Does Necessity Shield Work? The Struggles of Butchers and Waste Management Workers for Recognition

Drawing on two studies of those involved in physically tainted jobs, this chapter seeks to explore what constraints might compel or hinder the application of particular discursive ideologies and strategies in battling stigma attached to these jobs. The findings demonstrate how workers count on labour market participation as a way of preserving their worth. Participants also possess a strong sense of the appropriateness of particular types of work, a sense consistent with traditional norms of masculinity. However, edifying ideologies that workers commonly draw on lose their value as a result of changing labour market conditions (significantly less demand for physical labour and a preference for “clean” white collar work) and malformed understandings of what is useful (when the notion of utility shifts from “being beneficial to communities” to “providing the best value for tax payers’ money”).