Introduction

The organisational practice and management culture outlined in Chapter Three reveals realities facing service economy employers and employees. Many of these issues create conditions whereby instability affects workers. Work intensification and just-in-time processes raise stress levels, targets and incentives keep wages low, drive performance management and encourage a particular set of behaviours, while labour fragmentation fosters division and competition. Contemporary labour markets are increasingly characterised as flexible and insecure rather than stable and secure (Walther, 2006; Lee and Kofman, 2012; Glavin, 2013; Wheatley, 2016; Harvey et al, 2017). Precarious conditions emerge through the systematic reconfiguration of labour markets (Standing, 2011) driven by the requirements of neoliberal capitalism. The structural adjustment from job stability towards job flexibility provides necessary opportunities for employers to make efficiency savings and boost profitability (Harvey, 2010) but fundamentally damages the employees’ sense of security. The balance of power now weighted entirely in favour of the employer affords a reconfiguration of employment relations, working conditions and organisational culture that serves to heap precarity on the individual and erode a sense of stability.

Absences have a causative impact for both organisations and individuals; this negativity creates a set of conditions in which social relations are affected and harms can emerge. Within this chapter, exploration of the absence of stability in employment and working conditions will begin to reveal some of the more harmful effects of low-level service work and the precarious conditions of work for an increasingly high proportion of people in the UK, US and elsewhere. The systemic violence of neoliberal political economy represents a negative motivation to harm; the willingness to reshape labour markets in favour of efficiency and profit despite the attendant problems and harms this inflicts on workers. The absence of stability creates conditions within which harms occur. This chapter will focus specifically on the absence of stability in terms of employee contracts, the use of overtime and a second income to supplement wages, and the problems of progression up the employment ladder. Part-time, low-hours and zero-hour contracts present significant challenges to a sense of stability at work which, coupled with just-in-time rotas, leave employees in a state of indeterminacy and struggling to plan their lives in advance. This has ramifications for the notion of transitions to adulthood, which will be discussed at the end of the chapter.