The Moral Economy of Department Stores’ Working-Class and their Class Identity

Abstract

Globalised capitalism has changed the landscape of the working-class in different ways both in the Global North and in the Global South, including identities, moral frames, working places, and livelihood strategies. However, these transformations do not imply the disappearance of the working class. Precarity and insecurity is expanding (Zweig 2016), even reaching the middle-class (Standing 2014), and the core of the social and economic relations between labour and capital pervades. In this article, I use data collected from two sources; firstly, 40 interviews with the head of households/budget planners of working-class families from two cities in Chile, Santiago, the capital, and Copiapó, a mining town in the North, and secondly, secondary data on class self-identification. I want to bring attention to different ways in which the workingclass identity, culture and consciousness can be performed by the use of different categories in discourses which migrate from political or market sphere to the everyday lives of workingclass families, in particular of those who work in the retail sector for big companies. A social structure is characterised by objective-material positions, but also by how this structure is portrayed, enacted and legitimised (Crompton 1997). Therefore, together with the structural conditions of a financialized consumption, low-productivity services economy and debt economy, these ‘middle-classness’ discourses make sense in the moral economy of the socalled ‘services proletariat’.