PARADISELABORERS: HOTELWORK IN THEGLOBALECONOMY
By Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2004, xiii+296 pp., $US22 (paperback)
‘You land in paradise’—this opening statement not only locates this important work in context, but also represents a timely book. The international hotel in-dustry is a significant employer of labour, and estimates by the World Tourism Organisation suggests that global tourism will be responsible for creating approx-imately 251.6 million jobs or one in every 11 jobs by 2010 (International Tourism Overview, 1995, Madrid). This book is located within the study of organisations, occupations and class. The authors are both sociologists and the book deals with workers employed in selected Hawaiian tourist resorts. Tourism is a major source of employment, particularly for indigenous Hawaiians. This is an important area of study as hospitality and tourism is often seen by Governments, particularly in Australia, as a major source of employment, especially for the young as there are few skill barriers (excluding kitchen trades) to entry.
The book is the result of a participant/ethnographic study and the research experience unfolds before the reader making the book an appealing read. The argument is located within the context of broader sociological debates (mostly derived from American sociological inquiry). The authors were involved in par-ticipant observation in five luxury resorts, with over 500 resort workers and they interviewed 90 workers depth. The data provides a rich tapestry to draw in-ferences from and reveals much about workers’ experiences and understanding about their working lives behind the glamorous fac¸ade of palm trees and golden beaches.
Paradise Laborersis structured according to 11 chapters that set out the main arguments in a logical way. The authors’ major points are that hotel work forms part of a global labour market that is structured according to class, gender, ethnic-ity and life style choices, and that hotel work has a differential impact on different categories of workers. They distinguish two broad categories of hotel workers defined according to their relationship with the local labour market. The first are ‘trapped’ labourers comprising locals and new immigrants where local labour market conditions are such that these workers have limited mobility locking them into the peaks and troughs of the local labour market. Such labourers seek work wherever it can be found. The second are ‘transient’ labourers comprising job seekers who are highly mobile leisure/lifestyle seekers and managers who choose resort work for the temporal experience of ‘working in paradise’, moving on when local labour markets conditions decline. What the authors then do is to distinguish each job category according to patterns of race, ethnicity and class which, in turn, are connected to skill, job options, lifestyles and cultural capital
(the special attributes of race/ethnicity). These temporal numerically flexible cat-egories would be familiar to most labour market researchers in Australia. The exception is the high proportion of local indigenous Hawaiians and immigrant labourers who perform mostly the lower-paid/lower-skilled hotel jobs.
What the authors find is a connection between gender, class, race and ethnicity. They build their analysis to address how an entrenched work culture constructs and sustains an internal labour market stratification system whereby skills are not only socially constructed, but managerial strategy and policies that manufacture internal departmental job funnelling and self-selection are mechanisms that serve to usher workers into particular categories of skills and work. They show how management in the resorts structure the internal labour markets and job hierar-chies and sustain these through policies and practices, such as categorising specific job descriptions in ways that perpetuate stratification making it accepted as part of normal work culture. The effect is to withhold job and career opportunities from minorities and women. For example, local workers are generally disadvantaged by race/ethnicity, class and education and are relegated to less skilled back-of-house work. However, the point made by the authors is that these trends are also more subtle. Locals benefitted through their language skills and acculturation enabling many to move into middle management ranks/departmental management posi-tions. White (or ‘haoles’) and mostly male employees usually captured many of the skilled and career positions. New immigrants were often preferred over lo-cals for lower-paid jobs as lolo-cals generally disdained and avoided the dirtier and demeaning work.
The authors tackle the vexed question of whether local labour is displaced by an influx of new immigrant labour, arguing that locals find work in cultural activities, such as lei-making and hula and lu’au dancers, front office and tour guiding. This allows Hawaiian culture to become commodified, portraying Hawaiians as ‘ideal type natives’ in a commercially attractive way. The authors also show how resorts use the pool of local labour to manage seasonal variations and perpetuate job stratification as well as examples of union busting tactics used by some resorts. The authors see these developments as evolutionary and a consequence of our post-modern temporality brought about by a 24 hours, 7 days week consumer society that reshapes working time, and working experiences. At a public policy level, the authors’ point cannot be clearer: as managerial strategy continues to stratify labour markets perpetuating disadvantage, the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ will widen. This situation makes it less attractive for educated and trained workers who have the capacity to make other choices thereby reducing the pools of skills, experience and quality.
minimum wage levels and working conditions and one should exercise caution in making direct comparisons. What is needed are more studies such as this that peel away the glittering fac¸ade of the modern resort industry to reveal the darker processes and structures that shape and reshape contemporary hotel work.
NILSTIMO
GRIFFITHUNIVERSITY
DIRTCHEAP: LIFE AT THEWRONGEND OF THEJOBMARKET
By Elisabeth Wynhausen. Macmillan, Sydney, 2005, ix+246 pp., $30.00 (paper-back)
In 1946, George Orwell wrote a short piece entitled ‘Why I Write’. In attempting to explain how he was driven by a ‘demon whom one can neither resist nor understand’, he said, ‘I write...because there is some lie I want to expose, some
fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing’ (Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds (1968)The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920–1940. London: Secker and Warburg). In 1933, he published his first novel,Down and Out in Paris and London (Gollancz, London), an account of working and living with the poor in two of the world’s great cities. Elisabeth Wynhausen, who has a well established career in journalism, being a senior writer withThe Australiannewspaper, decided to go ‘down and out’ to experience life as a minimum wage worker, and, like Orwell, wroteDirt Cheap, ‘to draw attention’ to the lot of such workers.
