The Speech of Services Procurement: The Negotiated Order of Commodification and Dehumanization of Cleaning Employees

Abstract

Othering enables employers and managers to justify maltreatment and bad payment of cleaning employees. We examine forms of speech in the context of the subcontracting employment system and show how dehumanization of employees is coextensive with the structural commodification of their work. Two separate processes of dehumanization, through intimacy and through distancing, were defined from analysis of 31 interviews with employers and 24 Human Resources managers in Israel. We discuss the possibility that the two processes facilitate each other and together consist of a system that weakens employees and reinforces their exploitation.

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