Stallarbetet som livsstil - Arbetsprocessens görande och formande av ojämlikheter och motstånd inom Hästnäringen

Sammanfattning: It makes no difference to animals if it is a Tuesday or Christmas Eve, they still need food and care. Horses are one of the biggest hobbies and the number of horses has increased the last thirty years. With this increase the demand of working labor has grown. The dividing line between paid and unpaid work is today vague and hard to define and therefore makes the concept of labour more complicated. These circumstances weaken the professional status of the grooms and riding-instructors. The relationship with a horse is filled with emotions and commitment which shapes the work and its conditions. The aim for this study is to explore the doing of the stable work through people’s narratives of their work experiences. The intersectional feminist perspective is vital on the study of the labour process and how it’s organized and carried out. The study explores how the labour process in the stable creates and reproduces class-, age-based and gendered inequalities. But it also examines how the work establishes collective relations and solidarity at the workplace that shapes the resistance against the inequalities in the labour process. The study is based on eleven in-depth qualitative interviews with people working with horses in different part of the business. Nearly half of the interviewed people work at trotting stables and the other part at riding-schools. The interviews create a complex image of the work with horses and what it takes to perform well. These narratives show a notion of knowledge that is shaped by ideas of age and gender. This notion of knowledge forms the labour process and the social relations of the workplace. Some of the central themes that shape the labour process are the ideas, the organizing of time, technology and manual labour. The intensity of the work is illustrated in two ways: by the unpaid work and the high work tempo.