Despotism on Demand

How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace

Alex J. Wood

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501748899
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace.

Wood believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world he uncovers how control in the contemporary "flexible firm" is achieved through the insidious combination of "flexible discipline" and "schedule gifts." Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive "schedule gifts": more or better hours. Wood concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.

Part 1

POWER AT WORK

The first part of this book focuses on the internal states of two workplace regimes: ConflictCo in the United States and PartnershipCo in the UK. The term “internal state” refers to the manner in which control and resistance are shaped by different institutional and ideological apparatuses within the workplace. The similarities and differences in the internal states of the two regimes will be drawn out by placing each within its corresponding historical context.

Chapter 1 investigates PartnershipCo in the UK. Workers at PartnershipCo felt highly dependent on their employer, believing there to be few alternatives available to them. However, despite their vulnerable position, the rights enshrined in their legally binding employment contracts placed restrictions on the ability of their managers to take advantage of this weakness through threats of dismissal. Workforce surveillance at PartnershipCo was also variable and often limited.

Most importantly, PartnershipCo had agreed a “partnership” collective agreement with a recognized union. This collective agreement laid out the company’s highly developed grievance and disciplinary procedures and limited the use of temporary and agency workers. These policies had a hegemonic function, providing workers with important protections against traditional despotic methods of control. However, the partnership collective agreement also acted to mobilize bias against the development of collective challenges to managerial control through individualizing worker indignation and preventing the articulation of collective grievances. It also incorporated the union’s representatives and officials within a narrow framework in which they came to see their role solely as ensuring that company policies (many of which were effectively decided unilaterally by PartnershipCo) were followed. The focus on policing the company’s policies, therefore, came at the expense of promoting the collective questioning of whether these policies were just in the first place.

The union thus provided a normative control function whereby company policy was legitimized, and controversial management practices, such as precarious scheduling, were justified by union reps. For example, union reps often spoke of the need to “balance the needs of the business with the needs of the worker.” Moreover, the union’s national campaigns did not deal with major workplace issues, and were instead limited to issues such as bullying or learning that provided mutual gains for both workers and PartnershipCo. While the union provided a source of normative control, its ideological function was uneven and unreliable due to it following its own organizational interests, which did not necessarily overlap with those of PartnershipCo. Thus, the union could not always be counted on to legitimize management practices. In particular, due to the high labor turnover at PartnershipCo, the union required its reps to achieve high levels of recruitment, which, in turn, led reps to increase discontent by stressing negative aspects of the workplace in order to convince nonmembers to join the union.

Given the importance of the collective agreement and the union to this internal state, PartnershipCo might be assumed to most closely resemble a hegemonic workplace regime. Indeed, workers’ interests were concretely tied to their employers, through a profit share scheme, a relatively good defined benefit pension scheme, and pay being collectively bargained. However, during the period of fieldwork, PartnershipCo refused to award any shares due to declining profitability, while the collective agreement actually took pay negotiations out of the workplace and had resulted in declining real pay. Therefore, the internal state at PartnershipCo more closely resembled those synonymous with hegemonic despotism. The compromise equilibrium was seemingly in a state of disintegration, with the regime’s remaining hegemonic apparatuses being used to extract concessions from labor in the face of growing competitive pressures resulting from the growth of e-commerce. This does not, however, mean that workers received no benefit from the continued existence of hegemonic institutions. This is a fact that can be seen particularly clearly when this internal state is contrasted with the one at ConflictCo in the United States.

While the internal state at PartnershipCo resembled that of hegemonic despotism, ConflictCo’s internal state was closer to the ideal of market despotism. As at PartnershipCo, ConflictCo’s workforce was also highly dependent on the firm for their livelihoods; however, here insecurity was much greater, due to the “at-will” employment status used by ConflictCo. According to this employment status workers lack an implicit or explicit legally binding employment contract. Furthermore, ConflictCo’s policies and managers made workers aware of their vulnerable positions and the ease with which they could be replaced. In fact, workers frequently complained of having been verbally abused and bullied by managers and that an atmosphere of surveillance prevailed at ConflictCo.

In contrast to PartnershipCo, ConflictCo was extremely hostile to unions. In the absence of a recognized union and collective bargaining, ConflictCo created its workplace policies and rules unilaterally without worker input. Workers even struggled to access these policies and could look them up only on the firm’s intranet. That these company policies were created without their input and that they had limited access to them meant that workers perceived them as one-sided, unstable, and used by managers to catch them out. Likewise, the grievance and disciplinary procedures were underdeveloped. In fact, the disciplinary procedure did little more than provide managers with a convenient method with which to fire workers, with no burden of proof being required and workers not being allowed an independent representative or even a witness to be present at disciplinary meetings. This process was widely felt to be applied unequally and unfairly, based on favoritism or as a means to retaliate against workers who attempted resistance. The grievance procedure, which ConflictCo termed the “open door policy” (which, as one worker put it, had “been nailed shut a long time ago”), lacked the institutional oversight necessary for workers to feel that their complaints were being treated equally, and fairly investigated and dealt with.

Furthermore, even in the postwar period, ConflictCo had never fully embraced the kinds of hegemonic mechanisms, common at other U.S. companies, that tied workers’ interests to their firms’. These mechanisms include employer profit sharing, health care, and defined benefit pension schemes. Even the few benefits that ConflictCo did provide had been declining in value, and, in any case, most workers felt that their wages were too low to enable them to make much use of the company’s health care, profit sharing, or 401(k) retirement schemes. In fact, starting wages were declining in real terms and were close to the minimum wage. As at PartnershipCo, the declining value of wages and benefits was probably a consequence of the threat that e-commerce represented to ConflictCo’s continued dominance in the U.S. retail market, and that thus created pressure to cut costs.

