Читать книгу Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives - Madeleine Bunting - Страница 10

Time is only one part of the story. For many people it’s not so much the time they spend at work, as the effort that is required while they are there. They complain of being rushed off their feet, of always having more work to do than time to do it in, and of there never being enough people to get the job done. By the end of the day they’re exhausted: 36 per cent of us are too tired to do anything but slump on the sofa.¹ The nineties marked a significant increase in work intensification: workers are required to put in more effort and to work faster. This has been true throughout the economy, affecting most sectors of the labour market. If long hours have particularly hit white-collar Britain, work intensification has been across the board in both the public and the private sector, from school classroom to factory floor. Many of the cost savings attributed to contracting out public sector services have been achieved through work intensification: cleaners have more wards to clean, and catering assistants have more meals to prepare. The killer combination is when both the hours of the job and its intensity have increased, and that is usually the case: surveys show that the single biggest cause of long hours is having too big a workload.² ‘More for less’ is an old tool used by employers to reduce labour costs and improve competitive advantage, and the fight against it has historically been a large part of the trade union struggle, while the challenge to leverage up work effort has been a central preoccupation for management theorists. But the balance of power has tipped decisively against trade unions in Britain. They have lost members and lost battles, and with a few notable exceptions have failed to combat intensification.

One crude, anecdotal measure of job intensification is that the British used to be famous for what the French called ‘tea-breakism’. Ask managers about teabreaks now, and they laugh with incredulity at how quickly they have become a distant memory. Office workers sip lattes and espressos at their keyboards: perhaps it’s only possible to maintain their workrate with large and regular doses of caffeine. Such is the pace of work that over half the British workforce say they are too busy even to go to the loo.³

Economist Francis Green acknowledges that work intensity is notoriously difficult to measure – how can anyone assess how much someone is putting into their work? – but the best available measure is how people regard their own levels of effort.⁴ Drawing data from nationally representative samples,⁵ he compared responses to the statement ‘My job requires that I work very hard.’ In 1992, 32 per cent of workers ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement; by 1997 it had jumped to 40 per cent. Women were slightly more likely to agree than men, and the figures were higher in the public than in the private sector. Top of the intensification league was the education sector, where the proportion strongly agreeing rose by 14 per cent, to well over half of all teachers. These increases are dramatic.

Green also looked at workers’ sense of their ‘discretionary effort’ – how much they choose to put into the job, as opposed to what they feel is asked of them. Again, this showed an increase in the number replying ‘a lot’, from 68.4 per cent in 1992 to 71.8 per cent in 1997; women indicated a more dramatic increase, from 69.9 per cent to 75.9 per cent. Green then looked at European surveys which asked workers whether they had to work at high speeds, and how often they had to work to deadlines. Those reporting working at very high speed ‘all’ or ‘almost all’ of the time rose from 17 per cent to 25 per cent between 1991 and 1996. When Green used these figures to create an index of work intensity for western Europe he found that Britain outstripped all other European countries for the fastest rise in work intensity. Some countries, such as Germany, Denmark and Greece, showed almost no increase at all.

Green’s analysis is borne out by the European Working Conditions Surveys (EWCS), which asked respondents in all EU countries whether they had to work to speed or to tight deadlines.⁶ The general trend in most countries has been up, but the UK is well ahead. More recent findings from the same survey indicate that the rate of intensification may have eased in the late nineties – a sharp push in the first five years of the decade may have subsequently stabilised.⁷

Green’s analysis of the situation in Britain is echoed in the findings of the Job Insecurity and Work Intensification Report of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which asked whether employees had experienced an increase in the speed of work and the effort they put into their jobs over the previous five years (1992-97), and found that 64 per cent reported the former and 61 per cent the latter. This was a dramatic increase on a study a decade earlier, in 1986, which reported 55.6 per cent and 38.1 per cent respectively.⁸ Intensification began in manufacturing in the eighties, and accelerated in the nineties when it hit professionals and white-collar workers in particular, found the European Working Conditions Surveys for 1995-96 and 2000. The evidence of white-collar blues is underpinned by a 1999 survey for the Institute of Management which found that 69 per cent of its members reported an increased workload in the previous year.

Marx argued that there were three main characteristics of labour under capitalism: it was progressively deskilled as part of the mechanisation process; the surplus value accrued in production was appropriated by the owner of capital; and the latter sought always to reduce the ‘porosity’ of the working day. By porosity, Marx meant those moments of downtime which were interspersed in the routine of the day – the minutes spent waiting for supplies to arrive on the assembly line, for a machine to be mended or prepared, or for someone to arrive for a meeting. On the first characteristic Marx was plain wrong, but on the third he foresaw one of the central characteristics of the late-twentieth-century labour market – reducing porosity, or intensification, has become a crucial component of efficiency and performance. What managers have sought to do over the last two decades is to whittle away all ‘unproductive time’. Shifts have been rescheduled to eliminate breaks, and the organisation of work has been refined to ensure a steady flow of work.

