Abstract
This article examines the articulation of class and affective labour in the creation of work for the unemployed. Bringing together two sets of interlinking literature on work, class and subjectivity – the proliferating and increasingly popular literature on affective labour and the highly influential Bourdieusian inspired sociologies of class – we argue for closer research attention to the specificities of exploitation in contemporary experiences of paid employment. To do this, we draw on in-depth research on the informal work created by the social enterprise The Big Issue. This research demonstrates the ways in which affective labour is enacted through the productive exchange of commodities and the cultivation of particular worker dispositions. In the process, the homeless and long-term unemployed are positioned as productive workers and classed subjects through the disciplinary requirements of this form of affective labour.
Introduction
This article explores forms of classed exploitation taking place through processes of ‘affective labour’ at the margins of the paid labour force. In doing so, we respond to trends in theories of labour and class which have shifted analyses away from paid employment towards struggles for symbolic value or the economic productivity and valorisation of ‘life itself’. We argue for refocused attention on the relations of exploitation and employment in affective labour in order to understand how this form of labour operates to produce classed subjects. Specifically, we suggest that initiatives creating work opportunities for the homeless and long-term unemployed offer a unique opportunity to examine the way in which the classed and affective relations of employment are cultivated in the making. Drawing on research undertaken on the social enterprise The Big Issue – a magazine sold by homeless people on city streets across the world – we shed light on the ways in which classed relations of exploitation are enacted through affective labour. This research demonstrates how affective labour in paid employment is reliant on the production and exchange of material commodities, which frame the subjective conditions of work and the conditions for class exploitation.
First, we introduce and discuss the key sets of literature to which this article aims to contribute and respond: on the one hand, Bourdieusian inspired explorations of contemporary class subjectivity (e.g. Atkinson, 2017; Reay, 2005a, 2005b; Savage, 2003; Sayer, 2005; Skeggs, 2005) and, on the other hand, the expansive uptake of affective labour as representative of present-day ‘new economies’ (e.g. Berardi, 2009; Gill & Pratt, 2008; Hardt & Negri, 2004; Lazzarato, 1996). We argue that whilst Bourdieusian class analysis has positioned affect as central to subjective classed experience, a consequence is the relative marginalisation of employment as a site for class formation. Something similar has taken place in theories of ‘affective labour’, which situate value as a product of ‘life itself’, shifting focus from the exploitation of labour in employment relations. Whilst suggestive of important transformations in the nature of contemporary work and subjectivities, these theoretical trends risk obscuring the specific classed experiences and forms of exploitation taking place in paid employment, including those forms of work in which affect is central.
In this context, this article then draws on in-depth empirical research to explore how relations of classed exploitation are established as the disciplinary requirements of affective labour and are expanded into an informal economy created by work initiatives for the unemployed. Taking The Big Issue as our example, we examine the ways in which the creation of the magazine commodity, and the necessity of workers to sell this commodity, produces a unique form of classed exploitation through practices of affective labour taking place at the margins of the paid labour force. Examining a work initiative created for the unemployed and marginalised offers a unique opportunity to understand the processes of class-in-the-making, in the context of what Adkins (2017) has described as a repositioning of unemployment as sources of labour and value in post-Fordist capitalism. The Big Issue has become an example of interactive service work in an intensely precarious part of the contemporary economy. Big Issue vending demonstrates the ways in which value is created through labour that involves the production and exchange of commodities in an affectively-charged interaction between buyer and seller. Ultimately, we suggest that the relations of exploitation that underpin this form of paid employment offer new ways for understanding the contribution of classed inequalities to the production and value of affect in the contemporary economy.
Class, work and affective labour
Whilst starting from different conceptual frames, contemporary theories of social class and approaches to work in the ‘new’ or post-Fordist economy have both come to focus on subjectivity, affect and value. Bourdieusian accounts of class, for instance, have brought focused attention to what Reay (2005a) refers to as the ‘psychic landscape of class’ – the diverse aesthetic and embodied ways class is lived and felt. Such accounts have shifted attention away from strict theorisations of class-as-paid-employment to focus on hierarchies of symbolic value enacted beyond the realm of work (see e.g. Flemmen, 2013). Conceptions of affective labour are also concerned with understanding how contemporary capitalism cultivates value from the self in ways that blur distinctions between paid and unpaid labour (see Virno, 1996). In what follows, we bring these two sets of literature together in dialogue to consider the kinds of conceptual tools that are required for understanding contemporary forms of exploitation and inequality in employment.
