In the previous chapters, flexible discipline was shown to be a powerful means by which control could be secured at both PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. This chapter will investigate how control at the two workplace regimes was aided by the obscuring of exploitation. The chapter will proceed by describing the main characteristics of retail work at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. In particular, the nature of the labor process will be detailed. The chapter will then provide a brief history of work games, that is, the manner in which workers create games that make their work more enjoyable but that also lead them to become complicit in their own exploitation, for winning these games invariably entails producing additional profit for their employer. The chapter will then move on to discuss the absence of work games at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. In place of the mystifying effects of work games we find that flexible working time aids control as a consequence of “schedule gifts” obscuring exploitation. Schedule gifts resemble Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of the misrecognition that formed part of the gift-giving ritual among Kabyle peasants in northern Algeria. Schedule gifts are found to be crucial for understanding control in the on-demand economy.
At both PartnershipCo and ConflictCo stores, the job content and labor processes were similar. Although there were a range of jobs being undertaken, the two main job types can be categorized as shelf stacker and cashier. The shelf stacker role involved restocking shelves on the shop floor with products from the stockroom and the “facing up” of shelves. Facing up required that goods be moved to the front of shelves in order to make the shelves appear well stocked at all times and to make the shop aesthetically pleasing. Facing up also eased the shopping experience by making products more visible and easier for customers to reach. This was my job for two months at PartnershipCo’s Mulling Point store.
Cashiers at ConflictCo and PartnershipCo operated large checkouts with conveyor belts for moving goods, bar-code scanners for their identification, and cash register software for the calculation of the required payment and change. Because the roles demanded quite different levels of physical labor, cashiers tended to be older and shelf stackers generally younger. However, functional flexibility required permanent shelf stackers to be trained to operate checkouts during busy periods. This meant that shelf stackers could be called away from their shelf-stacking responsibilities at any time that extra checkout operators were needed.
Functional flexibility of this kind caused shelf stackers much frustration and stress, as their work was still evaluated in terms of the level of completion of their shelf-stacking tasks. As Ashlyn, a worker at ConflictCo, explained: “I hate it, I do not like to go up there and handle money, I don’t like being up there. It takes time away from my department, you know, and I tell them, if you want me to be cashiering do not expect me to come into my department and have it zoned [faced up] and have no go backs [products that require putting back on the shelf]. You know I can’t do it, I’m telling you right now I can’t do it, I’m just telling you I can’t do it. If you want me to have my department zoned and everything I can do it, as long as I’m not at the cashiers.”
A discussion with two ConflictCo workers in the LA area, Sophie and Megan, that I noted down in my fieldwork diary demonstrated this point clearly: “The call went out for her [Sophie] to go on the tills, a circumstance which she was very despondent about, saying, ‘How am I going to get all this done when I’m getting called to the checkout all the time?’ Megan responded, ‘Oh no, you’ve had your checkout training. I’m trying not to have mine, otherwise I’ll never get my work done and will be shouted at by the managers.’ ”
At PartnershipCo, functional flexibility caused similar problems. Nick, a union rep at PartnershipCo, put it as follows: “There is a lot of this multi-skilling going on now … It’s getting harder to work there now.”
During my participant observation, working as a shelf stacker, I noted how glad I was that I myself was not checkout trained: “Whilst I was working on the toilet rolls a bald manager, who I didn’t know, came over and asked if I was checkout trained. I replied that I wasn’t, to which he responded, ‘Oh, you are one of the lucky ones.’ If I had been [trained] I would never have completed my shelves.”
Cashier and shelf-stacking roles required some emotional labor, such as smiling and being friendly with customers, and in the case of shelf stackers, helping customers to locate products. Yet physical and emotional labor often came into conflict, as the manager doing my induction training remarked: “You see, with PartnershipCo it is like they want us to be like robots, everything is controlled, every task only takes an exact amount of time which is measured and this [a video illustrating customer service] reminds us that we need to be human when dealing with customers.”
However, those elements of the work that required more qualitative evaluation invariably took a back seat to elements that could be measured quantitatively, such as the speed at which shelves were stacked and faced up and how much produce was processed through the checkout. Paul, a union rep at PartnershipCo, discussed the difficulty of doing both: “The work rate that you’re expected to do on checkouts … is phenomenally high but then they also want you to give good customer service, but if you want me to speed up and get things done then I’m not going to be able to give good customer service.”
