My time at the bar: Management, leadership, and organisation from below during the industrialisation of hospitality labour

Hospitality is one of the biggest employers in the UK, recruiting large amounts of young workers, often into their first jobs. Pubs and bars play a particularly important place in British cultural life as well as the wider economy. The centralisation of capital and labour can be read from macro data, but this tells us little about how this process has occurred over time. There is little research that address the experience of work in the industry from worker’s perspectives. Perceptions of how technology is deployed and how corporate management reorganises work remains unanswered. With the class maps of the past unfit for our deindustrialised present, how to recruit precarious pub and bar workers into the labour movement is unclear. This thesis maps the changing dynamics of the labour process from worker’s perspectives. A historical materialist account of pub and bar work, informed by workers inquiry and class composition analysis, discusses the ways in which the state and capital shape the labour process. Spending 7 months working in a centrally managed pub chain and 12 months organising with the South London Bartenders Network, it combines an ethnographic account of the contemporary conditions of pub and bar work with an exploration of grassroots experiments in hospitality worker organising. Drawing out the shifts in the technical and social composition of pub and bar workers sharpens an understanding of how the labour process has and is changing. It maps out how the centralisation of capital and labour results in forms of industrialisation in hospitality services. The inquiry highlights some of the core tensions that exist in the strategies for profitability in bars and pubs in Britain. It argues that whilst this workforce is marked by quiescence, the contradictions at work show where worker power might emerge.