ILPC 2026

                           Fragmentation but no solidarity!Grey zones of hand car washing across middle England

Clark, I., Fearnall-Williams, H., Hunter, J., Pickford, R., Reynolds, B.

Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Key words: Exploitative labour practices, informalization of work, community dynamics and engagement, fragmentation of work in one sector, digital research methods and tools.

The theoretical orientation of this paper argues that to understand the dynamics which enable and facilitate the informalization of work it is necessary to utilize a lens which extends beyond work, employment and organization. Accordingly our contribution to new knowledge is an examination of ‘abandoned spaces’ in localities and how these attract exploitative informalized employment on sites that previously housed formalized work. This transition is a structural transformation of urban areas which grounds the obsolescence in place-based manifestations of some sites which housed the fordist mode of production and associated forms of formalized employment.

Our research method provides a nuanced understanding of localized spatial structures which house inequality and amalgamate into a regional and national picture of vulnerable workers in exploitative informalized workplaces in one sector of work. To do so we categorize the location of types of hand car wash (HCW) at different scales and sizes of cities and towns across the east and west midlands. We do this through a digital GPS community engagement classification tool developed by Hunter. The tool enables us to create digital profiles of community engagement, crime and deprivation characteristics in neighborhoods’ across a region.  In turn this enables us to generate an indicative interactive map of HCW sites across midlands cities and towns, cross-referenced by type and community location. Delivering on these objectives will enable us to identify which types of HCW are most prevalent in particular communities; specifically the extent to which these workplaces demonstrate different levels of informalization and exploitation.

At the time of submission our research is on-going but is informed by a small pilot study of one post-code area of Birmingham, the largest city in the middle of England. This pilot leads us to two research propositions; firstly, the segregation of informalized employment in HCWs represents a spatially informed structure for work inequality where these workplaces are unevenly distributed but spatially concentrated. Secondly, the nature of informalization in the wider labour process is highly space-specific to localized contexts.

Our contribution to the grey zones of work and employment stream addresses and advances three areas of debate cited in the call for papers; firstly, our theoretically informed empirical lens provides a sophisticated digitally informed analysis of labour exploitation sites to enable a broader contextual setting within which the labour process operates. Secondly, we demonstrate how space-based territorial transformations change working trajectories for wage labour subject to precarious informalized employment. Thirdly, we suggest that across middle England a growing heterogeneity of labour informs the socio-spatial fragmentation of work within a nationally emergent area of employment pushing it beyond traditional tools and institutions which regulate work and employment. Our work demonstrates a labour process dialectic for the state which has been forced to take a direct regulatory role in the management of hand car washes.