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.

It used to be that the newspaper report would say “The police were tipped off about the whereabouts of the gold bullion”. And in Evelyn Waugh’s, Scoop, that sort-of journalist William Boot, who hoped to go to Ishmaelia as a spy but ended up being sent as a journalist, finds that “Now he had something under his hat; a tip-off straight from headquarters, news of high international importance” (Waugh, 2003: 101), Boot might have found a red under the bed.

Tip-offs make the world go round; they are a flow of secret knowledge. Imagine this as a tip-off story: the police tip-off a bunch of journalists about the coming arrest of an ex-journalist for possibly having hacked a phone to get a tip-off to write a scoop. The police employ an ex-journalist who hacked a phone for a tip-off in order to better manage their public presence and this ex-journalist is mates with another ex-journalist who has the ear of the PM. The police know the journalists who know the politicians who know the police. They’re tipping-off to their hearts content, from behind the smokescreens of public relations who keep on saying no-one knows about this tip-off circle.

2. Strategic Ignorance

Murdoch, R., Murdoch J. and Brooks, R. appear before a Select Committee of elected MPs to explain phone hacking. The Chairman and CEO of NewsCorp, the Chief Executive of Newscorp and the Chief Executive of News International and former newspaper editor know nothing now and knew less then. They’re shocked and horrified, but they deny. They employing “strategic ignorance”, Linsey McGoey’s compelling phrase to describe the

“feigning of ignorance — whether deliberately or unconsciously, collectively or individually [which] answers the twin demands of appearing transparent while wielding control over the very information one has an interest in concealing.” (McGoey, 2007: 216–7)

There’s no unequivocal bliss to be had in ignorance though: responses on twitter either mock or are horrified by the vacuum of control implied by the NewsCorp/NewsInternational ignorance position.

3. The Art of Asking Questions

We’re used to interviews now. We’ve all been interviewed: by our future bosses, by our GPs, some of us by the police, and some of us by social scientists (see Mike Savage (2010) for a discussion of how respondents of early interview-based research projects seemed flattered to be asked to give their views). We’re used now to having our views and experience sought out, and there’s no doubt that Yates, Stephenson, Murdoch, Murdoch and Brooks interviewed in Select Committees yesterday have been questioned before.
Fewer of us have experience of asking questions, and not all question-askers are skilled – however many episodes of tv shows about sharp lawyers we might watch. Tom Watson MP and his short, sharp questions based on detailed preparation gave a masterclass in expert interviewing, of pushing the respondent towards revelation. Louise Mensch MP (for example) gave us words, lots of words, assertion and opinion: a grandstanding questioner doesn’t produce excitement .

References

1. McGoey, Linsey(2007)‘On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy’, Economy and Society,36:2,212 — 235.
2. Mike Savage (2010) Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method Oxford, Clarendon.
3. Waugh, Evelyn (2003 [1938]) Scoop</> Penguin.

He left school at 16. Left before he was thrown out, that’s how it felt. Out, and straight to the dole office. Twenty years earlier and he’d have gone up to the shipyards, with his Dad. Twenty years after and it’d be the call centres, where his sister is now. But it was 1992, and there wasn’t much left. Part of the Toon Army at the weekend, but not much else to keep him up there.

Army catering corps was the route out: better than daytime telly and sitting keeping Ma company. And it’s a skill that lasts, is cheffing. And army discipline isn’t too bad: he can keep things tidy, he can get on with the lads, he’s got something to step up to. The Friday nights, the were wild though: Eez are good, a bit of whizz, whatever he can get his hands on. Not too many fights, though always a chance of one if he fancies it. Got out as soon as he could, mind, cheffing in a pub. Like I said, it’s a skill that lasts. There’s no saluting any more, but he still keeps his clothes nicely ironed.

Cardiff, or nearby

A strict family, they were. God and Wales, family and farm. He was put to work at 8, they all were. He’s the 4th of 6, and he’s the black sheep. He rode the pony to round up the cows, but he didn’t get to drive the tractor. Didn’t get to have a kickaround on a Sunday. Left home at 16; he’s the only one to get out of the farm, out of the country, out of the family.

