Foreword

Summary

The book series Studies in Social Harm seeks to advance the disciplinary agenda of zemiology by encouraging innovative approaches that can produce accurate and systematic analyses of injury in late capitalist societies. It encourages theoretical and methodological approaches that seek to build a more sophisticated picture of the lived reality of injury, focusing for example on the interrelated nature of harm, its social patterning, and how harms accumulate across the life course from the ‘cradle to the grave’. One of the principal motivations driving this work is to foreground structural harms within social science analysis, to understand the varied ways that the organisation of societies serves to injuriously compromise human flourishing.

In this, the latest contribution to the series, a further aspect of harm production in contemporary capitalist societies is explored, this time in relation to the shifting nature of the labour market. Over the last 65 years, the UK like many wealthy industrialised nations has seen a marked shift from the manufacturing to the services sector. In the UK, this has been more dramatic than many G7 countries with the service industry now constituting approximately 80% of economic output, with more than four of every five UK jobs being an occupation with a service focus. The sector provides goods and services that have an impact on many aspects of our lives ranging from our financial security, health and well-being through to leisure and consumption. However, following the Sports Direct and Amazon scandals in 2016, which revealed workers to be employed on zero-hour contracts, paid under the minimum wage, undertaking 55-hour working weeks and working under severe surveillance and disciplinary regimens, the sector came to be questioned in political and policy debates. Indeed the very practices that appear to ensure savings and convenience demanded by the consumer (as well as the profits required by the shareholders), inflict untold injury on the workers in this sector.

Anthony Lloyd's The Harms of Work meticulously documents the lived experience of the service sector through a detailed ethnographic study of the service sector in the North East of England, that draws on the testimonies of both low-paid workers and their line managers across call centres, shops and retail, fast-food establishments, bars, pubs, takeaways, restaurants, and shopping centres.