Culturally, it is frowned upon in the United Kingdom to talk in a critical way about management and employers. People who do this risk one of two outcomes depending on the age of the person they are talking to:
being accused of reliving the ‘Winter of Discontent’ (something which
j obs . 67 remains bizarrely scandalising despite all the various much worse things which have happened since), or being likened to French workers, who kidnap their human resource managers, set fire to tyres and stage mass protests if they are asked to stay five minutes late at work (it is said).
There have, in fact, been some notable scandals surrounding ‘bad employers’ in Britain in recent years. Certain cases tend to act as lightning rods for criticism, and the individuals involved are presented as sacrificial offerings so that everyone else can carry on as normal. For instance, in 2016, the British media went through a few weeks of being obsessed with Phillip Green, the former owner of (among many other things) British Home Stores. He extracted vast sums of money from the company for his own enjoyment while its employees’ pension fund accrued a crippling deficit.
It is true that Green’s case is a particularly bad one, with added irony: at one point he was an adviser on cost-cutting to the 2010–15 Coalition government. People like this become the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’,2 whose very existence makes all the other faces of capitalism, by definition, acceptable. Cue various commentators rushing to reaffirm their faith in the system now that the bad apples have been found out.3 Once these people have been publicly shamed, the economy can go back to working for everyone.
In Green’s case the victims were his workers, but the scandal wasn’t really about work; it was too glamorous. A well-connected member of the elite who avoids huge amounts of tax was frittering away people’s security in retirement. It is much rarer that there is such a furore over the way people are actually treated by their employers in the workplace itself, although the damage done to human dignity is often just as severe.
The most significant case in this respect is the recent controversy around Sports Direct. This broke when the Guardian newspaper accused the company of paying its staff at the Shirebrook warehouse in Derbyshire below the legal minimum wage. In fact, while the staff were nominally receiving the statutory minimum, the company made them wait through lengthy security checks on entering and exiting the site and deducted pay for that time. If these security checks were counted as part of the working day (which they should have been, since people weren’t standing in them for fun), the hourly wage averaged out to less than the minimum.
Here the problem of low pay was caught out by a particular technical and legal calculation, but it is important to stress that concealed behind this calculation are many other qualitative issues. By staging these security
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checks the organisation demonstrated that it distrusted its employees. It made a public show of the fact that it could subject them to invasions of personal space on a daily basis.4 Workers could be singled out by name and shouted at, like a primary school teacher with a naughty child, if a supervisor judged them not to be working fast enough.
Upon starting the job, workers were welcomed with a letter containing the lines: ‘your performance on-site will be monitored and if you do not meet the expectations of Sports Direct then your assignment will be terminated’. This kind of text is one of those things that, to those accustomed to living in the system we live in, sounds ‘harsh but fair’, like something Alan Sugar would say. How unreasonable it would be to expect someone who doesn’t ‘meet expectations’ not to be fired. But what are these expectations? In this case they were defined unilater-ally by management, and so became more like an autocratic system of laws over which the worker has no say, but which they have to follow for fear of losing their livelihood. As the Guardian reported, at Sports Direct, falling short of expectations could involve spending too long on the toilet, clocking in one minute late, or the perennial ‘horseplay’.
For this reason, the reporters also found that the children of Sports Direct workers needed to stay at school despite illnesses, because their parents were afraid of management punishment if they left work to look after them.
The employers’ initial response to the Guardian’s exposé was that many of these practices are standard for UK warehousing work. It is easy to sneer at this but perhaps we should take them at their word. Some years ago I worked for a labour rights organisation in the United States where we uncovered very similar practices at a warehouse in the Deep South. There, the employers also used a ‘strike’ system whereby workers reported losing their jobs after leaving early to provide emergency care for their children, or coming back one minute late after lunch. In this sense Sports Direct has merely been engaging in the transatlantic diffusion of cutting-edge management techniques.
Warehouse workers at UK Amazon sites encounter similar methods.
They were asked to walk up to eleven miles over a night shift, and were expected to collect an order every 33 seconds. Enforcing this required no human contact: they were monitored by a wearable device which bleeped if their pace slackened. According to the undercover reporter who worked at the plant: ‘We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into
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ourselves … We don’t think for ourselves, maybe they don’t trust us to think for ourselves as human beings.’5
It is unlikely that this kind of highly intense and dehumanising monitoring is unique to retail industry warehousing. Managers across the economy have begun to take control over work time much more seriously in recent years, and in this they have been egged on by media exaggerations about the supposed costs to the economy of people being off sick. They have intensified the surveillance of ill workers, through measures such as the now-ubiquitous ‘return to work interview’, where people are required to explain periods of sickness in intrusive discussions about their health. There are also attempts to link sickness absence to disciplinary procedures (as illustrated by Sports Direct’s ‘strikes’ system) which have proliferated much more widely.6 Surveys show that British workers are becoming more conscious of managerial intervention around their health and feel increasingly pressured to attend work when ill.7
Beyond these threats relating to absences from work, the Amazon case in particular shows the intensive monitoring of workers’ actions while they are clocked in. Employees had to perform repetitive and uninterest-ing tasks for many hours at a time, watched over by an electronic handset that would berate them if they slowed down. Here, the machine becomes a relentlessly pedantic overseer which is programmed to tut-tut at its human victim incessantly.
