Workers and Their Foes: Customer Scapegoats in the Service Triad

Abstract

The author reconceptualizes the service triangle as a Simmelian triad and draws on 16 months of fieldwork to analyze restaurant servers’ experiences of income and interactional precarity. Precarious work frustrates servers. However, triadic dynamics position customer scapegoats as responsible for servers’ frustrations. Employers passively benefit from this dynamic, which continually minimizes opposition to the structure of employment. This is a new mechanism for the reproduction of precarious service work that can explain why service workers consent to exploitation. These findings apply to workplaces in which workers experience low levels of autonomy and encounter customers who are interactionally salient and can control workers’ behavior. In such workplaces, the triadic dynamics identified in this article could weaken the potential for worker-customer alliances and complicate the promise of anti-tipping campaigns.

The Making of the “Good Bad” Job: How Algorithmic Management Manufactures Consent Through Constant and Confined Choices

“…Work arrangements amplify this information asymmetry. While classified as independent contractors, workers cannot organize (Dubal, 2023a), may not negotiate personally with managers (Maffie, 2022), lack access to official voice channels (Bucher, Schou, and Waldkirch, 2023), have minimal recourse against customer malfeasance (Laemmli, 2023), and have limited knowledge of the actual code that underpins the algorithmic management system (Christin, 2020). Indeed, the algorithmic management systems set the terms of interaction.…”