Youth and labour; how employers got rid of the responsibility to care

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published under the author’s pseudonym, Lyra Parks.

The holidays are just around the corner, and this means different things to different people. For the retail and service sector, it means a hiring spree unmatched in any other season. The industry is preparing to sell furiously and build up profit the way a bear stores up fat, ready to make it through the hibernation period of January and February (that is, until Valentine’s Day hits). What makes this corporate feeding frenzy possible is the in-store workforce that companies amass, which for some organizations, like my employer, means literally doubling their number of frontline employees for the months of November and December.

Casually discarding seasonal employees when the retail-death period hits in January is standard practice, accepted without batting an eye, but nevertheless awaited with bated breath by new hires who are hoping to be one of the few selected to stay. Their labour status, increasingly uncertain the closer Christmas and Boxing Day loom, is one of the ways in which employers have shrugged off the obligation to provide dependable, sustainable, and dignified jobs.

The fact of the matter is that retail jobs suck. Not on principle and not in every case, but on average and across the board, they do. And it’s not the actual labour that is the key offender, but the conditions in which labour is performed. The plight of seasonal workers and their uncertain employment status is just one obvious example. On-call scheduling systems, which require employees to be available to come into work should they be needed, but do not actually guarantee pay for that period of time, are another.  The common practice of distributing shifts across widely varying times and days often makes it difficult to plan one’s life outside of work. There is the fact that many shifts are intentionally just short enough to avoid being legally obligated to give the employee anything more than a 15-minute break. There is the much-debated topic of minimum wage, which paired with the scarcity of full-time retail work, often necessitates having more than one job to fully support oneself.

However, I would argue that one of the worst aspects of retail work is the expectation of emotional labour, i.e. the requirement that employees display certain emotions as part of their job. Companies are well aware of how false “Hello, how can I help you today?” sounds by now, and acting genuine is a genuine part of my job description. It is, of course, intuitive and logical that employees should help make customers’ shopping experiences enjoyable, but when the minute actions of employees are controlled in order to create the perfect customer experience, the conditions of labour begin to infringe on bodily autonomy, and things become invasive, distressing, and dehumanising.

Retail employers have given me instructions like “Use ‘assist’ instead of ‘help’ because it sounds more sincere”, have told me to avoid sounding like a robot, and have barked the word “smile” at me over our headset comm system when my expression wasn’t radiant enough during an evening rush. I have never worked harder to avoid publicly bursting into tears than the day I spent two soul-sucking hours at the front of the store, repeating a one-sentence promotion over and over again (that’s the same sentence, without a break, repeated easily over 400 times), and handing out flyers, only to be approached by a manager who suggested I must be having a bad day because I’m clearly not doing my best to be cheerful. A robot could easily have done my job that day, but a robot could not perform the emotional labour I was doing, and so the task fell to me.

And here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be this way. Shitty, dehumanising, inadequate retail jobs were not created because 20-somethings needed poorly-paying, part-time work. Shitty retail jobs were created because companies realized that 20-somethings were willing to do this work for less pay, less stability, and less dignity than their predecessors. Being a shop-person was once a valid career choice; now the position is specifically marketed toward employees like me, because it is not only assumed that I am transient, that I do not need benefits or a stable schedule, but it is also an actively cultivated idea.

Fill your employee ranks with enough young people who are forced to smile, and you can mask the fact that these are young people swimming in student debt, young people living with their parents for the longest periods of time in decades, young people who are often not so young, not single, and not childless. Young people who deserve better. But we won’t see any reversal of this trend, of taking advantage of young people’s desperation to work, unless almost unimaginably broad coordinated collective action is taken by workers to demand better, or our late-capitalist system is replaced by something that does not make a mindless pursuit for profit the raison d’être of most employers. Both those things are on my wishlist this year, but I won’t hold my breath for a revolution under the Christmas tree.