In manufacturing, one of the major themes of management literature over the last 40 years has been lean production, which has often been assumed to make the labour process less alienating for workers and reverse various ‘Taylorist’ methods. Lean production as a concept originates in Japan, particularly with the car company Toyota. Lean at Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers was a shift away from the Taylorist workplace, towards a more flexible and team-based model of production. It emphasised ‘quality teams’, where groups of workers had greater ‘functional flexibility’. In other words, they were supposed to collaborate in understanding and performing a wider range of tasks, taking part in quality control as well as suggesting new ideas for the production process.
But despite these kinds of trends, there are inevitably limits to how far control can really be loosened in the capitalist workplace. The efforts to transpose ‘lean’ methods to Western workplaces shows this. We need to note a general observation: the fact that workers are sorted into teams with some greater degree of autonomy does not necessarily mean control
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is loosened. In some respects, it can become tighter. In Barker’s8 famous study of US telecommunications workplaces, the shift to autonomous teamworking appeared, counter-intuitively, to lead to much tighter restrictions. Previously, while a lot of power was concentrated in a more dictatorial manager figure, the fact that one manager can never be omni-present meant workers could find ample scope to regulate their own pace of work and covertly find time to talk with colleagues. But once their
‘self-managed teams’ were established, free to set their own processes and targets, individuals found they were under a much more relentless kind of surveillance. Co-workers with whom they would once have been co-conspirators against management were suddenly responsible for ensuring targets were met, creating a whole new set of monitoring eyes.
However autonomous the team, the fact that it became bound up in the process of surplus value extraction and realisation means these pressures are inevitable.
The more humane aspects of lean production were lost in transit from East Asia. In Japan, lean production was bolstered by the ‘three pillars’
system of employment relations, which implied very strong job security and intensive worker training as well as an active trade union role (not universal, but applied to a large segment of the workforce). These were seen as necessary to enable workers to take part in quality control. Only some of these features made it into Western manufacturing: while functional flexibility and quality teams have been adopted to some degree, job security and stronger trade unionism have not. Control remains very intense. In the US, a lean manufacturing worker-turned-academic Darius Mehri found that, much like in Barker’s study, quality teams fostered a culture of informal peer-to-peer surveillance and intense pressure to meet targets.9 The snazzy new office designs intended to support teamworking also served these ends:
The open office space … facilitates both monitoring and bullying. It is important that the employee who is the subject of harassment be humiliated in front of the other members of his group … at times the rules are vague, allowing managers the flexibility to blame the workers at will … The most powerful rules are unwritten and can only be learned by observation.10
In the UK, Rick Delbridge’s research also shows that workers in lean manufacturing remained under a culture of surveillance, with
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making powers only devolved very slightly to employees.11 Managers were stricter in holding them responsible for problems, but they did not have significant autonomy to address these problems. This meant an intensified culture of blame as workers sought to shift responsibility on to colleagues for faults that once would have lain with management.
The consequence was work intensification rather than empowerment.12 Wayne Lewchuk et al. have also shown that lean production in the British car industry has done little to reduce the arduousness of manufacturing work.13 Under capitalism, a workplace with genuine individual freedom is unthinkable.