As discussed in chapter 1, my experiences at PartnershipCo demonstrated that, in the context of low-end retail, the importance of the much commented on triadic relationship among workers, managers, and customers was of secondary importance to worker-manager relations.1 This meant that the emotional labor of customer service was clearly of much less importance to managers than the physical labor of handling and moving goods around the store so that customers would be able to locate and purchase them.
At both firms, most job roles allowed little employee control or discretion over how and when these work activities were carried out, leading to workloads that were experienced as high and intense. Work intensity was also felt to have increased in recent years at both firms, representing an additional source of dissatisfaction. A common phrase at PartnershipCo was “doing more with less.” Nick (a union rep at PartnershipCo) explained this common theme concisely: “They are putting a lot of pressure on everybody to work harder, faster, with less people … People are getting pushed and pushed and pushed all of the time … A lot of people are under a lot of pressure.”
Work intensity also put workers under a great deal of emotional strain, as Mary (another union rep) explained: “Well I’ll tell you how bad it has got, because we’ve got a supervisor who came out of this room two weeks ago in floods of tears; it was unusual for her to be like this so I took her to the toilet, and she said, ‘I can’t cope with my role as a supervisor anymore, it’s just too much.’ ”
Likewise at ConflictCo, a chief source of discontentment was the perception that workloads and the intensity of the work had increased in recent years. A worker, Pamela, illustrated this theme particularly clearly: “In general there is not enough staffing, not enough hours, not enough time in the day to accomplish what they demand out of every worker in that place.”
A number of informants claimed that the intensity of work was so high that it was damaging their health. Akira explained what happened to her while working at ConflictCo: “We could never get that job [cosmetics] done, we were defeated before we came to work … So I tried to start working harder and I worked myself into a hospital.”
As noted in chapter 2, ConflictCo shelf stackers called the “my-guide” task management program “my-slave.” The idiom of slavery was also employed by black workers to describe the general work intensity at ConflictCo. For example, Twanda stated, “They work you like a slave.”
Andre also used particularly lucid imagery of slavery to describe the consequences for worker health: “We have a saying ‘cracking the whip and not giving a shit’ … They just want to keep on pushing you, and pushing you, and pushing you, and pushing you, to see how hard they can push you until you break.”
At PartnershipCo the work intensity was also felt to have increased in recent years, and this was a source of dissatisfaction. During my participant observation of shelf stacking at PartnershipCo, I found that the workload was constantly too high to be achieved in the time allocated, requiring a very high work rate to reach anywhere close to what the managers expected of us. Some members of my team even resorted to working off the clock at the start and end of their shifts. The physicality of this “service work” should also not be underestimated, consisting as it does of lifting, pulling, and pushing quite heavy boxes of products, as well as ripping up packaging, all at a fast pace.
Previous research has highlighted the ingenious ways in which workers have been able to use their agency to subvert intense labor processes such as these and create work games that can transform arduous work into a source of relative satisfaction. These work games not only enable workers to develop new sources of enjoyment in the workplace but also involve an element of consent to exploitation in that “winning the game” usually entails producing higher levels of profit for their employer.2
Hegemonic regimes in both the United States and the UK made work games viable due to the employment security this type of regime provided. At the same time, the constraining of managerial despotism provided workers with a degree of what sociologist Andrew Friedman has described as responsible autonomy from managers’ direct control.3
Workers initially devise and enter into work games in order to counter the weariness, tedium, and arduousness of work and to make time pass quickly. Although workers initiate these games independently, managers play an important role in ensuring their sustainability.4 However, in market despotic regimes “the piecework game becomes a self-defeating spiral of labor intensification … The game itself produces conditions that make the game more difficult to play.” This is because workers lack sufficient bargaining power to ensure that the rules of a game become stabilized and thus that the game is reproduced. In such situations, if there is too much uncertainty and fear, then work games lose their ability to be engrossing. There is therefore only limited scope for the obscuring of labor processes via work games in despotic regimes.5
Hegemonic regimes, on the other hand, provide conditions that are more hospitable to the constitution of work games, as they restrict the scope for managers to practice arbitrary discipline. The internal state and the internal labor market protect workers from capricious managerial discipline, providing them with the appropriate level of certainty and security necessary to become absorbed in work games. Furthermore, social pressure provides a powerful incentive to play the same game with the same rules as everyone else. Continual peer-to-peer evaluation into how well each individual is playing “the game” makes it difficult to opt out without also being ostracized by colleagues. However, “the very act of playing the game simultaneously produce[s] consent to its rules. You can’t be serious about playing a game … if, at the same time, you question its rules and goals.”6