Bourdieu is now recognised as a cornerstone of contemporary scholarship on class. Bourdieu (1990) described class in terms of the social distribution and collective accumulation of symbolic capital, or markers of prestige that provide symbolic power within cultural fields. Engagements with Bourdieu’s work have formed the basis for claims about a ‘new class paradigm’ (Savage, 2003), studies of contemporary class groupings (Savage et al., 2013), and a focus on struggles for symbolic value as key to contemporary class research (Skeggs, 2005). Building on a critique of static models of ‘social stratification’, Bourdieusian inspired accounts focus on the formation of classed subjectivities through struggles over symbolic and moral value and the attribution of symbolic value to the classed self (Adkins & Skeggs, 2004; Atkinson, 2017; Sayer, 2005; Skeggs, 1997). This has included situating affect, embodiment and aesthetics as aspects of the cultural politics of class (Lawler, 2005; Tyler, 2013), in which struggles over symbolic value are reflected in the affective experience of being positioned as classed.
The emergence of this paradigm has proved enormously significant for class research and has shown how affective dimensions of class reflect struggles over power and symbolic value in contemporary societies. Key contributions include expansive and generative developments of labour and value to consider, for instance, the work of mothers as integral to the experience (and making) of class (see Reay, 2005b). This focused attention on the subjective aspects of class, and the labour of – and symbolic struggles over – class that occur beyond paid employment (e.g. education, culture, parenthood) has significantly developed contemporary understandings of class to incorporate embodied, affective and aesthetic dimensions. However, in highlighting affect and subjectivity within hierarchies of symbolic value this paradigm has shifted analysis away from employment – and therefore economic value – as a site for class formation in and of itself. Indeed, for Bourdieu, employment is significant inasmuch as it contributes to stocks of symbolic capital that confer positions within social fields and is not approached as a site of class formation as such. This is reflected in a general shift away from paid employment in Bourdieusian studies of class to a consideration of forms of labour outside of formal work.
A similar interest in the labour of self outside of paid employment has also occurred in the theoretical developments around ‘affective’ or ‘immaterial’ labour. Here, and in a move away from class analysis, the concept of ‘immaterial labour’ (Hardt & Negri, 2004; Lazzarato, 1996) has been situated as emblematic of a ‘new’ or post-Fordist economy (Adkins, 2005) in which economic value is produced through affectivities and subjectivities that transgress the inside and outside of paid employment. Immaterial labour takes an expansive conceptual stance, standing for ‘labour [that] produces immaterial goods such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge or communication’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 290). The concept is motivated by a supposed explosion in ‘cognitive’ or ‘informational’ capitalism, the growth of the ‘creative industries’, and the enormously diverse service sector in general (e.g. Berardi, 2009; Gill & Pratt, 2008). Thus, immaterial labour describes the emergence of an informational economy, whereby symbolic, analytical and problem-solving tasks are emerging as key (and highly valued) labour (Gill & Pratt, 2008; Hardt, 1999). It also encompasses a range of other forms of labour, such as unpaid reproductive work, care work and interactive service work in hospitality or retail, which have become emblematic of the most precarious and poorly remunerated parts of the economy (see Hardt, 1999; Morini & Fumagilli, 2010).
Claims about transformations in the nature of work hinge on the specific kind of product that immaterial labour produces; that is, signs, aesthetics, sensations, affects, interactions, relationships and subjectivities (e.g. Aguiar, 2011; Hardt & Negri, 2004; Lazzarato, 1996; Muehlebach, 2011; Virno, 1996). Labour that is specifically oriented towards the creation of subjectivities and social relationships has also been described as ‘affective labour’ (Hardt, 1999). Reflecting considerable diversity in its conceptual take-up, affect is mobilised to represent that which is perceived to be ‘pre-conscious’ (Clough & Halley, 2007), or at the very least, deeply embodied. This labour is affective ‘in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 292–293).
The conceptual development of affective labour is deeply connected to feminist analyses of women’s paid and unpaid work, despite the fact that this is often frustratingly under-acknowledged (Jarrett, 2015; McRobbie, 2010). This scholarship has long highlighted the centrality of caring capacities and welcoming and happy dispositions in the performance of diverse forms of paid and unpaid labour (e.g. Acker, 1995; Graham, 1991; Hochschild, 1983). Central to this is Hochschild’s (1983) development of emotional labour, which describes the deployment and management of emotion in gendered service work. More recent scholarship explores the value and productivity of labour once relegated to the ‘private’ realm (see e.g. Jarrett, 2015) and the ‘feminisation’ of labour more broadly, including the expansion of precarious, flexibilised paid employment requiring embodied performances and the production of personal relationships (McDowell, 2009; Morini, 2007).
