‘We’ve not breached our side of the contract’: Broken employment bargains and in-work poverty in the financialised hospitality sector

Using the disconnected capitalism thesis, a study of the financialised hospitality sector investigates whether management mitigates the impact of in-work poverty (IWP) for workers. Rather than introduce efforts to alleviate the plight of workers, IWP is exacerbated through policies that encourage insecurity and low pay. Management justifies these actions through forms of misbehaviour, by adopting values reflecting market rationalism that display little regard for the responsibility organisations have to their employees. Adopting a ‘take it or leave it’ approach to work and placing blame on employees themselves for IWP, managers disassociate the organisation and themselves from the plight of employees and begin to identify them as ‘the other’. The study therefore identifies how deeper disconnects between capital and labour emerge within financialised environments, where management fail to offer the fundamental components of an employment bargain that can prevent IWP. Ending IWP, therefore, represents a challenge for policy, practice and attitudinal change.