The final part of this book provides more detail on what it was like to work at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. In particular, chapter 5 focuses on the nature of the labor process at the two firms. Parts 2 and 3 looked at the cases separately and in succession. Doing so was useful so as to draw out the differences between the more progressive regime at PartnershipCo and the more reactionary one at ConflictCo. However, the common characteristics of the work mean that in part 3 they are best considered together, so as to capture the slight differences that were present. The work at both firms mainly entailed stocking shelves and serving customers, with the use of functional flexibility causing similar (high) levels of work intensity and stress as workers attempted to juggle the physical and emotional demands of their jobs.
As highlighted in the book’s introduction, previous research has demonstrated that workers can subvert intense labor processes such as these by creating work games that provide them with “relative satisfactions.” These work games have been argued to aid workplace control by obscuring exploitation through focusing workers’ attention on “winning” the game and thereby producing greater profits for their employer, rather than questioning the exploitative social relations in which they are located. However, at ConflictCo there was no evidence of work games operating in this way. This was not entirely unexpected, as the internal state of ConflictCo most closely resembled that of market despotism (although, as chapter 2 explains, a worker association had been able to win the workforce some respite from blatant acts of despotism). Workplace regime theory suggests that work games are a feature of hegemonic rather than market despotic regimes, as it is the former that provide workers with enough security and certainty to absorb themselves in work games without fear of management retaliation, unsustainable work intensification, or job loss.1
More surprisingly, work games were also absent at PartnershipCo, where the internal state included some institutions that resembled those found in hegemonic regimes and that provided workers with some protections and security. That work games were not important features of the regimes of ConflictCo and PartnershipCo might be explained by the high levels of schedule insecurity, making it impossible for workers to focus their attention on turning the labor process into an engaging game.
In the absence of work games at ConflictCo, workers instead turned to highly individualized acts of escapism through music, either listening to it on headphones or singing and humming to themselves, as well as attempting to laugh to themselves about the grim situation that confronted them. Escapism was also the prime way in which workers at PartnershipCo sought to relieve the daily grind of their work. But unlike at ConflictCo, where workers feared high levels of surveillance and harsh discipline, at PartneshipCo the greater security and protection afforded to workers by the internal state meant that they could engage in informal acts of collective escapism. This escapism in the form of “having a laugh” was usually based around the assertion of masculinity and femininity through horseplay, bullying, and flirtation.
While this escapism made working at the two firms more bearable, it did not obscure exploitation. In fact, it was the flexible discipline outlined in part 2 that again aided control by laying the basis for the misrecognition of exploitation at both ConflictCo and PartnershipCo. Managers at both firms had the ability to arbitrarily improve or worsen workers’ schedules in terms of both the quantity and quality of their work hours. This situation meant that it was imperative that workers both attempted to win their managers’ favor and plead with them for changes to their hours. When managers accommodated workers’ needs by providing them with different hours or alternative schedules, workers experienced it as an act of kindness that needed to be reciprocated through hard work. In this way the account of “schedule gifts” in this book develops on the sociological literature on gifts, in particular, the classic studies of Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu as well as recent research by Ashley Mears.2 Schedule gifts are shown to bind workers to managers, through the creation of social debt and the moral obligation to repay perceived acts of kindness by managers in helping workers improve their schedules. In this way, flexible scheduling leads exploitation to be misrecognized and experienced relationally in terms of gratitude and moral obligation toward those in positions of power.
Chapter 6 investigates the room available for resistance at ConflictCo and PartnershipCo. In doing so, it demonstrates that the control afforded by flexible scheduling was not complete and was also susceptible to breakdown. At PartnershipCo the insecurity of scheduling seemingly fueled union membership; however, given the hegemonic role of the union, discussed in chapter 1, this did not actually lead to collective resistance. Instead workers engaged in forms of what anthropologist James C. Scott has termed “ ‘hidden resistance.”3 While the potential for such acts to markedly challenge managerial control was limited, they do, nevertheless, highlight that the control enabled by precarious scheduling is not complete and that it could potentially fuel acts of collective resistance. In fact, ConflictCo provides an example of how precarious scheduling can fuel new forms of collective action at work.
At ConflictCo the high level of surveillance and fear of harsh managerial reprisals limited the kinds of hidden resistance that were common at PartnershipCo. Yet a small minority of workers had overcome their fear and been mobilized by a union-backed worker association. This worker association had been able to make use of social media in combination with direct action to successfully improve working conditions at ConflictCo. This success was despite the worker association’s relatively small number of members, the weak structural power of these workers, and the extreme hostility of ConflictCo toward worker organization. Therefore, this mobilization demonstrates how even in the face of the despotism entailed by precarious scheduling it is possible for workers in the twenty-first century to resist, and that the workplace regimes of this era may be unstable.