However, studies of immaterial and affective labour have been critiqued for failing to grapple with classed differences in the disciplinary requirements, and modes of affectivity, required of differently positioned workers (Gill & Pratt, 2008). This is due to the challenges that authors such as Hardt and Negri (2004) make to hierarchical approaches to class and work. First, immaterial labour is positioned as transgressing traditional boundaries between work and the rest of life, creating value from the affectivities of life itself both inside and outside of paid employment. Second, Hardt and Negri suggest that hierarchical approaches to class are unable to capture the generalised precarity increasingly prevalent as an aspect of the biopolitics of labour in general. In response, Gill and Pratt (2008) argue that while the concept of affective labour captures many critical dimensions of the relationship between subjectivity and labour, it rests on a generic figure of an abstract affective worker who – problematically – comes to stand in for all workers. McRobbie (2010) also argues that affective labour tends to flatten ‘class’ to mean a universal precarity, allowing little analytic grasp of the gross inequalities in working conditions under capitalism. Moreover, McRobbie and others suggest that affective labour literature dismisses the importance of gender and women in the new relations of labour, whereby the changing nature of service and care work both support – and muddy – traditional binaries between women’s and men’s work (McRobbie, 2010; see also Federici, 2008; Weeks, 2007). Bolton (2009) goes further, arguing that the notion of immaterial labour produces a ‘tidy white, male, middle class analysis of the labour market, in that it loses sight of who are actually doing . . . front-line service jobs’ (Bolton, 2009, p. 75).
In this article we wish to push these critiques further to consider the specific relations of classed exploitation within contemporary employment and affective labour. Pettinger’s (2006) critique of the conceptualisation of service work as predominantly characterised by emotional or affective labour is particularly helpful here. Pettinger (2006) argues against analyses of service employment that focus exclusively on its subjective elements, such as the performance of identity or the experience of affect, suggesting that this obfuscates the materialities of this labour, which involve the production, exchange and consumption of things. This contribution emphasises that it is the commodity exchange process, and the extraction of surplus value from labour, that contours and makes valuable affective labour in paid employment. Thus, whilst affective labour exceeds paid employment, there is a need to understand the specificities of affective labour in the context of labouring practices within paid employment that facilitate this exchange.
When considering these two sets of literature together it is clear that both trends of scholarship surrounding contemporary class and work have usefully developed insight into the subjective, aesthetic and affective dimensions of life. Whilst recent Bourdieusian inspired sociologies of class bring focus to the cultural and affective dimensions of inequality, the recent turn towards ‘affective labour’ suggests the need for a stronger orientation to the processes of labour in this context. The deployment of affect in paid employment is reflective of wide changes in the contemporary economy and is correspondingly linked to contemporary forms of class relations and exploitation. This sociological context requires attention to both the cultural and subjective processes of class formation and the specific conditions within which affectivities and subjectivities become valorised through labour in and beyond paid employment.
Thus, understanding the relationship of affective labour and class requires moving beyond a flattened, all-encompassing treatment of ‘affective labour’ so as to capture the specific dynamics of labour, exploitation and material inequality articulated through paid employment. In other words, we are arguing that whilst affective labour may assist in shedding light on new forms of classed experiences, it is also the case that in order to fully conceptualise affective labour it is necessary to understand how it is articulated through the classed relations that underpin commodity exchange and the production of surplus value in paid employment. Class, in other words, provides a means to understand the exploitative material basis of affect as it becomes reified through processes of valorisation. In putting forward this argument, we suggest that analysis of emerging formations of paid employment offers an important window into the changing formations of classed experiences; in particular, the nexus between unemployment and employment reveals the ways in which class is being made anew.