He went to play trombone in an army band. In for 22 years now, and not sure how much longer he’s got, with the cuts coming and him being years older than the rest. He’s not much to say to them anyway. What’s next though? A 6 week retraining course in plumbing? Making his way for himself. No one to tell him what’s what, or what to do.

Kerry was a careers advisor in a career she hated. She took redundancy and spent her pay-out ‘upskilling’, taking a vocational MA, which she thought would increase her chance of a job in the culture industries. She did what is supposed to be right: she aspired to higher qualifications, and she aspired to fulfilling work. She did well on the course. And she learned that what would make the difference to her chances of good, exciting work wasn’t the quality of her work, it was the quality of her network.

Unemployed since the end of the course, Kerry has just found the most temporary of jobs: as a “Peak Relief Assistant” at a local library. She provides holiday and sickness cover for full time workers. On a temporary contract, her working hours are flexible and contingent (on their being holiday and sickness) and her job content is unpredictable. Further, the continued existence of her job is dependent on structural changes to the public sector: in the aftermath of public sector spending cuts, two pincer moves might stymie Kerry’s chances of ‘good’ employment: firstly hers, the most precarious of jobs is easiest to cut, and secondly ‘efficiency savings’ will render more jobs ‘flexible’ so her chance of locating stable employment, and a stable life, will lessen. Kerry experiences of both sides of precarity: the precarity of networked life in the culture industries (Gill and Pratt, 2008), and the precarity of temporary, flexiblised service work (McDowell, et al, 2009). She scrapes an unpredictable living.

Cuts, rhetorical shifts, changing social welfare and the drive to ever more competition are producing a hyper-precarious labour market. This labour market has precarious employment relationships, precarious forms of work (what Barbier (2008) calls ‘jobs without status’), high and rising unemployment, and attacks on already undependable, and moralised, mechanisms of social support. It’s no way to make a living.

References

1. Barbier, J C (2008) ‘There is more to Job Quality that ‘Precariousness’: a Comparative Epistemological Analysis of the ‘Flexibility and Security’ Debate in Europe’. In Flexibility and Employment Security in Europe: Labour Markets in Transition. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
2. Gill, R. and Pratt, A.C. (2008). ‘In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work.’ Theory, Culture and Society Annual Review 25(7–8):1–30.
3. McDowell, L., Batnitzky, A. and Dyer, S (2009) ‘Precarious Work and Economic Migration: Emerging Immigrant Divisions of Labour in Greater London’s Service Sector’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (1) March 3–25 .

The Start of the Day

Celia Lury defines the brand as “the object or medium for the exchange of information between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’” (2004: 74). Retail workers are configured as extensions of their employer’s brand values, through the aesthetic labour they do and the sorts of customer service they are expected to offer (Pettinger, 2004). Brands produced by marketing specialists through analysis of the consumer market are presented back to the customer not merely through logos, the arrangement of the shop and such like, but also through the bodies of employees, whose consumption practices reflect the brand’s idealised consumer.

Branded workers embody the exchange of information Lury talks about; they are simultaneously producer and object; their working lives are always of the brand. The personal branding industry goes beyond this, objectifying the worker as brand and so collapsing the person to the object — as in the current election when we’re no longer voting for a party, or a local MP, but for Brown, Clegg or Cameron.

Some people might quite like being the brand. Mike Allen, author of Washington insider dealing, agenda setting  gossip sheet Playbook exemplifies a man who seems to delight in being reduced to a brand; cagey about his history and apparently living without a private life, Allen is always on and always making news. It’s an alarming vision for other journalists if this is what they are to aspire to: not sleeping, being in touch, at work all the time. Work becomes all-consuming.

What does this mean for the consumer? The consumer is not neutral recipient of the brand, but qualifies the market too through their attachment to objects (Ilmonen, 2004; Pettinger, 2008). Retail consumers don’t passively accept brand stories. Mike Allen’s consumers are people like him, politicos who need to be in the know, even ahead of the game for their own work. They’re always on too, they can’t be behind the times. But most of us consume journalism more casually (one of the nowaytomakealiving team prefers to read the week’s newspapers in reverse chronological order; the other couldn’t do this, but does do a month’s worth of New Statesmans at a time).  How do we experience branded journalism?

