Work Matters

Critical Reflections on Contemporary Work

Sharon Bolton, Maeve Houlihan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781350305366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Gestion des ressources humaines

Work Matters brings together a strong collection of narratives from the ethnographic field to discover the reality of pressure and change in the modern workplace. Chapter-by-chapter, experts in the field of work and employment examine empirical accounts and explain the forces shaping today's organisations through a critical, contemporary perspective. The result is a powerful compendium of voices that will provoke a reassessment of work trends and inform the future of policy and managerial practice. Key benefits: - Understand the real issues that affect modern worklife within global capitalism from a range of perspectives - Evaluate key debates about work quality through a flexible, critical mindset and a social perspective - Build a strong social understanding of work place issues through a diverse and international set of field accounts, from the UK, Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand

CHAPTER 1

Work, Workplaces and Workers:The Contemporary Experience

Sharon C. Bolton and Maeve Houlihan

This book has a very simple ambition: to explore the matter of work and why work matters from the perspective of a range of workers engaged in different forms of work in a wide variety of workplaces. These accounts link their telling from the workplace to the globalised economy, with disconnected capitalism firmly in their sight. The many authors of this collection introduce us to voices from the supermarket floor, the factory floor, school rooms, taxi cabs, hotels, restaurants, care homes, public sector blogs, junior doctors on their rounds, and more. They are voices that tell of how we work today. They tell us of the systems and procedures and rules and regulations and bureaucratic structures. They tell us of the persistent growth of work routinisation. And yet they tell of flexibilisation – most particularly of the employment relationship – and of the personal consequences of casualisation. They tell us of intensifying management regimes, new technologies and changing, and often unmet, expectations and at the same time they tell of passion for and joy in work. They tell us of the story of the individual – and as structure rears its head – of choices and lack of choices, of a desire to work as a means to an end, and for a whole host of other reasons too. These are accounts that determinedly bring forth the voice and humanity of people in relation to their work experiences. The threads that tie these diverse narratives together present a picture of commonality across all sorts of regimes around one central point – the increasing pressure of the workplace under vigorous capitalism.

Why work matters

Whilst we write about work matters the irony is not lost that as we study we are also our own subjects. Sat in an airport lounge, laptops balanced on knees, working in the short hour between clearing Immigration and flying to an American conference, we find ourselves in the unlikely position, given we are editing a book entitled work matters, of looking at each other and wondering if, and why, work matters to the extent it appears to do. Questions borne of fatigue and frustration summed up in the challenge ‘whose idea was this book anyway?’ Lacking immediate inspiration we sit and stare around us and observe the actions and interactions of passengers and airport workers. The shuffling cleaner who with stooped shoulders drags her bucket along the floor. The officious, and somewhat overenthusiastic, immigration officer. The ‘suit’ sat opposite shouting orders into his mobile phone and another suit nearby also balancing a laptop on his knee.

The results of our musings are not very profound: we work and our work matters to us and it matters for others too. At its most basic work matters because in a market-based economy we need to sell our capacity to labour as a means to survival (even though, as many of the chapters to follow remind us, sometimes it barely fulfils that function). But casting our fatigue aside for a moment, there is more: work matters because it is rarely only that; it is about esteem and disrespect, status and subordination, opportunity and cost, commitment and alienation. If we listen to people talk about their work we are reminded that work and workplaces are fields of struggle where interests can both coincide and clash, and personhood is both attacked and maintained (Sayer, 2005: 41). And, perhaps most importantly, that work is a fundamental requirement of humanity but the capacity for its achievement essentially relies on factors external to the individual. Do they receive adequate pay? Are they involved in interesting work? Do they experience reasonable conditions? Have they security of tenure? Are they offered equality of opportunity? Thinking in terms of work matters recognises that work has both material and subjective dimensions rooted as it is in a moral economy (Sayer, 2005); a world where the social and the economic are immutably symbiotic and interdependent. Thus the experience of work relies on the material conditions of ‘decent work’ and the support of the human ties that generate respect and dignity (Bolton and Houlihan, 2007; Bolton, 2007). The economic world depends on social abilities to oil its wheels. This is very different than simply making the best of a bad job and generating a positive attitude to work, as some commentators would see it (Reeves, 2001; Knell, 2000). Rather, the economy depends on the full spectrum of social life – in all its messiness. In recognising that work matters, work becomes a political issue; a means of analysing the wellbeing of society through a telling lens.