Importantly, unemployment itself is being repositioned as a source of value in contemporary economies, such as in workfare programmes in which the unemployed are coerced into performing poorly remunerated labour (Adkins, 2017). For instance, Friedli and Stearn (2015) have shown that the expectation to produce valorisable affect is a new mode of coercive welfare policy now targeted at the unemployed that aims to create employees whose affective and embodied subjectivities match the needs of the new economy. Moreover, welfare interventions now instruct the unemployed in the modes of dress, bodily comportment and face-to-face interaction required in the service sector (e.g. Nickson et al., 2013). With Adkins (2017, p. 296), we suggest that reforms to unemployment and workfare are doing more than reformulating welfare as a ‘site for the exploitation of labour’; they are also creating ‘a space in which the activities of the unemployed are made calculable as objects or goods which can be mobilized and traded’. Building on this, we suggest that these transformations extend beyond formal workfare policies as developed and enacted by the state. Crucially, as we explore below, the valorisation of unemployment is occurring in informal paid employment sites which focus on creating work for the unemployed. In what follows we show that the requirement to produce valorisable affect is now part of the reconfiguration of poverty and homelessness as a form of work, and therefore as a mode of class exploitation taking place through affective labour.
Making class on the margins: Producing affective commodities
In London in the early 1990s, The Big Issue, a magazine sold by homeless people on the street, was launched as a legitimate income generation opportunity (in distinction from begging) for London’s homeless, poor and long-term unemployed. Whilst homeless street press has a diverse past and present practice, The Big Issue has become the biggest and most recognisable global franchise (Gerrard, 2017). In England it is the only homeless street press and is immediately recognisable as such. The Big Issue is premised on the value of ‘ethical’ consumption, enabled by the moral decision-making of individual consumers (Humphery, 2017). As such, the purchase of the magazine is not simply about the value of the magazine itself, but also the value of ‘helping’ the person selling it (Gerrard, 2017). This is of paramount importance to the organisation of The Big Issue: the motto ‘a hand up, not a handout’ encapsulates its organisational ethos as a work – and business – practice, not of charity or begging (see Swithinbank, 2001). As one of the first social enterprises, it is premised on the worth and possibility of market-based business solutions to perennial social problems, and as such operates as a business and not a charity or welfare organisation (Gerrard, 2017).
For sellers of The Big Issue, this form of work sits on the margins of mainstream employment, connected to broader practices of ‘homeless street press’, requiring sellers to ‘sell’ their poverty effectively (see Cockburn, 2014; Lindemann, 2006). Sellers are not waged employees, but are effectively sub-contractors as they work for themselves on a piecemeal basis, buying The Big Issue magazine at half the sale price, thereby earning half of the sale when selling on to the public (at the time of the research The Big Issue cost the public £2.50, thereby making vendors £1.25 per sale). They do not receive sick or holiday pay and work on a flexible basis. In this, The Big Issue anticipates the working conditions to be found in the electronically mediated ‘gig economy’, in which workers are regarded as ‘independent contractors’ despite being dependent on selling commodities that are priced by the company that produces their product. Like some other forms of interactive service labour, selling The Big Issue implicates the identity positions of workers into the value of commodities. In addition to their precarious employment relation, Big Issue vendors’ status as homeless and unemployed is critical to the valorisation of the magazine, and positions this work as something of and for the marginalised, offering paid and legitimate, but not waged, employment.
The data analysed here come from a broader three-city transnational research project conducted by the first author, which examined the working practices of homeless street press sellers in Melbourne, London and San Francisco. This research, independent of any organisation, took an ethnographic approach, seeking to gain insight into the ‘everyday’ routines and understandings of these highly marginalised workers, contextualised within the transforming economies of advanced capitalist nations, and whose experiences had hitherto attracted very little scholarly attention. The notion of the everyday focused significance on what can at first appear commonplace or taken-for-granted (see Back, 2015; Highmore, 2002). As such, the research foregrounded participants’ own accounts, and the ways in which they felt and thought about their work.
A broader account of this research can be found elsewhere (Gerrard, 2017). Here, we develop new analysis with specific focus on London due to the institution of new working rule at the time of the research only in London. The new rule reflected the pressures of this ‘socially-conscious’ business enterprise, which has the dual purpose of helping and to make money through the extraction of surplus value. The rule established the need for London sellers to sell 35 magazines a week in order to keep their permanent ‘pitches’. Within the fluid and flexible work practice of being a Big Issue vendor, permanent pitches are highly coveted. Pitches are the spaces allocated for selling the magazines, and a permanent pitch – a guaranteed space and time, each week or day – provides stability in an otherwise highly variable work practice. A permanent pitch also facilitates the possibility of building customer relations with ‘regulars’ in the area, and thus of building sales. In our analysis here we draw only on the London-based research. This involved spending time with sellers whilst they worked, and semi-structured qualitative interviews with 11 sellers and two Big Issue staff. Pseudonyms are used throughout to maintain participant anonymity. First, we discuss how staff at The Big Issue understood the introduction of this rule. Second, we examine vendors’ response to this rule and how this relates to the economy of ‘affective commodities’.