Burawoy illustrates the process through the game of “making out” that was played by workers he studied in a machine shop in the 1970s. This piece rate game entailed skillfully producing large quantities of parts and thus producing the output on various machines, which would result in the workers’ earnings being maximized. However, if workers produced too much, then the piece rate for that job would be rerated by management, thus making it harder for everyone to earn a living on that job. For this reason getting a job rerated by producing too much would earn the scorn of the rest of the workforce. Therefore, winning the game of making out required a skillful and delicate maintenance of an output just below what would lead to a job’s piece rate being altered. “Making out,” however, became an end in itself beyond that of making more money, with “operators constantly shar[ing] their piecework experience as a chief item of conversation, and always in terms of ‘making money,’ [but] they were, in reality, communicating ‘game scores’ or ‘race results,’ ”7 and therefore “the difference between making out and not making out was thus not measured in the few pennies of bonus we earned but in our prestige, sense of accomplishment, and pride.”8
In addition to Burawoy, a number of researchers have identified the importance of work games. For example, as Burawoy points out, sociologist Donald Roy found similar “making out” work games in the same machine shop thirty years earlier.9 Roy also details a work game in a garment factory that involved cutting certain quantities of particular colored shapes so that the die used to produce them would require filing down and thus provide the worker with a change of activity as a reward. However, this game was not collective and was, consequently, less gripping for workers.10
During the hegemonic period similar games were also identified in the UK. For instance, Huw Beynon discovered at Ford a game that he dubbed “working back the line.” This game consisted of a process whereby workers “worked back the line” by working faster than the assembly line required so as to “make their own time” in which they could rest and socially interact.11 Another example is provided by Pollert’s study of female workers at an Imperial Tobacco factory. At this factory, workers also tried to cope with the drudgery of their work through escapism and “having a laugh,” but Pollert also demonstrates how this provided the basis for a work game: the game of flirting, teasing, and poking fun at male supervisors. This game proved highly absorbing because it “was a complex, tense balance between confrontation and collaboration: complex, because class control was mediated by patriarchal control, and neither side of the relationship could separate them; tense because if either side went too far in the sexy word-play, if the girls’ flirtations turned to disrespect or the charge hands[’] sexist cajolery went too far, the rules of the game could snap.” Moreover, for the workers, “failure in the game [ineffective flirting or going too far] leads to the sanction of being more likely to receive arbitrary victimization.”12
Despite the era of hegemony and employment security coming to an end in the 1980s, a number of researchers have identified work games as continuing to play an important role in the obscuring of workplace relations. For example, fast-food workers have been found to engage in sales games.13 As noted in the book’s introduction, this is surprising, as Burawoy argued that security was important for making these games absorbing, and employment security is not something often associated with the fast-food industry. Indeed, these games often lack a financial incentive, with the only compulsion being the social pressure to play. This means that these games might not be absorbing. For example, at a call center most workers soon became uninterested in the learning game they engaged in and instead quit their job.14 This game, therefore, did little to generate commitment among the workforce. Contemporary work games have also been found in factories and casinos where workers do have some security.15
It was highlighted in the book’s introduction that given the importance of flexible working time, there might be potential for games structured around time to play an important role in the maintenance of workplace control. In addition to the game of “working back the line” at Ford (already discussed), other time-based work games have been uncovered, albeit not in the service industry, for example, at a Chinese textile factory and a UK chemical plant.16 Given these examples, drawn from various contexts, it was expected that work games would continue to play a central role in workplace control in the twenty-first century and that at firms making use of temporal flexibility these games would be structured around time.
Previous research has documented some potential for work games to obscure exploitation in service sector settings, including in fast-food restaurants and call centers, but most successfully in casinos where workers had greater security. Given the importance of temporal flexibility, discussed in part two, and that previous research has highlighted examples of work games involving working time, it might be expected that such games would exist at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. Yet, there was in fact very little evidence for the importance of work games, involving time or otherwise, at either ConflictCo or PartnershipCo. ConflictCo did not systematically incentivize work games through the provision of bonuses or even symbolic prizes.17 Without this material support, the development of work games was left to the creativity of workers to spontaneously devise games for themselves. Indeed, some informants explained how they tried to constitute their work as a race, either with regard to their scan rate when operating the checkouts, or regarding the speed at which they could empty their pallets of goods when restocking shelves. They even occasionally discussed their scores and strategies with their coworkers.