So back to the question ‘whose idea was this book?’. Actually we cannot lay claim to the idea at all. It is an idea generated by all of us who work, and the stories that we tell about it. Listening to these stories restores a sense of clarity. We believe in good work. Work that brings connection and fulfilment. Work that fulfils potential. And we believe in people’s capacity to derive joy from work. And yet also we are concerned that work can be miserable, toxic, soul destroying, inadequately rewarded, and at times dangerous. Examining closely these accounts of contemporary work, workplaces, and workers reveals a rich and varied picture of the ways in which these aspirations – these rights – are afforded, and the concerning degree to which they are under pressure.

As we settle into a new millennium, the question of whether work is getting better, or indeed, worse; whether we are improving in the act of organising work; and whether our needs and expectations as workers are changing, has never been more pertinent. Time perhaps to reflect on the evidence, as we turn now to each: work, workplaces and workers.

Work

If some things have changed but much has stayed the same then this is reflected in critiques of contemporary work that highlight the inequalities in access to well-paid work and safe and secure working conditions. Polly Toynbee’s study of the working poor spans 30 years (1971, 2003) and highlights how structural inequalities have changed little over that period with vast numbers of people working for barely, if not less, than the minimum wage whilst carrying out work that should be socially valued but is not. Similarly Fran Abrams’ (2002) account of living ‘below the breadline’ in the UK and Barbara Ehrenreich’s experiences of low pay work in the US points out that often it is only the non-material rewards that make work bearable (2001). These accounts reflect ever present concerns about the general availability of ‘good work’ (Coats, 2007; Green, 2006; Moynagh and Worsley, 2005; Powell and Snellman, 2004; Sennett, 1998, 2003; Thompson, 2005). Concerns that are echoed worldwide with common themes emerging from all advanced and developing economies as people are feeling under pressure in today’s world of work and reporting that work has grown more stressful for all categories of employees from senior managers to manual workers and most people saying that they are working more intensely and clocking in for more hours than in the recent past (Eurofound, 2007; Coats, 2007; Green, 2006; OECD, 2007).

And yet policy-makers continue to propose a unitarist vision of equality of opportunity in a high skill, high reward economy where there is a general conception of a radical break from the past with the introduction of new types of creative, technology and knowledge led work – work that is ideally presented as ‘infomated’: virtual, clean and value-adding. The upbeat theme is represented by the focus on the ‘high road’ of management which includes the development and utilisation of new skills and the increasing availability of ‘good’ work along with the move towards the utilisation of soft, tacit knowledge and even its long overdue recognition as a quantifiable skill (DTI, 2004; Coats, 2007; Westwood, 2002). While indeed higher skilled work is increasing in advanced economies (Ghose et al., 2008), there appears to be little recognition that whilst some jobs – notably manufacturing and information processing – have moved from advanced to developing economies (thus triggering the notion of only high skill jobs remaining), a vast majority of ‘routine’ jobs remain, particularly those at the human interface: shelves still need stacking, noses wiping, tables clearing and wounds dressing. And flexibilisation is hitting these workers hard, most particularly lower-skilled workers, assigned to the margins with non-standard work arrangements, and less and less security (Ghose et al., 2008). The continual pressure to push costs down an ever lengthening supply chain is wreaking its work, with large companies squeezing smaller companies into agreeing impossible contract terms which are then reflected in the pay and conditions of workers. And this is not simply a reality for the private sector, as the public sector too adopts the business model, creating its own internal markets. Healthcare, education, and state services each one by one have become marketised, in the process creating an army of contracts and agency workers, these institutions divorcing themselves ever more blindly from their embeddedness in moral economy.

Meanwhile, the jobs flowing from shifts towards services and ‘new’ forms of work are proving just as gruelling, monotonous, tightly controlled and poorly rewarded (Thompson, 2005). Empirical studies highlight the poor conditions of work in call centres, retail and hospitality; the emotional pressures front-line service workers face and the health risks involved in the new ‘clean jobs’ (Bolton and Houlihan, 2005; Boyd, 2003; Callaghan and Thompson, 2002; Houlihan, 2002; Taylor et al., 2002, 2003). Nor can we say that ‘dirty work’ has disappeared. On the contrary, the growth in ‘personnel services’¹ partially represents a new ‘upstairs and downstairs’ (GMB quoted in Guardian, 2005) where the cash rich but time poor contract out domestic work – cleaning, gardening, childcare – and a 21^st century servant class emerges who regularly earn less than the minimum wage and have no employment rights or protection (Greg and Wandsworth, 2000; Philpot, 2000; The Work Foundation, 2005). This is also spawning a very much understated informal economy, and here too the most vulnerable members of society are to be found – particularly home workers and migrant workers employed on the fringes of legality.

