Restaurant Workers and Their Foes: A Reconsideration of the Customer in Service Work

• In Event: 1184 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 18. Marginalized Work and Workers

Abstract

A now standard question in the sociology of work asks: why do workers consent to their own exploitation by employers? I shift this essential question, instead asking: what workplace divisions are most salient to workers themselves and what do they mean for the service labor process? Using data from sixteen months of participant observation with restaurant servers, this article shows how servers located their exploitation in the figure of the customer rather than the boss. The tense relationship between servers and customers organizes servers’ work experience and differs from that documented between workers and bosses in one key dimension: after work, servers are free to switch positions in their workplace hierarchy by taking on the status of the customer in other establishments. By moving away from service industry research that remains strictly in the workplace and seeking to understand workers’ subjective experience, this article offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the customers’ role in the labor process. Rather than seeing the customer as incidental to the service labor process, I use one case to understand how the customer can be integral to worker control, experience, and exploitation.

Author

• Taylor Nicole Laemmli, University of Wisconsin-Madison