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:

Competition among firms.
Highly controlled labor processes.
Workers’ dependence on their employer for a wage in return for labor power.
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 spread to other sectors. The adoption of cotton mill–style management even affected sectors where the work remained less automated and required greater skill, for example, the new pottery factories that had sprung up.⁵ Across these industries control was widely achieved through corporal punishment of apprentices and children (who made up a large percentage of the workforce), fines, threats of dismissal, and blacklists. As historian Sidney Pollard puts it, “By comparison with these commonly used examples of the ‘stick,’ more subtle or more finely graded deterrents were so rare as to be curious.”⁶ As each new technical innovation gradually extended automation in the workplace, the UK saw the systematic extension of despotism to new sectors of the economy.

Hegemonic Internal States in the UK

Karl Polanyi famously argued that the growing insecurity created by British nineteenth-century free market capitalism spurred formation of labor unions as part of a countermovement seeking to regulate the market and decommodify labor.⁷ In the late nineteenth century, male craft unions were finally granted legal freedom. Consequently, these unions were able to gain a degree of control in some workplaces. Historical data suggests that, while overall union density (the percentage of employees who are members of unions) had reached only 13 percent by 1900, among mine and dock workers this was much higher, at around 60 percent by the early 1890s. The figure was around 30 percent for metal and engineering workers and printers, and around 25 percent for cotton textile workers, glass workers, construction workers, seamen, and shoemakers.⁸ This led to a period of constant attack and counterattack by employers and sectional unions.⁹ On average there were 932 recorded strikes every year between 1910 and 1914.¹⁰ However, by the mid-1930s, the First World War, depression, and government policy had transformed Britain’s economy into monopoly capitalism, that is, an economic system in which giant modern corporations had replaced small family-run businesses. But instead of monopoly profits enabling hegemony, employers used the relative weakness of unions during this period to “push for tighter managerial control.”¹¹

It was the outbreak of the Second World War that sparked the hegemonic transformation of UK internal states. Most importantly, the wartime government made it difficult for employers to sack workers and ended the victimization of union activists.¹² A unique history of shop stewards (whereby elected workers, rather than full-time union officials, represent their unionized colleagues within the workplace) and workplace bargaining that developed during the earlier sustained period of union attack and employer counterattack gave hegemonic internal states in the UK a flavor distinct from those in the United States. While the concrete coordination of interests existed, workplace-level bargaining, and its voluntary and informal nature, made the compromise equilibrium that developed in the UK far less stable than in the United States.¹³

Industrial relations scholar William Brown argues that during the postwar period before the 1980s, management could not rule through despotism, as they lacked “effective disciplinary powers,” due to high employment levels and the strength unions had built up during the war. These factors meant that foremen no longer had the ability arbitrarily to discipline or sack workers. This forced them to make concessions to workers on the shop floor in order to gain their cooperation. What took place was “political activity, not in the sense of party or state politics, but as an activity in which conflicting pressure groups come to temporary accommodation through the agreement of rules.”¹⁴ Once these informal rules were agreed on, they came to be seen as “custom and practice” and were thus understood as legitimate by both workers and managers. Union shop stewards’ committees came to play a central role in these hegemonic regimes by sanctioning workers who risked causing the entire system to break down. For example, shop stewards would ensure that pieceworkers did not excessively exceed the required output of a particular job or overzealously fix the job’s piece rate in an attempt to increase their own earnings at the cost of making the enterprise too inefficient. Thus, the compromise equilibrium was actively maintained by the workers themselves.¹⁵

Paul Edwards and Hugh Scullion also documented how during this period some union shop stewards had an “impressive range of controls over effort, and the growth of these controls can be related to management’s willingness to give up various aspects of managerial rights in exchange for continuous production.”

While workers at another factory Edwards and Scullion studied had less control, there nevertheless existed a concrete coordination of interests and a compromise equilibrium that both managers and workers were committed to maintaining: “The company had developed a distinct ‘welfarist’ image, providing stable employment (together with such things as long-service pay awards) … Foremen in both plants were concerned to build up good working relationships … There was now more of an openly negotiatory stance. This reflected the development of steward organization during the late 1960s … Stewards were prepared to work within the system and to be, as managers often stressed, ‘responsible.’ ”¹⁶

Most importantly during this period, even where workers lacked strong workplace bargaining power, hegemony often still existed, as a result of a management philosophy based on shared interests and genuine negotiation. Even workplaces that appeared more despotic were, nevertheless, usually based on the recognition of unions (whose officials were called upon by management when disputes arose) and other forms of collective regulation, job security, and relatively high wages. Accordingly, discipline was largely found to be rationalized, and if workers acted within the rules, they did not need to fear management.¹⁷

A study of a chemical plant by sociologists Theo Nichols and Huw Beynon is particularly illustrative of how hegemonic workplace regimes developed during this period. Management voluntarily signed a collective agreement with a union that created a closed shop (i.e., union membership was a prerequisite for and a condition of working at the factory), and union dues were deducted directly from the workers’ pay. This was without the union ever having to actively run a widespread recruitment campaign. The collective agreement provided workers with relatively high pay, job security, and a profit share scheme. Shop floor relations were marked by the fact that managers did not “thrust their power in workers[’] faces. They try not to let the iron fist behind the velvet glove show,” and thus workers could use the union as an effective threat with which to sanction managers. Nichols and Beynon summarize that such workplace regimes were a “clear attempt to deal with and incorporate trade unionism … to the end of subjecting the labor force to a degree of order, regulation and control.”¹⁸ Likewise, sociologist Duncan Gallie highlighted that during this period, the formal structure of power could be legitimized by opening up key areas of decision making to negotiation, and that doing so could lead unions to help management secure workers’ consent to workplace rules.¹⁹