I’m a Guardian reader, of course. My parents get the Telegraph though, and when I’m visiting them I look at it with gritted teeth. Whilst I think I’d very happily go to the pub with some of the people who write for the Guardian, I suspect I’d never give the time of day to a Telegraph journalist. In my naive understanding of how recruitment happens, I reckon the Guardian must handpick its staff according to whether they’re good guys. But then it turns out that the author of how to cope with a Tory government is also writing for the Telegraph’s banker’s wives’ shopping guide Stella. So how do I make sense of this? For me the Guardian reader, the Williams’ personal brand is conditioned by her location in the Guardian and is subverted when it appears in the Telegraph. Brand advisors say that trust is the key reason to have a brand, but my readerly trust is easily attacked by the nature of the individualised freelance media industry that means my Guardian journalists publish elsewhere. The branded worker is vulnerable to consumer rejection as well as to a mode of organising work as though it was the only thing that mattered in life.

References

1. Boltanski, L. and Chi­apello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Cap­it­al­ism. Verso, Lon­don, trans Gregory Elliot.
2. Du Gay, P. (1996) Con­sump­tion and Iden­tity at Work. Lon­don: Sage.
3. Lury, C. (2004) Brands: the logos of the global economy. Abingdon: Routledge.
4. Ilmonen, K. (2004) ‘The use of and commitment to goods’, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.27–50.
5. Pet­tinger, L. (2008) ‘Devel­op­ing aes­thetic labour: the import­ance of con­sump­tion’. Inter­na­tional Journal of Work, Organ­isa­tion and Emo­tions. 2 (4): 324–343.
6. Pet­tinger, L. (2004) ‘Branded stores, branded work­ers: ser­vice work and aes­thetic labour in fash­ion retail.’ Con­sump­tion, Mar­kets and Cul­ture 7(2): 165–84.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/844/feed 1 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:00:12 +0000 Scott Taylor http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=815 Researching women and work can be really puzzling. There is a series of things I genuinely don’t understand: how it feels to earn your living in a workplace where you are the only woman or in a small minority; what it’s like frequently finding yourself the only person of your sex in workplace contexts; the emotions generated by spending lots of time in ‘between men’ cultures, where conversations tend to focus on masculine activities or are conducted according to masculine norms. In doing academic work I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of women and work, by making sex, gender, sexuality, and gendered inequality part of students’ lives and understandings through my teaching, along with doing some research into why women leave prestigious professions like law to go into more satisfying work[1]. More recently, whenever possible, I’ve been making small changes and differences in my own workplace and working practice (but not through positive discrimination, dear me no, that would be illegal in the UK). But it doesn’t seem to make much difference, academic work… imagine that… or anything I do in my own working context, business schools… wonder why…

I think I started to understand women and work a little better when in 2004 I went to visit the Women’s Library in east London with my partner – it’s in a lovely building in Old Castle St, E1 (a converted wash-house, I’ve just found out) in a backstreet within sight and sound of the City, but definitely not on the main drag. A location that seems unpleasantly appropriate, given the cultural hostility to women in the UK financial industries – reading Linda McDowell’s Capital Culture is one of the most disturbing introductions to gendered discrimination or inequality in that milieu. All business school students should read it… anyway, I like that the library is within reach of everyone working in the Gherkin and the other various glass and steel phallic symbols around there.

Being in the library is a lovely sensory experience – quiet, calm, pleasant. (I’m thinking here ‘the way libraries used to be’ but that makes me sound old and grumpy.) In any event, a very nice place for thinking. The impression from reading pieces on this website is that academics interested in the experience of work never switch off their brains — Dawn Lyon in a B&B quizzing an innocent hotel inspector about his work, Lynne Pettinger getting lost and starting to think about work and sound,Tim Strangleman walking around galleries thinking about organizational death. The experience I had in the library that day was similar.

