(source: cyclingweekly.co.uk via Ewen Speed)

On your hands and knees: your mate lines up the screws, as straight as can be, and you drive them right in. All the way. On any cyclist’s list of the things that matter, avoiding a puncture is up at the top.

Reference

‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’ in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 225–258

The first time I saw a pager, in 1994, I though it was a pretty clever device. You page me, I see your number, and I find a landline and give you a ring. It’s a very effective way of being contactable when you’re out and about but still on-call. It’s hard to believe, though, that given the ‘communications revolution’ of mobile telephones and wi-fi internet, that the pager is still the device of first resort when a doctor needs to be called to a patient’s bedside. And it’s not hard to believe that the pager isn’t that effective in getting through to the right person.

source: http://handihealth.me/2012/03/18/bleep-bleep-stone-age-technology-in-the-21st-century-nhs/

The handihealth account tells us of all the contingencies and uncertainties that might get in the way of this working well, from not being able to find a phone lines that’s free, to not knowing if you’ve got in touch with the right person. It’s stressful and it takes time in cases where speed really matters. It’s hard to imagine that the bleeper is the best technology to make the work happen. But it’s cheap to run, and it’s well embedded in working practices, so perhaps it’s stuck.

As Froud et al (2011: 6) comment, ‘Governments decide value for money by considering only price and quality on an individual purchase basis’, and by this reckoning, a bleeper’s pretty cost effective. This concern with upfront price frames all forms of economic action in the language of microeconomics — simple markets and individual buyers — and hence applies simplistic understandings of ‘value for money’ to very complex practices of providing care. Thinking about the unit price for individual purchase gets in the way of more subtle (but not so subtle as to be invisible to even a half-awake mind) thinking about what is worth spending money on to make care possible. (The outrage earlier this year at the headline cost of the Metropolitan Police’s use of the speaking clock (£35,000 a year!) is a good comparison. Personally, I’d rather not be the copper waiting to start the raid whose watch was a minute fast.

I remember some time ago watching a television programme which sent the boss back to the shopfloor. A ‘top’ manager in a major supermarket chain went to work on the till, and discovered just how fiddly it was to remove discount stickers in order to scan the barcode beneath. The sticker glue was later changed. I have a childish idea to remove first the secretarial support and then the mobiles of Andrew Lansley, David Nicholson, the heads of various private healthcare companies competing for a share of the NHS pie, and their managerial subordinates. Instead, each can have a pager and shared access to a landline to get some insight into the challenges of care in an old-tech world.

Reference

Froud, J., Johal, S., Law, J., Leaver, A. and Williams, K. (2011) ‘Knowing What To Do? How Not to Build Trains’. CRESC Research Report . Open University/University of Manchester.

Under the terms of the 2012 Act, ‘any qualified provider’ (AQP) can submit a tender to the local Clinical Commissioning Group to provide healthcare services. Since the act was passed in March, Serco, acting as AQP, have been awarded a £140 million contract to provide Community Services in Suffolk. Similarly, and without a trace of irony, Virgin Care will be providing Sexual Health Services in Milton Keynes. According to Unison, the Serco contract in Suffolk will result in 1000 staff being ‘TUPE’d’ from NHS contracts onto Serco contracts.

TUPE or Transfer of Undertakings [Protection of Employment] arrangements are nothing new. Ruane (2007) describes TUPE arrangements under New Labour PFI schemes, where many support services, such as hospital porters, previously provided by salaried NHS employees, came to be provided through private sector companies (and Serco has form here). Staff ended up performing exactly the same duties, but under different conditions of employment. For example, Ruane details how porters in Durham reported a £30-£40 per week shortfall in salary between TUPE and non-TUPE staff doing the same work. Between 2003 and 2005, and on the back of trade union mobilisation, agreement was reached over a public sector ‘two-tier code’. This code meant that any public sector employees who were TUPE’d to private sector organisations could not be offered a contract deemed to be ‘overall less favourable’ than their previous public sector contract (with the exception of pension provision). The two-tier code was implemented in healthcare through the ‘Agenda for Change and NHS Contractors Staff – a Joint Statement’, which was agreed in 2005.