One of the ways in which this last is achieved is through ‘functional flexibility’; employees have been trained to do more than one job, so that if a machine breaks down or there is a delay in stocks arriving, they can do something else and then turn back to the original job. Francis Green found a strong link between this kind of flexibility and agreement with the statement ‘My job requires that I work very hard.’ Companies instituted multi-tasking – giving someone several jobs to do, and leaving them to co-ordinate the different tasks in the most time-efficient way. The aim is to ensure a continuous workflow, so there will be no time wasted waiting at the employer’s expense. The conclusion of one study of six organisations was that the whole ‘wage-effort’ relationship is being restructured in several different ways, by reducing non-working time and by increasing the effort required.⁹ The study quotes a machine operative from one of the organisations it looked at: ‘We’re running the presses with four men, five if you’re lucky…stress and fatigue are beginning to creep in. Young men in their twenties are tired. I hear of people coming in at six and I say, what are you going to do with the afternoon? “I’m going to bed.”…There used to be a lot of activity, there used to be football and God knows what else after, they haven’t got the time.’

The study described the same process in the public sector, and quoted a local authority employee: ‘It’s run more like a business…whereas before you’d go in and it was like a more friendly basis. You’d go in and you’d do what was required of you and then [the patients] want the company, cup of tea, sit down and have a chat, whereas you can’t do that now because time’s money.’

Green cites two influential management techniques as important in speeding up workflow: total quality management and just-in-time working: ‘The imperative of total quality management is that many more individuals have to take continued responsibility for quality checks and improvements and so on. Rather than wait for someone to tell them what to do, they have to get on and do it.’ Just-in-time aims to perfect the logistical flow of materials so that whatever is needed for a task arrives – just in time.

In an attempt to understand the process of work intensification and how it came about, I went to an industrial estate on the outskirts of an old coalmining town in the Midlands. This is the home of Saltfillas – the name has been changed – a small family company. From the windows of its offices could be seen the old coalmining slagheaps and the even older canals which run on either side of the estate. It’s an area which has experienced the vicissitudes of industrial change for nearly three hundred years, and the legacy of some of those changes – the bankruptcies and the works closures – is evident in the vacant lots and boarded-up buildings in nearby towns.

The predominantly female workforce of Saltfillas have lived through some of this change, with husbands, fathers, brothers and neighbours who once worked down the pits or at the steelworks. The global economy has ripped out the economic entrails of these towns in the last two decades, and unemployment is above the national average. Survival is a precarious business. That’s certainly true of Saltfillas; it’s had few spare resources to buffer itself from the pace of globalisation – deregulation, increasing competition and the rapid expansion of European trade – so it’s some achievement for Dick and his father, who founded the business in the early sixties, that it’s still thriving on a modest but secure footing.

The reason I went to visit Saltfillas is not because they work long hours – on the contrary, the company instituted a 7 a.m.-3.30 p.m. shift pattern because the workforce wanted to get off early, and by 5 p.m. it’s empty bar a few evening-shift workers. They can’t afford to pay overtime, and they’ve even managed to stop a long tradition of management coming in on a Saturday morning by reorganising rotas. I went to Saltfillas because the company offered to explain to me how competition drives the intensification of work, how and why they have exacted more work from fewer people, and to give me some insight into why the workforce has gone along with it.

This is not bleeding-edge new economy, and this is not a cut-throat company trying to work its labour force into the ground; on the contrary, it’s an old-fashioned firm in many respects, which still holds to a sense of loyalty, and a relationship in which the management will treat employees fairly if they do a fair day’s work. Staff turnover is low, and Dick joked that he was buying gold watches for twenty-five years’ service in bulk this year.

Saltfillas started out packing salt, and now packs other dry products such as washing powder. It’s high-volume, low-margin packing. On the factory floor the noise is deafening, with the clatter of machinery which fills, labels and packs in a mesmerising Heath Robinson-style series of movements. The factory workers’ job is to keep the lines moving, sorting out any glitches, ensuring supplies are ready and removing the finished product. It’s ceaseless, repetitive hard work. A radio blares out over the noise of the machines, everyone is in hats and overalls and no jewellery is allowed, in order to meet exacting hygiene regulations.

Next door in the office, Tracey has been with the company since she started work at fifteen; in twenty-five years she’s risen from the factory floor to being production and quality control manager. She is responsible for making sure the company is always using the available labour to its full potential. It’s a constant, complex juggling act as she moves from factory floor to her computer terminal and back. There’s no doubt in her mind that the workforce have to work harder now than they did when she first started: ‘When I first started, we’d go on a line and after a couple of hours, we’d stop the line and all go off for a toilet break. Then we’d be back to work for a while before it was another break, and then the same thing happened in the afternoons. Between 8 and 4.35, we’d stop the lines two or three times on top of the two breaks we were allowed. Sometime in the early eighties, they offered us a bribe – a pay rise in return for stopping that.’

