Intimacy at work? A Comparative Perspective on young people at work in the context of neo-liberalized workplaces

In a recent chapter on the future of work, Edward Yates suggested a focus on young adults’ vulnerability in the labor market as enhanced by neo-librealized workplaces exploiting young adults as cheap labor force. With little occupational training offered by states under austerity regimes, with little power of unions to protect them, with little resources to pursue higher education, they are left deskilled, devalued and therefore exposed to employers intensified profit orientation. These processes differentiate countries based on path dependent entry of neo-liberal ways of transforming labor markets. Thus, in order to better understand experiences of vulnerability and forms of resisting them we suggest a comparative perspective on young people at work in three countries under going neo-liberalization of workplaces to different extent: Israel leading the race to the bottom, Italy following it and Ireland, where unions and Parliamentary involvement slow down the neo-liberalization of workplace it in sense as increase precarity. How comparative perspective is anchored in young adults’ perceptions of their jobs’ quality and their in-work forms of resistance to the low levels of their jobs’ quality. Next to well discussed forms of resistance such as the anti-work movement, the great resignation, union action, we propose a focus on a far less discussed form of resistance: it is currently described in the literature as organizational communication referring to intimate gestures between employees indicating recognition of out of work sources of sorrow and uncertainty. It’s a form of resistance that has the power to aleviate intrinsic dimensions of job quality when young adults can benefit of response to the increased need for inter-personal intimate connection at work. Our study is based on 20 semi-structured interviews in each of the countries we compare. Our analysis allows us to contrast between actual characteristics of job quality as understood by our interviewees, their hopes, their views and their actions towards resisting alienation and dehumanization. We use our findings to theoretically elaborate on current understanding of the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic dimensions of job quality.