The work relation and commodity exchange
Having an organisational ethos of ‘working, not begging’ (also the motto printed on vendors’ badges in London), the importance of vendors acting like, and being perceived as, workers is central to The Big Issue. Vendors may be marginalised, homeless and long-term unemployed, they may even be ex-beggars, but their work as a vendor is just that: work. The organisation is also a business, requiring the sales of the magazine to keep afloat and thus requiring vendors to actively sell magazines. Concerns surrounding the lack of sales, therefore, are what prompted the new rule across London, as explained by Big Issue staff member Anna:
We’ve said you need to sell thirty-five magazines to get a permanent batch a week. Which is seven magazines if you work a five-day week. Seven magazines a day. So that’s one an hour if you work a seven hour working day.
And what’s the purpose of that?
The purpose of that is the fact – it’s an interesting question and I’ve just got to compose the right answer. Really, it’s for the vendors themselves. Because we don’t feel that somebody having a good pitch and selling twenty magazines a week is good enough. For the vendor or ourselves. And what I mean by good enough is the fact that we’re a company that relies on sales. So if we don’t sell magazines, we have stopped trading, or the price of the magazine gets very, very expensive. So we need to sell a certain amount of magazines to operate.
We are an alternative to begging. . . . I’ve lost count the amount of times that a vendor will come in and said, ‘Yeah I sold five magazines today and made a hundred pounds’. Well that’s great for the vendor but it’s actually useless for us. So, we have to force somebody to help themselves. They need to sell a certain amount of magazines otherwise it’s holding a label ‘poor me, give me some money’. That’s not the idea. The idea is to sell a product and to have some sort of pride in what you’re doing. Because otherwise it’s just a sort of form of begging. And I don’t think we should exist if we are going to do that.
Here, Anna’s explanation of the 35 sales per week rule clearly articulates how the requirement to generate sales demands particular work practices. The unemployed, homeless and poor are offered the opportunity for legitimate work – and therefore identities as workers – but this work is only sustainable through the introduction of traditional relations of exploitation in work practices.
Thus, even this highly flexible piecemeal work requires the production of surplus value. In fact, this work practice highlights that exploitative relations are inevitable in the cultivation of formal work. Anna goes on, for instance, to explain that in instituting this new rule, there is going to be a need to monitor and track under-performing vendors. She says, I imagine the people at the very bottom of the scale we’ll have [a] talking to and told, that you – to get a badge you’ll need to sell more magazines because what’s the point in selling five magazines a week? You know if you just want an interaction with people go to a day centre. If you want to make yourself some money sell the magazine properly and don’t use it as an advert.
Here, the tension in the organisational purpose of The Big Issue – between social inclusion and formal employment – is wrenched open. ‘It sounds harsh’, Anna says, ‘but you know that’s what we’re here for is to put money in people’s pockets. Not as an alternative to begging.’
Brett, also a staff member at The Big Issue, explains this new rule in similar fashion, citing the need for money and profit as the primary justification:
Some of vendors have mentioned to me the new rule about thirty-five a week.
Are they happy? No, they hate us, yes, I know. Yes, thirty-five is not enough. Tell please everyone in the world because when you come to sell The Big Issue you do it because you don’t have any other income. Now in theory if you don’t have any other income selling thirty-five magazines is going to give you, what, forty-four pounds? Forty-four pounds in a week is nothing. . . . The majority of our people are in hostels, in squats so that means that they have some bills to pay up front. That means that they need to create some sort of income and budget this income. So, when they come they’re really, really good at saying, ‘Oh I need to do this because I need money’. Great so then produce this money because otherwise my [sic] suspect is that you are begging on top of the magazine. And that’s what’s killing us as a business.
