Retail shift workers: two qualitative case studies. The times and rhythms of emotional labour in London and Milan

The topic of this research is the retail shift work, in particular the perceptions and feelings of retail shift workers in Corso Buenos Aires, Milan, Italy. The methods used are qualitative methods: interviews, focus groups and ethnographic fieldwork. I worked three years as retail shift worker in a phone store in this shopping street in Milan. Post-Fordism and the expansion of the service sector in the labour market have led to a substantial increase in young people employed in this sector, often in multinational companies of famous brands and in a condition of flexibility of contract terms. Shift work, in holiday, on Sundays, sometimes at night, up until only a few years ago was synonymous of factory work and blue collar workers. Today this is intertwined with the retail work, characterized by an empathic interaction between workers and customers in a condition of immediacy. A. Hochschild underlined that: “Jobs of this type have three characteristics in common. First, they require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public. Second, they require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person-gratitude or fear, for example. Third, they allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees” (Hochschild 1983). Retail workers must identify with the customers and must empathize with them everyday with timing and pace of work fast and tight. Working with customers, they could perceive a condition of estrangement from themselves. This kind of alienation could be linked to the demand of instant satisfaction and the contraction of times and rhythms, the immediacy of relationships, in the “shopping areas” of the western metropolis. As well as studying the socio-economic phenomenon of globalization as social scientists I think that we have to study what I called the phenomenon of "immediatelyzation", a process of contraction of social times and rhythms, from social times long-term based, through the so called Social Acceleration, to the immediacy of the relationships. This radical change, the disappearance of shared times, experiences and rituals, could even generate in the future a different and riskier phenomenon: a de-structuration of social life, of the society itself. This research will carry on within another case study, Oxford Street in London. In Italy the legislation regarding shop opening hours has become total in 2012, while in England the opening hours are more regulated. Labour legislation in England protects the rights of retail workers to refuse work on Sundays, and to receive overtime payments and time in lieu for working on Public Holidays. This topic is actual and important in the public debate in Europe: in England, a campaign against working on Sunday, called “Keep Sunday Special”, was supported by religious and secular groups and organizations. In Italy there are similar groups, in several cities, called “Libera la Domenica”, “Set free the Sunday”, against the deregulation. Recently the organizations of “Keep Sunday Special” have written in a letter to The Telegraph: “Keeping Sunday special is essential to the fabric of our society” (8th August 2015).