ILPC 2026

The factory floors that motivated early studies of the labor process have declined in advanced capitalist economies. Instead, the simultaneous re-emergence of traditional service industries and flexible employment relations pose challenges for understanding labor control. How do owners and managers in small, less formalized firms manage workers and the labor process? What tools do they have at their disposal for controlling workers, and what are the consequences for the quality of jobs?

This paper examines how firms manage workers in the restaurant industry, one of the largest sites of precarious work in the U.S. It draws on 90 interviews with owners, managers, and workers to determine managerial practices with reference to a policy shift—city minimum wage increases in Chicago and Oakland. Building on the insight that firms place considerable emphasis on maintaining wage hierarchies and other social structures of the workplace, the paper explores how employers in this low-wage industry retain and motivate workers. It finds that despite the low wages in the industry, owners and managers emphasized the importance of skilled, efficient labor. Despite lacking the resources of larger employers, owners and managers developed strategies for motivating workers and creating symbolic rewards for hard work.

Two forms of control and motivation are examined. Firstly, owners and managers establish internal hierarchies of worth, skill, and wages that differentiate among workers. These hierarchies are rooted in the authority of management to evaluate workers and reward workers as deserved. Secondly, raises reflect relations of reciprocity between owners and workers. They establish that workers will also benefit from the firm’s success in raises or job security—an important consideration given the instability of the restaurant industry. While these forms of control often operate in conjunction with market behavior, the study demonstrates that owners and managers structure evaluations and raises in ways that reinforce their authority and importance in the workplace. These approaches make use of racialized and gendered notions of workers. Thus, the paper shows how the social meanings of wages can be used as a form of managerial control in small, less formalized firms.

These findings show that hegemonic forms of control are widespread in the U.S. restaurant industry. While precarity bolsters the effectiveness of coercive, “despotic” workplace regimes, I argue that the limited resources of small businesses produce a reliance on autonomous worker effort. In many cases, firms have more to gain from motivating and retaining workers than from cutting labor costs and punishing deviance. In addition, the lack of bureaucratic distance between workers and management reinforces hegemonic approaches to control. The paper discusses the potential of these mechanisms for understanding other peripheral industries in the U.S. and the Global South.