When Brett was asked about what repercussions this new rule might have for under-performing vendors, his response explicitly positions vendors as workers whose value lies in their capacity to produce surplus value and profit from the business model of the magazine: I think it will generate more sales. And it will influence the vendors’ behaviour. And yes we’re going to lose vendors but the vendors that we’re going to lose I think are the vendors that are giving us lot of problems in bringing The Big Issue into disrepute, in cutting off sales from other people that are working really hard, of perpetrating in themselves, ‘Oh dear I’m miserable I’m lost’. Where in reality they’re just lazy. . . . We’ve got really brilliant people working with us. People that really put a lot of effort and they sell and they are – they’re just talented. . . . So, when I see vendors that shift you know like two hundred, a hundred magazines a week – good! I mean you’re just good. . . . [These vendors have] got such a anthropological, psychological, psychoanalytical way of looking at people ’cause that’s how you fool them. Yeah, it’s not just being sweet ’cause it doesn’t work being sweet doesn’t pay so much and be consistent selling. You have to be really sharp. The ones that we going to lose is going to be minority.
In this explanation, Big Issue vendors are understood as salespeople whose value is determined by their capacity to sell the magazine and the personal qualities and skills they bring to their work. The loss or exclusion of vendors due to the new selling requirements is merely the loss of under-performing employees, who lack the work ethic and ‘way of looking at people’ required to successfully sell the magazine. In this way, the introduction of new selling requirements positions homeless and long-term unemployed Big Issue vendors as an extremely precarious, poorly remunerated and intensely governed labour force whose value lies in the interactive sales work they perform for the organisation. As the commercial pressures and disciplinary requirements of Big Issue vending intensify, the flexibility of the work is further restrained to ensure the extraction of surplus value. In the process, vendors join the ranks of the precariously employed contemporary working class, albeit in a position of extreme marginality.
For Big Issue staff, the business model of the organisation – and the capacity for vendors to create sales and make money – is reliant on the perception of helping a disadvantaged person, regardless of the content of the magazine itself:
. . . we’ve put millions of pounds of money into people’s pockets legitimately that wouldn’t have been otherwise. And we’ve also changed the way that local communities look at some of these people. . . . I mean my mother-in-law buys her magazine every week. She never reads it but she’s rewarding that person for standing there every day trying to do a job.
In this respect, the marginality of the workers is critical to the value of the magazine. As a material commodity, it is the vehicle by which a legitimate sale is made possible. It provides the legality and the identifier of the exchange as being work (as opposed to begging), whilst the sellers themselves bring authenticity to the value of the magazine as ‘helping’ commodity. In what follows we discuss the labouring practices through which this commodity is attributed with value and sold.
Affecting commodities
Drawing extensively on vendor interviews in London, here we explore the labouring practices of Big Issue vendors in relation to the new requirement imposed on them by the organisation. First and foremost, sellers of homeless street press understand that a key part of their work involves creating an affective environment in which the magazine will be attributed with a unique value stemming from the relationship between the buyer and the marginalised seller (Gerrard, 2017). Like workers in the retail or hospitality industries (McDowell, 2009; Tannock, 2001), Big Issue vendors labour to perform a happy and welcoming demeanour, and this is central to attracting sales. In the process, vendors must make the form of ethical consumption into a pleasant and virtuous experience – of providing a ‘hand up’ – for buyers. The affective exchange between buyer and seller is inseparable from the exchange of the magazine commodity, whilst the exchange of the commodity is what turns this interaction into work rather than begging: without the sellers’ marginality the commodity would not have the same value (see Lindemann, 2006); and without the commodity, the opportunity for buyers to consume an ethical purchase would be lost (see e.g. Hibbert et al., 2005).
Selling The Big Issue requires the capacity to create a momentary connection with passers-by in public spaces through a personal and relational performance that will be enjoyable for the potential buyer. This is how Harry (51, male) put it when asked what makes a good vendor: Somebody that can converse with the crowd about, you know, smile at them. Somebody that can actually smile at them – ‘How are you?’, have a laugh with the crowd and that. That’s what makes a good vendor. Not somebody that just stands there like that. Like . . . in a shop window you know . . . And I’d be like ‘go on give it a try don’t be shy give it a try buy The Big Issue from me.’ . . . If you can get them laughing you’re halfway there. . . . And there’s other things that I sort of – I suppose it’s a struggle out there you know; your heart’s not in it or whatever. So if you’re upset in any way it’s not a good idea to out and sell some Big Issue. ’Cause you make you stand out a wee bit more upset.
For Harry, one’s ‘heart must be in it’ in order to sell, requiring a level of authenticity in self-presentation in order to successfully connect with buyers. The tension between authenticity and the deliberate self-performance required to perform interactive labour was also raised by Hochschild’s (1983) original formulation of the concept of emotional labour. However, in this context it is mobilised in order to make an encounter with marginality into a moral exchange process. As put by Roland (70, male) Nobody stops to buy a Big Issue unless they have some kind of motivation like ‘I’d like to do this, I would like to help someone’ and those kind of people I want to meet all day every day.
