Lay Moralities of Young Workers and the Moral Economy of Service Labour

This article develops concepts of moral economy to show how workers’ notions of justice and practices of social reciprocity contribute to the structural conditions and value relations of precarious service employment. The article draws on a project which interviewed 75 young workers employed in the retail, hospitality and call-centre industry, exploring the normative ideas and social relationships that shape how young workers’ negotiate their conditions. Data shows that young workers draw on lay definitions of fairness, entitlement and obligation, to make critical and reflexive moral evaluations of their workplaces, and form moral communities enacted through everyday social reciprocity. Lay moralities are constitutive of the social relations of labour and processes of exploitation in the service economy, because they determine the social legitimacy of working schedules and wages, and because they are the basis for young people’s reflexive evaluation of their position as workers.