On 13December 2010 the Cabinet Office withdrew the ‘two-tier’ code across all public sector service contracts, without discussion. It was replaced by six ‘Principles of Good Employment Practice’ These new principles are voluntary and have not been negotiated between government, employees, employers and trade unions as the two-tier code was. The requirement to avoid less favourable conditions is replaced by a commitment to ‘fair and reasonable terms and conditions’, such that;

Where a supplier employs new entrants that sit alongside former public sector workers, new entrants should have fair and reasonable pay, terms and conditions. Suppliers should consult with their recognised trade unions on the terms and conditions to be offered to new entrants.

The implications of this change, in light of the AQP legislation and the bun-fight that de-regulated NHS provision is quickly becoming, are stark and immediate. The NHS, as a collective social good, is constituted as much by its staff — by what it does for its staff and what it garners from its staff in return — as it is by a commitment to universal health care, free at the point of need. The latter isn’t possible without the former. Such is the strength of feeling for these principles of free access to healthcare, that attempts at their reform would be politically unsustainable. Staff are altogether a softer, more indirect and more politically sustainable target. The withdrawal of the two-tier code coupled to the opening up of healthcare to any qualified provider, (and the consequent privatisation and transfer of large numbers of NHS staff) is a far more immediate threat to the future of the NHS than the carve up of primary care that is currently dominating the debate. The implications of this privatisation of staff for the future of the NHS are far more invidious than people realise. There is a very clear danger that the NHS becomes nothing more than a brand, alongside Serco, Virgin Care and others. Once this happens, what becomes of the commitment to free universal healthcare as a collective social good? I would argue the situation becomes terminal.

Reference

Ruane, S. (2007) ‘Acts of distrust? Support workers experiences in PFI hospital schemes’, 75–92, in G. Mooney and A. Law (eds.) (2007) New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and resistance inside the welfare industry , Bristol: The Policy Press.

An obvious example of bullying is the bad boss: perhaps he makes you work late and takes credit for your work; perhaps she puts you down in front of your colleagues and blames you for mistakes which are not yours. But bullying is often not confined to this one-on-one relationship between unequals. Mobbing is the term in common use in Europe for behaviour in organisations where gangs of colleagues, with the de facto approval, and even support of bosses, pick on, demean, exclude and push out the colleague who is different in some way, and vulnerable for that difference.

The Unkindly Art

Kenneth Westhues (2006) describes the process of The Unkindly Art of Mobbing as initially a “nonviolent, polite, sophisticated” kind of action in “ostensibly rational workplaces”, which begins by wearing “the target down emotionally by shunning, gossip, ridicule, bureaucratic hassles, and withholding of deserved rewards….If the target refuses to leave or acquiesce, the mobbing may escalate to a formal outburst of aggression. Mobbers seize upon a critical incident, some real or imagined misbehavior that they claim is proof of the target’s unworthiness”.

There’s been extensive research into this behaviour in hospitals, universities and elsewhere. This idea of the group opposing the one, labelling them as wrong and making them feel their difference is troubling. Want to read more about mobbing? Click here.

 In Precarious Times

Westhues’ description of mobbing presumes work operates within a bounded organisation. But a deep understanding of how mobbing comes about needs a broader understanding of economic activity than this. Noelle Molé (2012) locates her analysis of mobbing in a specific labour market context, an Italy remarkable for the increasing precarity of its workforce. Molé tells how precariousness — the uncertainty of work, the impossibility of relying on the idea of a stable job — frames mobbing. Workers who understand already that they are disposable, and in competition with each other, exclude others through “suspicion, doubt and distrust” (2012: 49), making sense of their own experiences so that “ambivalent, confusing, or disjointed work relationships become construed as mobbing” (2012: 37).

