This part of the book focuses on the allocation of labor at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. In doing so the findings highlight that the kinds of mechanisms synonymous with the internal labor markets of the hegemonic era were largely absent at both companies—there being little evidence of workers being shielded from the external labor market. For instance, neither firm made use of seniority rules to protect established workers from insecurity, there was little real job mobility, and pay was close to the legal minimum in the respective external labor markets. In fact, the relatively low pay of workers, compared to management, and the huge profits of both firms were sources of perceived injustice at both. As already highlighted in this book’s introduction, the shielding of workers from the external labor market has been argued by Michael Burawoy to be crucial for enabling hegemonic workplaces and the creation of consent. However, even at the more progressive PartnershipCo, we find little evidence that the existence of an internal labor market was central to the production of consent.
In the absence of the hegemonic effects of internal labor markets, part 2 instead investigates an element not considered by Burawoy—namely, working time.1 Despite the highly divergent political and economic contexts and the contrasting internal states of the two cases, both operate with high levels of temporal flexibility. In both cases this was achieved via manager-controlled flexible scheduling and was experienced by workers as damaging to work-life balance and as a source of precarity and insecurity. In fact, the experiences of precarious scheduling were remarkably similar, despite the existence at PartnershipCo of union-backed policies and procedures that were meant to result in flexible scheduling being a “two-way process.”
The high levels of precarious scheduling at both firms provided managers with a powerful mechanism by which they could arbitrarily discipline workers. The use of flexible working time in this way is termed “flexible discipline.” Managers at both firms could use their control of scheduling to punish specific workers by changing their hours so that their schedule clashed with family or social activities. Alternatively, managers could simply cut a worker’s hours so that these hourly paid workers could no longer make ends meet. The power of flexible discipline meant that control could be secured without recourse to traditionally despotic techniques.
Flexible discipline had other advantages for managers, in that it was impossible for workers to be certain that they were being punished or whether managers were genuinely responding to changing demand. At PartnershipCo this meant that control could be achieved “with a smile” and without the damage to the “psychological contract” (the unwritten expectations regarding employment) caused by threats of dismissal. At ConflictCo the inherent ambiguity and subtlety of flexible discipline were particularly useful for undermining the worker association, providing managers with a means of disciplining workers who became active in the worker association—one that was very hard to prove as being a form of retaliation. Other benefits for managers of this form of control were that it is less rigid than the binary of dismissing / not dismissing a worker and could be rescinded and modulated by providing more hours or predictability, making this a very flexible form of control.
Unsurprisingly, scheduling was perceived as operating according to favoritism, and, therefore, flexible discipline was not only a mechanism for the punishment of individual workers. It also operated as an active source of overall control in which workers generally tried to gain managers’ favor through increased productivity, so as to avoid being a victim of this form of discipline.