Class, affective labour and exploitation: Unemployment and the creation of work on the margins

Abstract

This article examines the articulation of class and affective labour in the creation of work for the unemployed. Bringing together two sets of interlinking literature on work, class and subjectivity – the proliferating and increasingly popular literature on affective labour and the highly influential Bourdieusian inspired sociologies of class – we argue for closer research attention to the specificities of exploitation in contemporary experiences of paid employment. To do this, we draw on in-depth research on the informal work created by the social enterprise The Big Issue. This research demonstrates the ways in which affective labour is enacted through the productive exchange of commodities and the cultivation of particular worker dispositions. In the process, the homeless and long-term unemployed are positioned as productive workers and classed subjects through the disciplinary requirements of this form of affective labour.

Affective labour and class distinction in the night-time economy

“…This has been a key focus of feminist critiques of immaterial labour, which have observed that this 'new' economy nevertheless relies on the exploitation of longstanding forms of feminised labour (Bolton, 2009;Oksala, 2016) and that young women experience heightened forms of insecurity and specific manifestations of class inequality in immaterial economies that tend to be highly precarious (Gill & Pratt, 2008). In response, there is now an emerging literature which is focusing on the way that class inequalities operate in immaterial economies (Gerrard, 2019;Gerrard & Farrugia, 2021). In this article we contribute to this literature by drawing on the tradition of class theorising established in feminist developments of Bourdieu (Adkins & Skeggs, 2005;Lawler, 2005;Skeggs, 2004;Skeggs & Loveday, 2012).…”

Love, laughter and solidarity on the docks in Liverpool, c.1950s–1990s

“…I argue that we must assess the nature of everyday relationships at work to understand the emotional malleability of solidarity as an ongoing process and the varied ways in which dock workers and their families experienced and expressed it. I also intend that this article provides historical context to contemporary studies of the emotions of class, and precarity in particular, to illustrate how the emotions of solidarity functioned and continue to function as a form of resistance (Gerrard & Farrugia, 2021;Patulny et al, 2020). These emotions have always been rooted in converging structures of power such as class, gender and race (Connell, 2005;Skeggs, 1997;Virdee, 2014).…”