In the absence of mechanisms to concretely coordinate the interests of workers with those of the company, ConflictCo sought to ensure normative control and to limit resistance through directly shaping the values of workers. Such methods included an Orwellian use of language, heavy use of in-store propaganda, and compulsory collective ritual. However, these attempts at normative control were largely ineffective and in fact legitimized opposition to the current management. Much of the propaganda, along with the ritualistic “ConflictCo cheer,” emphasized the supposed values embodied in the founder as pro-worker, thus the company’s stressing of these values highlighted the disparity between the symbolic representation of ConflictCo and the reality of working at the company. Moreover, the stressing of the founder’s support for these values also justified resistance to those currently in charge and in doing so actually destabilized the regime and undermined its control.

The failure of these normative controls was compounded by a recent curtailing of managers’ ability to secure control through blatant acts of traditional despotism. Despite the hostility of ConflictCo toward unions, a union-backed worker association had provided workers with a degree of associational power. The association had been very successful at creating negative publicity around working conditions at ConflictCo, as well as filing a large number of successful legal claims against the company for unfair labor practices. These tactics proved effective at limiting obvious forms of managerial despotism.

Therefore, this first part of the book demonstrates that while internal states in the UK and the United States have generally developed along similar historical contours, PartnershipCo and ConflictCo seemingly represent somewhat divergent workplace regimes, with the former’s internal state more closely resembling that of hegemonic despotism and the latter’s market despotism. However, at both firms, the internal state placed limits on the ability of managers to achieve control through blatant acts of traditional despotism. It is this similarity that made flexible discipline an attractive alternative means for securing control, and it is this form of control that is elucidated in part 2.

1

INTERNAL STATES IN THE UK

This book’s introduction outlined Michael Burawoy’s influential workplace regime approach. His framework provides us with tools with which to investigate how control and resistance are shaped by institutional and ideological apparatuses within the workplace. This chapter investigates the mechanisms of control that comprised the “internal state” at PartnershipCo. These mechanisms include a union and collective partnership agreement, developed disciplinary and grievance procedures, a defined benefit pension, and bonus schemes. The chapter proceeds by considering the historical development of internal states in the UK before presenting a detailed account of the main features of the internal state at PartnershipCo.

Market Despotism

Karl Marx’s depiction of early English factories provides Burawoy with the ideal type for “market despotic regimes.” Marx argues that automation, such as Richard Arkwright’s water-powered spinning frame in the cotton industry, significantly reduced the skill level of work in these factories. Moreover, Marx describes the organization of these early factories as being synonymous with the military, autocracy, slavery, and prisons. For example, he states that there is “barrack-like discipline … dividing workers into manual laborers and overseers … In the factory code, the capitalist formulates his autocratic power over his workers like a private legislator … This code is merely the capitalist caricature of the social regulation of the labor process … The overseer’s book of penalties replace the slave-driver’s lash … Was [the philosopher] Fourier wrong when he called factories ‘mitigated jails’?”¹

Marx also footnotes Friedrich Engels’s famed study of the working class in England in which Engels states that the factory is where “ends all freedom in law and in fact … [The worker] must eat, drink and sleep at command … The despotic bell calls him from his bed, his breakfast, his dinner … The employer is absolute law-giver; he makes regulations at will, changes and adds to his codex at pleasure … the courts say to the working man: since you have entered into this contract, you must be bound to live under the sword, physically and mentally.”²

Drawing on the work of Marx and Engels, Burawoy suggests that market despotism is characterized by four criteria:

1. Competition among firms.
2. Highly controlled labor processes.
3. Workers’ dependence on their employer for a wage in return for labor power.
4. State regulation only of the external conditions of production, that is, maintaining market competition without regulating the production process.³

A key experience of workers under market despotism was the immense level of insecurity they experienced. There were no employer or state protections against job loss or unemployment (apart from the workhouse), and the enclosure of common land made workers highly dependent on their employment. Engels describes how “far more demoralizing than his poverty in its influence on the English working man is the insecurity of his position, the necessity of living upon wages from hand to mouth … Every whim of his employer may deprive [him] of bread.”

In Engels’s view, it was insecurity that made life worse for the English worker than for the German peasant, even though the latter was materially poorer and suffered more from want. This insecurity placed the English worker in the “most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being … Everything that the proletarian can do to improve his position is but a drop in the ocean compared to the floods of varying chances to which he is exposed, over which he has not the slightest of control.”

Engels describes the insecurity workers faced in further lucid detail: “He knows that every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he temporarily saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep his head above water. He knows that, though he may have the means of living today, it is very uncertain whether he shall tomorrow.”⁴

Other accounts endorse this dismal portrayal of life in English factories during the Industrial Revolution. In these workplaces the internal state was usually based on harsh discipline and fines meted out by overseers and managers, along with employment laws that threatened workers with imprisonment for breach of contract, but that punished employers only with fines.

In the early nineteenth century, forms of discipline similar to those practiced in the cotton mills (hierarchical supervision, rules, and fines) begun to spr...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Flexible Despotism
• Part 1: Power at Work
• Part 2: The Despotism of Time
• Part 3: The Dynamics of Work and Spaces of Resistance
• Conclusions
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index