Worker Autonomy & Resistance-Compliance Among Fast Food and Retail Workers

• In Event: 30826 - Unions and Labor Unrest

Abstract

This paper draws on an in-depth interview study of 30 service sector workers to take up the question of how workers navigate resistance and compliance to corporate and/or managerial demands in their everyday actions. The service industry, known for its monotonous work and rigid workplace demands, provides an ideal site to observe how worker autonomy is expressed in subtle forms of resistance-compliance. Rather than debate the effectiveness of indirect resistance, this paper shows how indirect resistance is taking shape within service work, an industry with limited worker rights and protections. Focusing on the interviews of 30 service workers who discussed experiences of resisting and complying while at work, I describe three overarching approaches that workers in the service industry employed to express their autonomy as workers: surface compliance, backstage activities, and direct noncompliance. Both direct and indirect forms of resistance and compliance were often influenced by employee relationships with managers and their presence. These findings suggest that despite the rigid and monotonous demands of service work, employees find ways to exercise worker autonomy and control. Findings may inform academic disciplines, such as sociology of work and occupations and organizational psychology, about the many indirect forms that resistance takes within precarious occupations and influence policymakers as to the importance of worker autonomy within the service industry.

Author

• Esperanza Teresa, Guadalupe Padilla, University of California-San Francisco