I am regularly asked what I'm studying or if I'm still studying or what my real job is…I'm like, surprisingly I get paid to be here, because it's a job. [Felicity, 29 years old]

In this, workers reflected on times when their job was positioned as something that a young person would do before they eventually entered the labour market ‘for real’. Daisy, an experienced bartender and manager, said that hospitality is generally seen as a pathway to something else:

I feel like you go grocery shopping with your mum and your mum is talking to one of her old friends. They're like…What does [your daughter] do? Oh she manages [venue]. Oh is she studying? Like it's a pathway job. That's what they expect you to be doing. It's not a profession.

[Hospitality] is not taken seriously…It's a segue to your next career. [Daisy, 25 years old]

While making a ‘transition into work’ was once seen as a biographical milestone signifying adulthood (Wyn and White, 1997), front-of-house hospitality labour is positioned here as somehow prior to ‘real’ work, and therefore as a biographically temporary or youthful activity prior to more serious adult labours. The subjectivities associated with hospitality labour are infantilised – positioned outside of adulthood and the ‘real’ labour market. Participants attributed this to several factors, beginning with the extremely limited upward mobility available in the industry. As Burawoy (2012) notes, the existence of an ‘internal labour market’ ties the interests of workers more closely to those of employers, but also increases their power to negotiate with management by providing job mobility within firms. However, participants did not regard this as available within the hospitality industry. Front-of-house interactive service work also does not offer a career pathway into other parts of the hospitality industry, such as chef work, events management, logistics, or marketing and finance roles in larger hospitality businesses in the tourism or catering sectors: these more well-remunerated jobs require additional educational qualifications at the vocational or degree level and constitute forms of labour and career pathways distinct from front-of-house work. Career progression is especially limited for workers in smaller or ‘boutique’ venues which are staffed by front-of-house workers and managed by the venue owner, meaning there is literally no upward mobility available. Even workers with managerial duties receive little extra financial compensation or employment security in return for carrying out managerial responsibilities, often on top of customer-facing work. Many of our participants emphasised their limited prospects in terms of remuneration, status or employment conditions, such as Finn, a bartender:

I think it's hard work and it's a good job. I guess people might not see it as something you would just continue doing, it's not like a career for you to do in your adult age and beyond that.

Yeah, so why do you think that is?

I don’t know, I guess because there's not room to move upwards a whole lot. [Finn, 26 years old]

As Finn states here, the poor conditions and limited opportunities for career progression are part of what makes hospitality a young person's job, although this was resented by workers:

Almost ten years ago when I started working in bars the wage is the same as it is now; that hasn’t gone up. You get paid shit, you still are offered really poor working conditions, for example I worked in some bars where I’ve been paid $16 or $18 an hour and it’s always cash in hand, there's no [retirement savings plan], no tax, no [retirement contributions] and stuff like that. [Jenny, 30 years old]

Moreover, these poor working conditions are also the structural basis for service interactions that participants find demeaning and infantilising. Disrespectful or abusive interactions with customers are commonplace in interactive service jobs such as retail and hospitality, and an Australian Union representing retail workers recently ran a public campaign against this issue (ARA, 2022; SDA, 2020). As Good and Cooper (2016) emphasise in their analysis of sexual harassment, interactive service workers are expected to be ‘friendly’ and ‘nice’ to customers even when treated in ways that are demeaning, and our participants described routine incivility as a daily occurrence in their jobs. This was another reason why they described hospitality as largely work for young people:

Why do you think people don’t stay in the industry?

To be honest, I reckon it's the conditions. Who wants to be a real grown-up and dealing with people that are complaining that their food is taking 10 minutes? … You don't want to deal with crappy customers, with crappy bosses. [Romy, 22 years old]

The working conditions and interactive requirements of hospitality work are described here as not for a ‘real grown-up’. In this narrative from Romy, the figure of the ‘real grown-up’ operates as a signifier for the dignity and autonomy that is denied to her as a hospitality worker who must tolerate and cater to unreasonable requests from consumers. Across these narratives, workers describe hospitality as work for youth, because it is transitory labour characterised by low wages, precarity, limited benefits, the absence of any meaningful career structure, and incivility from irate consumers that participants see as infantilising. They are resentful of these conditions, as well as of the popular perception that hospitality is somehow unserious, or not a ‘real job’.

