Post-industrial worker-citizenship

This paper explores the everyday, informal politics of service work for young people, and suggests new research agendas in the area of youth, citizenship and work. In youth studies, perspectives on citizenship and work remain based on a paradigm focused on the formal entitlements granted to male industrial workers by the post-war welfare state, and therefore regard citizenship as a normative status that has been eroded by precarity. In contrast, this paper develops concepts of everyday or lived citizenship to explore how service workers critically engage with the power relations they encounter at work. The paper explores how workers make (or are prevented from making) claims for just treatment, how their informal relationalities and modes of belonging shape their working conditions, and how the dynamics of racialisation and everyday multiculturalism shape young people's capacity to exercise political agency. It therefore shows that informal citizenship is foundational to the power relations and working conditions of contemporary youth labour and re-positions of paid employment work as critical to discussions of everyday citizenship.