In this chapter, we explore the despotic use of working time to achieve control at PartnershipCo. In his influential studies of workplace control, sociologist Michael Burawoy highlights the importance of the internal labor market in shaping workplace regimes. The term “internal labor market” refers to the shielding of employment relations from the external labor market through mechanisms such as seniority policies, employment protections, internal promotion ladders, and differentiated job structures based on skill and knowledge development. However, as Burawoy recognizes, his research objectified as timeless what was actually a historically specific workplace organizational form. In fact, as highlighted previously, internal labor markets represent a particular institutional form that was dominant during the relatively brief hegemonic era, starting in the 1930s and 1940s. The importance of internal labor markets diminished from the mid-1970s onward, being dismantled through concession bargaining and the procedural individualization of employment relations. Internal labor markets are, however, just one means by which tasks are allocated within firms. This chapter focuses instead on an element of work organization that Burawoy did not consider: the regulation of working time.1
The starting point for this analysis is the view that working time is not determined technologically. Instead, its regulation is determined through a process of conflict and struggle over the definition of “working time”—and its distinction from, and relationship with, “free time.” As historian E. P. Thompson states: “Mature industrial societies of all varieties are marked by … a clear demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life’ … This is a place of far-reaching conflict … not a simple [historical] one of neutral and inevitable technological change, but one of exploitation and of resistance to exploitation.”2
This chapter highlights the degree to which a new flexible definition of working time has taken shape in the twenty-first century. Doing so sheds light on the role of working time in securing workplace control. In particular, the chapter will illustrate how flexible scheduling at PartnershipCo was found to be highly manager-controlled, even in the presence of institutionalized working time regulations. The negative impact of flexible scheduling on job quality and well-being is also demonstrated. This is shown to provide managers with an additional powerful yet subtle means of securing workplace control through coercion. Specifically, flexible scheduling offers managers a simple, readily available, and unaccountable way to threaten and punish specific workers with worse hours and shifts, as well as requiring all workers to actively maintain the managers’ favor through being “good employees.” This chapter, therefore, focuses on the role of flexible scheduling in enabling coercion in the workplace through flexible discipline. Chapter 5 will then focus on how flexible scheduling also enables the misrecognition of workplace relations through “schedule gifts,” that is, the granting of additional work hours by managers in order to help workers meet their material needs by increasing their earnings. Additionally, managers’ alterations to schedules can help provide for workers’ social needs by improving work-life balance.
At PartnershipCo, an internal labor market was not significant in the creation of worker consent. As already mentioned, the internal labor market refers to the shielding of labor from the external market through administrative rules and procedures—particularly the notion of seniority. The fieldwork highlighted the limited efficacy of an internal labor market in the creation of worker consent at PartnershipCo. This supports the literature, which suggests that there has been widespread dismantling of internal labor markets and growing procedural individualization of employment relations.3 In particular, there were no seniority rules whereby those with the longest service at the firm would be protected from redundancy. However, in one important way workers at PartnershipCo were sheltered from the external labor market in that they experienced little employment insecurity although they did often experience schedule insecurity (discussed in detail below). As Jimmy, a union rep, explained: “I think people are concerned not so much with worry about [losing] their jobs; new people are concerned about their [flexible] contracts as they don’t offer any [schedule] security … [over] the hours they are doing. The older workers know the score; they know it’s a secure job.”
Absence of a strong internal labor market and the exposure of labor to the external labor market can also be seen in the fact that pay did not diverge much from the minimum wage. Wages were, therefore, low, with starting pay being below a living wage, and had been declining in real terms for a number of years. However, while some informants were very angry about pay and understood that in real terms it was deteriorating, it was inequality that really generated a sense of outrage. As noted by Jimmy: “The gap between the bottom and the top is horrendous and if you worked it out in cans of baked beans … how many we have to sell for her [the store manager’s wage] and how many we have to sell for us, it really puts it into perspective, and should we be paid more? Yeah!”
