For a recent article in Truthout, C.J. Polychroniou speaks with Annie McClanahan about her new book, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work.Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full interview. An excerpt of her commentary appears below:

“The rise of the service economy wasn’t just a solution to economic stagnation; it was also a cause of it. As I said before, service work is fundamentally different from manufacturing: it’s labor-intensive with low labor-productivity growth. As a result, the service sector contributes pretty minimally to overall economic growth, which is why we’re decades into a ‘long downturn.’ Even though we’re now in a situation where 80 percent of the workforce labors in the service sector, a lot of our assumptions about what capitalist labor looks like in the advanced economies still come from the world of manufacturing. We assume that workers are paid a time-based wage, that they are subject to a very regimented and standardized form of time discipline, that they are directly overseen by scientific managers, that they have working days of a predictable length, that their work is highly mediated by technology, that their working conditions are regulated by the state. Very few of those things are true of contemporary service workers.”