Of course, front-of-house hospitality work is not unique in its precarity, limited career structures or poor working conditions, and we are not claiming that in all of these conditions we should expect to find youthful subjectivities as key to the labour process. However, workers in other industries known for precarity such as personal care work or seasonal labouring are not required to interact with consumers in a way that appears fun in order to facilitate consumption. This requirement constitutes a specific form of affective labour, and one that is particularly significant to the kinds of hospitality venues most heavily represented in our sample. Beyond the structural conditions of work, labour in these venues was also regarded as unserious because of the working practices required and the affects produced, which enrolled aspects of ‘youthfulness’ into the labour process. Our participants described being ‘fun’ at work as part of the job, and part of producing the affects of convivial enjoyment that make up the key product of hospitality work (cf. Farrugia et al., 2018). The necessity to be fun meant that a hospitality shift includes moments that resemble leisure and that produce affects of enjoyment that are shared amongst patrons and staff. This was most explicit in narratives from bar workers in venues with late-night licences. In the following narrative, Catherine says that a successful performance at work appears fun, and describes a typical bar work shift in terms of performing and experiencing enjoyment:

We have a lot of fun there and at least once a week someone comments to us that they want to work there because they're just like you guys look like you have the best time and we do. We do. We genuinely get along really well.

So tell me what a shift is like.

Friday and a Saturday night we're busy and we dance, we have fun, we joke around with each other. We don't really drink during a shift but if we do it'll be like sort of communal shots between all of us and we'll sort of stop service for two seconds but they're okay with that because we do it in front of everyone. We just like creating that vibe and we dance together, we sing together, we crack jokes all the while still working but we interact with the customers because they can see we're having fun then it makes for their experience. So that's obviously what the management want. [Catherine, 24 years old]

This narrative describes a reflexive awareness that performing enjoyment is part of bar work. It is expected by management, and offers a consumption experience in which patrons of a venue participate in a shared atmosphere of enjoyment. Our participants positioned this as a specifically youthful quality:

Yep technically I'm not a good bartender but I think in terms of personality – I can be fun … But I then I feel I kind of got to the point where I'm completing my Master's Degree and this isn't actually what I want to do with my life and I'm here too often. What am I doing.

It doesn't feel like an adult it feels like a party constantly. I had a few moments of a few things like people from my old high school came in and we're like hey how are you what are you doing with your life and I'm pouring them a gin and tonic and thinking I'm here obviously thanks for asking how are you, and they're like I own a bank now or whatever. [Christine, 24 years old]

Christine describes bar work as feeling ‘like a party’, in which the experience and performance of enjoyment means that hospitality is not ‘adult’. Her narrative also positions her as a good worker on the basis of her ‘personality’ rather than any specific cultivated capacities, and locates her as biographically ‘behind’ an imagined interlocutor with a more serious, professional job. Youth and adulthood are invoked here as signifiers that denigrate her work as unserious, low status, and based on personal capacities for leisure rather than anything resembling skills. Whilst the capacity to be ‘fun’ is critical to what venues offer consumers, this process also essentialises the ability to create the right kinds of affects as an intrinsically youthful attribute, in which hospitality labour expresses a kind of youthful exuberance that must inevitably give way to more serious labours in adulthood.