However, these attempts at the creation of games were undermined by managers. For example, managers were meant to give out badges to checkout operators who achieved fast scan rates, which would have enabled workers to keep score of who was winning this game. However, the badges were not distributed by their managers, undermining the purpose of the game. In another instance, managers told workers that the number of pallets they put out was unimportant, as the amount of stock on each pallet varied. Thus, the basis of the game was again undermined, and the workers were deprived of a means of keeping score. Instead of focusing on the race to put out pallets and thereby breaking the work down into measurable goals that could have provided a form of relative satisfaction, the workers’ attention was refocused onto a constant stream of intense work.
The fact that managers were seemingly undermining a potential means by which exploitation could be obscured demonstrates that patterns of control are unlikely to be a conscious priority of management. This supports Paul Edwards’s view that control will often not be the consequence of deliberate managerial strategy but rather develops out of a complex, and often unconscious, interplay between agency and structure within the workplace.18
Earlier it was highlighted that the “learning games” that call center workers have been found to play are not very effective. Workers tended not to find them absorbing, for the only compulsion to play is the social pressure created through interaction with customers. Most workers thus refuse to continue playing and instead quit the work.19 At ConflictCo, however, there appeared to be little compulsion to even begin to play such learning games, as the workers did not seem to experience any intense social pressure to become competent in their interaction with customers. In fact, workers at ConflictCo did not struggle to be proficient in their customer interactions—though given that these interactions were of a fairly routine nature, there was little need for employees to work hard at becoming better at serving customers. Thus, there was no basis for learning-type games.
Without work games to occupy their minds, escapism and humor were central to workers’ lived experience of ConflictCo. Sociologist Huw Beynon documents escapism and humor as pertinent psychological coping methods.20 For those on the shop floor, this escapism was principally achieved through using headphones to listen to music—despite this being against company policy. John, a shopping cart collector at ConflictCo, discussed his coping method: “I just do my job. When I get to my job site I just put my headset on and listen to my radio on my phone, on my earphones, and get my job done.”
The importance of this escapism for productivity can be gleaned from the fact that this was one of the few rules that managers allowed workers to break. As Matthew (a worker) explained: “Even though it’s against policy and they [managers] say it, … they don’t over-enforce it, apart from when overnighters fall behind, [then] they usually come out and reinforce it and say ‘no more music’ and we’ll go a little while and then somebody will have the courage to play the music and then it just all gets going again.”
The unlucky workers whose job made listening to music through headphones impossible had to detach themselves from the reality of the workplace in other ways, one of which was to create their own music by singing or humming to themselves. Another way, as Beynon found at Ford and sociologist Donald Roy found in a garment factory, was by “having a laugh” through horseplay and lighthearted worker interaction.21 As Mary, a worker at ConflictCo, put it: “You just have to laugh, just laugh it off, because if you dwell on it, it just brings you down.”
In Burawoy’s account of work games, he argues that too much workplace uncertainty is a barrier to the development of games.22 Thus, it might be expected that the employment protection provided by the hegemonic apparatuses at PartnershipCo would create a more hospitable environment for the constitution of work games than at ConflictCo. However, here too, workers’ only tactic for making their situation more enjoyable was escapism from the daily grind of work. Listening to music was said to be an advantage of the job for online delivery drivers, but for in-store workers the principal manner in which escapism was achieved was, again, through “having a laugh” so as not to dwell on the everyday reality. As we saw in part 1, workers perceived there to be a lower level of surveillance at PartnershipCo than at ConflictCo, and workers at PartnershipCo were also less fearful of being fired for misconduct as long as they had the support of a union rep.
A consequence of this lower level of employment insecurity was that the workplace regime provided space for the pursuit of escapism through informal group formation and a degree of autonomy from officially sanctioned behavior through horseplay, messing around, and flirting with each other. Ackroyd and Thompson argue that having a laugh, horseplay, and banter in the workplace often revolve around the assertion of sexuality.23 In fact, among male workers at PartnershipCo, “having a laugh” could involve a quite predatory and aggressive affirmation of masculinity. Jeff provided an illustrative example:
So you know when you get a group of guys together and they are just going to start beating the crap out of each other. Well in my store you get a lot of messing around, you know, not on the shop floor but downstairs you’ll get, how can I put it, horseplay, I suppose … So there was this one guy, a guy called Dahn, who we, well, I should say for the record that I wasn’t involved, he got tied up with the sort of red ties that come on the cages, completely tied up, I mean totally tied up, literally hogtied [laughing], put in a cage, and left in a chiller for about half an hour. So yeah we were all stood outside and he’s going “let me out, let me out!”