The exhibition was a corker — called Office Politics: Women in the Workplace 1860–2004, it was a brilliantly put together mixture of furniture (with desks designed specifically to ensure women’s modesty and protect men’s marriages – as an antidote, this is good fun: http://www.linux.otherspace.co.uk/officepolitics/), antique office machinery, clothes, self-help books, all sorts of stuff to position women in relation to work, organization, men. So much stuff I didn’t know about. And also, a little paper timeline with key events marked over the 150 year period. One event and date stood out for me – 1961, Barclays removes the marriage bar.

You’ve probably heard of the marriage bar, but I hadn’t. Turns out there used to be a formal rule in lots of organizations that women had to leave on getting married. No question, no debate, no exceptions — marry and you have to go. And the year when the board of Barclays decided this wasn’t really a good idea — 1961 – just 2 years before my mum got married, not long before I was born. Well within living memory. In some organizations you could come back as a temporary employee without any benefits or security (‘Thank you sir!’), but for most the bar was a barrier that couldn’t be jumped or worked around. The Foreign Office was especially reluctant to remove it, waiting until the Sex Discrimination Act in the early 1970s sort of outlawed its implementation. Hmm.

So, marry and go do some domestic and reproductive labour, or stay single and you can stay in your job. With a colleague from Exeter, Emma Jeanes, I started to do some digging in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, an archive that’s been called a ‘structure of feeling’ rather than a systematic dataset. One diary lodged there, written between 1938 and 1944, tells a wonderful story of a woman working in the civil service. She fell in love with a married man, became pregnant, and told her boss – who promptly asked for her resignation under the marriage bar rules. This woman, who must have been very sparky, refused, on the reasonable basis that she wasn’t married but pregnant, and there was no rule about pregnant women having to leave. Rational argument for a bureaucratic setting! She kept her job, gave birth to twins, and continued to work for the Civil Service, by all accounts doing a very good job (in both spheres of life, work and family – her children are currently editing her diaries for publication, when they can find time — they’re both senior academics, at Imperial College and Oxford). Another diarist, who stayed single and therefore kept her job, was brave enough to call herself a ‘Feminist’ (with a capital F) in her workplace in 1940s Glasgow. (Weirdly, this diarist lived at the top of the hill my mother was born at the bottom of – strange feeling to read her diary, as she describes sitting on the bus going past my granny’s house.) I really like this woman, from reading her diary, because she prods her colleagues all the time about their views on women and work – making trouble, causing conflict, challenging, then writing it all up. She would have made a good academic or researcher. Her brother did, from what she says – he worked at Glasgow University, first in the engineering faculty, then as an industrial psychologist of all things. Whereas his sister seems to have spent her working life as a clerk, writing wonderful diaries and being a Feminist. 

We’re not entirely sure where this research is heading, but it does feel like it’s taking us into interesting areas empirically and theoretically. We’re finding that women writing about their experience of work responded to the marriage bar in very different ways. Some argued for it, telling workmates that it was unethical for a woman to ‘take a man’s job’ when she didn’t need to earn independently; others were strongly opposed, wanting to maintain financial and social independence from husbands. The women report very different responses from their male colleagues, from extremely conservative to relatively radical. Above all, reading the diaries has given us a healthy respect for the variety of human experience and response to regulation. In short, as ever, we’re finding that a societal and organizational desire to impose a norm, to create a divide according to biological sex, was continually contested, circumvented, and undermined.

We’re on the lookout now for people who actually had to leave work because they got married. So if you know of any friends or relatives with this experience who would be willing to tell their stories, please contact either me or Emma Jeanes.

---

[1] Taylor, S. (2010) ‘Gendering in the holistic milieu: A critical realist analysis of homeopathic work’, Gender, Work & Organization, 17(4).
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/663 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/663#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:25:28 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=663 My Dad has a story about how he came to get a job. It was the mid-60s, and he was going to leave school with a miscellany of o-levels. The teacher called him in and said,

“well Pettinger, what’s it to be”.

“dunno sir”

Mr Heckthorpe starts reading from the list of possible careers, starting at A.

“Accountant?”

“ Yeah, that’ll do.”

Mr Heckthorpe gets the yellow pages to start calling all the accountants in Bradford, alphabetically. This is long before professionalisation made accountancy a graduate-only occupation. At ‘C’ (for Claridge Turner), he finds an opening, and my Dad starts his training. (It’s not quite the youth employment officer who thinks Billy Casper’s only right for manual labour in Kes.)