Contemporary critical accounts of work offer a balance to the hyperbole of the Knowledge Economy rhetoric and question what the realities of work are for the majority of people (Ackroyd et al., 2005; Baldry et al., 2007). Whilst recognising that ‘bad’ work is unlikely to disappear (Coats, 2007; Philpot, 2000; Taylor, 2002) there is a call to ensure that policy makers and companies worldwide recognise what the ingredients of good work might be – a recipe that clearly reflects the ILO’s definition of ‘decent work’ in its emphasis on equality of access, employee voice and just reward: (Coats, 2007; ILO, 2006; Moynagh and Worsley, 2005; Taylor, 2002; Westwood, 2002).

Whatever the approach, there is a growing consensus that at the present time ‘good’ work appears to be the preserve of those clearly defined as ‘knowledge workers’; a privileged band involved in the professional, high tech and creative industries who fare well in the new economy, at least on the face of it enjoying continual opportunities for growth and development and increasing levels of pay, whilst the largest majority of the global workforce are subjected to lesser terms and conditions at the sharp end of the economy, in mundane, yet demanding, support and service occupations. While many of the occupations explored in this book bear the flat characterisation ‘low-skilled’, as the chapters amplify, this captures little of the level of dexterity, emotion work and not least, toleration, that is involved. Boxing off work as low skilled has persisted for too long because of the voicelessness of certain groups, and part of the work of meaningful research is to create a vocabulary and understanding that can tangibly change this.

And of course it is vital to put all this in context: Ghose et al.’s latest report (2008) The Global Employment Challenge, reminds us that 73 percent of the world’s workers live in developing economies, coping with underemployment and mere survival, that the world’s labour force is growing rapidly, and mainly in developing economies, and that there is a serious world crisis of insufficient productive jobs. So while our concentration here is on issues pertaining to advanced economies where the vast majority of the world’s capital and ‘skills’ are located, it is shameful to note that here, as worldwide, the first challenge remains providing economically sustaining work with the promise of decent work remaining lower down the agenda.

The conclusions? While the distribution, technologies and locations of work may be changing, the nature of work that is to be done in our world, remains largely unchanged. There is a deficit of decent work, and fundamentally this revolves around core issues of pay, equity, security and dignity. Critical sectors such as education, health and care work are vastly undervalued, and while the volume of high skilled or knowledge work is increasing, it too may be driving a schism whereby lower skilled work is yet further marginalised.

Workplaces

So are we getting better at organising work and the way in which we manage it? For some 30 years or more the debate on changing organisational forms has been dominated by the argument of whether we have moved into a post-bureaucratic, post-Fordist world as new forms of creative and service-orientated labour takes over from routinised manufacturing type jobs. At the most basic, post-bureaucratic organisational forms are defined in opposition to modernism which is identified as resting on a rationalistic, positivistic, technocratic knowledge base that seeks efficiency through standardisation, order and control. If organisations are the form of our modern condition, one cannot help but note that this is frequently represented less as an opportune or benevolent phenomenon but more as something which is constraining and repressive. Organisations ‘do’ (define) us, rather than we ‘doing’ (defining) organisation.

On the other hand it is proposed that we now have networked, non-hierarchical, flexible and learning organisations, something celebrated as offering cleaner, safer and more supportive, even liberating working environments (Reeves, 2001; Bickham, 1995). All of which entails new management practices often presented as high commitment human resource management, involving mechanisms of employee empowerment and offering opportunity and development within a learning environment. The basic message being that employees are to be treated as valuable resources rather than merely commodities – as assets, as human capital. This is clearly demonstrated with the advent of so called exemplary organisations such as Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, Goldman Sacks and the many more that top the world wide ‘Best Places to Work’ lists (Great Places to Work Institute, 2008).

However, what ample empirical studies tell us is that the radical change envisaged (from old to new, from control to liberated, from modern to post, from structured to flexible) has not actually materialised: organisations are still rule bound and demanding, and most usually rely on a fundamental division of labour and spoils. Forms of control may be more subtle, bound up in psychological contracts and modes of comportment, but they are control nevertheless. Despit...