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Paper short abstract

Manicure work in Athens’ expanding nail industry, though routinely undervalued as low-status, recasts habitual manual labour as skilled practice, artistic creativity and entrepreneurial aspiration. The hand, as both agent and object of labour, produces value, demands care and resists disposability.

Paper long abstract

Three occupations —waiters and waitresses, delivery workers, and nail technicians— are routinely invoked in public discourse to lament the perceived erosion of ‘highly skilled’ work and the simultaneous rise of low-capital, service-oriented, manual labour in contemporary Greece. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in Athens, this paper uses manicure work as an entry point to examine the meanings, values, and power relations of manual labour under contemporary capitalism. Relying almost entirely on the skilled labour of the hand, requiring little formal training and minimal start-up capital, and often performed informally, manicure work occupies a space of both constraint and opportunity: it carries a low-status reputation while offering the promise of autonomy and a steady —even if modest— income. At the same time, manicure work points to a revalorisation of manual labour. In Athens' rapidly expanding and diversifying ‘nail industry,’ mundane tasks are increasingly reframed through idioms of expertise, artistic creativity, and entrepreneurial aspiration. In this process, manicure work remains firmly embedded within the domain of manual labour while simultaneously complicating it, mobilising aesthetic authority, claims to professionalism, and narratives of self-making to negotiate —or even escape— its association with disposable work. Within this constellation, the hand —as both agent and object of labour— demands care even as it produces value.