Labour Markets and Identity on the Post-Industrial Assembly Line

Anthony Lloyd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367195892
• eBook ISBN: 9781317108450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

As a product of its time, the call centre utilises new developments in telecommunications and information technology to offer cost-efficient delivery systems for customer care. Efficiency, productivity and flexibility are all embodiments of neoliberal market capitalism and are all personified in the call centre operation, as well as the structure of the labour market in general. Thus the individual and the workplace are embedded in a variety of global processes. In order to frame the context in which call centre operations exist today and their employees (mainly young men and women) negotiate the increasingly risky and individualised task of developing an identity or sense of belonging in the world, Labour Markets and Identity on the Post-Industrial Assembly Line sets out the economic, social and political changes over the last three decades that have restructured the labour market, altered the balance between labour, management and the state, and unleashed global market capitalism upon previously sheltered areas of the economy and social life in both Britain and elsewhere. This ground-breaking book offers one of the first real qualitative sociological investigations of a relatively new form of employment, to see what life is like on the 'post-industrial assembly line', whilst also taking a close look at the nature of class, identity and subjectivity in relation to young people coming of age in a world dramatically altered over the last three decades.

Chapter 1

DOI: 10.4324/9781315591292-2

To understand the world we live in today, it is important to look to the recent past and see where we have come from. As noted in the introduction, Marx tells us how the needs of the economy shape the local, the personal, the social. Over the last three decades, economic decisions and changes have radically restructured the local and the social across large parts of the UK, Europe and the USA. This chapter will outline these changes and, by using Middlesbrough as context, demonstrates how global changes and economic processes can have a very real impact on the lives of individuals at a local level. Once we know where we have come from, we can begin to understand the way the world is now.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

At the heart of this book is the contention that processes of deindustrialisation throughout the late 1970s and 1980s fundamentally altered the social, cultural and political landscape of the Western world, of the UK, and Middlesbrough. Middlesbrough owed its existence entirely to the emergence and consolidation of capitalist relations of production (Beynon, Hudson and Sadler 1994). Geographically, Middlesbrough lies on the south bank of the River Tees. Situated three miles west of Teesport and the North Sea coast, Middlesbrough was a true product of the Industrial Revolution. In 1801, the population stood at just 25, situated across four farmhouses; the discovery of ironstone in the nearby Eston Hills in 1850 turned Middlesbrough into an industrial hub (Lillie 1968) and, by 1874, Middlesbrough had become the number one iron ore town in England, leading to the nickname the ‘Ironopolis’. One third of all national iron ore output originated in Middlesbrough and was transported around the world. By the end of the century the population was nearly 90,000, making Middlesbrough the fastest growing new town in England during the nineteenth century (Bell 1969). Middlesbrough's place as an emerging powerhouse in industrial Britain led Prime Minister William Gladstone, visiting the town in the 1860s, to comment, ‘this remarkable place, the youngest child of England's enterprise, is an infant, but, if an infant, an infant Hercules’.

Rapid growth during industrialisation gave Middlesbrough the feel of a frontier town, dramatically expanding around the natural resources and consequent industries created in the area (Taylor 2002). This frontier feel was epitomised during the early rush to mine ironstone from the Eston Hills; one of the many hastily erected settlements east of Middlesbrough for the incoming mine workers was named California, after the 1849 Gold Rush (Hornby 2004). Steel production began at Port Clarence, across the river from Middlesbrough, in 1889 and Dorman Long, a local steelworks, famously designed and built Australia's Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932. Steel and iron production in Middlesbrough reached such levels that for many years during the nineteenth century Teesside set the world price for iron and steel (Frey 1929). Consequently, Middlesbrough's production of iron and steel contributed greatly to Britain's prosperity throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By 1919, Middlesbrough was producing one third of the nation's steel (Appleton 1929). The emergence of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in 1929 saw Middlesbrough lead the way in chemical production whilst the chemical factories began producing plastics as early as 1934. The development of chemical industries led to another population boom as, by the 1960s, the population had reached 160,000. Petrochemicals had replaced iron and steel as the engine of the local economy and there was virtually full employment in the town at the end of the 1960s. As recently as 1977, Cleveland (Middlesbrough was part of Cleveland County from 1974 until 1996 when the county was abolished and the town became a unitary authority) had the fourth highest county GDP in the country (Beynon, Hudson and Sadler 1994).