Even in the midst of conflict, there could still be a tendency toward the concrete coordination of interests and development of a compromise equilibrium. Ford Motor Company is an exemplar of this trend. Henry Ford violently resisted unionization until 1941 in the United States, and only accepted unionization in the UK in 1944. Ford also continued to refuse to implement piecework (as payment by results was feared to cause upward wage drift) or to formally yield control over manning decisions and workloads to unions. In the early 1960s, there remained a great deal of insecurity and favoritism at Ford, especially with regard to the allocation of overtime, which fueled conflict over job control.

Nevertheless, Ford did sign collective agreements with the unions, and these agreements provided, among other things, a developed grievance procedure. Moreover, day-to-day acts of resistance (such as verbally abusing foremen, small acts of sabotage, and unofficial walkouts) were highly effective at undermining management control—so much so that, by the late 1960s, the union shop stewards’ committee had managed to gain a degree of job control in those areas that did not seriously threaten profits. The job controls that shop stewards had wrestled from management included control of assembly line speeds, overtime, work allocation, and, in some sections, decisions over time off. This control became so extensive that shop stewards were able to decide which workers would be allocated which tasks. By the late 1960s, even at Ford, foremen were forced to make compromises with workers on a daily basis. Foremen’s control relied on asking workers to do favors so that production targets were met and, in return, allowing workers to take longer breaks, and so on. In short, a compromise equilibrium developed: “For most of the time they [union shop stewards] play negotiations management’s way. They learn the limits of the game and in the routine of their lives in the plant they tend not to step outside them: ‘You can’t fight a battle every day.’ ”

Therefore, even in this conflictual workplace, despite the supposed militancy of the shop stewards, they maintained “a degree of internal discipline within the workforce … The nature of the relationship between the union and the employer can mean the steward rather than the manager disciplines individual workers for not working properly.”²⁰

Another example of the operation of a hegemonic regime in the UK is provided in sociologist Anna Pollert’s study of “low-skilled” female workers at an Imperial Tobacco factory.²¹ This is an interesting case study, as it has been held up as an example of nonhegemonic direct control and used as a critical case with which to attack Burawoy’s workplace regime framework.²² However, the hegemonic tendency is in fact clearly evident. Here too, union membership had, since the Second World War, been encouraged by the company. Moreover, “the company prided itself on its good labor relations, co-operation rather than confrontation.” Supervision was, in fact, much more subtle than it had been twenty years earlier; strict discipline was “not necessary” because the workforce “had their hands tied … by the incorporation of trade unionism into management.” As one worker reflected, it was “not so strict in here. I expected a factory to be … real strict.”²³

Although there was a clear tendency during this era for UK workplace regimes to develop a compromise equilibrium institutionalized through mechanisms that concretely coordinated the interests of capital and labor, there was no guarantee that workplace regimes would take this form. For instance, sociologist Miriam Glucksmann (a.k.a. Ruth Cavendish) provides evidence of how the tendency toward concrete coordination of interests among low-skilled female factory workers broke down. While the speedometer factory she studied operated a closed shop, and a bonus system also existed, the extremely poor and worsening terms and conditions, along with the harsh discipline by supervisors, meant that there was no hegemonic compromise equilibrium.²⁴

The End of Hegemony

In the 1970s, core capitalist countries such as the UK were gripped by a crisis of relative profitability as information technology made possible global product markets and increased competition. The solution to this crisis lay in the transition to “flexible accumulation.” This required the overcoming of “rigidities” brought about by the regulation of employment, labor, financial, and product markets that lay at the heart of the hegemonic era.²⁵ A consequence of attempts by firms (with state backing) to curtail such rigidities is that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been marked by an extraordinary decline of unions in the UK, especially in the private sector. Not only have union membership and collective bargaining coverage declined dramatically, but so too have the scale and scope of labor movement collective action, most obviously strike activity. By 2013, collective bargaining coverage had declined dramatically in the private sector to just 16 percent.²⁶ Even where employers have continued to recognize unions and nominally engage in collective bargaining, there has been a process of “procedural individualization” of employment relations, whereby collective mechanisms for determining terms and conditions of employment are weakened or abolished. Procedural individualization can, arguably, be equated with the de facto de-recognition of unions.²⁷

In the context of the disintegration of the compromise equilibrium upon which hegemonic workplace regimes were based, the question then arises as to how control is maintained in flexible low-end service sector workplaces. It is this question that this chapter seeks to answer with regard to the UK. To do so it presents an in-depth ethnographic case study to investigate the contemporary internal state of an exemplar UK firm, referred to in the chapter as PartnershipCo.