I have heard many stories of mobbing, though I did not know the name. There was the whispering campaigns that ran through an organisation sanctioned by managers against the worker who tried to uphold standards; the sanctimonious regrets of the former colleague who said one thing to the mob and another to the target; the media reports about those who compile and use blacklists of Trade Union activists: all mobbing.

Don’t Be a Minion

In Britain, we’ve been seeing another kind of mobbing that is sanctioned and enacted by the powerful. Rather than the increasing precarity employment, as in the Italian case, it is increasing unemployment and the ostensible welfare burden this generates that produces mobbing. The individuals being mobbed are not in secure or insecure work, but are judged – and mobbed — for their failure to work, which is reinterpreted as a personal failure. They are deemed unworthy of dignity for being outside work, because it’s their own fault if they are, they’ve simply not made themselves sufficiently employable. These are the unemployed (read lazy scroungers), the disabled (read benefit scroungers) and the young NEETS (read feral youth). In media reports and government policies around workfare, we see the privileged in-work minions ganging up on others to squawk and tweet their disgust. Why should that bloke with MS not be in work, he’s been labelled fit according to the criteria of a generic questionnaire administered by a medically untrained private sector official?

Mobbing is a good term for this kind of behaviour, though it is not a strictly ‘correct’ application of the concept. It’s a good because what happens in work is not entirely separable from what happens outside. The instability of economic systems including the labour market condition behaviour, so that — in this case — the fears and anxieties of those who have work, and must hold on to it become easily translated into opprobrium for those who are not in work. You may say “what else can we do? We are in an Economic Crisis. There is no alternative”. And I would answer, “do not give me your ‘infernal alternatives’”, because I agree with Stengers and Pignarre, that “The ‘we have to’ to which minions adhere designates something of the order of the vindication of a paralysis” (2011: 34). The state is not at fault, corporations are not at fault, economic difficulties are the responsibility of individuals and there is nothing else that can be done. This gives succour to the private organisations implementing government policy to reduce the benefits bill, by any means possible, by carrying on mobbing: “you could work. You just don’t want to”. But as all schoolchildren are now taught – and it’s a lesson that adults seem to have forgotten — it’s just not right to bully people, even if they are different to you. Think, think properly of some alternatives.

References

1. Molé, N (2012) Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy: Mobbing, Well-being, and the Workplace. Indiana University Press.
2. Pignarre, P and Stengers, I (2011 [2005]) Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. trans Goffey, A. Palgrave Macmillan.
3. Westhues, K (2006) ‘The Unkindly Art of Mobbing’ Academic Matters: the Journal of Higher Education, OCUFA, Fall 2006, pp. 18–19.

The London winebar has its menus handwritten, it’s a form of distinction don’t you know.

The writing’s a different size, and is made with different material to that used on adverts and pub menus. Liquid chalk pens are easy to use, it’s the writing on a vertical surface that’s hard.

My favourites are the make-do notices. In, Out, and we’re not here.

I walked past here a while ago, and amused myself — if not my companion — by pretending that whoever lived at this house was a very active user of the telephone.

This was just a weak joke on my part. These are to be unwrapped and delivered, and someone was going to deliver them. Are they safe outside? Well, no-one’s going to steal something that they’re about to be given for free, are they? And it probably wont rain.

I didn’t meet the person who pushed one through my letterbox that week. But a day or so later, I saw the fruits of their work elsewhere in the neighbourhood, neatly propped up, too big for the letterbox.

Ref­er­ences

1. Stark, D. (2009) The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life Princeton University Press.

Boredom, one of the ‘minor’ and ‘non-cathartic’ Ugly Feelings that fascinate Sianne Ngai (2005), is the lot of the service sector worker. Whether bored by the repetition of script — of which ‘have a nice day’ is the most clichéd, and ‘who’s next please?’ the most common — or bored by the absence of stimulation, boredom is an ordinary state for many.

In small outlets, without a brand-driven manager pumping inspiration into the atmosphere, there is one nice way to respond. Accept the silence, and steal 40 winks.

