Temporariness and precarity in London’s hotels

This paper develops a theoretical argument drawing on data collected between 2008 and 2010 through participant observation in temporary staffing agencies in London dispatching migrant workers to the hospitality industry. Catering and hotel jobs in the UK constitute one of the lowest paid and least unionised industry of the country’s service economy.  The hospitality sector is also characterised by high levels of labour turnover (People first 2009-2011), an increase in labour recruitment outsourcing and forms of ‘subcontracting by stealth’ (Evans et al., 2007) namely through the use of temporary agencies (McDowell et al., 2008; McKay 2008). These processes have intensified in correspondence with new labour migration patterns since the British government’s decision in 2004 to open the labour market to the new EU ‘Accession 8’ from Eastern Europe.  The resilience of transnational migration in the crisis (IOM 2012),  from within and outside the EU, testifies to the existence of a mutual relationship between labour market flexibilisation and the growing search for ‘just in time’, cheap and disposable labour, typically provided by migrant workers.

This paper detects the tensions emerging in the day to day recruitment, management and reproduction of migrant agency workers’ disposability to work under temporary arrangements, testing whether the high turnover of labour in sectors such as the London’s service industry is completely subsumed by the regime of migrant/agency employment.

While migrants may be among the first to be fired in the context of job cuts, they constitute a paradigmatic figure of the flexible and temporary workforce that employers tend to favour in light of their cost cutting strategies (Rogers et al. 2010). In this context however, the perspective of migrant workers, their own experience of temporary work and their everyday practices to cope with the exploitative and uncertain nature of the employment have seldom been subject of attention. How do migration and agency labour differently combine to identify new forms of control and management of living labour and new possibilities of worker resistance and escape?

 The research highlights significant frictions arising between management practices in subcontracted work and the movement of labour across borders, illustrating how migrants’ subjective experience of  ‘temporariness’  and their strategic use of flexibility in contingent labour markets disclose alternative routes of geographical and  social mobility even for this vulnerable section of workforce.  The argument is that the transient character of certain jobs is not solely the effect of management’s strategies but is irremediably bound with the social and subjective composition of the contemporary movement of labour transnationally. This has some critical implications at the level of employment relations and labour market reform.  Acknowledging that is a key step to achieve the radical changes needed in the current forms of representation and organisation of labour, especially in non-unionised and highly flexible sectors of the UK labour market, in order to improve the conditions of permanent and temporary, settled and mobile workers alike.