How have the skills of service jobs changed? Have they undergone deskilling, upgrading or some contingent or compensatory development? This study examines these questions as they pertain to frontline sales work in US department stores. It begins by identifying an operational concept of service skill latent across recent debates and then examines it via qualitative comparison of full-line and discount stores in New York City. Based on an evaluative framework akin to that of Blauner, this study’s workplace-level findings suggest that the industry-level succession of full-line stores by discounters has embodied a decline in the complexity and autonomy of salespersons’ emotional labour.

This article compares violations of minimum wage laws and other labour standards in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. Los Angeles has the highest violation rates, due to such factors as its industrial composition and disproportionately large number of small establishments, as well as its vast unauthorised immigrant population. In addition, Los Angeles’ higher rates reflect the stricter legal standards in California. We conclude that, although stronger workplace laws and regulations are crucial, in the absence of effective enforcement, they may fail to prevent workplace violations.

We investigate trade union strategies in fashion retail, a sector with endemic low wages, precarity and a representation gap. Unions in Milan organized ‘zero-hours contract’ workers, while their counterparts in New York established an alternative channel of representation, the Retail Action Project. We argue, first, that the dynamics of both cases are counterintuitive, displaying institution-building in the USA and grassroots mobilization in Italy; second, union identity stands out as a key revitalizing factor, since only those unions with a broad working-class orientation could provide an effective representation for fashion retail workers.

No abstract