Investigating Workplace Control in the UK

Over the space of a year in 2012–13, I observed union organizing at four PartnershipCo hypermarkets. Five days of union organizing, three union team meetings, and a union branch meeting in a hypermarket were also observed, and the meetings recorded. I met with two senior members of the union leadership and collected documents, such as the staff policy handbook, union collective agreement, union representative scheduling guide, and union rep flexible scheduling guide. Toward the end of my research, an opportunity to gain a deeper insight into the lived experience of work at PartnershipCo presented itself, and I undertook two months of participant observation at the Mulling Point hypermarket (a pseudonym) in North London. The Mulling Point store had a workforce of approximately 200 employees, and this participant observation involved working 8.5 contracted hours per week as a shelf stacker. Work issues were also discussed with colleagues in the canteen before the shifts began and during the train commute to work. In order to complement the observational, experiential, and documentary data, thirty-nine semi-structured interviews were held with thirty-five PartnershipCo informants (workers, labor union reps, and labor union officials).²⁸

PartnershipCo was (and continues to be) a dominant retailer in its domestic oligopolistic retail market, and is also one of the largest global retailers, with operations in dozens of other countries. PartnershipCo had hundreds of thousands of employees in the UK and used its size to take advantage of significant economies of scale and to squeeze producers. However, the rise of online shopping represented a major challenge, as it reduced one of the company’s main competitive advantages—owning numerous hypermarkets. Therefore, while making large profits, PartnershipCo had also experienced recent pressures to cut costs.

Workers’ Power and Rights at PartnershipCo

In sketching the internal state at PartnershipCo, it makes sense to begin by considering the bargaining power of the workforce and the rights to which they were entitled. Workers at PartnershipCo recognized that their livelihoods were highly dependent on their employers. Indeed, they had little confidence that they had adequate alternative sources of income with which to replace lost wages, in the form of either sufficient savings or state benefits. The workers who felt slightly less dependent were those who had second jobs to fall back on. The global economic crisis and resulting high levels of unemployment had created a pervasive view among many informants that there were few realistic alternatives available to them.

They did, however, have some employment rights that were codified through legally binding written contracts. The forms that these contracts could take were specified in the collective agreement with the recognized union. Accordingly, there were three types of contract that workers could be employed on:

Temporary: Used to cover peak trading times and limited to a maximum of twelve weeks’ employment. These contracts required that workers be given only one week’s notice before termination, except in cases of gross misconduct, where no notice was required.
Permanent full-time (36.5 hours a week) or part-time (a minimum of 4.5 hours a week): Workers employed for more than a month on one of these contracts, except in cases of gross misconduct, were guaranteed four weeks’ paid notice with an additional week’s notice for every year of service after their fifth year, up to a maximum of twelve weeks—representing considerably more protection than the statutory minimum.
Flexible: These contracts could be temporary or permanent, but a worker employed on one would receive only ten to sixteen core hours of work per week. Workers could then be “flexed up” with additional hours that fell during a period in which they had declared themselves available for work. As long as the workers were given twenty-four hours’ notice, they could not refuse these additional hours. PartnershipCo’s policy stated that additional flexed hours should only amount to approximately 60 percent of a worker’s core hours.

The protections granted to workers through their contracts and enshrined in the collective agreement curbed managers’ ability to elicit compliance through fear of dismissal. In addition, use of temporary contracts—which provided workers with much less employment protection—was limited by the collective agreement. Moreover, as detailed in part 2, the additional training and recruitment costs associated with temporary workers made the extensive use of such workers unattractive to PartnershipCo. This meant that a significant core/periphery distinction, which is central to many existing accounts of “flexible despotism,” was not present.

However, reality did not always reflect the policies enshrined in the collective agreement. Managers at the workplace level occasionally flouted these rules, usually with regard to flexible contracts (as documented in chapter 3). At Mulling Point, where I worked as a shelf stacker, management also did not follow the rules surrounding temporary employment. Temporary staff taken on over the peak Christmas period were not given written contracts to sign, nor were they informed of their employment status. Workers who were in fact employed on a temporary fixed-term basis had their employment status incorrectly described by managers as being “flexible” in that either party could end the employment or alter the shifts worked by giving five days’ notice. This caused much confusion among workers, including myself, especially as none of us were ever informed of the end date of our employment or told that one even existed. In fact, I discovered that I was a temporary worker accidently only when I asked my manager to provide me with a copy of the contract for my records at the end of my fieldwork. To my surprise it included a fixed end date! Up to this point, it had been repeatedly implied to me that demonstrating a high level of performance would result in my position being made permanent.

This use of temporary contracts to audition workers for a permanent position was clearly contrary to their intended use as laid out in the collective agreement. However, a recurring theme of life at PartnershipCo was the struggle surrounding enforcement of company policies. This struggle sometimes led to a striking disparity between the official company policies and how PartnershipCo’s workplace regime was constituted in practice. Nevertheless, it is clear that the employment status granted to workers at PartnershipCo provided them with considerably more employment protection than the UK statutory minimum.

Labor Unions, Conflict, and Integration

On the face of it, workers at PartnershipCo appeared to have a high level of associational power via their union and the existence of collective bargaining. A “partnership” collective agreement was at the heart of PartnershipCo’s internal state. Partnership agreements center around employer support for unionization and employment security while unions in return agree to support flexibility and productivity and to focus their campaigning on issues that provide mutual gains for both workers and employers. Industrial relations expert John Kelly suggests that partnership agreements can be classified according to an “employer-dominated” or “labor parity” typology that is determined by the balance of power between the employer and the union.²⁹ The findings presented below suggest that the agreement at PartnershipCo was an employer-dominated agreement. The fact that PartnershipCo had seriously considered de-recognition before opting for a partnership, combined with the fact that the union was reliant on PartnershipCo for the majority of its membership, adds credence to this view.

Over the previous half decade, the union had experienced strong growth in both membership and density. Both the interviews and observation of union recruitment indicate that this was in part a result of the union’s heavy emphasis on recruitment. However, the union’s efforts were also facilitated by the access to workers that the collective agreement guaranteed. At the time of the research, union density at PartnershipCo stood at over 60 percent nationally, nearly five times the sector average of 13 percent.

Many of PartnershipCo’s company policies had been collectively agreed with the union and codified in the 142-page Partnership Agreement. This agreement outlined the nature of the relationship between the union and PartnershipCo. The agreement ensured union involvement in consultative committees at store, regional, and national levels, and created a pay consultation and agreement mechanism. Grievance and disciplinary procedures and the process for discontinuing or changing a worker’s job role or hours were also covered by the agreement. These procedures guaranteed workers the right to be represented by union reps at all the stages. In addition, union reps themselves had the right to be represented by full-time union officials. The formal role of union reps during the above processes was to help support the workers, to speak on their behalf, and to act as a witness. A large body of other company policies existed and were made available to union reps and officials. Furthermore, all individual workers were, in theory, made aware of the basic policies and rights that these policies conferred upon them through the seventy-five-page employee handbook. Union officials and reps explained during the research interviews that much of the union’s work went into making sure that both managers and workers were aware of company policies and followed them.

These company policies provided union reps and officials with leverage on a wide range of issues, especially as they often had a better grasp of them than their managers did. However, the focus the union placed on enforcing these policies also meant that no matter how unjust or inflammatory an issue was perceived to be by the workforce, the default position of union reps was that if it had been carried out by managers according to the stated policy, then it was legitimate. This emphasis on enforcing the company policies confined any struggle between workers and managers within a narrow framework. Moreover, the policies that constituted this framework were not all the result of bilateral agreement between the union and PartnershipCo. In effect, union reps and officials explained that their role was to ensure that the company policies were followed, rather than to promote collective questioning of the fairness of these policies. Thus, they did not seek to campaign or mobilize around injustices, even when they themselves felt that a company policy was unjust (such as the precarious scheduling discussed in chapter 3).

We can see, then, that at PartnershipCo there were some hegemonic practices by which the union and collective agreement functioned to maintain control by keeping contentious issues off the table. Therefore, the greater potential associational power of workers at PartnershipCo, compared with workers at ConflictCo in the United States, was limited to the spheres of workplace politics sanctioned by the company and institutionalized by the collective agreement. In other words, conflict was focused almost exclusively on whether managers followed PartnershipCo’s policies correctly. Workers lacked structural power, but they did have some degree of associational power. This restricted managers’ ability to secure control through traditional despotic threats of job loss.

Surveillance

A key factor determining the ability of managers to secure control by punishing workers for transgressions is the effectiveness of surveillance. If managers are unaware of workers’ behavior in the first place, they cannot take action against it. However, as highlighted in the introduction, it is not only the actual surveillance of workers that is important for control. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, a number of researchers have argued that high levels of workplace surveillance lead workers to self-enforce and internalize the values of their managers and firms. Such claims have tended to overstate the power of surveillance and understate workers’ ability to find novel means of resistance. Nevertheless, surveillance is important in shaping forms of resistance.³⁰

The degree of surveillance at PartnershipCo was variable and far from comprehensive. Some jobs had greater degrees of technological surveillance, such as online delivery drivers whose route and progress were tracked by GPS. Pickers in the online-only stores had strict pick rates (i.e., rates at which goods were picked off the shelf, scanned, and placed in the box for distribution) that were monitored and enforced by managers. Cashiers in brick-and-mortar stores had their scan rate monitored to ensure that they were processing goods through the checkout fast enough. If the scan rate dropped below a certain level, they would be disciplined. However, at the same time, they were also expected to carry out customer service tasks, such as asking if the customer had a loyalty card, packing customers’ bags, and generally providing emotional labor. These customer service tasks and emotional labor were monitored via the use of mystery shoppers.

Customers themselves can also be an active component of surveillance in retail work.³¹ However, in practice at PartnershipCo, unless a worker was deliberately rude, it was unlikely a customer would take the time to make an official complaint. After a few weeks of working at PartnershipCo, I myself had few qualms about letting the customers see my annoyance as I told them not to mess up the shelves I had just sorted and arranged. In fact, my line manager set an example of how to deal with customers who asked where products were located by fobbing them off with vague directions so that the “more important work” of getting stock onto the shop floor could be continued.

A hint at the future of workplace surveillance at PartnershipCo may be gleaned from the fact that a union official informed me how, in a few of his stores, PartnershipCo was trialing a device that measured the speed at which stock was being stacked by hand on the shelves. But this form of surveillance was some years away from being widely implementable. The majority of the surveillance at the time of the research in 2012–2013 remained dependent on managerial presence on the shop floor. At certain times, this could be significant; at others, it was only a minor element of the internal state and not an overbearing experience.

Moreover, the perception of surveillance via closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras at PartnershipCo did not loom large in the experience of the workplace regime. There were plenty of cameras, but the feeling was that there was usually nobody monitoring them, especially in terms of surveillance of the labor process. Lacking video cameras and, as yet, task management technology, managerial surveillance at PartnershipCo was on the whole perceived as variable and intermittent rather than constant. In particular, the level of managerial surveillance was felt to vary depending on a manager’s relationship with a particular worker, how trusting they were, and how busy the store was.

Disciplinary Procedures: Rationalized Discipline

A central company policy shaping the pattern of control in a workplace is the disciplinary procedure. It is, therefore, worthwhile looking at these policies in more detail. At PartnershipCo, the collective agreement specified in detail the burdensome procedures that managers were to follow when disciplining workers whose behavior or job performance had “fallen behind the required standard.” In doing so, it limited the manner in which managers could use the formal disciplinary mechanism to secure control in the workplace.

The disciplinary procedure at PartnershipCo provided workers with a number of important protections against arbitrary managerial discipline. It was also a costly procedure for managers—it was arduous, time-consuming, and potentially embarrassing. Managers had to record all acts of discipline in order to move the worker to the next stage. Another manager had to carry out an investigation and keep notes on all meetings. The worker being disciplined and their union representative would have access to these notes, along with written notice of why the worker was being disciplined, how they could avoid being further disciplined, and the time frame in which they had to improve.

The fact that workers had the right to have a union rep present and could appeal a decision meant that managers were forced to demonstrate that a satisfactory investigation had been undertaken and that they had followed due process, showing that there was a just cause for discipline according to fairness and precedent. During appeals against the first three stages, the investigation and rationale would have to stand up to interrogation by a union rep and, during the final stage, to interrogation by a full-time union official. Moreover, this interrogation would be heard by the manager’s own line manager and, at the final stages of appeal, by a senior manager from outside the store.

Embarrassment in front of a more senior manager was thus a potential cost for a manager who decided to discipline a worker without good cause or who did not follow the disciplinary procedure correctly. This provided a large amount of scope for union officials and well-trained union reps to protect workers from managerial discipline, especially through the appeals process. For example, union reps and officials explained how they could shield workers from manager discipline by demonstrating that the procedure had not been followed correctly or that the decision was not consistent with other similar cases. For these reasons, it was felt that the union’s institutionalized role in the disciplinary process provided workers with a relatively large degree of protection from the threat of dismissal. Jeff (a union rep) explained how PartnershipCo “isn’t the worst employer. To get sacked from PartnershipCo is very very hard and on the whole they do follow the procedures because we have 168,000 members and they are pretty good but only because of the union influence.”

The collective agreement then provided reps with an effective tool with which to limit managers’ scope for despotism by reducing manager discretion and rationalizing discipline. Anna (another union rep) explained:

When you say to a manager “Have you read the collective agreement?” and they say “no,” that’s when you know you’ve got them ’cause if you say “actually if you go on to page nine, chapter three, and you’ll see that what I’m telling you is correct and what you’re saying is not correct” and then they suddenly flick around for it in the drawer and they say “oh, that’s right” … Without it there would be disciplinaries going right, left and center and there would be people losing their job right, left and center … It is all stated there in black and white and it’s all clear about disciplinaries, what levels of disciplinary, how to move it to a disciplinary, how to issue a warning and all that, how many verbal warnings and written warnings and all that. Whereas some managers don’t want to give a verbal; they want to go straight to written and they want it to be their final written, but they can’t do that … and a lot of managers don’t realize until you point it out to them, but that’s the best tool, having that partnership agreement and that’s why I think it’s good that all reps get a copy of that partnership agreement.

Individualization of Indignation: The Grievance Procedures

Another policy central to shaping workplace control is the grievance procedure. Formal grievance complaints place a particular manager’s behavior under scrutiny and may even result in managers themselves facing sanctions. Therefore, the degree to which the internal state limits or aids workers in their ability to raise complaints above the heads of their immediate superiors can have a powerful impact on the pattern of control. In most workplaces, the formal grievance procedure provides an institutionalized mechanism for raising complaints.

At PartnershipCo, the collective agreement specified a detailed grievance procedure. After raising a workplace issue informally with their line manager, workers could raise a formal grievance if their manager had not gotten back to them with a solution in fourteen days. An investigation was then carried out, and the grievance was heard within seven days by their line manager with a union rep accompanying the worker. The worker then had the option to move the grievance to the next stage. If the worker decided to do so, a second hearing would be arranged within two weeks and heard by a senior manager. This procedure provided a means for workers to voice their complaints that managers could not simply ignore.

Tellingly, there was no procedure for collective grievances at PartnershipCo that would have provided a means for workers to challenge management as a united group. Rather, the collective agreement detailed how such issues were to be raised through worker representatives at store-level, regional, and national employee consultation committees. But these committees met irregularly. Moreover, they restricted worker participation, with just a handful of worker representatives attending the store-level committees. Area consultation committees further restricted worker representation, with just one worker rep elected by each store consultation committee. Only a tiny percentage of the workforce was on the national consultation committee, which was elected from each area consultation committee. This process, therefore, detached collective issues—and the reps raising them—from the workplaces. Consequently, workers lacked the collective power with which to successfully influence management. As Lee (a union official) explained: “The way PartnershipCo and the union do our negotiations is through the consultation committee processes … and quite a lot of these things [grievances concerning precarious scheduling] are negotiated at the area consultation stage and then pushed down to the stores. It’s, you know, if I’m completely honest, it feels like one-way traffic at times from PartnershipCo.”

Therefore, the main mechanism for raising grievances, even when they were of a collective nature, was through the individual grievance procedure. This meant that workers’ collective problems were individualized. This made collective responses, which would have had the potential to shift the frontier of control by permanently wresting significant power away from managers, difficult to mobilize. The individualization of indignation was reinforced by the fact that the grievance procedure required workers with the issue to raise the grievance themselves rather than a rep being able to raise an issue on behalf of one of their members. A major frustration for union reps was the difficulty of persuading workers to pursue a grievance when they felt vulnerable, victimized, and scared. This issue will be revisited in subsequent chapters when discussing why the union and the internal state at PartnershipCo had little impact on precarious scheduling and when explaining the lack of collective resistance at PartnershipCo compared with ConflictCo.

The grievance procedure had a hegemonic function, in that it both protected workers from despotism and also kept issues off the agenda and acted as a brake on the development of collective challenges to managerial control. For example, I observed at a rep team meeting how the rule that workers with an issue must raise the grievance themselves had become elevated to a norm that constrained union responses to injustice. During this meeting, the assumption that managers would class a grievance as legitimate only if it was raised by the individual concerned effectively stopped the store’s reps from attempting a collective response to a perceived injustice. This was in spite of the fact that the rule could only apply to individual grievances, as there was no procedure for collective grievances:

MARK (UNION REP PARTNERSHIPCO): What I think is the way forward is for us to raise a grievance as a union.

RYAN (UNION OFFICIAL, PARTNERSHIPCO): What you’ve gotta be careful of is that they might turn this around, “this as your personal crusade, it’s nothing to do with her, she’s perfectly happy because she’s not raised it as an issue through the [grievance procedure].”

NEIL (UNION REP PARTNERSHIPCO): Yeah but is it a personal crusade? Or is it for the fact they have not been engaging and following what they should be doing?

RYAN: It’s not a personal crusade but they will accuse you.

NEIL: Well, that’s why we do it as a collective.

MARK: No, this is like in chess we have to think two or three moves ahead.

This example highlights how the internal state at PartnershipCo entailed a systematic bias that made it difficult for workers to voice their dissatisfaction. In this way the internal state mobilized bias to aid labor control at PartnershipCo.

Despite the developed grievance procedure, PartnershipCo workers also provided many examples of overt managerial abuse, such as verbal bullying and threats, indifference, and aloofness. In fact, our store manager at the Mulling Point store would not even speak to us directly, even when a purposeful hello was directed at him. Instead he relayed orders via our line managers even when he was stood next to us. However, if workers were union members and there was at least one good union rep at their workplace, it was likely that the union would put an end to any abuse. Union reps could protect workers against informal despotism by informing the workers of their rights, thereby empowering them to make use of the grievance procedure. Reps could also protect workers against formal despotism by defending them in disciplinaries. In fact, the interviews suggest that many reps had become active in the union following their own experience of overcoming manager despotism by deploying the mechanisms provided by PartnershipCo’s internal state. It was not only a major reason why union members became reps, but was also a major reason why people joined the union in the first place. This is not to deny that managerial abuse continued to be a major issue for many workers, but to emphasize that there were institutional remedies available to curtail managers’ despotism. Many workers had found these mechanisms effective, and this had frequently propelled them to become more active in the union as a result.

Concrete Concessions: Profit Share Schemes, Bonuses, and Pay

So far, we have seen that PartnershipCo had a number of hegemonic features that both protected workers from individual managerial despotism and controlled the agenda so as to avoid collective worker challenges to the workplace regime. In this section, we consider the degree to which the interests of labor and capital were concretely coordinated.

Workers’ interests were principally tied to their employers through a profit share scheme and a (relatively good) defined benefit pension scheme. Up until the year of the research, it had been customary for workers to receive bonus shares worth a couple of percentage points of their pay. However, during the year of the fieldwork, PartnershipCo decided not to award any shares due to declining profitability. It was clear from the informants that the nonpayment of this bonus was a source of significant outrage, amplified by the perceived unfairness of the replacement cash bonus. This cash bonus would only be received after a further three years’ service, with workers who left in the meantime losing the bonus altogether. PartnershipCo suggested that the union had been consulted on this replacement payment, a claim the union strenuously denied. Nonetheless, this caused a great deal of antipathy toward the union.

The collective agreement took pay negotiations out of the workplace, and they were instead carried out at a national level by the National Employee Consultation Committee. Pay negotiations, therefore, seemed very remote to the average worker on the shop floor. The workers’ only input was to cast a vote in the election of representatives to their store consultation committee. These representatives then elected a representative from among themselves to attend a higher committee, which in turn elected one of its own members to attend a higher body to vote on the pay deal and potentially be chosen by the union’s national officer to carry out the pay negotiations. The use of this committee system to agree to pay deals, instead of balloting members, as had happened before the partnership agreement, limited direct say on pay to a tiny percentage of workers.

As shown in figure 1, the system of pay negotiations had delivered real pay decreases for four out of the five years prior to the fieldwork (2009 being marked by extremely low inflation;³² see table 2). As a result, pay in real terms at PartnershipCo in 2012 was around 15 percent lower than in 2007. Moreover, workers at PartnershipCo received smaller real pay rises than the average UK worker every year apart from 2009. This meant that, despite having a union density that was more than twice as high as the UK average, workers at PartnershipCo accepted a decline in real pay between 2007 and 2012 that was worse than that of the average UK employee. With regard to pay, this suggests that since the onset of the Great Recession, collective bargaining at PartnershipCo had served to win concessions for capital at the expense of labor.

FIGURE 1. Percentage Change in PartnershipCo Real Wage since 2007

*Note: PartnershipCo pay deals 2008–2012 adjusted for Retail Price Index (RPI) UK inflation.*

*Source: PartnershipCo figures provided by the union.*

The Union and Normative Control

As we have seen above, while the union provided workers with significant employment security and other benefits, it also institutionalized bias toward the interests of capital and kept certain issues off the agenda. However, the union also played a further ideological role by legitimizing certain aspects of the workplace regime, thereby partially obscuring workers’ understanding of their situation. As long as company policy was correctly followed, the union justified controversial management practices such as precarious scheduling.

Sociologist Duncan Gallie’s case study of a British refinery during the hegemonic era demonstrates how union reps do not represent a simple one-way transmission of neutral information from workers to managers. Rather, they also transmit information from managers to workers; and what they convey, and the manner in which it is conveyed, will be shaped by the wider political and symbolic practices they encounter.33 Likewise, industrial relations scholars Eric Batstone, Ian Boraston, and Stephen Frenkel detail how union reps on some occasions act as delegates who reflect the views of their members, but on others they initiate and suppress issues and decide how issues are dealt with, as well as instilling particular priorities and views in members.³⁴ An illustration of this process at PartnershipCo is provided by Asim, a union rep, who saw his role as helping PartnershipCo achieve flexibility by eliciting a mind-set among workers in which they would be willing to compromise:

If they haven’t got legitimate concerns or legitimate reasons why they can’t change their hours then the manager will expect and the company and the store will expect them to change their hours, so I will try and get them in that mind-set. Rather than [have them] say “Oh no I can’t change my hours because I do X.” “What is X? Can you be a bit more flexible?” So I try and get them to be a bit more flexible and understand the reasons why they [managers] are trying to change it. You will get individuals who won’t want to change their hours no matter what and there’s nothing you can do for them … apart from explaining to them what the consequences are.

Similarly, John (a union officer) explained that the union could not campaign around precarious scheduling despite the discontent surrounding the issue. All the union could do, in his view, was to seek a compromise through negotiation: “We’ve [the union] not done any big campaigns on this [precarious scheduling] as we are the big losers; all we can really do is help them [workers] through the process, try and negotiate with the company, go in there with the lad [and represent them] … and if the company is reasonable then they will meet us half way and put something together, but it’s pointless campaigning on something you can’t win on.”

One union rep, Toby, had completely internalized the employer’s logic that what was legitimate was that which benefited the company’s bottom line rather than the needs of the workers he was elected to represent: “There is obviously a business need for it and the union wants PartnershipCo and supermarkets to do well for members and things like that and employment.”

This union rep’s level of identification with the interests of his employer over the interests of his members was an extreme example. It is, nevertheless, telling of the internal conflicts that other union reps faced, for the union reps commonly saw their role as being to “balance the needs of the business with the needs of the worker.”

Moreover, a recurrent view among union officers and organizers was that the campaigns the union encouraged nationally did not deal with the key issues in the workplace, such as the problems caused by flexible scheduling. Though union reps and officers were taught “issue-based campaigning,” whereby campaigns are focused on discontentment in the workplace,³⁵ they did not generally practice it. Mobilization theory highlights the central importance of employers and unions in framing issues within the workplace.³⁶ In this case, rather than seeking to mobilize around discontentment through campaigning on these issues, the union’s campaigns were instead focused on issues that provided mutual gains for both workers and PartnershipCo, including campaigns on lifelong learning and how to deal with customer abuse of staff. As Jimmy (a union representative) described in detail: “We can campaign on a lot of things, one thing is about learning, we campaign on that, about bringing up their educational qualifications, it’s free, it’s great, it gets people involved, but there is still issues on pay, there is still issues on pensions and if we do realistic campaigns or realistic surveys which are about what really affects us, and what affects us, at the end of the day, is our pay.”

The fact that the union did not campaign on major workplace issues such as precarious scheduling reduced the opportunity for it to play an active role in framing issues that were contrary to PartnershipCo’s interests. This seemed to be a deliberate element of the union’s partnership approach. As Derek, a union rep, explained: “The union attempts to keep away from anything which is contentious; they like to do easy things like looking after children and stuff like that which nobody is going to argue about and nobody’s going to say that’s wrong … or fight racism, the Government or PartnershipCo isn’t going to say we disagree with that, but like you say, Sunday trading, PartnershipCo would not like you going into their stores campaigning against Sunday trading … so I think they [the union] steer away [from contentious issues].”

Therefore, the union did little to counter precarious scheduling. In fact, it actually aided the smooth operation of firm temporal flexibility through managing the dissatisfaction generated by the insecurity over hours and schedules.