She reckons the toilet breaks were probably not much more than ten minutes or so – perhaps occasionally someone would have a quick cigarette at the same time. That added up to twenty to thirty minutes a day off for each employee. ‘No wonder they stopped us. We’ve had to get more efficient, and there’s some long-term employees who’ve been stuck in a routine who don’t like the change. But we talk to them individually and we try to be as honest as we can with them; sometimes you have to say, “If we don’t do it like this, we’ll lose the contract.” We do work harder. In recent years – about the last six – we’ve never had people with nothing to do, because we now have such a range of products. It’s always busy.’

Ed, a senior manager, explains how the ‘machines have to work all the time now, there is no quiet time’, and any cleaning or maintenance is done after hours. If someone needs to go to the toilet, other packers have to cover for them – the line is never turned off. Computers assist the speed-up of the flow of work to ensure the lines and packers are constantly being juggled to meet orders by the deadlines. The company has diversified into dozens of different products, so the process of aligning into a continuous stream of work the machines, packers, supplies, orders and deadlines is immensely complex. The essential prerequisite for such a system is that employees are ‘multi-skilled’, so they can work on different lines doing different jobs at different times.

‘The labour has to be more intensively managed so that people work more continuously. We’ve always had every packer trained on every line since 1980 – it’s much more flexible. We avoided job descriptions; perhaps if we’d had unions involved, we wouldn’t have had that kind of flexibility,’ says Ed. ‘Two years ago we explained to them that they would have jobs they hadn’t done in the past; we told them that “We can give you the pay rise, but that may mean cleaning sometimes.” We kept them informed all the time. When people leave the company, they’re not being replaced: their jobs are shared out between people, and that might mean new tasks for people, but they understand that. We’ve not recruited in three years. We tell them that the survival of this company depends on you, and that wins their co-operation. They saw a big company locally which went down – that wakes them up. They see it’s a very competitive environment.’

Dick chimes in enthusiastically: ‘There’s a big change in attitude from the seventies when they’d say, “I’m not doing that, it’s not my job.” They don’t say that now – probably because of the Thatcher years. The attitude now is that we’re all in it together. They see workers on the television saying they’ve done everything they could and yet their companies are going bust. We share much more information with the supervisors, and the pressure from customer complaints and machine breakdowns drips down the hierarchy. The supervisor knows that if we don’t get this order out, we’ll lose the business.’

The turn-round times have become much tighter as well. Just-in-time delivery ensures that no stocks are sitting around in warehouses (it’s a waste of money storing and buying products before they’re needed), so the whole system is always working on tight deadlines of a few days – as the petrol blockade of 2000 brought home so powerfully. An entire supermarket network can be a week away from running out of salt. ‘We used to say we’ll deliver an order in fourteen days, but now it can be expected in three. If they said it must be done in two days, we’ll do it. We try to negotiate, but they keep a record of our performance,’ said Dick.

Even with the most sophisticated planning, demand can still be unpredictable, leading to sudden intense periods of work: ‘There was a marinade powder and they put over £1 million into advertising it, and we went from an order of 5,000 cases to 30,000. We’d bought machines to cope with their predicted capacity, but the demand caught the manufacturers off guard and we were running around like headless chickens. If you can react quickly to unexpected demand, you can do very well.’

For small suppliers like Saltfillas, the relationship with their customers has been revolutionised. For a start, there are far fewer of them, and consolidation and concentration mean that the balance of power has shifted away from the supplier; supermarkets hold such a grip over them that they can pretty much dictate their terms, making or breaking a company on the strength of a few contracts. This is the sharpest contrast for Dick from the days when his father was negotiating with dozens of different co-operative societies. Now he has no relationship of any kind with the supermarket buyers. He’s lucky if he gets through to them on the phone. When a European company undercut him on a bid with a long-standing customer, he was told to match their price or lose the contract. He couldn’t afford not to, and the company packed the line at a loss until it could invest in more sophisticated machinery which enabled it to cut labour costs.

What I found at Saltfillas is a story familiar throughout UK manufacturing, of how increased competition coupled with de-industrialisation has enabled employers to push through, bit by bit, a process of work intensification. Management’s increased communication with workers reinforces the sense of the precariousness of a company’s survival in the global market. This awareness reconfigures older perceptions of the distinct and often conflicting interests of management and employees: the ‘We’re all in this together’ line has been amply used by management to exact higher levels of effort or flexibility. This is what labour economist Andrew Scott found in his study of three British factories in the early nineties: threats of closure, unemployment, of being uncompetitive mean that it ‘may be that the modern wage-effort bargain has become still more elastic, capable of being stretched well beyond the limits to which it was subject in the past.’¹⁰ Workers find it harder and harder to construct a credible case against this piecemeal encroachment on the pace and nature of their work. ‘You can’t buck the market,’ intoned Margaret Thatcher in the eighties, and her words still resonate on the factory floor.