Paul also explained how he and his coworkers would make time go faster by “messing around,” such as throwing boxes at each other. Paul was also certain that managers were not concerned by such antics as long as the work was completed on time.
Conversely, for female workers, messing around involved the assertion of femininity, which could have a more explicitly sexual dimension. Sara explained: “A lot of what I’m about to tell you, we should in theory get told off for but we don’t. So I’ve got Norman, so we have tickle fights … and it’s just hilarious and we have so much banter, people would say it is sexual harassment, but it’s not, it’s just banter, the fact that the guys know that I’m flirtatious and the rest of it, so they’ll say ‘alright darling’ and we’ll have hugs.”
Jeff and Sara had a clear understanding that management tolerated this messing around and “banter” because it improved the workers’ ability to carry out emotional labor when dealing with customers.
While these findings at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo parallel findings of escapism at Ford and among the garment workers studied by Roy, they differ from Pollert’s findings, drawn from female tobacco workers, for whom “having a laugh” did develop into a work game.24 This may have been due to the “laughing” at ConflictCo being an individual experience, while “having a laugh” at PartnershipCo did not tend to be a tense competition between worker and manager. Instead, it was nonrisky and inter-worker. In fact, workers avoided contact with managers so that they would be free to “have a laugh.” For example, Laura, a worker at PartnershipCo, explained the existence of the “managers’ table” in the canteen as being a consequence of workers wanting to “have a laugh,” which they could not do in the presence of managers: “The manager is a nice guy but I don’t want to eat bloody lunch with him, I want to have a laugh” (PartnershipCo, field notes).
It is not possible from the data available to infer the exact reason for the absence of absorbing work games at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. Perhaps the work activity was simply ill suited to the formation of such games compared to the semiskilled manufacturing and less routine service work previous researchers have studied. Alternatively, the specific workplace regimes may have been unconducive to work games for some reason. Maybe the managers were less interested in allowing work games to develop, or perhaps precarious scheduling generates too much uncertainty for enthralling work games to take hold. Certainly, as the previous chapter highlighted, workers were worried about what the present held for them due to the unpredictable nature of their schedules. Consequently, it is conceivable that they preferred to try to transcend their present reality through escapism, rather than focusing on the anxiety of their current situation by engaging in work games.
As Gabriella, a worker at ConflictCo, put it: “How are you gonna make your job more enjoyable … You are always worried, how many hours am I going to get this week, you know, can I afford to pay my bills … you always worry.”
Which raises the question: In the absence of work games, was exploitation simply left unobscured?
At ConflictCo, the continued loyalty of other workers was often explained figuratively through idioms of “domestic violence” and “Stockholm syndrome.” For example, Gabriella explained her coworkers’ loyalty as being due to the fact that “people are scared and are used to the abuse already. It is like when you are in a relationship, an abusive relationship; it is the same cycle. They get used to the abuse and they don’t want to say anything.”
When questioned further as to why employees at ConflictCo work so hard when they are treated so badly, Gabriella returned to this theme of workers becoming used to being treated in this way: “Why [do] we work so hard? Because we get used to the abuse, that’s why we cannot see it [the abuse] anymore.”
Another worker, Tim, also suggested that his coworkers’ loyalty was like domestic abuse because they blamed themselves for the abuse they faced: “They go ‘oh it’s my fault that I’m being pushed around,’ battered wife syndrome kind of thing.”
Rachel (another worker) also spoke of the psychological effects of workplace abuse: “You have to remember that ConflictCo has fifty years of treating their associates like this. You can’t take away [the psychological effects of] fifty years of mistreating their associates that quick, it takes a while.”25
Emma, a recent employee who was now working as a union organizer, elaborated further on the power created through abuse: “If you’re in an abusive relationship, a lot of people stay because they get used to it, and they still stay loyal to that one person who keeps knocking them down every day. That’s kind of the same thing as with ConflictCo. It might not be a personal relationship but it’s that exact thing, you get used to them knocking you around. It’s just a commonplace thing and you end up staying. You don’t think there is anything different, or you don’t know anything different.”
The references to domestic abuse should not be taken literally, of course, but instead understood as attempts by the informants to describe a situation that seemed paradoxical to them, one in which their coworkers seemed to have positive feelings toward their abusive employer. This idiom of an “abusive relationship” was applied specifically to the experience of precarious scheduling, and it is this element of abuse and how it can be obscured that we will now develop further.
