Tag Archives: Charlie-Walker

Local work futures in Southampton and Hampshire

Presentation Pauline Leonard

Presentation Pauline Leonard

by Rebekah Luff, Suzanne Reimer, Silke Roth and Charlie Walker

A key dimension of projects and events organised by the Work Futures Research Centre at the University of Southampton has been an ongoing engagement with different user groups in relation to employment change, seeking to shape policy and research agendas and to disseminate research findings. 2015, for example, saw the organisation of a policy dialogue event, Gender equality at work, held in June at Portcullis House, Westminster. The symposium was a follow up to a March 2013 panel discussion (also held at the House of Commons) interrogating the ways in which policy interventions might operate to make a difference to gender inequalities in waged labour.

Another major event hosted by the Work Futures Research Group in 2015 sought to turn a more locally-focused lens onto patterns of employment change. A key aim was to bring together academics and practitioners at an explicitly interdisciplinary workshop entitled Work, gender and generation. Held at the University of Southampton on 8th May 2015, four panels explored the local context of transformations in work and employment. An opening session investigated employment and training opportunities for young men and women across the local labour market, whilst a second panel reflected upon the specific employment contexts of the creative industries.  A third panel considered the experiences and labour market status of social care staff, with a particular focus on youth training in and for the sector. The final session of the day examined aspects of a specific labour market transition from military to civilian work.

Participants included academics working on youth training and skills development; local college educators who run apprenticeship programmes; creative industry academics and researchers based in both universities and local authorities; academic analysts of the social care sector; and career advisors working for military charities.

Cross-cutting themes included ways in which divisions of labour at times may appear to shift whilst at other times they remain robust. For example, although certain factors have led to the increased involvement of strongly qualified male migrant workers in social care, the current workforce as a whole is most likely to be young and female, with relatively lower qualification and education levels. A further point of connection across the panels was an interest in the decision-making processes of individuals as they move into and through different parts of the labour market.

From a policy perspective, panellists and audience participants underscored the importance of understanding job transitions in a holistic fashion. That is, if interventions to support education and training do not connect with labour market policies, young people will be left with ‘training’ or ‘education’ but without jobs; or alternatively they may achieve entry into low paid work but will be left without the possibility of career development. Examples of mentoring and support programmes, both formal and informal, were cited as important within the creative industries and also were emphasised by those working for military charities.

As a result of the workshop, Rebekah Luff and Charlie Walker are pursuing their cognate interests in employment in the social care sector and the development of apprenticeships with a research bid to the charity Abbeyfield, which, if successful, will allow them to examine the impact of apprenticeships on social care provision and the prospects of social care employees within the Southampton area.

The event was organized by Rebekah Luff, Suzanne Reimer, Silke Roth and Charlie Walker.

Femininity, interactive service work and social mobility: reflections from Russia

Dr Charlie Walker

Dr Charlie Walker

In their recent book Shopgirls, Cox and Hobley illustrate that the connection between retail and qualities traditionally associated with femininity developed in conjunction with women’s gradual entrance into the service sector labour market from the late 19th Century. Alongside their association with femininity, customer-facing forms of service sector employment have also had a historical association with glamour, and in turn, with possibilities of social mobility. This is despite the fact that, as Cox and Hobley document, workers in the retail sector experienced dire working and living conditions well into the 20th Century.

In the early 21st Century, while conditions have improved, this contradiction continues. As Valery Walkerdine has argued, in a context in which working-class people are increasingly denigrated as flawed workers and flawed consumers, service sector employment, alongside the expansion of previously inaccessible educational opportunities, ‘appear to offer possibilities and lifestyles which are tied up with what is traditionally regarded as middle-class status’ (2003: 240). However, in reality, low pay and non-standard contracts continue to be the norm for many in service sector employment. Thus, what has been seen as the cultural feminisation of the economy, with a growing number of jobs that require workers to be customer-focused, communicative, caring, and flexible – qualities traditionally associated, rightly or wrongly, with femininity – should not be assumed to have brought greater gender equality. Indeed, as Lisa Adkins has argued, since women appear to ‘embody’ rather than ‘perform’ femininity, they are less likely to be rewarded for it, and instead, may more easily be positioned as ‘gendered workers’.

The demand for and utilisation of the feminine in service sector employment are central not only to western economies, but also, to emerging economies such as those of Eastern Europe and the BRIC countries. In China, for example, Eileen Otis’s work explores the ways in which women and their bodies have been used as a vehicle for the mobilisation of global corporate capital as the public face of high-class hotels for international businessmen. My own research has explored a similar context in Russia, where images of women also indicate a shift towards a more ‘emphasized’ version of femininity in line with the building of post-Soviet capitalism. My interest, however, has predominantly been in questions of social inequality and social mobility – what sorts of prospects do new forms of interactive service work hold out for working-class young women in contemporary Russia?

I recently published the results of a study conducted in the rapidly developing metropolis of St. Petersburg, which involved interviews with thirty-four young women who were either training for or already working in various forms of interactive service work such as hospitality, tourism and the beauty industry. It was immediately apparent that the young women in the study were very attracted to the work roles they had chosen, and that they distinguished these roles strongly from older forms of employment in, for example, manufacturing. The attraction of service sector roles was rooted in part in their substantive content, including the possibilities it offered the young women to engage in communication-based work, and in what they regarded as creative tasks, as opposed to the ‘monotony’ of employment in the industrial sector, where many of their parents had worked. In addition, employment in hospitality and tourism, and the newer parts of the beauty industry, often held out forms of symbolic capital through their connection with the West, either in the form of western-standard hotels or possibilities for future travel, or simply western-sounding job titles such as menedzher and vizazhist. Finally, the attraction of service work stemmed from its aesthetic dimension, namely, the requirement to perform an idealised version of middle-class femininity, which held out significant appeal for working-class young women.

Newspaper advertisements for a sales manager and various forms of manual labour draw on different (albeit tongue-in-cheek in the latter case) constructions of femininity

Newspaper advertisements for a sales manager and various forms of manual labour draw on different (albeit tongue-in-cheek in the latter case) constructions of femininity

However, taken together, these factors only made up a symbolic form of social mobility. In material terms, none of the young women in the study expected to earn more than they would have done had they chosen to work in industry, and all expected to earn significantly less than their boyfriends and future husbands. This was a realistic reflection of a gender pay gap that, according to Rosstat, stood at 37% in 2008.

Thus, the contradiction between notions of social mobility and the reality of poor prospects in feminised forms of service work appears especially stark in some of the newer contexts of global capitalism. In all of its contexts, though, it is important to unpack the significance of employment shifts that appear to favour a particular gendered worker.

The expansion of service sector employment has been at the heart of the apparent cultural feminisation of the economy, which has often underpinned discourses proclaiming that ‘the future is female’, and that men, or at least working-class men, are becoming increasingly ‘redundant’, as deindustrialising economies offer fewer jobs requiring skills associated with masculinity.
However, as the experience of the young women in the St. Petersburg study indicates, it is crucial not to mistake shifts in the gendered performances demanded by employers with shifts in gender equality.

Charlie Walker’s article ‘“I Don’t Really Like Tedious, Monotonous Work”: Working-class Young Women, Service Sector Employment and Social Mobility in Contemporary Russia’ appears in the journal Sociology