The reality of life in the low-paid service sector is one of insecurity, flexibility, hard work and precarity. David Graeber (2013) identified the growth of ‘bullshit jobs’ which emanated from reconfigured neoliberal labour markets. The well-paid jobs of the knowledge economy and professions accommodate small workforces who work progressively long hours. The rest of the working-age population is swept into increasingly precarious, underpaid and exploitative forms of temporary or on-demand labour. In an economy dominated by consumer capitalism, the service economy offers the widest range of roles and functions designed to satisfy the demand for instant consumer gratification. Organisational culture and management practice aims to meet ‘just-in-time’ demand with a flexible workforce buttressed by temporary staff at peak periods of high demand (Hatton, 2011). In the quest for efficiency and productivity, work routines are automated and monitored to ensure maximum effectiveness while employees face targets and performance management which incentivises activity. Rotas constrain workers who are unable to plan ahead and are reliant on managers to allocate suitable shifts. Customers increasingly habituated to their own sovereignty expect frictionless and instant service and often demonstrate willingness to assert a perceived degree of superiority on their low-paid interlocutor if instant gratification and satisfaction is not forthcoming.

These realities are the result of a series of causative absences at the heart of the service economy and labour market in the UK, US and elsewhere. An ultra-realist harm perspective grafted onto the reality of life in the service economy makes an important analytical breakthrough and provides a new lens with which to consider the bottom slopes of the labour market. It also perhaps breaks ossified thinking on low-paid work and ethico-social obligation. Through a rupture with empirical traditions which observe the presence of something, the interpretation of absence at the heart of capitalist political economy and neoliberal ideology presents new realities. The conditions within which harms emerge are a reflection of the ethical void at the heart of capitalism's generative core, the libidinal energy at the centre of the mode of production, driven by the absence at the heart of a subject emotionally invested in the world around them.