Sociologist Ashley Mears has forcefully argued the need to go beyond work games and what she calls the “situational construction of consent,” and instead place even greater emphasis on the relational nature of control. Mears highlights the manner in which “meanings of work are also shaped through relationships and social ties beyond the accomplishment of work activities.”26 In particular, she draws on Marcel Mauss’s seminal work on gifts to demonstrate the powerful role of feelings of obligation in enabling exploitation. As discussed in the book’s introduction, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed Mauss’s argument further by demonstrating that the power relations underpinning gifts are, in fact, often misrecognized by both the giver and the receiver. For Bourdieu, the power of gifts lies not only in the obligation for reciprocation but in the inability of the less powerful party to reciprocate. Bourdieu’s concept of misrecognition provides a sophisticated account of how abuse can simultaneously produce consent. Bourdieu states that misrecognition is “the gentle, invisible form of violence, which is never recognized as such, and it is not so much undergone as chosen, the violence of credit, confidence, obligation, personal loyalty, hospitality, gifts, gratitude, piety—in short, all the virtues honored by the code of honor.”27
Bourdieu illustrates the process of misrecognition through the exchange of gifts among Kabyle peasants. He argues that gifts that cannot be reciprocated bind debtor to giver through moral obligations while shrouding the gifts as a gesture of generosity. This is not to say that there is a deceiver or a deceived but, rather, that there is a collective denial of the reality of exchange. For example, a master who gives his servants gifts is, Bourdieu contends, deceiving himself about his true motives just as much as he is deceiving his servants. In fact, misrecognition is even held to be beneficial to the dominated, as it enables them to perceive themselves not as subjugated and oppressed but rather as the lucky and honored recipients of gifts. As shall be demonstrated, schedule gifts aid control by providing a means by which the securing of control through flexible discipline is simultaneously translated into the obscuring of exploitation.
Chapter 4 demonstrated that manager-controlled flexible scheduling at PartnershipCo enabled the securing of control without recourse to standard despotic practices. Thus, a high level of 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 in operation at PartnershipCo—such as the developed disciplinary and grievance procedures policed by the union.
At ConflictCo, managers also had a discretionary capacity to improve workers’ schedules. Manager-controlled flexible scheduling, however, was not just a tool that managers could utilize as and when they needed in order to punish specific workers. Workers felt compelled to attempt to avoid and reduce the harmful consequences of precarious scheduling by going to see their manager and pleading with them in person to alter their schedule or provide more hours. Leonardo, a worker at ConflictCo, explained that if you did not complain to a manager then you did not get enough hours. A more detailed account of this common experience was provided by another ConflictCo worker, Joe: “Before they used to cut my hours but now I can go to a manager … There are times they’ve scheduled me for sixteen hours, and I went to her and she fixed them.”
Vincent, a ConflictCo worker, provides an illustrative example of the level of desperation this pleading could amount to: “I’m always constantly asking for a full-time position … I’ve told my store manager, ‘It’s literally getting hard for me to put food on my table and pay my bills. Can I get a full-time position?’ ”
As we have seen, precarious scheduling caused significant harm to workers. Moreover, having to beg managers for schedule gifts, in the form of more hours or alterations to schedules, acted to hide the nature of flexible scheduling as a mechanism of control. The requirement for workers to go to their manager and ask them directly for help personalized the scheduling experience, which otherwise would have been a remote and mechanical practice. Without this personalization, the scheduling experience would have consisted of little more than the workers collecting a printout of their schedule, which had been drawn up according to predictions of demand calculated a hundred miles away in the head office. When managers acceded to workers’ requests and accommodated their needs, it therefore appeared as a personal act of kindness.
As Gabriella explained: “It’s just temporary fixes, but then the person feels so grateful that the manager has given them the hours. But next week you have to worry again.”
This kindness, however, could not be repaid directly and thus had the potential to create an emotional debt, as Seb (another worker) noted: “Sure I have [felt grateful] … not [to] management in particular … but when a particular manager says, you know, ‘Sit down, let’s take a look at your schedule and see what we can do,’ then I’m grateful to that guy or gal.”
Moreover, any individual acts of managerial kindness could only ever be temporary fixes owing to the need to schedule workers flexibly to meet demand. Accordingly, the workers’ gratitude could be regenerated on a weekly basis.
