ILPC 2027

Jobs in hotels are highly “feminised” with a disproportional number of women employed in the sector (representing between 56 and 59% of all hotel workers in the UK  according to People 1^st 2006). These jobs appear also highly sexualised and reflect gender roles in the division of labour, e.g. across front desk and back door positions as “interactive” and “domestic” occupations are often considered ‘women work’ (Adib and Guerrier 2003). Moreover, processes of racialisation within a “super diverse” population in cities like London (Vertvec 2007) have increasingly fragmented the workforce in the industry and weakened workers’ bargaining position (McDowell et. al 2007; Matthews and Ruhs 2007). 

 Very different kinds of jobs are therefore performed in a workplace such as a luxury hotel: from the relatively invisible and isolated work of cleaners and “chambermaids” to the interactive service provided by waitresses and waiters in the “Food and Beverage” departments. What are the advantages of adopting an approach that emphasises the intersectional and embodied nature of work in this section of the service industry? How are feminist interpretations of embodied labour useful to explore the various forms of resistance and political subjectivity developed by hotel workers? Is it possible to draw a line between forms of embodied and intangible, manual and emotional, material and immaterial labour across the differenciated figures of work within a hotel? To what extent do these definitions dovetail with relatively arbitrary distinctions between “highly-skilled” and “low skilled” jobs? What are the implications of these constructions for workers’ “occupational identities” and for the functioning of old and new models of union organising?

 In order to answer these theoretical questions the present paper will draw from the empirical material I collected through participant observation in hotels and job agencies as part of my PhD on migrant women workers in the hospitality industry in London. Exploring their working conditions and forms of political engagement within a campaign for unionisation, the aim of the paper will be to illustrate some of the ethnographic accounts of these women’s everyday working experiences as forms of embodied work while looking into the labour process they are involved in. Furthermore the paper will investigate the possible implications of the different nature of these womens’ work on the ways in which they might develop forms of “affective resistance” and organising to improve their every day precarious working lives through the embodied relationalities with their co-workers, supervisors and custumers.