What it means to be ‘fun’ was also connected to gendered expectations about personal aesthetics and relational styles. For young women, the need to be ‘fun’ is intertwined with flirtatious interactive styles and the appearance of sexual availability. As in Lloyd (2010), participants were ambivalent about this. Christine was both reflexively aware of her own positioning, and of the strategic way that heterosexuality is enacted within the service industry (Adkins, 1995):

People go to the bar expecting an ideal stereotype. There's a real sense of expectation that the women behind the bar are sexy and fun, flirty, especially in a [hip] bar … I think a lot of the time I unintentionally became a ‘manic-pixie-dream-girl’ [stereotype] kind of thing because I had pink hair or red hair or blonde hair and a Joy Division t-shirt … It was a weird kind of fantasy thing … I found myself a lot of the time enacting that because it actually gets the tips, and that's shit, but you know … [Christine, 24 years old]

However, being fun at work also meant that young women experienced sexual harassment and degradation. Virtually all of the women who participated in our research programme had had these experiences and considered them a major problem in the industry across bars, restaurants and cafes (see also Brunner and Dever, 2014; Coffey et al., 2018; Good and Cooper, 2016 for research on sexual harassment in hospitality). In contrast, some young men described the possibility of meeting sexual partners at work in positive terms, as a potential ‘perk’ of the job. One young man who worked catering large events suggested a need to be ‘professionally single’ whilst mingling with some consumers (both men and women), suggesting that the appearance of sexual availability could be part of his job. However, these narratives were unusual, and for those young men who did describe the appearance of sexual availability as part of their job, narratives about their positioning at work were free from suggestions of degradation or risk. In contrast, for young women, producing fun affects ran the constant risk of sexual harassment, and in a few instances threats of sexual violence. As also discussed in Coffey et al. (2018), being a young woman in hospitality labour required additional forms of labour which are rendered invisible (Oksala, 2016), but which mobilises gendered sensibilities and modes of bodily comportment, as well as patterns of masculine power and domination which drive the harassment and risks to young women in this study both at work and in everyday life.

Across these narratives, participants describe and contest the status of front-of-house hospitality work as frivolous labour that resembles leisure and as work best suited to youth. In part this is due to the structure of the industry, which offers limited progression and is biographically temporary, seen as inhibiting rather than facilitating the kind of work that would signify ‘adult’ status. However, this is also due to the content of the labour – the affects produced and the practices required of workers. The frivolity attributed to hospitality work is due to the fact that it consists of affects of enjoyment that are produced through embodied performances of spontaneous leisure that are essentialised as attributes of young bodies. These performances are deployed from a position of relative disempowerment that makes workers vulnerable to experiences of degradation and incivility. This situation has particular gendered contours for women, for whom the requirement to ‘be fun’ takes place in settings characterised by widespread sexual harassment. In the next section we expand on how the notion of hospitality as frivolous, unskilled labour is contested by workers, especially by those with more experience in the industry.

‘Skilled’ labour?

Participants were aware and resentful of the popular perception that hospitality is unskilled labour. They discussed the ability to ‘read people’ and mobilise the kinds of interactions required of different consumers as critical to facilitating a consumption experience. However, analogous to Iskender's (2021) discussion of the relationship between skills and personhood, participants were most resentful of their status as unskilled workers because they felt that it contributed to the poor treatment they often received from customers:

It just feels like for people to make the assumption that hospitality is unskilled, it kind of reeks of classism or elitism … you can't demean a service and then demand it. It feels very disgusting to me when you love going out to cafes and restaurants, and then you're a bitch to the wait staff. [Amber, 24 years old]

Amber, a waitress, suggests that this incivility is based on the assumption that they are unskilled, a demeaning position in the relationship between customer and worker. However, asserting that hospitality was skilled labour was complicated by the youthful and transitory nature of the labour force. Jessica, also a restaurant waitress, describes her frustration at having worked in workplaces in which young workers were hired and then not trained or supported to learn their jobs. Jessica said that this meant that workers struggled to contribute meaningfully to the labour process and were an impediment to the work of more experienced staff:

Get the young ones in, whinge about them because they don’t have skills, but don’t pay them hardly anything, don’t worry about it. Then wonder why customers complain [laughs]… That seems to always be the frickin method with it. Just throw a bunch of young people in and expect it to be really successful [laughs]. [Jessica, 29 years old]