Investigating the misrecognition of this process required more experiential and textured observation of interactions in the workplace, which was made possible through my participant observation as a worker at PartnershipCo. During my time working as a shelf stacker at the Mulling Point hypermarket, I observed that managers would encourage workers to beg them for additional hours, making vague promises that more hours were available or soon would be. For example, as documented in my field notes, one manager claimed: “ ‘I always have some overtime so let me know if you want any’—this was despite my entire work team being employed on less than nine hours a week and all desiring more hours and, in some cases, to be made full-time.”
Such claims understandably created an expectation among workers that more hours would be available to them. For example, one of my coworkers claimed that he had only taken the job based on the assumption that he would be getting more hours. Another poignant example is provided by Jackie, a worker I had met during our induction training two months previously. On my way into the store on my second to last day of working at PartnershipCo, I met Jackie, who was having a cigarette break. As I noted in my field diary:
[I] asked her whether she was getting many hours. She replied that she’d not since Christmas and that “it’s strange because you speak to the staff and they say their department is short but when you ask the manager they say there isn’t any at the moment but keep putting your name down for overtime. I’m just getting a few hours here and there.” I asked her what they’d said when she was first taken on and she replied that “originally they’d said I would get a full day on Sunday, and then my manager said a few weeks ago that it would only be three hours, but next Sunday I’ve not got any. So I don’t know what’s happening … my manager just keeps on saying ‘just carry on until February’ and then he’ll get his new budget from the store manager.”
Similar expectations were created at other stores, as Bryah, a union rep at a different store, explained: “The way they say it is that ‘we employ you for ten hours but you may get twenty-five hours a week’—you may—it may not always happen.”
In order to explore the effect of the capricious, unsettled environment created by these vague promises of more hours, it is instructive to compare my own experience with that of my closest work colleague. Rio would get the train to and from work with me, providing good opportunities for us to discuss work. Rio was a black man in his early twenties and from one of the most deprived areas of London. Rio did not share the university education of our manager, and before starting at PartnershipCo he had been unemployed for a year, forcing him to move back home with his mother. Despite my own best efforts not to work overly hard and to be considered an average worker, I was, nevertheless, a favorite. Favoritism manifested itself in the fact that, like other favorites, I was routinely offered additional hours while Rio was not. Rio was desperate for additional hours and had told our manager during his interview that the core hours on which he was hired were insufficient for him to make ends meet. In fact, he claimed to have explicitly told the manager not to take him on unless PartnershipCo could provide him with additional hours. At the same time, the manager offered me schedule gifts, offering me additional hours and allowing me to rearrange my schedule even when this broke company policy.
For my part, my personal commitment to not working hard was undermined by the realities of being a favorite in a workplace practicing manager-controlled flexible scheduling. To take one example: I was scheduled to work on both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve at a time when it was company policy that no one be granted leave on either of these days. This was a major problem, as I needed to travel on Christmas Eve to be with my family on Christmas Day. I had also booked a holiday over the New Year before being employed by PartnershipCo. However, when I brought these problems up with my manager, he casually replied that it was “no problem” to change my hours on Christmas Eve and to take New Year’s Eve completely off! Moreover, he appeared genuinely concerned by my predicament. When this manager then came to check on my progress on the work tasks (which he had personally set me), I felt guilt that I had not achieved what he had asked of me. I found myself feeling an emotional debt to him and a moral obligation to increase my work effort.
What this example demonstrates is the manner in which scheduling gifts obscure the role of precarious scheduling in securing control. I was not outraged by the general organization of the work, which meant that my coworkers and I should have so little control over our working time. Nor did I feel guilt or sympathy for the worker who would have to take my place on Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I felt gratitude to the manager and identified with his interests (the completion of the work tasks he oversaw). Thus, precarious scheduling is not only a mechanism that forces workers to accede to managers’ wishes; it also actively integrates workers into achieving managerial aims. It binds workers to work hard for their manager through a sense of gratitude and obligation to repay them for their “kindness.”
Even with a sociological understanding of the exploitative nature of labor processes and my commitment as a researcher not to work hard, the work no longer appeared to me as just paid labor, but rather as a moral obligation to my manager due to his acts of “kindness.” Under such conditions, employment is not experienced as simply the impersonal exchange of X money for Y labor, but rather relationally as the need to repay what appear to be managers’ acts of compassion, caring, and friendship. Manager-controlled flexible scheduling was thus a powerful yet subtle mechanism of control at both ConflictCo and PartnershipCo: securing control by extending arbitrary managerial power, and obscuring exploitation through misrecognition of workplace relations. Bourdieu found that the economic relations (gift exchange) of Kabyle peasants also obscured the domination of that very same economic system. Likewise, at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo, manager-controlled flexible scheduling not only enabled the securing of exploitation through discipline but simultaneously obscured this process.