The union also supported increasing the age at which workers could claim their pension (from sixty-five to sixty-seven) and a tightening up of the attendance policy so that workers no longer received sick pay for the first three days of illness. However, this should not be understood as some kind of conspiracy (although this was a surprisingly common view among the workforce); the union was not always willing to act as a conduit for the interests of PartnershipCo. However, it did act according to a logic based on its leadership’s understanding of its own organizational interests. Often these interests were deemed to align with those of PartnershipCo as a profit-making enterprise, but not always. Thus, it was not always in the union’s own organizational interests to legitimize the workplace regime.

In fact, the high turnover at PartnershipCo required the union to recruit around a third of its membership each year just to maintain its existing membership level. Therefore, a heavy institutional emphasis was placed on recruitment. In order to meet their recruitment targets, union reps framed workplace issues in a way that was detrimental to managerial control—despite not framing their campaigns in such a manner.

I observed how union reps made use of the union’s non-work-related benefits, such as promotional offers, when attempting to recruit new members. This might be expected, given the union’s general nonconfrontational approach, but union reps also stressed the workplace benefits the union provided. By highlighting what the union could do for workers in the workplace and why they needed to join (whether it was to increase pay through bargaining, protect them in grievances and disciplinaries, or provide legal services), they actually heightened awareness of problems in the workplace surrounding these issues. For example, I observed that Jimmy’s recruitment technique was based on stressing how intimidating the disciplinary meetings were for workers, but that the union equalized the institutional power imbalance and protected members by acting as a shield between them and managers. I also observed that Sara’s (a union representative) approach was to frame the workers’ position as precarious and the union as the only source of security within the workplace. On one occasion, she told a worker, “It was important to be in the union as it gives you ‘job security, you never know what’s around the corner’ ” (field notes, PartnershipCo).

On another occasion, I observed a similar approach for recruiting a temporary worker who had been kept on for five months without receiving a permanent contract (despite the company’s policy of using this contract only for a maximum of twelve weeks): “Sara told her ‘other people have then [i.e., after five months] still been got rid of.’ She then focused on the union’s legal services for workers going to the Employment Tribunal. The worker swiftly signed up” (field notes, PartnershipCo).

To a coworker who was considering leaving the union, Sara again framed the workplace as highly insecure for nonunion members, telling him, “ ‘It’s when you come out of the union that they get you’—she then told a story of someone who PartnershipCo tried to fire rather than making redundant in order to save on redundancy pay and emphasized that this happened as soon as he had left the union” (field notes, PartnershipCo).

While at times the union provided a normative control function, in doing so it followed its own logic, which was not always congruent with the interests of capital. Thus, the union did not always legitimize the workplace regime nor increase workers’ integration into the firm. In fact, regarding some issues, union reps in particular would actively increase discontent by stressing negative aspects of the workplace in order to meet their own recruitment goals. A consequence was that, in terms of integrating workers into the workplace, the role of the union was at times dysfunctional.

Despotism or Hegemony?

The presence of collective bargaining and significant union presence at PartnershipCo raise the question of whether the internal state was hegemonic. An answer can be gleaned from the degree to which the relationship between capital and organized labor was of a quid pro quo nature and, thus, whether there existed a true concrete coordination of interests and a stable compromise equilibrium. However, as we have seen, the internal state repeatedly enabled PartnershipCo to benefit from the alteration of workers’ terms and benefits. For example, pay negations resulted in the acceptance of declining real wages. The union also supported increasing the age at which workers could claim their pension from sixty-five to sixty-seven. While this was a source of anger among some workers, it was, nevertheless, much less contentious than might be expected, and its rationale was accepted by many. As Paul (a union rep) explained, “Although they changed it [the pension] slightly because of the nature of the stock market and stuff like that, it had to change but it is still one of the best pension schemes in the world.”

A further example was PartnershipCo’s unilateral decision not to give workers their customary bonus shares. When PartnershipCo communicated this decision, it stated that the union had been consulted, even though this was not the case. The union was evidently used as a rubber stamp for what was a very unpopular decision. However, despite the union’s outrage, there were no negative consequences for PartnershipCo in using the union in this way.

We can conclude that the compromise equilibrium at PartnershipCo was in a state of disintegration due to the increasing competitive pressures faced by the company as a result of the growth of e-commerce. The breaking down of hegemony at PartnershipCo was reminiscent of the hegemonic despotism described earlier, in which the absence of a compromise equilibrium meant that hegemonic workplace institutions acted to extract concessions from organized labor. However, that is not to say that this form of internal state was of no benefit to the workers. The union and collective bargaining did provide workers with some associational power that translated into disciplinary and grievance procedures that limited the scope for arbitrary managerial despotism. However, these benefits were situated within a framework that ensured the continual extraction of concessions from labor and thus better enabled PartnershipCo to deal with the challenge presented by e-commerce.

This chapter has also demonstrated how the internal state at PartnershipCo limited the ability of managers to secure control via despotism in important ways. Hegemonic apparatuses rationalized discipline, constrained manager discretion, and provided workers with employment protections. This meant that there was an imperative for control to be secured via other, more subtle means—a dynamic explored in chapter 3. The next chapter will investigate the more despotic internal state at ConflictCo.