However, it is not simply the inexperience of young hospitality workers that complicates the notion of hospitality as unskilled labour, but rather the way that attributes of youthfulness are enacted within the labour process. As also documented in Marshall's (1986) ethnography of a British pub, young workers expected their jobs to be fun, and to include moments of casual socialising during a shift. Something similar is described by Bessen-Cassino's (2014) ethnography of young front-of-house cafe workers in the United States, and making work ‘fun’ is a deliberate employer strategy to attract young workers to the retail industry (Tannock, 2001). The relationships created in this way are also important parts of the hospitality labour process because they allow workers to support one another and participate in the relational production of affective atmospheres (Farrugia et al., 2023). However, they were a source of frustration to more experienced hospitality workers. Almost all of these more experienced workers had plans to leave the industry eventually, but at the time of the interview their hospitality work was their main commitment. An example of this is the following narrative from Jenny, an experienced worker from a working-class background who had been a bartender for over a decade. Jenny had tried to gain further educational qualifications to leave the industry, but was unsuccessful due to the impact of her late-night shifts on her ability to study. Despite her desire to leave the hospitality industry, Jenny was frustrated by what she said was the attitude that her younger and less experienced co-workers adopted towards their jobs:

They’re sort of there for a bit more of a social opportunity. There can [be] a bit of a miscommunication of what a lot of people think working there is supposed to be like. It's just a party and you hang out with your mates. It can be and sometimes it is but then there's also work that needs doing. [Jenny, 30 years old]

As discussed above, hospitality work can sometimes appear similar to leisure, but while being ‘fun’ is critical for the creation of atmospheres of enjoyment, the idea that work can include moments of leisure is a source of frustration for more experienced workers or those with managerial duties. They also described their frustration at working with co-workers who were hired because they had the right ‘look’ for a venue, but who were unreliable when it came to the less glamorous aspects of work such as cleaning up after patrons. This frustration was therefore not simply a reflection of class positioning causing these workers to take work more ‘seriously’, but was an outcome of shifts in their orientation towards work as an aspect of their biography with an increasingly ambiguous relation to the notion of ‘adulthood’ (see Threadgold et al. (2021) for a discussion of how class is enacted in service interactions). Whilst adulthood is a contested term (Woodman and Wyn, 2015), certain signifiers (such as becoming a parent) remain significant for designating adult status. As workers accumulated the aspirations and responsibilities popularly associated with adulthood, their experience of work also shifted, as this example from an experienced bartender shows:

[I enjoyed] the social side of it … have a few sneaky drinks while you’re at work, and that's what it's all about. I think – I couldn’t tell you when it changed. I don’t know if it was when I was more managerial or whether I just got over or what it was – it's been a gradual thing, but I – this is really bad, but I would honestly say I hate my job, I hate dealing with customers.

The staff – even though most of my friends I’ve met through hospo, I’m 34 now, they’re all 20 … I’m pregnant – it's not the same … you could put up with the crap pay and conditions and everything, because it was fun, because you were with your friends and you were drinking, but now it's all that crap stuff, and I couldn’t tell you one good thing about it, which is a shame, but, honestly, I couldn’t. [Zoe, 34 years old]

For Zoe, the performance of spontaneous leisure expected of her at work, and which comes so easily to her co-workers, has become laborious. She is increasingly resentful of the poor working conditions that she took for granted earlier in her hospitality career as the cost of having fun at work. The social relations of her workplace are also attributed with new meaning in the light of changes in her own biography. Significantly, these are not merely biographical age, which has ceased to become a meaningful indicator of adult status (Blatterer, 2007). Instead, they include her pregnancy and future expectation of parenthood. Moreover, managers like Tess felt that they were positioned as ‘like parents’ at work, whilst their staff were analogous to children:

Yeah, so now I'm actually a bar manager … most of them [co-workers] now are 19 to 23. This is their first hospo job which is nothing wrong with, but it definitely creates a different work atmosphere. Maybe the work ethic isn't there sometimes … a lot of them are just like kids that are still living at their parents’ … going to uni, they don't really care … you definitely get the vibe with a lot of them that they just think it's a fun job; like oh, I'm a bartender.

