Trouble at Work

Ralph Fevre, Duncan Lewis, Amanda Robinson, Trevor Jones

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781472557483
• eBook ISBN: 9781849664660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Trouble in the workplace - whether it is bullying, harassment or stress - is always in the headlines. Yet, in many discussions, the research and statistics that are cited prove unreliable. This book summarizes the largest specialist research programme on ill-treatment in the workplace so far undertaken. It provides a powerful antidote to half-truths and misinformation and offers a new way of conceptualizing trouble at work, moving the discussion away from individualized explanations - and talk of 'bullies' and 'victims' - towards the workplace characteristics that cause trouble at work. The biggest problems arise where organisations fail to create a workplace culture in which individuals really matter. Paradoxically, these are often the organizations which are well-versed in modern management practices.

PART ONE

This book represents the most important product of the largest, specialist research programme on ill-treatment in the workplace so far undertaken. The programme dates from 2006 when the authors began work on a funding bid to the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. The project funded by this successful bid (award number RES-062-23-312) provided the bulk of the original data which are discussed in the book. Public funds also paid for the UK Government’s Fair Treatment at Work Survey (FTWS) which provided valuable supporting evidence that we cite at various points. The book therefore owes its existence to public funds but its value derives from the further, unpaid contribution of thousands of British employees who spared the time to tell us about their own experiences, no matter that they sometimes found this hard, and even distressing. It is to their stories that we turn first of all.

1

A Bad Day at the Office

As part of the survey we discuss later in this book, people who told us they had been ill-treated at work were asked why they thought this had happened to them. We gave them options which included their age, gender and ethnicity, characteristics of the place they worked and about anyone whom they thought was responsible for the ill-treatment (see pp. 30–1). If none of these options fitted, they were asked to explain in their own words. A few of our respondents said it was just a ‘bad day’ or that someone else was ‘having a bad day’. The best way to explain what this book is about is to tell the stories of a random selection of respondents who had experienced a bad day at work.¹ While the facts reported, and the feelings expressed, are given verbatim, we have made up some other details in order to preserve our respondents’ anonymity; for example, all the names used here, and throughout the book, are pseudonyms. We have also imagined everything happened on the same bad day.

At 5.10 p.m., Suhuur, a 25-year-old Muslim woman of Pakistani origin, is collected by her mother outside the shop where she works. As she gets into the car, her mother can see she is upset and, as she eases into the traffic, her mum asks her what’s wrong? You won’t believe what happened today, says Suhuur, and then it all comes out in a rush: ‘A customer asked me for something which didn’t make any sense. When I went to my manager to see if she could help, the customer said a completely different thing to her than what she had said to me. We sorted out what she needed and the customer blamed me for not understanding her.’ How rude, says her mother, but Suhuur says that’s not the worst of it. The customer said it was my fault because of my head scarf. ‘She said to me “you should unwrap that thing from around your ears so that you can hear better”.’

It is now 6.30 p.m. on the same day and Tanya, a 37-year-old black Caribbean woman who has a physical disability, has just arrived home from her job as a manager in local government. As she waits in the kitchen for the kettle to boil, her eldest daughter comes in: you look tired mum, she says, bad day at work? Tanya tells her that her ‘bosses harass me as a result of not meeting the unreasonable deadlines’. Her daughter is only 15 and is yet to have a job. She tells her mother it’s only work and not to take it to heart, but Tanya tells her she doesn’t know how bad it makes you feel when you are ‘unable to meet deadlines owing to unmanageable workloads. This makes you feel incompetent’.

Half an hour after Tanya gets home, Chris rings his brother from a car rental garage in Aberdeen. Chris is white, Christian, 32 and works for an estate agent. He says, did Belinda tell you ‘I flew to Scotland after work’?, and then he tells his brother that he’s ‘expected to drive back [the] same day – 11 hours’ driving’. His brother says it’s ridiculous, probably illegal, but Chris says, I know, I tried to tell them it’s against health and safety but ‘management took no notice, and said I could not stay at a hotel’. Well at least they’ve given you tomorrow off then, replies his brother. You are joking says Chris, ‘when I said “could I come in late next day?” they said no; come in at your normal time’.