Wynhausen, who, at the time was 55 years of age when she decided to embark on this project, had 10 weeks accumulated leave up her sleeve. Most workers/persons of this age would provide themselves with ‘a much deserved’ holiday, or would hold such leave in reserve and cash it in on retirement. Not Elisabeth Wynhausen. Following a reading of Barbara Ehrenreich’sNickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Owl Books, New York, 2001, an Orwellian demon took over her life. Ehrenreich worked in a series of jobs, at minimum wages of $US6 to $7 an hour, and documented how difficult it is for such workers to live in ‘frugal comfort’, to obtain accommodation, food, basic health care and necessities in modern America. Wynhausen ‘made a spur-of-the-moment decision’ to take 9 months off her job (she extended it to a year) ‘to see if I could get by as a minimum wage worker and live to tell the tale’ (p. 1). She had paid-off the mortgage on her one-bedroom flat and had some savings, both of which she found she had to draw on during her year as a minimum wage worker. She says that she found the idea of ‘a sort of self-funded sabbatical on the breadlines...exhilarating, as if I were embarking on
an adventure that would give my life new purpose and meaning’ (p. 2).
Wynhausen wanted to discover for herself what ‘progress’ means for such work-ers. In the prologue she says:
The view of society you get from newspapers is as indistinct as the view of the street from the highest floor of a city building, that being rarefied top-down perspective journalism habitually adopts...I’m more intent on vivifying the flash of colour and
the blur of movement down below. I prefer to be in the thick of it, a perspective better suited to telling the other side of the story, like the glorified tale of the economy, furiously hyped as ‘the miracle economy’ even as it widened the gulf between winners and losers in a nation that once led the world in social mobility (p. 3).
During her ‘sabbatical’, Wynhausen worked in six occupations. She was a cafe-teria worker in an ‘exclusive’ Sydney club, an egg stacker in a factory in a rural area, a cleaner in Melbourne, a breakfast attendant and general hand in two ho-tels in Melbourne, a shop assistant in a large department store in the northern suburbs of Sydney, and a kitchen worker and general hand in two nursing homes for the aged in Sydney’s northern suburbs. In the chapters dealing with her jobs away from Sydney, Wynhausen devotes much time to the problems of finding suitable and affordable accommodation; a theme which was more prevalent in Ehrenreich’sNickel and Dimed.
Of her four full-time jobs, the hourly wage rate she received ranged from $11.72 to $13.77. Her three part-time jobs ranged from $13.00 to $19.06 an hour. The $19.06 was as a shop assistant, but she only managed to work slightly less than 33 hours in almost 3 weeks, at an average rate of $200 a week (p. 176). Such an income would barely cover rental costs in Sydney. Her club job paid penalty rates for weekend work, and her egg stacking job paid overtime for working hours longer than the standard working day. Other jobs did not provide such entitlements. More significantly, she (and other workers) was (were) not paid for the time they stayed behind, after their stipulated shifts, as required by employers. If nothing else,Dirt Cheapdemonstrates that wage—and especially low wage— workers require protection to ensure that they are paid for the time they actually work, rather than the fictitious time employers specify in the shifts they offer workers. Wynhausen also found that with some jobs, the rate she was paid was below the award wages (pp. 124, 227). Moreover, in one of her part-time cleaning jobs, ‘tax’ was deducted from her pay, when she received a cheque made out to her in her first name (p. 124).
from repetitive strain injury, through to manual handling and lifting injuries and exposure to chemicals and cramped working conditions. They are expected to be active and on their feet for every second while employed and yet denied the right to sit down and rest their bodies during quiet times. They have lunch breaks of 30 minutes. Given the continuous demands on their bodies, there is a strong case that workers engaged in continuous labour and/or required to stand during shifts have, on occupational health and safety grounds, a one hour lunch break to have some rest.
The increased flexibility associated with industrial relations changes since the beginning of the 1990s, works in favour of employers. Minimum wage workers are so fearful of losing their jobs or, if part-time, of having shifts denied to them, that they have been coerced into submission. They are divided and defensive. Wynhausen writes, ‘It was as though employees reluctant to confront their own sense of powerlessness had displaced their fears and suspicions of management to each other’ (p. 36). She also draws attention to how minimum wage earners are ‘rendered invisible’; of how they are not consulted or burdened with explanations about what is required of them (p. 234).
There are at least two ways in whichDirt Cheap can be read. The first, as Wynhausen would surely like, is in horror to the treatment of minimum wage earners and an end to what ‘Australians prided themselves on giving people a fair go’ (p. 231). The second, is how passive minimum wage earners are and how meekly they respond to that which is dished out to them. This could be translated to mean that they can be pushed down even further. And this is what the current government has in store for them.