References

1. Ngai, S. (2005) Ugly Feelings Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press. Cam­bridge, Mass. and London.

“the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons.”

Priestley, 1984 [1934]: 375

These factory girls were an object of concern and scrutiny, troubling the established categories of class with their outspoken, performed femininity. A new, light, industrial labour force destabilised the established understandings of gender and class. The Bata factory in East Tilbury was staffed, in part, by this kind of woman: making shoes in order to pay for new shoes and handbags and lipsticks. And to keep their families: women’s work is not all about pin money and frivolity, J. B..

There are, or have been, Bata factories all over the world, making shoes for Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, as well as the Czechs. Haresh Khanna, the shoemaker-suitor of Lata Mehra in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy has Bata at the top of his list of preferred employers “I’ve been trying Bata and James Hawley and Praha and Flex and Cooper Allen” (2003: 620). Haresh eventually negotiates his way to taking a supervisor’s position with the efficient Czechs, and stands out from fellow Indian employees by moving into the compound with the ‘Prahamen’ in ‘Prahapore’, pseudonyms for the real Batanagar. In 1932, Bata arrived in East Tilbury, UK (and in the 1940s in Maryport, Cumbria), down at the bottom end of the Essex coast, the dirty part, near where the Thames spews out.

Bata built a new, modern factory, and a new, modern town around it. It brought Czech managers, men, and their families from HQ in Zlin, and recruited local women and men to work the production lines. East European migration isn’t such a new thing. The company wanted a productive workforce, and a productive workforce must be happy. Neat and modern boxes for living in were built, along with leisure facilities – including a swimming pool – a hotel, a bar a grocers and a post office, as in Zlin. Everything you might need, designed for the future.

There are echoes of those nineteenth century paternalists, Cadbury, Salt and Lever, and their company towns, Bournville, Saltaire and Port Sunlight. But with a difference that reflects the mid twentieth century’s “second spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007), where the gambling of the bourgeois entrepreneur gave way to mass production, mass consumption and massive organisation. Management understanding of the benefits of rationality and planning mark the building of the Bata factories and company towns. And what felt like institutional benevolence for those in charge seemed to have a sound footing in science and logic.

The second spirit drew on techniques of scientific management, developed by F W Taylor, and the Gilbreths, amongst others. Workers were measured and assessed to design productivity improvements through rationalising work activity, or replacing human with machine. The production line, with work divided into discrete tasks, is one legacy of this. However, as Eva Illouz argues, rationality was not all-conquering. The new sciences of the emotions, psychology in particular, gave rise to techniques of emotional capitalism. Elton Mayo for example brought the techniques and presumptions of therapy into management. The good manager would listen to his workers, would pay attention to how they felt (Illouz, 2007: 13–15). Bata had vision and ideals. “Friends and fellow workers” said founder Thomas Bata in one of his Mayday speeches…the contemporary equivalent is ‘we’re all in this together’.

So the difference between Saltaire and East Tilbury is not merely in the contrast between brick houses and a Yorkshire stone factory on the one hand, and the square white boxes of East Tilbury’s working and living spaces, but in the understandings of production, work and life that were presumed. Salt’s employees worshipped in the church he built, and it’s not certain whether god or Salt seemed the most powerful. Bata’s employees were freer, to swim in the pool, and to send their children to scout groups. Forward looking international companies in the 1930s managed with science, offering rationalised work and sensible leisure, rather than direct command and control. Scientific management met emotional capitalism. “Work together, live separately” was one of the Bata family slogans, but living in the company town wasn’t such a separation.

East Tilbury Bata was the temporary HQ of the operation during the second world war, and it made boots for soldiers for this time. Production for the domestic market resumed after the war, and generations of Essex girls and boys worked there. Production continued in East Tilbury until 2005, when the factory was closed (Maryport had gone in the 1980s). Now only one of the twenty Bata ‘production units’ are in Europe (8 in Asia-Pacific, 7 in Africa and 4 in Latin America, see www.bata.com. So, like other company towns founded in era of the ‘third England’, the factory building is decaying and some of the houses – still lived in – are starting to bear witness to the long term unemployment or underemployment that can mean a paint job is out of the question. Of Essex’s modernist legacy, these places of work have come off worse than the genteel, expensive houses of Frinton, or the curved splendour of the Labworth Cafe, Canvey Island (Rose, 2012).