And according to Jeff, also a union rep: “The injustice, the sheer profits that they’re getting … look at the people at the top … we’re working for one of the biggest companies in the world, let alone in the UK, and getting paid a pittance … When people see the directors at the top earning literally millions and that’s without their bonuses and us at the bottom getting £7 an hour, £7.50 an hour, and you know it just doesn’t seem fair when we are doing most of the work … These guys are getting paid millions and only coming into the office for three days a week. So yeah I would say anger sums it up.”
For some informants, this sense of injustice was heightened by their belief that board-level management were responsible for running PartnershipCo badly. These workers, therefore, felt that the board was thus culpable for the business requiring that workers’ pay be squeezed. Sandra, another union rep, commented: “I think the reason we got 2 percent [for a pay raise], a lot of it, was PartnershipCo’s fault … it’s us that’s suffered again ’cause of their mistake and it does make you kinda angry.”
However, other workers were more accepting of the pay at PartnershipCo. This was largely due to the fact that, although for many workers pay was below a living wage and had been declining in real terms, it was still better than the pay at comparable retail employers. Additionally, not all workers recognized that a “pay rise” below inflation represented a pay cut in real terms. Some informants were, therefore, happy with below-inflation pay rises since, to their minds, this still constituted an increase in their pay. Given the wider economic situation, this made them feel relatively lucky. What is clear, however, is that while some workers accepted their pay, it was not a mechanism by which much active consent within the workplace regime was generated. In fact, it was a source of discontent for many workers at PartnershipCo. For example, at the Mulling Point store where I worked for two months, PartnershipCo’s own staff survey found that 52 percent of the workforce felt that their pay was unfair.
Furthermore, there was little opportunity for genuine mobility within the job structure, given that there was little incremental difference between pay grades for hourly paid workers. There was also very little likelihood of advancement into salaried management. Therefore, on the whole, there was little evidence that internal labor market–type elements were significant hegemonic features of the workplace regimes that aided labor control through producing consent. The allocation of labor to particular tasks was based on the principle of functional flexibility. This meant that most staff were trained in multiple roles and could be shifted by managers from their primary tasks to secondary ones as needed. For example, at a moment’s notice shelf stackers could be ordered to stop what they were doing and to go operate a checkout. This lack of task discretion led to working time being experienced as intense and insecure. Let us consider the role of working time in securing workplace control in more detail.
Experiences of flexible scheduling at PartnershipCo highlight the importance of the conceptual distinction between “manager-controlled flexibility” and “worker-controlled flexibility.”4 Manager-controlled flexible scheduling is of principal benefit to employers, whereas worker-controlled flexible scheduling is beneficial to employees. Research suggests that despite frequent employer claims to the contrary, flexible scheduling cannot be both manager-controlled and at the same time worker-controlled.5 The findings presented below clearly demonstrate that there was a high level of temporal flexibility at PartnershipCo, which was achieved through manager-controlled flexible scheduling with little evidence of worker influence. This was despite the fact that there were institutionalized workplace mechanisms that aimed to unsuccessfully ensure that flexibility was both manager- and worker-controlled.
The collective agreement between the company and the union covered many aspects relating to scheduling. Most importantly, it stipulated that PartnershipCo’s employment relationship with its hourly paid store workforce was to be limited to three forms: standard, temporary, and flexible. Standard workers were employed on contracts that guaranteed them fixed core hours (36.5 if full-time and no less than 4.5 hours if part-time) with overtime being voluntary.6 If managers wished to change workers’ fixed core hours, they had to follow a strict “labor matching review process”—also codified in the collective agreement.
The union’s policy booklet on labor matching reviews explained that “change is constant and is driven by many factors including new technology, customer demands, the economic climate and new business initiatives … [Labor matching] is the policy used to manage this constant change by making variations to [an] employees’ contracted hours … [And] identify[ing] where hours are needed in store.”
Following the labor matching review process, which included a twenty-eight-day consultation with the affected worker, PartnershipCo would issue contractual notice (ranging from four to twelve weeks, depending on length of service) unless the worker agreed in the meantime to alter his or her hours. The outcome of these labor matching reviews could vary from small alterations to existing shift patterns (such as moving the shift an hour earlier or later in the day) to more major ones (such as moving a shift from a weekday to a weekend or modifying a daytime shift to a night shift). The most extreme alteration observed was the complete transformation of a particular job role from days to nights. However, as discussed below, even the less extreme adjustments could have serious consequences for work-life balance.
