Work, wage and consumption: valuing and displaying among manufacturing workers

Abstract

When a former female manual worker decides to put on gel nails soon after losing the job that had prevented her from making up her hands (as someone in my fieldwork has recently done), it could be tempting to see a shift from a constrained worker identity to an unbound consumer identity materializing there. In the following pages, however, this episode and its local (and) labour context are taken as starting points to attempt a further exploration and a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between work and consumption. On theoretical and empirical grounds, it is argued that, instead of conceiving work and consumption as separate and indeed opposite realms, a close link between them – with work providing a relevant context to the working person as a consumer, and consumption providing subjects a relevant arena where to perform the value of their work – should be acknowledged and scrutinized.