It can be really frustrating with like honestly feeling like their mum sometimes, just nagging them. It's like – close the bar properly! I come in every morning and every morning you're missing the same three things. [Tess, 26 years old]

Here, the duties allocated to different staff are narrated in terms of distinctions between youth and adulthood enacted through the social relations of hospitality labour. Making these distinctions, workers also contest the status of hospitality work: experienced workers who regard their work as requiring the effortful and reflexive deployment of skills resent the image of hospitality work as unskilled and fun. This is despite the role of these kinds of youthful dispositions for the atmosphere produced in venues, which relies on capacities for spontaneous, pleasurable relationality. Critically, these distinctions were not necessarily based on biographical age, but rather on relations between general workers and more experienced staff, or managers who still performed front-of-house work:

It started as a joke. Mama [Jenny] started as a joke … but I do feel like a mama sometimes and I’m looking after all of my 35 year old children … A lot of the time when I was there I would be the person that was asked to … look after someone, take care of the problems, to fix the situation and to do that other work. I didn’t mind it; this is what I’m capable of doing so I’ll do it. [Jenny, 30 years old]

As this quote from Jenny indicates, her ‘children’ can be older than herself – what matters is that she is in a position of authority and also, in this instance, a position of care. Jenny described often being called upon to resolve problems for others during a shift, such as dealing with uncivil customers who were treating other staff poorly. This was because she had finely developed relational skills and was competent in defusing potentially problematic situations – a key task in hospitality venues that often falls to women workers (Coffey et al., 2018). In this, her narrative again intertwines biographical and gendered distinctions in the way that labour takes place, in this case through practices of care and support between hospitality staff and in the gendered relationships that support these informal practices. These kinds of relationships are poorly recognised aspects of hospitality labour, and these skills or capacities are unremunerated – not part of Jenny's official job description, although key to what she does at work.

Conclusion

For working capacities to be recognised or constructed as skills, they must be regarded as separate from the body of a worker – possessed and reflexively deployed rather than intrinsic to a worker's body (Iskender, 2021). In this project, we found that the practices through which hospitality's pleasurable affects are produced superficially resemble leisure, and are essentialised as attributes of young bodies and youthful workers. It is in this way that workers are positioned as unskilled – intrinsically ‘fun’ rather than deliberately deploying cultivated capacities in a reflexive manner. This interacts with longstanding gendered divisions within the service economy that include expectations connected to femininised capacities for care and that position women as sexually available as part of the service relation (Adkins, 1995; Bolton, 2009). It is also critically connected with the broader cultural association of youthfulness with spontaneous enjoyment and cutting-edge consumption (Farrugia, 2018) and with the biographically transitory relationship that young people are expected to adopt towards work (Tannock, 2001). More experienced workers who contest the status of hospitality as frivolous labour distance themselves from the idea that work is fun or ‘like a party’, and in the process position themselves as ‘like parents’ at work, emphasising the need to leave behind a youthful identity in order to adopt a position as a skilled worker. This takes place within a generally precarious and degraded working environment, which offers workers extremely limited improvements in conditions or remuneration over time, and requires them to endure degradation and sexual harassment from customers.

With this insight, this paper extends theories of affective labour in new directions. Situated as dimensions of the social relations of affective labour, youth is not simply an attribute of workers, but enacts a specific relationship between subjectivity, labour and value that is connected to the affects produced at work, in this case sensations of pleasure that facilitate consumption and that are experienced relationally in service interactions. Through attention to the subjectivities enacted in the politics of skill, affective labour appears less in terms of the creation of value from subjectivity in general (as in Autonomist approaches to affect) and instead emerges as a site of contestations about the status attributed to workers, and as complex scene in which workers reflexively and critically engage with their role in the labour process. If skill is the measure of personhood at work (Iskender, 2021), then affective labour does not create value simply from life itself, but rather through the attribution of degrees of personhood through a politics of skill that is enacted in the labour process and in the social relations of service labour. Affects are therefore positioned within a set of disciplinary requirements and embodied power relations that shape the subjectivities enacted through the labour process. As well as the need to consider the specific, socially located and embodied nature of workers in their classed and gendered dimensions, the politics of skill inserts notions of youth and youthful embodiment as critical to the production of affect in hospitality and to the way that workers are enrolled into hospitality labour.