Assemblare le differenze. Il lavoro tra frammentazioni, migrazioni e resistenze nell'industria alberghiera veneziana

Inspired by the growth of the service sector over the past decades, the issue of the hospitality labour has gradually gained the attention of scholars from different disciplines. Nowadays, the hospitality industry is regarded as the quintessence of labour studies, both by virtue of its ability to assemble some of the main trends of the contemporary labour and because every single hotel is an ideal place to show the production and reproduction of occupational hierarchies and social stratifications. A large part of the literature has hitherto addressed some of the challenges posed by the hotel labour through two macro analytical approaches. The first, which is close to geographers, focuses on the spatiotemporal dynamics of the hospitality and on the relationship between multi-scalar production, the processes of vertical disintegration – included outsourcing – and the contractual fragmentation of the labour force. The second, more interested in grasping labour transformations, deals with the dynamics of interaction, the production of social differences in the workplaces and the labour market segmentation. Based on an empirical research carried out in the Venetian hospitality industry, the purpose of this thesis is to show how the intersection of social identities of workers shapes the organization of productive relationships, thus affecting the division of labour. More to the point, the aim of the research is to answer to the following questions: a) whether and how does the social differentiation of the workforce interact with the segmentation of production and labour market and what are the consequences of this relationship on the labour process organization? What affects the social and technical division of labour of the hospitality industry? What are the effects that the fragmentation generates on everyday social relations among workers? What are the forms of resistance and agency that workers - individually or collectively- put in place as inside as outside the workplace to challenge the experiences of inequality and to reassemble the social fractures? In this work, it is argued that to capture the effects of social and occupational hierarchization marking the everyday experiences of hotel workers, it is necessary to pay attention to the ways in which the technical division of labour overlaps with the social division of workers. The intersection between production and occupational fragmentation, labour market segmentation and social stratification of workers allow us to explore both the forms of multiple fragmentations which characterize the hotel labour and the reproduction of the experiences of inequality among workers. The joint analysis of the fragmentation process which characterizes the hotel labour is based on the empirical and theoretical proposal to consider every single hotel as able to reproduce, on a local scale, the specific functioning and consequences of the global production networks. As a matter of fact, a hotel, while being prevented to delocalize, is able to use locally some of the economic, political and social condition of exploitation (that usually other firms shall ensure with offshoring process), to disarticulate the production process - via outsourcing - and to segment the labour force without spatial dispersion of activities. In doing so, it produces some of the phenomena which are normally traceable across and along the global production networks, including the multiplication and the subsequent connection of forms and regimes of labour and the assemblage of social vicissitudes and heterogeneities. At the same time, social relations of hotel workers are deeply affected by the reproduction of social borders and by occupational, wage and power hierarchies. While working together in a relatively limited space, indeed, those workers recognize themselves in a different social and productive fate. The research has been conducted by using qualitative methods especially in-depth interviews with workers, unionist and managers of the Venetian hospitality industry during the years 2014 -2018