“Bad jobs”: a case study of toilet attendants
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-11-2017-0263 |
Date | 01 April 2019 |
Pages | 489-505 |
Published date | 01 April 2019 |
Author | Stef Adriaenssens,Jef Hendrickx |
Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
“Bad jobs”: a case study of
toilet attendants
Stef Adriaenssens and Jef Hendrickx
Faculty of Economics and Business, KU Leuven, Brussels, Belgium
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge of precarious and low-quality jobs
with the study of toilet attendants, an ideal typical case of low-wage manual service workers who are
excluded from secure wages, decent working conditions, and employment protection.
Design/methodology/approach –An extensive survey with standardized questionnaires (n¼107) and
in-depth interviews (n¼10) of toilet attendants in Belgian towns, mostly Brussels and Ghent. Results are co mpared
to the work quality of low-skilled workers, and the within-group position of necessity workers is analysed.
Findings –Toilet attendants definitely occupy “bad jobs”, measured by the higher prevalence of informal
and false self-employed statuses, more intense work-life conflicts and verbal aggression from clients, and a
lower job satisfaction. In all these respects, they perform worse than other low-skilled workers. Concurrently,
there is a strong within-group divide between necessity workers and those who see the job as an opportunity.
Despite a similar job content, necessity workers less often earn a decent wage, suffer more from customer
aggression, lack social support and pleasure from work. Mechanisms related to self-selection and the absence
of intrinsic rewards explain these in-group differences.
Originality/value –This contribution indicates, first, that job insecurity spills over into poor working
conditions, work-life conflicts, and customer aggression. Furthermore, it documents that jobs are not
necessarily bad in themselves, but become problematic when taken up by people withtoo few choices and too
pressing socio-economic needs. Problems of sub-standard jobs are not merely job problems but problems of
workers in a certain position.
Keywords Precariousness, Non-standard employment, Quality of work, Toilet attendants
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
This paper discusses and documents the quality of work and employment of workers in one
specific occupation at the very bottom of the labour market, toilet attendants. It sheds light
on how this type of jobs cluster adverse features in different dimensions –“bad jobs”–but
also how, within the group, the most vulnerable are pushed by dire socio-economic needs
into even worse jobs.
In recent debates about dual labour markets and changes in the quality of work,
precariousness is deemed central to the rise of “bad jobs”. Usually, scholars denote jobs as
“precarious”if occupational risks are transferred towards workers (Kalleberg, 2012).
Scholars often localise precariousness in the employment relation –flexible relationships
such as temporary employment, fixed-term contracts or downright informal employment.
For jobs at the bottom of the labour market, we argue, the depth of precariousness is greater
due to the spillover of insecure employment relationships into other dimensions of work.
This contribution thus argues, first, that nonstandard job arrangements capture “bad jobs”
if they occur in conjunction with other low-quality features. Toilet attendants are an instance of
this set of associated aspects of “bad jobs”. Furthermore, this paper seeks to explain how
within-group differences, in particular with respect to socio-economic burden, differentially
affect the workers’quality of life in insecure occupations. Even within one occupational group of
precarious workers, such as toilet attendants, the analyses indicate that significant and
far-reaching differences in the level of precariousness exist depending on the socio-economic
needs of the workers. For instance, single parents are more burdened than others by an insecure
income. We document how socio-economic necessities affect different areas of the quality of
working life, such as poor workplace amenities, aggressive customers and job satisfaction.
Employee Relations: The
International Journal
Vol. 41 No. 3, 2019
pp. 489-505
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-11-2017-0263
Received 9 November 2017
Revised 11 September 2018
Accepted 12 September 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
489
Bad jobs
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. In the following section, the
theoretical framework is further developed and applied to our case of toilet attendants.
The central conjectures are explained, and we hypothesise how dimensions of the quality
of life are related to one another in the case of precarious workers. Then the data,
fieldwork, central measures and design are briefly discussed. The analytical part falls into
two parts: in one, we discuss the comparison of toilet attendants’job quality with other
low-skilled workers, and in the other we document how being a necessity worker affects
toilet attendants’quality of working life negatively.
Literature
How precariousness works
The transfer of risks towards workers is often given a central role in analyses of the
nonstandard employment relationship (Barbier, 2013). Typical forms of precarious
employment relations are fixed-term contracts, or agency, temporary, and seasonal work.
These flexibleforms of employment are in many instances becoming more popular, facilitated
by policy changes (Grady, 2017; López Andreu, 2017). Also, informal employment, the
wholesale avoidance of any employment protection, is sometimes imposed by the employer.
A specific type of informal employment that seemsto be on the rise is false self-employment:
formally it is self-employment, but theagent has to comply with detailed instructionsfrom the
employer, normally as a binding feature of the employment relation (Eichhorst et al., 2013).
Many of these types of work organisation indicate that rising insecurities are not confined to
the contractbut include other dimensionsas well (McCann and Fudge, 2017):job and payment
insecurity,tenure and lack of social protection.Kalleberg’s (2012) influentialthesis argues that
precariousness increases for all workers, not just those at the bottom of the occupational
ladder. Nevertheless, other researchers argue that nonstandard employment relations or
income insecurity will mostly hurt those positioned at the bottom of theoccupational ladder.
Certain scholarsindeed seem to reject the idea of a so-called “democratisation”of rising risks,
and see a shift towardsincreasing employment risks for vulnerable workers (Eichhorst, 2015).
Some have argued thatthe bottom part of the workforce not only loses groundin terms of
income levels, but is also hit relatively harder in dimensions that relate to employment
protection and other insecurities (McGovern et al., 2004), and in other dimensions of work.
This paper aims to documentthat conjecture through a case study ofone occupational group
that indeed combinesboth trends: toilet attendants.These workers are an almost ideal typical
case combining insecure working arrangements with unstable and low-wage service manual
work. Toiletattendants attend a (semi-)publiclavatory, clean the premisesand ask for a fee in
return. Thestandard occupational classification classifies the job as low-skill (CentraalBureau
voor de Statistiek, 2010). Even more than other low-ranking staff in the service
industry (OnsØyen et al., 2009), toilet attendants are totally absent from the social-scientific
literature. Concurrently, toilet attendants suffer strong stigma in the public imagination.
In Polish, for instance,“kałboj”associates the wordfor a lavatory attendant with the word for
excrements (“kał”). In literary tradition, the occupation of toilet attendanttypically represents
those hitting thebottom of the social hierarchy (see, for instance,Joseph Roth (1924/1984) and
Amélie Nothomb, 1999).
In short, this contribution exemplifies the trend that service-oriented employment at the
bottom of the social hierarchy consists of relatively less rewarding and less secure
occupations. Workers in these growing low-skilled blue-collar occupations typically work in
flexible, low-wageand low-status employment, with a highprevalence of informal status. We
argue that insecure employment relationships are a necessary, not a sufficient condition of
precariousness (also argued in Famira-Muehlberger, 2014). For instance, independent
contractors in managerial or professional occupations, may have autonomous and flexible
jobs that are well paid (Kalleberg, 2003; Kashefi, 2007). As illustrated by these contractors,
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