Terry is white, Christian, born in South Africa and 36. He is meeting his friend Wayne at the pub at 8.30 p.m. and is running late, so he rings Wayne on his mobile and tells him to get the drinks in. Wayne says, it sounds like you need one, have you had a bad day at the golf course (where Terry works)? Terry says he ‘made a mistake by cutting the wrong piece of grass’. He tells Wayne his supervisor ‘berated me about it, shouting at me, and he assaulted me; he struck me on the jaw with his fist’.

By 11.30 p.m. Ramsey knows he is not going to be able to sleep for an hour or two yet. He is a 43-year-old Christian of Indian origin and he has a physical disability. He checks his Blackberry and sees his brother, who is working in Korea, is already at the office, and he sends him a message to say he has had a bad day at work. His brother will not be surprised by this – he knows that Ramsey has had a long battle with his private sector employer in health and social care but has not had an update on what has happened in the past few weeks. Ramsey says, ‘they said I had been sick for too much time; they then offered me a low daytime job which was not suitable for me. They then offered me redundancy.’ His brother sympathises but tells him that employers do need their employees to be available for work. This is not the point, Ramsey tells him: ‘Staff that came after me had more sickness but no action taken against them.’

It’s 1 p.m. and Nandi is working at the hospital and things are going badly as usual. He is 28, of Indian origin, a Hindu and recently qualified as a doctor. He gets a five-minute break and uses it to go to the toilet and update his Facebook status on his i-phone. He wants it to be, ‘On call – patients to be seen from A & E and then sometimes only two doctors and 20 people to be seen. Employees off, either sick or study – no proper cover’. But he hasn’t time to type all this so writes ‘pressure and stressed’ instead.

It was C. Wright Mills (1959) who taught that it was the job of sociology to explain what bigger structural causes lay behind private troubles like those of Suhuur, Tanya, Chris and the rest, including the 1,788 survey respondents whose accounts we do not have room to discuss here. Mills explained that individuals like them could not hope to understand what was really happening in their lives from their own isolated viewpoint. The virtue of sociology was that it allowed any one of us to step outside the limitations of that individual view and find out if others shared our troubles, and what the common causes of those troubles might be. The private troubles Mills had in mind entailed an element which is common in all six examples above. In each case, a person feels their values are being threatened, and it was this threat that Mills thought could form the seed of the public issue that sociology could help people to fashion from their private troubles.

Examples of the successful translation of private troubles into public issues in the world of employment are easy enough to find. There have been public debates about unemployment, job security, working hours, health and safety, wages, income differentials and discrimination, for example. Unemployment was one of Mills’s examples, but he said that it could be far from obvious how private troubles were turned into public issues, and there might be serious disagreements about the way this was done. We are now in the middle of such a period of debate and disagreement about how best to turn the troubles at work we have just described into public issues.

Mills might agree it has taken a surprisingly long time for sociologists to get involved in this process (Beale and Hoel 2011), but we must first make it clear that this late entry left the way clear for other social scientists to get to work. By far the most important contribution to this work came from psychologists and social psychologists. It is the concepts taken from these disciplines that have drawn together the private troubles of individuals into something that can be measured and investigated, and for which causes and remedies can be found. The two most influential concepts they have introduced are work-induced stress and workplace bullying.

The concept of stress conceives of workplace troubles as excessive strain on employees which impairs their ability to function normally. Ultimately, stress may harm an individual’s mental and physical health. Examples of the kinds of remedies that have been proposed when the private troubles of the workplace are translated into the public issue of work-related stress are provided by the United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), for example, HSE (2007) which offers guidance for employers. The equivalent public...

Table of contents

• Trouble at Work
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• PART FOUR
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index