Life as a soci­olo­gist of work isn’t inev­it­ably amus­ing, but Friday’s news that a group of French postal work­ers had taken La Poste to court for recom­pense for the labour involved in clean­ing their uni­forms made me smile. I did enjoy the chal­lenge this court case makes to the idea that all labour that (re-)produces the work­ing body is most appro­pri­ately done in the private sphere.

I have done some writ­ing on the sub­ject of ‘aes­thetic labour’, the work of pro­du­cing and present­ing an accept­able work­ing body, seen very clearly in Dawn’s post. In cloth­ing retail in the UK, the cost of work cloth­ing is usu­ally borne by the employee and often has to come from cur­rent stock. Although employ­ees may get a dis­count, the need to stay in fash­ion can be a bur­den to a worker on low wages; con­cep­tu­ally we can read this as show­ing how work­ers are implic­ated in con­sump­tion work as well as the labour mar­ket (Pet­tinger, 2008). Organ­isa­tions’ demands for aes­thetic labour reflects their pre­sump­tions about the import­ance of pro­tect­ing and enhan­cing their ‘spe­cific’ brand val­ues (Pet­tinger, 2004), and marks a sim­il­ar­ity between the postal worker and the sales assist­ant: both are con­figured as the embod­i­ment of the corporation.

These postal work­ers will now be get­ting 5 euros a week for keep­ing them­selves tidy; retail sales assist­ants are unlikely to start a sim­ilar cam­paign, tend­ing instead cel­eb­rate the chance to “live it, love it, be the brand”, by buy­ing them­selves a nice new frock.

Ref­er­ences

  1. Pet­tinger, L. (2008) ‘Devel­op­ing aes­thetic labour: the import­ance of con­sump­tion’. Inter­na­tional Journal of Work, Organ­isa­tion and Emo­tions. 2 (4): 324–343.

  2. Pet­tinger, L. (2004) ‘Branded stores, branded work­ers: ser­vice work and aes­thetic labour in fash­ion retail.’ Con­sump­tion, Mar­kets and Cul­ture 7(2): 165–84.