Dad reckons he considered holding on till Mr Heckthorpe reached bricklaying… and the Pettinger world would have been quite different.

In the recent discussions of careers advice (renamed careers guidance… advice is a dangerous thing to proffer too readily), it’s very easy to find funny stories about its failures, as Philip Hensher does. But it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well: matching people, with all their presumptions about work, their knowledge and abilities, to a spectacularly wide range of occupations. To know what jobs exist, yet alone have an inkling of what they demand, what pleasures they offer, what you need to do to get them, would be an enormous undertaking.

Now, as a sociologist of work, I’ve being asked to contribute to a career development module to improve the ‘employability’ of students – because the main benefit of education is, apparently, to provide an oven-ready workforce. No mind that my research expertise is in customer service work (please, no rubbish jokes about the likely destinations of sociology graduates: our students learn to think independently and question commonsense understandings of how the world works, which some employers value). There are two things I want to tell them:

1. the jobs they’ll end up in ten years are probably not ones they think are possible now: there’s more complexity to the labour market than they can imagine.
2. that asking people to talk about their careers produces stories about luck and happenstance as much as decision making and direction (see e.g. Arthur, Inkson and Pringle, 1999).

But luck and happenstance demand decision-making in turn, and even good possibilities throw up conundrums that need worrying out. When a friend asked for advice about what direction to take in a career he’s well established in, I stuttered a tepid, milksop answer, one that stressed feeling and intuition. I had no expertise to offer in the moment, no wise-sociologist suggestion to assess the possibilities of each role, to consider how each would be formative of future possibilities. This means I encouraged him to make decisions based on values which Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) associate with the ‘new spirit of capitalism’: emotional responses to a quest for autonomy, creativity and self-fulfilment, which those engaging in the flexible network of the ‘projective city’ ought to aspire to. Not certainty, a ladder, security and a plan for a future as a company man.

And I wonder whether it is right of me to reproduce these new spirit values as the ones that matter most. For my friend, already a winner in the global labour market, it works well. For my students, the selling of autonomy and flexibility as virtues maybe more problematic: they certainly understand that work should be fulfilling, suit their personalities and such like, but I don’t know that sort of work is so easy to find and hold. And if a lad like my Dad is about to leave school in Bradford with a few GCSEs, I’m pretty certain he’ll find it harder to get work that has meaning to him, and certainly impossible to leverage the sort of mobility Dad found when he stepped onto the bottom rung of a well-placed ladder.

References

1. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
2. Arthur M. B., Inkson K., and Pringle J.K. (1999) The New Careers: Individual Action and Economic Change. Sage: London.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/663/feed 6 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/578 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/578#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:42:20 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=578 Dawn and I recently watched Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1, a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Jacques Mesrine, France’s most famous bank robber. Apart from a brief period working in an architect’s practice, Mesrine (played by Vincent Cassel) made a living from illegal activities. A professional criminal has to do more than rob one bank, kill one thug. He must commit to the life, wear the bullet scars and break out of the prisons that try to contain him. Dick Hobbs says a professional criminal isn’t one who works full time as a criminal, but one who accesses a criminal knowledge base and infrastructure to faciliate their work (2006: 421). Mesrine does all this. In Killer Instinct, Guido (Gérard Depardieu) is the gangster boss who trains Mesrine and inculcates him into the professional code. This code is illustrated most notably when Mesrine returns to the Canadian jail he escaped from, to spring the other inhabitants. It’s all very exciting.



But during Public Enemy Number 1, despite several more robberies, shootings, a kidnapping and prison escapes, I did start to shift in my seat, yawning. It turns out the mid-life career of a professional bank robber is only little more exciting than the mid-life career of the professional bank clerk. The routinisation of Mesrine’s criminal life serves as warning against crime, not because of the danger, but because of the tedium.

References

1. Hobbs, D. (2006) ‘The Nature and Representation of Organised Crime in the United Kingdom’ in Fijnaut, C. and Paoli, L. Organised Crime in Europe: concepts, patterns and control policies in the European Union and beyond. Springer.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/578/feed 0