Given the shifting demands of industrial capitalism, cycles of ‘boom and bust’ were regular occurrences in Middlesbrough and the inter-war depression hit Middlesbrough as hard as anywhere else in the country and the world (Beynon, Hudson and Sadler 1994, see also Dudley 1994, Hopkins 1991, Parker 2008 and Safford 2009 for a national and international perspective). Hornby's excellent film, A Century in Stone: The Eston and California Story (2004), tells the tale of the ironstone miners in Eston, an outlying suburb of East Middlesbrough situated close to the river. Interview testimony from elderly Eston residents forcibly hits home exactly how hard life was in a formerly prosperous working-class area:

The gentleman from the parish came up, it was in Eston High Street I think, and he had to look all through my house to see if I had a piece of bread or anything. He left me ten shilling, no rent, I couldn’t afford to pay the rent, but there was ten shilling to get two weeks’ groceries.

They’d say, “here's the means test man coming” and say … my sister's husband would run out into the back way and go into somebody else's house. They’d come into anybody's house and say, “you can sell that”, or “you can sell that”. Anything you had in the house that was sellable, you had to sell it, to live on. It was really very, very … that's why people today don’t even know they’re born.

Means testing split up local families as fathers and sons could not live in the same house and claim assistance from the government (Bourke 1994, Kynaston 2007, Hoggart 1957). In some cases men even resorted to camping on the Eston Hills they mined the ironstone from in order to claim benefit (Hornby 2004). For many people interviewed in the film, local community spirit and solidarity seemed to be crucial to getting through hard times as fond recollections of a previous era permeate the film. Although Pearson (1983) would describe this as a nostalgic look back at a mythical ‘golden age’, it seems from the testimony provided in A Century in Stone that a strong working-class community was forged through hard manual labour and close-knit ties to a neighbourhood whose internal logic was inextricably intertwined with the heavy industry around which the town grew up.

Throughout Middlesbrough's history, there are many examples of desperate poverty, inadequate government aid and chronic unemployment. However, despite the conditions, a strong sense of local pride and working-class culture emerged in Middlesbrough. The Ministry of Town and Country Planning conducted a social survey after World War 2 in order to gauge public opinion about Middlesbrough and the results indicated that, despite the image of poverty and desperation, many felt a strong sense of attachment to the place. Seventy-five per cent of all housewives and 73 per cent of men revealed they would prefer to stay in Middlesbrough after the war rather than moving elsewhere with many in the lowest income group admitting they wanted to stay because ‘they were born there’, ‘they are used to it’ and ‘because they like it’ (Chapman 1946). The sense of solidarity is apparent from the fact that many chose to live among people of the same class rather than choosing any other demographic, such as religion or race (Chapman 1946). After a while, this became intergenerational:

The employers, the professional men, the tradesmen, are handing on their work to sons who come after them. In many cases the sons of the workmen are going on to work for the same employers as their fathers did before them. All this is gradually creating a precedent, a tradition, a spirit of cohesion and solidarity. Many of the inhabitants today have been born in the town or the district, and to a large proportion of them the associations of home and childhood, of leisure and enjoyment, as well as of work, are already centred in a place which to the first restless generation of newcomers who started it was nothing but the centre of industrial activity.

(Bell 1969: 7–8)

During industrial capitalism, the need for a strong, compliant working-class labour force capable of working in physically demanding circumstances contributed to the structure and content of a working-class habitus that incorporated the values required by the capitalist system (Hall and Winlow 2004). This is not to say that all forms of modern working-class life were totally dominated by the logic of capital accumulation; indeed, there seems to be evidence that oppositional politics and independent cultural forms were much stronger during the majority of the twentieth century than they appear to be today (Rose 2002, Winlow and Hall 2006). However, for working men their relationship with the means of production was irreducible to masculine working-class cultures. As Hall and Winlow (2004) note, ‘physical hardness, fortitude, persistence, endurance, mental sclerosis and a general hardening of the psychosomatic nature were at the core of this being’.

