Stories of Professionalization and Social Inclusion in Public Parking Services

This paper presents stories from fieldwork among parking patrol officers and managers in a Danish municipal centre. The stories are about the hiring, firing and retention of parking officers. The centre is renowned for management’s active and ambitious work to improve the work environment for parking patrol officers, the quality of parking services and to employ diversity management. As many other types of unskilled work in Denmark, the job as parking patrol officer is a possible entry point to the labour market for people without formal education or people who have been worn out in other occupations. By presenting stories told by parking patrol officers and their managers at Centre for Parking, I wish to contribute to our understanding of the role of the public sector as an employer: the ambitions and limits of the public sector in regard to employing people for unskilled work and the dilemmas that follow. The aim of the paper is to show how these stories shape the simultaneous processes of professionalizing the traditionally unskilled work of parking patrolling and fulfilling a role as a socially inclusive workplace.