The exchange of gifts in this way could be understood as a type of game, one that takes place over an extended period of time and that is hierarchical as opposed to the horizontal games identified by Burawoy and others.28 However, Burawoy argues that work games produce consent because participants focus on winning the game, rather than challenging the socially sanctioned rules and goals that constitute them.29 In contrast, when engaging in gift exchange, actors are not aware of any socially constructed rules and goals guiding their actions—beyond the expectation of reciprocation. Instead actors collectively misrecognize the creation and maintenance of social indebtedness as acts of kindness, gratitude, and reciprocation. This misrecognition makes the experience of gift exchange in the workplace quite different from the conscious playing of games. For example, workers at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo did not keep score of their schedule gifts, nor did receiving schedule gifts become an end in itself, beyond that of meeting material needs, in terms of achieving a high score so as to win the game.
The argument above does not, however, rest on an assumption that managers purposefully manipulate workers through scheduling gifts. They could just as well bestow these gifts out of genuine concern and a desire to help. In fact, Bourdieu argues that gift exchange requires that the dominators deceive themselves just as much as the dominated.30 Additionally, Bourdieu argues that misrecognition is particularly important in the absence of formal institutions that can maintain domination through integration and mobilization of bias. Likewise, the findings presented in this chapter support the importance of misrecognition via schedule gifts for maintaining control when hegemonic institutions are absent, partial, ineffective, or dysfunctional. However, the next chapter investigates the consequences of relying on this misrecognition when it is not concretely underpinned by institutions within the workplace. It demonstrates that this form of control is inherently unstable and susceptible to breakdown, and that it can itself be transformed into a source of injustice that may lead to resistance.
Focusing only on discipline and coercion entails a one-dimensional view of control. However, when a complex division of labor exists, surveillance, and thus discipline, become difficult and costly. Therefore, workplace control also tends to require legitimization and the creation of consent. This chapter has investigated the dynamics of ConflictCo and PartnershipCo and explored whether work games aid control in our exemplar twenty-first-century flexible workplaces. Following the insights of Burawoy, it was expected that this control would be obscured through work games, perhaps games involving time. However, uncertainty and fear of arbitrary managerial discipline via flexible scheduling may have presented barriers to the development of satisfying work games. Consequently, rather than focusing their attention on the uncontrollable suffering of the present through engaging in work games, workers preferred to disconnect from the present via escapism. This was the case at ConflictCo, which more closely resembled the despotic regimes that, Burawoy argues, provide too little certainty and protection for workers to engage in game playing. Surprisingly, though, it was also the case at PartnershipCo, which had many elements that Burawoy equates with the hegemonic regimes that, supposedly, gestate work games by providing stability and security. This is perhaps due to the fact that while workers at PartnershipCo experienced fairly high levels of employment security, there was, nevertheless, a great deal insecurity caused by the prevalence of precarious scheduling.
In any case, the focus on work games has been criticized and the need to place even greater emphasis on the relational nature of control has been stressed. In the absence of the hegemonic regimes identified by previous research as being critical to ensuring the maintenance of control, alternative means of workplace control were required at both PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. One such means—precarious scheduling—is not simply a disciplinary tool; it also constitutes an active and constant structuration of the workplace environment according to which all workers constantly strive to maintain the favor of managers. At PartnershipCo and ConflictCo, control was found to be aided by the misrecognition of schedule gifts entailed by flexible scheduling. Therefore, flexible scheduling does not simply constitute a disciplinary tool as suggested by previous studies; it also simultaneously obscures exploitation by enabling the giving and receiving of these gifts.
Work environments that entail high levels of manager-controlled flexible scheduling require workers to actively and constantly beg managers for their schedules to be altered and more hours granted. The acquiescence by managers to a particular worker’s needs is then misrecognized by the worker as an act of kindness that the worker is unable to reciprocate. The inability of workers to reciprocate the schedule gift binds them to the manager through an emotional debt and a sense of moral obligation, while shrouding the manager’s act as a gesture of generosity and kindness. In securing and simultaneously obscuring the workplace in this way, flexible scheduling provides a powerful mechanism of control in the on-demand economy. The following chapter investigates the stability of this control through a consideration of worker resistance at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo.