As the percentage of people working in the service economy continues to rise, there is a need to examine workplace harm within low-paid, insecure, flexible and short-term forms of affective labor - work carried out to produce or modify emotions in others. The Harms of Work is the first book to discuss these forms of harm through an ultra-realist lens and examines the connection between individuals, their working conditions and management culture. Using data from a long-term ethnographic study of the service economy, Lloyd investigates the reorganization of labor markets and the shift from security to flexibility, a central function of consumer capitalism. The Harms of Work highlights harmful working conditions and organizational practices that many employees accept as the normal order of things. Challenging current thinking within sociology and policy analysis, it reconnects ideology and political economy with workplace studies and uses examples of legal and illegal activity to demonstrate the multiple harms within the service economy.