These internalised dispositions were created from, and crucial to, their immediate environment and the practical needs they faced. The individual is not merely a biological being, but a reflection of the social process (Adorno 2005). As Byrne (1989) noted, the culture of the entire north-east of England, not just Middlesbrough, was derived from industrial relations. In terms of Middlesbrough, Bell (1969) describes the birth of a working-class culture built around the economic necessity that transformed pre-industrial agrarian Teesside into a world of mass industrial production, most notably through the ironworks. Middlesbrough originated as a result of the natural resources conducive to industrial production and therefore, from the earliest stages of development, working-class culture was inextricably bonded to industrial labour. In traditional working-class cultures and communities, particularly during industrial modernity, a working-class habitus emerged based around family, community, hard work, mutuality, collective responsibility, toughness, endurance and a general sense of collective identity and destiny (Winlow 2001). Emphasis was placed on the family unit, the male breadwinner worked for a ‘family wage’ whilst the female occupied the traditional role of homemaker, venturing into the labour market only as far as secretarial work or part-time factory or shop work (Walby 1990). Patriarchal relations aside, the certainty of work and exploitation had become doxic by the time deindustrialisation struck in the 1970s. A community spirit and sense of collective identity lingered on even during the rapid changes that define post-war British society, and they did so, at least in part, because the range of employment opportunities was so narrow in an industrial working-class town such as Middlesbrough that a feeling of ‘everyone being in the same boat’ prevailed, usually because one's neighbours worked in the same or similar occupations (Bell 1969).

Though economic problems have often occurred in Middlesbrough, political decisions have also had a huge impact on the town. In the immediate post-war period, the prevailing ideological belief in central planning, full employment and Keynesian economics saw relatively few instances of recession (Harvey 2010). When recession did occur it was usually brief and shallow. The first full-scale global crisis of capitalism since the end of the Second World War occurred in 1973, beginning the erosion of the post-war consensus. During the 1960s and 1970s, the government began a modernisation campaign designed to kick-start a lagging economy by targeting specific areas for investment with Middlesbrough being one of them (Beynon, Hudson and Sadler 1994). Although investment managed to sustain the local economy by shielding it from the dominant trends of the global economy, the sense of continued prosperity felt by the people on Teesside was artificial and, once investment was withdrawn, disappeared almost overnight. By charting the fluctuations of capital across the twentieth century (Arrighi 2010, Harvey 2010) it becomes clear that once the post-war consensus began to erode and then finally jettisoned in favour of neoliberalism, there have been hundreds of financial crises around the world, often long-lasting and causing considerable damage to both the economy as a whole and to localities such as Middlesbrough. The next section demonstrates how the growing importance of global economic and social changes altered the social, industrial, economic and political landscape in Britain and thus signalled the end of the era of relative prosperity on Teesside.

Neoliberalism, Social Change, and ‘From Boom to Bust’

Whilst the infant Hercules grew up forging a strong working-class identity and reputation in the Promethean heat of the iron and steel industry, the town, over the last three decades, has suffered a decline and fall from prosperity worthy of Prometheus himself. Where the fires of industry once created a Hades-like dystopian skyline, the warning at the gates of hell in Dante's Inferno, ‘abandon all hope, ye who enter here’, seems apt for a town ravaged like Prometheus’ liver.

The post-war consensus, built around full employment and inclusivity and often referred to as Keynesianism, had dominated the social and political landscape for 30 years. By the late 1970s, this consensus had begun to break apart and a new set of ideas emerged as the dominant configuration in British and American society. The ascendancy of neoliberal ideology is central to this change,

Most generally, neoliberalism is a philosophy viewing market exchange as a guide for all human action. Redefining social and ethical life in accordance with economic criteria and expectations, neoliberalism holds that human freedom is best achieved through the operation of markets. Freedom (rather than justice or equality) is the fundamental political value. The primary role of the state is to provide an institutional framework for markets, establishing rights of property and contract, for example, and creating markets in domains where they may not have existed previously. Consequently, neoliberalism accords to the state an active role in securing markets, in producing the subjects of and conditions for markets, although it does not think the state should – at least ideally – intervene in the activities of markets.

(Dean 2009: 51)

Harvey (2005) regards neoliberalism as the return to power of the dominant class in the Western world. Re-establishing its dominance through the ideological victory of neoliberalism, the social intention behind liberal democracy and consumer capitalism is providing the freedom for those with capital to pursue unhindered capital accumulation and, over recent decades, this has occurred on an unprecedented level. Global economic competition and privatisation forced companies to streamline and increase productivity with smaller, more flexible workforces (Sennett 1999). A shift in ideology, created in the financial industries and then sweeping out into the market wholesale, emphasised ‘shareholder value’ at the expense of corporate responsibility (Ho 2009). The realisation that short-term profit making, rather than stable, steady long-term planning, would increase shareholder value and generate huge sums of money for those in positions of power resulted in a shift in focus and priorities; it was no longer the corporation's responsibility to worry about the long-term security of its workforce, rather it was more important to boost shareholder value (Harvey 2010, Ho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index