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.

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 .

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The pampas grass is blooming [ten], echo of some earlier moment of landscaping to soften the concrete and corrugated iron structure, and the bushes by the main entrance are pricklingly out of control [eleven]. The letter box is still there, and still working [twelve]; who knows whether the cctv is still hooked up to some distant watching eyes [thirteen].

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Work was done to close the building. Chipboard has been nailed in where glass once was, different boards at different points. Smooth here, the front of the building [fourteen], but scruffy, upside down mdf here at the back [fifteen].

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Here’s a makeshift skate ramp [sixteen]; the carpark’s now a place for playing. Who knows what happens out here [seventeen], or why there’s a rusty wheel suspended from chipboard [eighteen]. A few of the paving slabs at the front entrance have been dug out; then piled up and left [nineteen]. Work undoes the Works.

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The Photographic Unit of the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information took thousands of photographs during the decade from 1935 – 1945. They reflected all aspects of American life in the period, not just work, but the online collection (of over 160,000 photographs) has a ‘search by subject’ facility. The collection includes, for example, Dorothea Lange’s well-known pictures of a migrant worker family’s living conditions.

The New Deal Administration provided much of its relief to the nation’s unemployed in the form of work relief. The New Deal Network has an extensive collection of photographs, searchable by subject or by agency responsible, as well as other primary source material.

Some of the public work schemes allowed white-collar workers, or those in the creative arts, to use their existing skills. Graphic designers were employed to produce ‘public information’ posters, some directly relating to the world of work. There is a detailed index by subject.

The Federal Writers Project for unemployed writers carried out a number of projects with reference to the world of work. For example, they conducted interviews with ‘ordinary’ Americans to capture their life histories, including information on education, qualifications and work. For an account of the Federal Writers’ Project, and a sample of the life histories they collected, see this online collection.

The same project also interviewed many elderly African-Americans who had been born into slavery, thus offering an important window into the experiences of enforced labour.

The Farm Security Administration ran a number of camps for migrant workers, many of whom were attracted to California in the hope of obtaining seasonal work in agriculture. There is an online collection of various sources describing the daily experience of residents of these camps.

Nonsense. It’s work. And the centrality of work, however conceived, to identity is never more clearly revealed when the chance to do it is removed. When business closures or downsizing mean job losses. When Woolworths can’t outlast an economic downturn so women with 20 years of experience lose their purpose (Panorama, BBC, 13th April 2009). Even when inflected with other identity-anxieties (of nationality, as in the Immingham dispute; of gender in arguments over family breadwinner status), it is work.

And there will be more of this. I remember one thing that made sense in A level economics class: hysteresis. Named by economists (see Layard, Nickell and Jackman, 1991), but needing a sociological vision to explain it, refers to a short term rise in unemployment which then sticks. The unemployed find it increasingly hard to get back into work. The longer unemployment lasts, the more likely it is to last a long time. And this is not because unemployment produces fecklessness and a desire to sit around on those generous benefits, as the discourse of benefit-dependency suggests . It is because of the social and psychological impact of joblessness in a world where work matters, and where work identity matters. It is because of losing connection to the world outside home other than in mediated ways. It is because, regardless of fault, when hard work is a virtue not working means a lack of virtue. And it is also about a loss of skills. But to only refer to skill is to miss out the central significance – unemployment is felt and lived with, it is more than a status.

Bibliography

1. Bauman, Z (2005) Work, consumerism and the new poor. 2nd Ed. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
2. Layard, R., Nickell, S. and Jackman, R. (1991) Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Ransome, P. (2005) Work, consumption and culture: affluence and social change in the twenty-first century. London: Sage Publications.

cash registers by Lynne Pettinger

Though they don’t half make it hard. I’ve been looking in all sorts of fancy-pants shops for door handles, one’s that don’t even have to turn: the simplest of technologies, and fundamental to the effectiveness of a door. One shopkeeper promises to call once they’ve checked stock, but never does. One looks at me in shock, “we do not DO doorhandles” he booms, forbiddingly and indeed forebodingly for the future of his empty shop. In the next shop, she’s on the phone. The one after used to sell door handles but doesn’t anymore, the next might sell them in the future as quite a few people have been asking. I end up on Ebay.

There’s a little more to this post than just a rant about bad customer service. It’s not insightful to say that to ‘survive’ the recession, a business must deliver on customer service, especially when it is selling luxury. It makes me sound like a cheap consultant. Why the failure to serve then, in a month where fear of business failure must be present in all these traders minds? Well, to some extent its about class; there’s a difficulty in delivering service when you’re the boss and when customer service is coded as low status. It is also about the greater demands for emotional labour produced by the recession: pretty pink presents for women don’t sell themselves in a recession; this makes it hard for ephemera shops to survive. And for the shopkeeper to put on a friendly face now involves forgetting creditors pressing, it demands not thinking about the newly empty shop next door, not reading newspaper advice columns telling customers how to cut back spending by not buying the very things your shop sells. It’s harder emotional labour. And if you never needed customer service skills pre-recession, you’ve a whole lot more to learn now even as you’ve a lot more to forget about. So if a small trader in a fripperies shop tries to smile at you; be nice back – it’s harder for her than you imagine.