Retail shift workers: the times and rhythms of working with customers. Two European case studies

The aim of this research is to understand the perceptions and representations of young retail shift workers (RSWs) about times and rhythms of working with customers. The research case studies are two European shopping streets: Oxford Street in London, United Kingdom, and Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, Italy. The research methods are observation (6 months in each case), interviews, focus groups. In the last years flexible schedules have grown in Europe, in particular in the service sector. Italy is a paradigmatic example: here shop openings are fully deregulated. The contemporary age is characterized by globalization, automatization and delocalization of industrial production. However, some working activities cannot be delocalized or automatized: working with customers face-to-face, the so called emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) in fast food restaurants (Leidner 1993, Gould 2010), hotels (Scherman 2011) and shops. There is a specific kind of alienation linked to the emotional labour. Furthermore, this study allows us to observe a process of contraction of times and rhythms in urban contexts, that I call "immediatization". Social acceleration and immediacy (Rosa 2004, Tomlinson 2007), the demand of instant satisfaction by customers and the phenomenon of consumerism as commodity fetishism (Marx 1867, Marcuse 1964, Bauman 2000) have consequences on the pace of work, as well as on the productive processes. The economic system of today is called Fast Capitalism, clothing companies are called Fast Fashion. The young RSWs I interviewed are influenced by these processes: they experience a condition of alienation, lack of control and powerlessness both over their emotions and over their own time, especially their "reflective time", time to think about themselves (Nowotny 1983), necessary to plan their lives as young adults.