The Working Class in the Service Sector: Problem Statement and Current Sociological Discourse

The research is focused on the the review and analysis of the current sociological discourse devoted to the problems of routine service labor. Such aspects have been revealed in the research as the specifics of interactive service work, methods for assessing the number and composition of the service part of the working class, the new ways of the changed parameters of labor relations theoretical conceptualization, features of service workers’ class consciousness. It has been established that in the western discourse of sociology of labor, research in the service sphere currently occupies a leading position. The focus is on such problems as the structure of the new post-industrial working class, the inclusion of the client in the traditional worker/employer dyad as a third element that reconfigures stable structures of labor relations, the increased importance of "emotional labor", physicality and the so-called "soft qualities" of workers, the ideology of consumer sovereignty and the problems generated by it, precarization of labor, leading to the deprivation of interactive service workers, class consciousness and resistance practices of routine services employees. In Russian sociology service research has not been fully updated, there is no theoretical foundation, and the concept of service workers as part of the working class has not been formed. The majority of Russian authors rely on the structural and functional paradigm in the study of the service sphere, which does not correlate with the problems relevant to world sociology and the methods of their an

alysis. We propose the notion of the “new working class” and define it as a group of employees engaged in all areas of material production and service sphere, whose work is routine, divided into standardized segments, amenable to algorithmization, not involved in management, and without any ownership in the organization where they work.