Misanthropic Boredom and Surveillance
At two points on the script, workers are encouraged to try joking with the customer. The first is during the confirmation of details. There are two eligibility questions where the customer is asked to confirm ‘that you spend seven out of 12 months a year in the UK?’ and ‘that this is where you pay your taxes?’ These questions respectively open the door to two jokes: ‘So no long holidays planned this year then?’ And
‘no escaping that, is there?’ (On a couple of occasions I tried adding to the second question ‘unless you are Vodafone’, but this was quickly discouraged by the supervisors). The second point … is later in the script, during the communication of the exclusion ‘that you won’t be covered for death as a result of … participation in any illegal acts’, to which almost every worker adds, with feigned laughter, ‘so if you were planning to rob a bank we wouldn’t be able to pay out!’ While this is presumably a new joke for the customer, the workers will get to enjoy it over and over again throughout the day.14
[H]e did another return, again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 34A and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and ID number that some part of him still refused to quite get memorised so he had to unclip his badge and check it each time and then stapled the 402 to the return and put the file in the top tier’s rightmost tray for 402s Out and refused to let himself count the number in the trays yet, and then unbidden came the thought that boring also meant something that drilled in and made a hole … Then he looked up despite all best
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prior intentions. In four minutes it would be another hour, a half hour after that was the fifteen minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth like a panpipe … He knew what he’d really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and despite prayers and effort sit counting the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again.15
Huge numbers of British people are bored by their jobs, and this is by no means limited to low-skilled or repetitive work.16 Management surveillance can make this boredom very hard to cope with. One of the UK’s major growth industries is call centre work, the grimness of which has been very well-documented by others.17 When I did this kind of job, we were told by supervisors to lie to the (usually old) people that answered the phone, telling them our long and dreary list of questions would only take ten minutes (it could take 45). This was quite spirit-crushing, especially given that supervisors were often listening in to check you were following the script. I found that the time spent at the phone on a shift stretched out into seeming infinity: despite the shifts being relatively short, the end of the working day seemed like an inconceivable utopia right up to the moment you were actually allowed to leave.
This tedium and repetition, combined with the embarrassment and guilt of lying to people, made me look for any way I could to reclaim control over my own time. In one call centre, they (very unusually) had a hot chocolate machine which was free for staff to use. I would drink six or seven cups over a four-hour shift, not for the drink (this was unhealthy), but for the time you could spend just waiting for it to pour.
Thirty seconds or so where you can think your own thoughts. At most call centres nowadays you would not get away with this, so I was evidently lucky, though I did eventually end up getting fired. At another job, you would be shouted at by supervisors for standing up without permission, making drink or toilet breaks out of the question. So to reclaim time I was reduced to just dialling the phone numbers in my list as slowly as I could, and carefully redialling unrecognised numbers two or three times ‘just to be sure’. Nowadays, though, in most outgoing call centres computers dial the numbers for staff, affording no means of escape;
auto-dialling technology imposes a machine’s suffocating rhythm on the worker. A friend of mine found the only way of breaking this sadistic
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rhythm was to spend a few minutes just immediately hanging up on people that answered, though he fairly quickly got sacked for this.
Managers like to pretend they are humanising this intensely anti-human activity, though whether they really believe this, or just see it as a useful human resource facade, probably depends on the manager. For example, they encourage their underlings to ‘be yourself ’, i.e. appear fun and authentic, as a means of coping with the ridiculousness of what they are doing, as well as the relentless hostility they receive from the people they have to call.18 This authenticity is somewhat undermined by the wholly synthetic interactions with call receivers, sometimes vulnerable older people. As one journalist puts it:
When someone tells you about the rising price of their weekly shop, or how their husband was recently diagnosed with bowel cancer, or how they’re on their own now, alone in an empty house, continuing to flick through your objection handling booklet makes you feel like a sociopath.19
Nonetheless, you have to be careful because, as in many other workplaces, call centre managers survey staff without telling them. Someone can finish a call and then have a manager walk over to tell them they were listening and describe where they went wrong. For instance, I was told off for jiggling my leg too much, which made me self-conscious for a while. There was also something weirdly oppressive about the ‘incentives’
management dished out. Incentives are a standby of management science; in a call centre you might get a voucher or something if you get the most positive responses in a day. I used to wonder whether there was something wrong with me for not being enthused by this. But apparently it works, or at least managers think it does: expressions of power which grimly masquerade as fun are characteristic of the modern British workplace, from the recruitment stage onwards. For instance, job interviewees have been forced to dance in exchange for a chance to work at Curry’s,20 and I have spoken to students who have attended job ‘assessment centres’ which are apparently run by frustrated X Factor presenters (who will require people to attend from hundreds of miles away, only to sort them into groups to be sent home halfway through the day).
The surveillance and monitoring of workers is clearly not limited to lower-skilled and lower-paid jobs such as call centre or warehousing
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work. The nature of the labour–capital relationships suggests that these dynamics will emerge anywhere that people sell their time in exchange for a wage. Consider Bob Carter et al.’s studies of relatively profession-alised white-collar jobs in the tax office.21 Following shifts towards teamworking (intended as a means of reducing public sector bureau-cracy) in 2005, they show how the role of the line manager in HMRC
work. The nature of the labour–capital relationships suggests that these dynamics will emerge anywhere that people sell their time in exchange for a wage. Consider Bob Carter et al.’s studies of relatively profession-alised white-collar jobs in the tax office.21 Following shifts towards teamworking (intended as a means of reducing public sector bureau-cracy) in 2005, they show how the role of the line manager in HMRC