Bataville: we are not afraid of the future is an documentary made of an art project by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope around 2004, just as East Tilbury Bata was on its last legs. Former workers from Maryport and East Tilbury, and a group of ‘others’, travelled by coach through Europe to Zlin, the birthplace of Bata (now based in Bermuda…how times change). They stop in the Netherlands Bata, to see how robots replaced people, and then onto ‘Bataville’ to have a look round.

In the Netherlands, some of the passengers were tearful. These machines, “wonderful to watch”, have replaced people, people who had skills, who prided themselves that they could go “right down the whole shoe”, not just stick on the sole. And of course,” you can’t have a conversation with a robot.” So despite the pace of the line, where a shoe would pass you every 6 seconds and you had to do your operation on it, there was something that felt good in the work.

I liked this film. I liked the planning the artists had done to get the groups of strangers to talk to each other by asking each to provide some entertainment for the long coach. Some told stories about their working lives, now over, others played games or got everyone to make something, and some talked about the things they loved. I liked one of the artists talking about her worries that the people they took on the bus were left behind in plans for regeneration of post-industrial areas like East Tilbury.

The world we live in is one where production is subcontracted by branded firms, one where cheap goods are made by low paid workers, and where all kinds of footloose manufacturing industries leave unemployment behind. We see in Bataville the long historical roots of how the local is captured by the global. Bata might still be the company that counts in Zlin, but its experiments in work-life omnipotence in the UK didn’t hold out against individualised globalised capitalism. The ongoing ruination is not beautiful decay, but an emblem of post-industrial Essex, where the only jobs left for lipsticked would-be stars are not those of making something, but those of selling something.

This is a revised version of a talk I gave to introduce a screening of Bata-ville, at Manchester Metropolitan University on 26th January 2012. The event was organised by Morag Rose, on behalf of The LRM and the Manchester Modernist Society, in conjunction with Manchester Metropolitan University. Thanks to all involved, especially Morag.

References

1. (2006) Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future A Somewhere project by Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, developed by Commissions East.
2. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
3. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, London.
4. Priestley, J. B. (1984[1934]) English Journey, Penguin Books.
5. Rose, M (2012) ‘The Modernists’ Guide to Essex’, The Modernist, issue 3.
6. Seth, V (2003 [1993]) A Suitable Boy. Phoenix Books, London.

George Perec’s The Art and Craft of Approaching your Head of Department to Submit A RequestFor A Raise tells the tale of a man’s decision and indecision as he worries and wonders and wanders around his office looking for the right time and the right way to ask Mr X for a pay raise. He visits Ms Wye at times. He pays attention to what was on the cafeteria menu. He hopes Mr X’s daughters are well and don’t have measles. He circumperambulates the office waiting for the right moment. This comes at “the two hundred and fifty-fifth bid” (2011:79) and it isn’t an instant success.

What I love about this piece is how all those moments of uncertainty that make up organisational life, all the things that go through your mind when you’re at work but not working, the posturing and the wondering and the positioning are brought into a formula of no/yes, 0/1, recursion and slight development. The book’s about the systems that lie within the messiness of living and working. It is prefaced and inspired by a flowchart illustrating computerised decision making produced by Perec’s fellow Oulipian, Jacques Perriaud. Perec makes ‘real’ the grey media of the flowchart adding the uncertainties, false steps and coincidences that make up a working life. Almost real: it’s a story with just one full stop.

Play the game yourself theartofaskingyourbossforaraise.com

Reference

1. Perec, G (2011) The Art and Craft of Approaching your Head of Department to Submit A Request For A Raise, trans David Bellos. London: Vintage Books.