Nevertheless, Big Issue vendors positioned themselves as salespeople; as those whose employment consisted of selling a commodity, and whose work did not differ substantially from the labour of salespeople in more mainstream or formal employment: The Big Issue was originally started to help the homeless people out of their situation you know what I mean. But now it’s more like a business. It’s more like a job. It is like a job because it’s like I’m self-employed really. (Harry, 51, male) One, you need to be polite. Two, you need to . . . wear clean clothes every day and shave . . . I think that people look at that part of me and they respect that. They go, ‘Well this guy’s trying, he’s trying to do something with his life.’ Basically that’s what it is – I’m not selling vacuum cleaners, I’m selling a copy of the Big Issue and to me there’s no difference. (James, 58, male)
In this respect, Big Issue vendors are aware of their position as workers, and some embrace the positioning of themselves as part of the interactive sales labour force. Big Issue vending is representative of affective labour in that the subjectivity of the worker is critical to the value of the commodity exchanged. As a sales job, selling The Big Issue requires an orientation to the work that involves selling ‘themselves’, as the magazine is based on the premise that the sellers are particular people – those who are unemployed, homeless and/or disadvantaged.
At times, this affective character of their work created an extra burden in relation to the new rule, as vendors felt shame or embarrassment about their poverty and disadvantage. This is how Will (40, male) put it: What happens if you’re not very outgoing, do you know what I mean? . . . People are embarrassed about the situation that they’re in, you know what I mean? . . . I don’t think it’s very fair. So that’s what I’m saying it’s very money orientated now. It’s like everything else, it’s all business. . . . What happens if I sell thirty-four magazines a week? I think that’s why [founding editor of The Big Issue] John Bird’s got a Ferrari.
Here, Will exposes the contradictions at the heart of this labour process in which the very marginalisation that attributes value to The Big Issue makes it more difficult to perform the happy, authentic self-presentations required to successfully sell the magazine. This was made worse by the new selling minimums, which Cameron (40s, male) criticised in relation to the affective dimensions of his work, suggesting that the new disciplinary requirements impinged upon his capacity to perform the interactive labour required to sell the magazine. Cameron points to the ways in which being polite and welcoming is key to effective sales: It’s [the new sales rule] putting pressure on new starters . . . and if you want a week off, you want a holiday, you want a break . . . you do need a break from it, constant smile and constant on your feet all day, trying to make a sale. Now I’ve come out with eight magazines this morning, I’ve worked from eight o’clock till now and I’ve sold six. And I look at myself as a reasonably good salesman. Now I’ve noticed a lot of vendors can’t interact with the public and just stand there and they might sell one maybe two in the day because they haven’t got that confidence to interact with the general public. Whereas I will smile, laugh, sing, you know, make people say good morning, say goodbye. I’m always polite. And even that is only just getting me a few more sales from somebody standing there all day. And it really, really is difficult.
In speaking with vendors, it is clear that the new rule was viewed as a means to embolden exploitative employment relations. Often, this was viewed in the context of the history of the organisation, described as being previously less business oriented and more concerned with vendors’ rights and wellbeing. Of the vendors who discussed the new rule, all were against it, and all considered it to be particularly harsh for those who struggled to get sales. Importantly, understandings of the rule highlight the affective nature of vendors’ work practice, and thus of the relations of exploitation. Vendors’ experiences of needing, and struggling, to cultivate ‘sellable’ versions of themselves animated their discussion of the new sales rule and its exploitative effects. This is how Dale (46, male) put it: . . . like at the moment we’ve got this minimum quota where we have to sell thirty-five a week otherwise we’re going to lose our badges. Yeah, well to me that’s just slave labour because, you know, we’re self-employed, right? And if I go out and tried to sell more than thirty-five Big Issues a week means I’ve got to stand at the bridge for six hours, yeah? And I will probably get a pound an hour, sometimes even less. I would be able to do that if I was an employed person, you know. So they’re exploiting us and the reason why is because . . . sales are in decline and they’re trying put the blame on us when it’s not us: it’s the economy.
