ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how contemporary urban service labour plays a contradictory role through their assimilation within the growing circuits of Kolkata's consumer economy. The supply of an abundant and cheap labour force is critical for animating and sustaining the 'rumour of good life' in spaces like shopping malls, cafe chains, multi-cuisine restaurants, fashion boutiques, or multinational fast-food outlets. The chapter discusses the complex penetration of affective labour in a city where the development of consumerism and its validation as a properly utopian category remains at best a tendentious and partial one. The primacy of youth workers is not exclusive to Globofood, but is a generalized condition of organized retail work today. One personnel manager pointed out that the rapid expansion of retail corporations could only happen by tapping into the 'dynamism of the youth'. The absence of unionization in places like Globofood points to a more pervasive crisis in Kolkata's labour history.