Other scholars and writers have drawn attention to the plight of minimum wage workers in Australia. The scribblings of academics only seem to be noticed by the powerful when they say things the powerful know to be true. Wynhausen, a journalist who operates in a different, wider, more popular medium, and with a talent for producing accessible prose, may be able to have a larger impact than those who have walked down the same path as her. The ‘demon whom [she could] neither resist nor understand’ which resulted in her going ‘down and out’ has exposed what she regards as the ‘lie’ of claims concerning recent changes in Australia, and drawn attention to, and provided a hearing for, minimum wage earners.
BRAHAMDABSCHECK
UNIVERSITYOFNEWSOUTHWALES
HARDWORK: REMAKING THEAMERICANLABORMOVEMENT
By Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004, xv+244 pp., $US20 (paperback)
unions here had very little to learn from the American labour movement and that US unions would do better to visit and learn from us instead. There seemed some merit to this argument. At that time, membership density in the US private sector was around 10%, employers had been on a successful march against unions for over a decade, conservative governments were paring back union rights and there seemed little hope that organised labour could extract itself from this situation. ‘Our’ labour movement seemed positively blessed by comparison. While density had been declining for over a decade, it sat at the (in retrospect and by comparison) comfortable figure of almost 38%. The ‘new right’ disputes of the late 1980s had certainly made a dent in the union armour, but these employer strategies were the exception to mainstream employment relations during the 1980s and early 1990s. Conservative state governments had introduced legislative changes which shifted the goalposts for unions somewhat, but this occurred in the national framework of the Accord which, undeniably presenting some problems for unions, gave them a certain legitimacy as industrial and political actors.
As I read this book I reflected upon how much things have changed during the past 12 years for Australian unionists. Aggregate membership and membership density have declined precipitously, employers have been increasingly willing to militantly resist the joint regulation of work, and the Howard government’s increasingly aggressive anti-union legislative agenda alongside their activist policy stance have made life for unions very difficult indeed. The Coalition control of the Senate from mid-year and further re-casting of our industrial relations system will only make life in the union world a whole lot harder.
Hard Work is an engaging account of the woes of US unions which makes powerful and convincing arguments about the desperate need for the revival of ‘labour’ as a real industrial and political force. Because the book is written prin-cipally for a European audience, its five chapters present the history, structure, politics, and indeed failings of US unions in a manner which makes it very ac-cessible to non-American readers. The first chapter, ‘Why Labor Matters: The Underside of the “American Model”’, is compelling reading not so much because of its examination of the experience of work and workplaces for US employees (although this is interesting in itself), but because of its broader analysis of the insidious individualism which pervades all aspects of US society and which allows for the ‘abdication of collective responsibility’ for basic social services. The au-thors do not present unions as the hapless victims of this situation. They argue instead that US unions’ narrowly economistic and highly sectionalist view of their own purpose, in place of a militant solidaristic outlook, has reinforced and indeed entrenched the social order.
globalisation, employer opposition), but also in terms of the narrow and bureau-cratic outlook of unions which, they argue, legitimised and reinforced the union environment. Chapter 2 concludes with an overview of employer militancy from the Reagan years onward, including a discussion of the critical role that manage-ment consultants have played in further de-collectivising US workplaces.
Chapter 3, ‘Bureaucrats, Strongmen, Militants and Intellectuals’, charts the development of the ‘character’ of US union leadership. For readers outside the USA, the chapter is both illuminating and deeply depressing. The typical ‘business union’ leader is presented as a self-interested, bullying, corrupt, older man. The argument is supplemented by extracts from speeches and interviews with union leaders, which at times is very amusing (for example, see ‘notoriety doesn’t excite me that much’ on p. 91). The chapter ends with a discussion of the leadership style and strategies of the ‘New Voice’ officials who successfully challenged the leadership of the AFL-CIO 10 years ago. Fantasia and Voss begin to advance their argument about the ‘fitful reinvention’ of US unions during the past decade.
Chapter 4, ‘Practices and Possibilities of Social Movement Unionism’, extends this argument identifying a number of episodes and themes in the development of what is identified as a ‘new unionism’. This essentially involves the utilisation of innovative tactics to build political power and circumvent restrictions upon unions; in so doing, there is a broadening of union concerns and a building of closer union organisation. Together this gives Fantasia and Voss a hope that there is a prospect for unions to build a genuinely class-based ‘movement’. After presenting case studies of union action which in the authors’ view demonstrates this ‘new unionism’, the book concludes with an analysis of the ‘Two Futures’ for US unions. It is concluded that while there are formidable internal and external obstacles to building union power, the ‘social unionism’ identified offers the best hope for any kind of labour movement renewal.
Hard Workwould make a useful addition to the reading lists of many univer-sity courses dealing with comparative industrial relations, collective bargaining and the nature and purpose of trade unionism. At a broader level, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics and practices of the labour movement in a time of crisis. If Australian unionists have learned anything from the experience of their US counterparts it will come in handy now, as they brace for what will undoubtedly be a dark time.
