City Research Online

Abstract

Work undertaken by students is widespread, but largely overlooked, with this employment dismissed as a precursor to ‘real work’. The designation of student work as not real, ‘proto-work’, is central to the production of consent. Draws on original analysis of focus group interviews with 84 students undertaking paid work and Burawoy’s (1979) text, Manufacturing Consent, the article identifies two ways in which hegemonic legitimation of and consent to extremely poor-quality work is produced: 1) the role of ‘experience’ and 2) labour mobility as resistance. The article points to how student workers’ discussions of ‘experience’ echoes Government and Education policy on employability and demonstrates that the widespread re-framing of work as experience facilitates employers’ ability to exploit these workers and treat them disposably – paying them less than ‘real workers’ and entrenching poor working conditions. Additionally, this article demonstrates that ‘experience’ primarily serves to signal student workers’ work-discipline and exploitability. The article finds that student worker resistance primarily takes the form of quitting, or ‘labour mobility power’. Contrary to existing conceptualisations and drawing on Burawoy’s analysis of ‘the game’ the article shows that quitting reproduces the hegemonic framing of these workers as disposable, retrenching the overarching rules of the game which position workers as a hyper-exploitable proto-workforce.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2026, the author. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Publisher Keywords:	Burawoy, consent, student work, gender, quitting, students, proto-work
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of Sociology & Criminology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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