Despite the official policy stipulating that such reviews were not to be carried out frequently or utilized in relation to short-term changes in demand, informants perceived them to be very frequent, apparently affecting each worker between two and four times a year. Moreover, the review period could drag on for many months and in some cases lasted twelve months or more. Review periods were in fact experienced by employees as a virtually constant process, with the outcome being hard to predict. For example, Sandra described in detail during an interview how this procedure was used in reality: “All of a sudden you will get called into an office. ‘Right, we need to have a chat with you,’ and you’ll be all stressed about it … [But] you won’t hear nothing for two months and then three months and then four months … [and] a year down the road they then say they have to do it again.”
The consequence of labor matching reviews was that contractually guaranteed core hours were, in fact, amenable to high levels of manager-controlled flexible scheduling. In addition, it was widely perceived by the informants that managers were not holding proper consultations in which they were willing to listen to workers’ concerns and come to a compromise. Union reps and workers recounted how managers would instead intimidate workers into changing their hours to such an extent that workers were afraid they would be dismissed or lose their job if they were not compliant. Susan (a union rep) explained during an interview how this fear formed a barrier to the union’s influence: “People do feel compelled to do it and don’t really have a choice in it, if they still wanna job because it’s that whole canopy of ‘you’re lucky to have a job’ … That’s the biggest thing, people go to them [the union] and then they get half way through the process and they think ‘hang on a moment, I could lose my job through this, I don’t want to do this anymore,’ they sort of get a little bit scared.”
Another union rep, Rosie, elaborated on how managers’ subtle threats heighten such feelings: “You get told that there are plenty of people out there who need jobs, so it’s more bribing than anything else.”
Asim, a union rep, made it clear that, in some cases, this fear was achieved less subtly and was clearly in contradiction to PartnershipCo’s policies: “People have been told, wrongly, that they can be sacked for it if they don’t change their hours.”
Furthermore, while company policy stated that labor matching reviews should not result in reduced core hours, workers would “voluntarily” reduce their hours in order to remain in their current department and job role. As Neil, a union rep, explained: “It was all these shifts cobbled together, and it wasn’t a job. But what it allowed them to do was cut hours … So it’s been a way of cutting costs; people have cut their hours because they want to stay in their department.”
In much of the literature, temporal flexibility is suggested to be a feature of nonstandard, atypical, or contingent work. Yet what the findings at PartnershipCo demonstrate is the fact that in a 24/7 economy, firms can extend flexible scheduling to standard, permanent, and full-time workers who will generally experience this not as flexibility but as a source of precarity.
Temporary workers principally provide firms with numerical flexibility: the ability to respond to changes in demand by quickly altering the size and composition of the workforce. PartnershipCo had previously combined the temporal flexibility provided by labor matching with the numerical flexibility provided by temporary workers. Temporary workers were employed on fixed-term contracts of up to twelve weeks to cover peak periods of demand, such as Christmas, but this combination of temporal and numerical flexibility had proved inadequate. The guide to flexible contracts explained that the labor matching review process had proved too time-consuming, ill-suited to short-term changes in demand, and not flexible enough to cope with recurring shifts in demand. Furthermore, using temporary staff brought with it additional costs in terms of recruitment and training and, in the case of online-only stores, agency fees. Therefore, the year before the fieldwork was undertaken, a new temporally flexible employment status was introduced. The aim of this new employment contract was to increase flexibility.
This newly created flexible employment contract covered full-time and part-time employees. Full-time workers were contracted for 36.5 hours, but these hours were not set. The hours could be scheduled at any time (excluding Sundays, which by law had to be voluntary) the workers had indicated that they were available to work during their interview. While workers were free to stipulate their preferred availability, managers would take into account whether the workers’ availability suited the company’s needs before employing them. As such, providing greater availability increased the chances of being hired. These full-time flexible workers had to provide at least fifty hours’ availability each week. The worker’s schedule was supposed to be drawn up at least four weeks in advance but could officially be altered with as little as seven days’ notice in “exceptional situations.”