Harry (51, male) also considered the new quota in the context of the economic realities of the market. According to him, the price raise to £2.50 made the magazine unaffordable to many of his regular customers who were pensioners. Mark (49, male) put it more explicitly when asked about the new quota: I think it’s disgusting. . . . When you have three hundred and seventy-seven vendors, or whatever it is, then obviously you have people of various experience, various lifestyle, various other things. Men, women, young, old, physically well, physically unfit, etc., etc. So we’re saying to – that one size fits all right but without exception. . . . I mean one of the things that Steven [another vendor] said that was just exuberance ‘I’m going to work seven days’. That’ll last a wee while, right? I work five days and as soon as I’ve done five days I’m done. I want to rest up and try and enjoy at least one day rested up. So the vendors need to be supported. The vendors need . . . support because of the very nature of the difficulties that some of them have, I mean they aren’t able to support themselves.
Thus, for vendors, the new rule not only emphasised the exploitative relations between employer and worker. In addition, vendors understood – and felt – this requirement through the affective nature of their work. Their work involved affectively imbuing value to the magazine commodity, which was made more difficult by the social conditions through which their work was organised and regulated. Sellers resisted the new minimum requirements in an attempt to protect their working conditions and in response to their complex positioning as sales workers and representatives of the very marginalisation that attributes value to the magazine. In this respect, Big Issue vending is a complex and contradictory form of affective labour taking place through contested processes of class formation in the most precarious parts of the contemporary labour force.
Conclusion: Employment and affective commodities
The positioning of Big Issue vendors as workers, and the nature of the labour that Big Issue vendors perform, demonstrates the importance of theories of affective labour for understanding class and marginality in contemporary capitalism. Big Issue vendors are representative of broader trends in the commodification of unemployment and marginalisation such as workfare regimes, in which unemployment is positioned as a source of labour and value (Adkins, 2017). However, in the case of The Big Issue in London, this process takes place by imposing the disciplinary requirements of affective labour onto workers through the compulsion to sell at a given rate. While these workers are not waged employees, they are enrolled as part of a precarious service labour force, engaged through disciplinary interventions designed to maximise the exploitation of their labour. In this sense, The Big Issue is an example of class formation taking place through the transformation of unemployment into an exploitable and valorisable social condition. In this respect, what we have explored here is a process whereby affective labour is implicated in the formation of classed subjects amongst populations formerly excluded from the labour force, who are thereby compelled to produce value from the marginalised subjectivities they are forced to inhabit. Inspired by theories of affective labour, in this article we have explored this process as an intense form of exploitation through the production of surplus value from a population whose precarity becomes an input into capitalist valorisation.
However, like feminist engagements with autonomist Marxism (Bolton, 2009; Gill & Pratt, 2008) this article has also gone beyond existing theories of affective labour, to show that the spread of affective labour across formal distinctions between the inside and the outside of employment has not flattened class relations. Instead, this process has facilitated the production and exchange of a commodity (The Big Issue) whose value comes from the identity that vendors are assigned due to their position within broader relations of poverty and privilege. For theories of affective labour, the implication of our analysis here is that class inequalities are central to valorisation processes that take place through the production of subjectivities and in the intersubjective transmission of affect in labouring practices. In the case of The Big Issue, the employment relations and labouring practices of affective labour constitute vendors as classed workers, even as they lack the employment protections of waged employees. Class formation is in this sense synonymous with the affective labour of vending and necessary for affective commodification and exchange process of the magazine. This must be recognised in future developments of these concepts.
For Bourdieusian theories of class, this article demonstrates the critical role that work and labour continue to play in the attribution of subjects with value, and the role that economic value plays in the formation of classed subjectivities. In affective labour, the psychic landscape of class (Reay, 2005a) contributes to the value of commodities and the experience of working. In the example explored here, classed subjects are formed through the positioning of vendors as workers, and as those who must form subjectivities in line with the disciplinary requirements of labour in order to valorise a commodity. These workers are also skilled symbolic and affective producers, capable of facilitating consumption experiences that are pleasurable for buyers despite taking place within a complex cultural politics of disadvantage and stigmatisation. This cultural politics is enacted both within and beyond the labour relation, but is nevertheless critical to the successful exchange of The Big Issue. To understand this new form of working-class experience, it is therefore necessary to consider how the formation – and valorisation – of classed subjectivities takes place through transformations in the nature and disciplinary requirements of labour taking place at the margins of the contemporary labour force.
Footnotes
Funding
This project was supported by a McKenzie Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship awarded to Dr Jessica Gerrard.