Flexible part-time workers had to provide up to forty-eight hours per week of availability to work (although they would only work up to 36.5 hours). Part-time flexible workers were then contracted to work a minimum of 7.5 core hours per week and three hours per shift, although the guide to flexible contracts makes clear that PartnershipCo considered the ideal number to be ten to sixteen hours per week. These workers could then be “flexed up” with additional hours during their availability periods. Officially, these additional flexed hours should only have equated to a maximum of 60 percent of the workers’ core hours. For example, if they were employed for ten core hours, their flexed hours should have been no more than six additional hours. Importantly, flexible part-time workers were supposed to receive notice of their extra hours at least seven days in advance, but in “exceptional situations” could be provided with just twenty-four hours’ notice. However, the policy explicitly stated that this was not to be the norm. Additional flexed hours were allocated to match demand during busy periods. If workers refused to work at times when they were officially “available,” then in the first two instances they received a warning. After a third refusal, they would face disciplinary action.
According to PartnershipCo’s guide to flexible contracts, the implementation of this new flexible employment status was at the discretion of individual stores. However, it also made clear that a mixture of standard, temporary, and flexible workers was needed in order to respond to changes in demand while managing payroll budgets effectively. Flexible contracts were expected to limit the need for temporary workers to three peak trading periods (Easter, summer, and Christmas), and even during these periods, the payroll costs of temporary workers would be restricted to around 10 percent of the normal payroll. For new stores, the guide to flexible contracts explained that the ideal model was to reduce core contracted hours to 80 percent of the payroll costs. This was so that the remaining 20 percent of the payroll could be allocated to additional hours in order to match short-term changes in demand. This would require approximately 45 percent of staff to be on flexible contracts and was also considered to be the ideal model for existing stores to move toward. The transition toward this ideal was gradual, as existing staff could not be transferred to flexible contracts unless they applied for a new job role. That said, by January 2013—that is, only a year after flexible contracts were introduced—the union rep guide noted that flexible contracts were becoming increasingly common.
Despite plenty of evidence of part-time flexible contracts, there was no evidence at the fieldwork sites that full-time flexible contracts were being used. This was presumably because part-time flexible workers presented greater potential for flexibility through the combination of flexed time and overtime, as discussed below. Although the sampling was not randomized, this suggests that the vast majority of the workers employed on flexible contracts at PartnershipCo, in the London area at least, had part-time employment status. Consequently, the discussion below regarding workers employed on flexible contracts is limited to this part-time flexible work.
The guide to flexible contracts emphasized that the flexibility of these contracts was “two-way,” in that they enabled both manager-controlled flexible scheduling and worker-controlled flexibility, as workers could request not to work reasonable hours that fell during their availability if they had not yet been scheduled. According to the guide to flexible contracts, this would provide workers with schedules that “suit people’s lives … allowing staff in our stores to work hours that can be flexible enough to meet their individual needs.”
On paper, being employed on a flexible contract at PartnershipCo was quite different from being a standard part-time worker. Rather than working compulsory flexed time, standard part-time workers could be offered voluntary overtime paid at the standard rate. The proportions of flexed time and overtime within a store were meant to be roughly equivalent. The practice of achieving flexibility through both traditional overtime and compulsory flexed time required that both part-time and flexible workers be hired on contracts that guaranteed them only minimal core contractual hours. This meant that demand could be matched through fluctuating additional hours. Consequently, part-time contracts and flexible contracts operated as complementary forms of “short hours contracts.” In fact, a common theme of the interviews was the similar proportions of contracted hours and the additional hours that both part-time and flexible employees actually worked.
Additional hours were an important feature of the workplace, with standard part-time and flexible workers having, on average, thirty-six hours of work a week but being contracted, on average, for just nine hours a week. Although the standard part-time workers were not contractually obliged to accept any additional hours offered, in reality it was unlikely that those employed on short hours contracts would refuse them, despite the fact that they were only being paid at the same rate as core hours. The nature of these low pay and short hours contracts meant that workers often had a material need for additional hours. For example, all of my teammates at Mulling Point frequently worked overtime despite complaining about how hard it was to work a nine-hour shift and that their bodies were aching. Moreover, this precarious situation of potentially not having enough hours to make ends meet was heightened by a perception that refusal to work overtime would result in additional hours not being offered in the future. Derek, a union rep, explained this situation lucidly during an interview: “People will do their utmost to do the extra hours and will allow themselves to be bullied into working days they don’t really want to work or shifts that they don’t really want to work. A lot of them are actually struggling to get childcare in place and things because they are terrified of not getting any more shifts and being stuck with this three and a half or seven hours a week, which they’ve gotta live on … so I’ve known managers to say ‘look if you don’t do the shift tomorrow, I won’t offer you any more again.’ They are blatant about it.”
A further important difference of flexible contracts compared to traditional part-time contracts was that unlike overtime, flexed time was meant to require at least twenty-four hours’ notice. This contractual protection was also perceived to be disregarded, however. As Mike, a union official, explained during an interview, “They don’t use the rules and try and take advantage: ‘you will come in tomorrow.’ ”
PartnershipCo’s policy that additional flexed hours should constitute only 60 percent of core hours also made little difference, as it was frequently bypassed through the use of traditional overtime. This meant that overtime / flexed time could constitute three-quarters of a worker’s total weekly hours. This is, however, well below the most extreme example. Jimmy (a union rep) stated that workers were being contracted for less than four hours a week but typically working thirty-six hours, meaning that overtime / flexed time was increasing their hours ninefold.
Given that these contractual protections and company policies regarding flexed time were habitually disregarded by managers, from the workers’ perspective the differences between being employed on a standard part-time (short hours) contract or a flexible short hours contract were minor—despite the former in theory guaranteeing more worker control over additional hours worked. Instead, both were understood by workers as entailing precarious scheduling, as they experienced little notice of unpredictable and irregular additional hours, along with the disappearance of uncontracted hours that they had become accustomed to working.
In terms of maximizing scheduling flexibility, overtime and flexed time had contrasting advantages and drawbacks, and this made them highly complementary. This is why PartnershipCo aimed to have them utilized in equal proportions. The main advantage of overtime was that workers did not have to be given any notice. Thus, workers could be offered overtime with even less than the twenty-four hours’ notice contractually required for flexed time, providing the flexibility to respond to real-time changes in demand. For example, I observed that it was common for members of my team of shelf stackers at Mulling Point to be offered overtime for the following morning during our evening shifts or even to extend the shift currently being worked. In an illustrative example, Rio was asked to extend his shift as he was putting on his coat to go home.
The obvious disadvantage of overtime to the company was that workers had discretion as to whether they accepted or rejected the additional hours. So overtime, at least in theory, could leave demand unmet. Conversely, the advantage of flexed time was that workers could not decline additional hours if given twenty-four hours’ notice, so demand was guaranteed to be met. The drawback was that managers had to anticipate and plan for the increased demand at least twenty-four hours in advance. Flexed time also added a level of complexity to scheduling, which increased with the number of workers employed in this way.
The flexible scheduling at PartnershipCo fell a long way short of the claimed “two-way process” that supposedly enabled workers to meet their individual needs. Rather than constituting a harmonious combination of manager-controlled and worker-controlled flexible scheduling, it was in fact almost entirely manager-controlled. This form of flexible scheduling had a deleterious effect on job quality. Specifically, it diminished workers’ work-life balance by affecting their ability to plan their time, and consequently impacted their family life. A characteristic experience was that of Sara, a union rep: “Now that Paul [another PartnershipCo worker] is living with me and he has the Saturday off, I’ve already set aside Saturday as a day for me, Paul, and my son to do something as a family . . She [Sara’s manager] now wants me to work Saturdays … it’s all up in the air.”
A recurring concern raised in the interviews at PartnershipCo was the impact that precarious scheduling could have on childcare responsibilities—this was especially a concern for female workers. As noted by Asim, a union rep: “They balance their work life with their family life, i.e., dropping their kids off or having careers and when suddenly the business is like ‘you have to change your hours again’ it affects them, it affects them immensely because they have to start it all over again, they have to balance their family life because they don’t want to lose their job, so they have to make a lot of sacrifices.”
Primary childcare was not the only type of caring impacted. Low-income families could not afford professional childcare and therefore relied on family members such as grandparents. One of the major demographics employed at PartnershipCo was older people who were likely to have grandchildren. Similarly, the ability of workers to care for their aging parents was also adversely affected. This was important, as the labor matching policies at PartnershipCo considered only primary care as a “justifiable reason” for not changing hours.
The inability to plan one’s life also acted as a barrier to social activities. The unpredictable nature of their schedules caused workers to experience their lives as being in disarray. The experience of Susan (a union rep) was indicative of this: “You plan something, and then they say ‘oh can you come in and do something different,’ and you feel compelled to do it. So you’re changing all everything around.”
Susan also explained how the instability impacted her family: “It’s very hard moving things around … I’ve got a partner, so it’s having a normal life out of here, he works in an office, Monday to Friday shifts, nine to five sort of thing, so it’s having a normal life outside of here and [PartnershipCo] don’t realize that I’m afraid, they think you are just here for them.”
Derek, another union rep, detailed how it was not only the irregularity of the hours that played havoc with workers’ home life but also the unpredictability of not knowing when you would be asked to work: “You can get up one day and think right I’m not working today and then get a phone call, you’ve not got anyone to look after your kids, or whatever, you might just be going shopping … to do your weekly shop, get a phone call, you’ve gotta come into work and they daren’t say no, and especially women with children they’ve then gotta run round looking for someone to look after their kids.”
A further difficulty for workers was that the unpredictability of their schedules made it hard to work a second job, which workers often desperately needed as their guaranteed hours were so low. As Bryah (a union rep) made clear: “They give you that ten hours [which is in your contract] but then they call with twenty-four to forty-eight hours’ notice to come and do the job and if you have a second job, then there is a problem for you to come in and do that.”
The unpredictable scheduling and its consequences for work-life balance and workers’ income created a pervasive sense of insecurity. This supports the proposition put forward by a number of social scientists that insecurity related to working time can be an important contributor to job insecurity.7 Workers experienced insecurity over future changes to their hours, as Jimmy, a union rep, explained: “There is no sort of hour security … you work an average of forty hours a week or thirty-six and a half hours a week and then when the overtime cuts come in, you are only on seven hours a week.”
Or as Rosie (a union rep) put it, “You’re never secure; you’re never secure in your hours.”
The source of uncertainty and worry was a sense of workers not knowing what the future holds for their schedule, whether they would be able to work the hours they were given and, if they could, how this would impact their life. It was the uncertainty about what the future held, rather than the general requirement to change schedules, that was most problematic, and this was amplified by poor communication of the changes. Susan explained how a lack of communication increased schedule insecurity: “One minute you walk in and you know what you’re doing, and the next minute you walk in, and you don’t … It’s OK if you can accommodate that [change in hours] but sometimes it’s with the not knowing.”
This schedule insecurity was described by Tony, a union official, as being the biggest issue facing retail workers at PartnershipCo: “Insecurity, that’s a big challenge … Are they gonna change their hours, are they going to have their hours reduced … The biggest issue is usually that.”
Precarious scheduling created a pervasive sense of subjective insecurity at PartnershipCo. This is supported by over half of the workers who were asked responding that they felt that their working hours would get worse over the following twelve months. Furthermore, the vast majority of employees agreed that they felt insecure about the future of their job, despite none of these workers thinking it likely they would lose their job in the next year. This insecurity, combined with its potential impact on work-life balance, could be very stressful. Sandra (a union rep) explained how “they put a lot of stress on people … I used to be in tears.”
As discussed above, the flexible nature of scheduling at PartnershipCo resulted in many workers’ schedules varying widely in both the number and timing of their hours, week in, week out. The near-total control by managers of this scheduling had a damaging effect on workers’ work-life balance and led to workers experiencing a pervasive sense of schedule insecurity. This placed a great deal of discretionary power in the hands of managers.8 Managers had the power to cause distress to specific workers simply by altering their schedule to unusual times, or times that clashed with childcare, social activities, education, or a second job. Alternatively, managers could cut the number of hours workers received and thus drastically reduce their income, or could increase the instability and unpredictability of their schedule. In these ways, managers not only had control over workers while they were in the workplace but also wielded a significant influence over the workers’ home lives, as Tony (a union official) explained: “If I challenge [managers] … I might not get the overtime … or might not get my Sundays, or the hours I’m doing at the moment are perfect [as] I can finish at two, I can go home and pick up the kids … if I make a fuss I might have that taken away, or I’ll have my hours changed, so if I keep my head down and do as I’m told I’ll keep those hours.”
Of course, flexible scheduling is instigated for profit maximization rather than control. Nevertheless, it does place a large amount of power in the hands of managers who can potentially use their discretion to cause significant suffering to specific workers. In reality, how frequently managers took advantage of this situation is impossible to infer conclusively from the data available. However, the informants certainly perceived that this happened, and with regard to control, it is this that matters.
For their part, managers pleaded innocence, informing workers that they had no choice but to alter their schedules due to staffing needs being set by head office on the basis of projected sales. While this was often not believed by the workers whose schedules were being affected, the inherent ambiguity of securing control via scheduling presented managers with a major advantage. For example, over a number of years, a worker’s schedule may be relatively stable until he or she does something that displeases management. At this point, workers can suddenly find their schedule altered, their hours cut, and their working time highly unstable and unpredictable. In this situation, it seems extremely plausible to them that they are being disciplined. It is, nevertheless, possible that the change is a coincidental result of alterations to projected sales by head office, and that their manager is simply responding to this new reality in the best way they can.
That the majority of workers experience some degree of instability in their hours made it even harder for them to distinguish for certain whether such alterations were acts of discipline or not and, consequently, almost impossible for workers to know whether to blame their manager or the whims of market forces. Importantly, since schedule changes can always be disavowed as having been required by supply and demand, this makes them an ambiguous form of punishment and thus less damaging to the “psychological contract” than threats of dismissals. Colin illustrated this particularly clearly when he stated that, despite being very distressed that his job had been changed to nights, he did not blame management: “I do understand they need [to meet] certain [customer] demand and obviously, I’m just the unlucky one that mine happened to go to nights.”
Precarious scheduling enabled control to be secured without recourse to standard despotic practices. Thus, a high level of workplace control could be accomplished “with a smile.” This was important, as the scope for more traditional means of discipline was curtailed by the hegemonic apparatuses discussed in chapter 1, such as employment protections and the developed disciplinary and grievance procedures policed by the union. Nonetheless, workers felt reliant on their managers’ mood and were afraid that if they displeased them, their schedule would suffer as a consequence. Derek explained that “they are terrified of not getting any more shifts and being stuck with this three-and-a-half or seven hours a week, which they can’t live on … Being desperate for some extra hours, they depend on the mood of the manager for their income … Once your face doesn’t fit you don’t get any more hours.”
Within the constraint of ensuring that staffing needs were met within their labor budget, managers had the capacity to give workers they liked more hours (including upgrading their contracts to full-time status), the shifts they wanted, and greater schedule stability. Moreover, scheduling was a zero-sum game: any benefits one worker gained were at the expense of others who, as a consequence, would receive either fewer, less stable, or less desirable hours. Unsurprisingly, scheduling was perceived as operating according to favoritism. Logically, therefore, workers tried to gain favor with their manager, in some cases by boosting their productivity by undertaking extra tasks or working off the clock. For example, at Mulling Point I observed how Denise, a worker who often received overtime, tended to start work fifteen minutes early and continued working after her shift had finished.
This chapter has demonstrated that the operation of an internal labor market at PartnershipCo was not a significant source of consent. However, the despotism of working time aided the securing of workplace control, by increasing the arbitrary power of managers. Managers were perceived to use their discretion over scheduling to instigate flexible discipline, which could cause misery for specific workers by simply scheduling them to work at times that clashed with their home life, by cutting their hours, or increasing the instability and unpredictability of their hours. A benefit to managers of this mechanism of discipline was its subtlety. This subtlety was especially beneficial, as the scope for traditional despotic methods of control was constrained by the presence of hegemonic apparatuses such as employment contracts, developed disciplinary and grievance procedures, and union presence. The following chapter moves on to consider whether precarious scheduling operated as a similar mechanism of control at ConflictCo where the internal state more closely resembled market despotism.