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.

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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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This got me thinking though about the ways in which people make work. It takes quite some courage and creativity to insert oneself into a space and try to construct a new activity from which to make some kind of living. Take the street children of Accra, Ghana, studied by Phil Mizen and Yaw Ofosu-Kusi. They are incredibly resourceful in the ways they invent new activities which can be publicly perceived as work and for which they can then expect some kind of remuneration (cash, and/or food and shelter) (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2010; and see Street Children’s Photographs). When they act as porters, for instance, they make work by placing themselves, their bodies and capacity to labour quite literally in between people and objects, and they create new spaces of work by doing so.

Image of car guard from Cape Town Daily

A particularly strong case of ‘making work’ is informal car-guarding which is something that has emerged spontaneously in the last ten years or so in cities across South Africa (McEwen and Leiman, 2008). It ‘evolved out of the plight of the unemployed’ and was made viable because of high levels of crime, notably motor theft (Blaauw and Bothma, 2003: 1). It involves a self-appointed guard operating in a free or public car parking area directing customers to available spaces, and receiving (or not) payment for this ‘service’ and on the understanding that the guards provide security while the car is parked. In an imitation of the formal world of car parking, work is made to happen in spaces where it wasn’t previously envisaged. What is central though is that the work itself is made through the deliberate insertion of an activity in a socio-economic and cultural process of which it was not previously an element.

If the development of this new form of work arose in the informal economy, the picture has become quite differentiated in recent years. In some cases, private companies have sought to formalise car-guarding, seeking to control this sort of unregulated entrepreneurial spirit, and of course to profit from the activity. Another variant is where organisations hire out equipment such as jackets, which lend credibility to the car guards’ work, but do not directly employ car guards. Or, car-guarding may be part of an organised informal economy with people unofficially renting spots to car-guards, obliging them to pay for the privilege of working in particular locations. Furthermore, it can be seen as a form of ‘non-state policing’ which is widespread in South Africa in numerous spheres (Baker, 2003: 29) and as such provide a kind of public good, albeit one that is variously celebrated, supported, tolerated, manipulated or denounced by the regulatory authorities and local communities.

Car-guarding is an activity usually undertaken by men who are formally classified as low-skilled and who have lost jobs in the formal economy — and whose chances of re-entering the formal economy are low. It’s rarely more than a survival strategy in this context of high unemployment and poverty (McEwen and Leiman, 2008). There’s an interesting relation to the customer in the exchange implicit in the work of car-guarding too. Payment might be made out of fear of reprisal (on the car or the person), or out of altruism, to help the worker (notably in the case of generous tippers) and as a way of recognising the person and the quality service they are offering (McEwen and Leiman, 2008; Saunders and M Lynn, 2010). Nevertheless, overall earnings are extremely low, even when compared to domestic workers or waiters (Blaauw and Bothma, 2003: 11). And, according to some sources, for example, this travel site, some people exercise a strategy of ‘determined avoidance’ and a refusal to pay.

So despite the inventiveness of the car-guards in South Africa or of the street vendors in Accra and Cagliari, making work doesn’t always mean making a living…

References
1. Baker, B (2002) ‘Living with Non-State Policing in South Africa: The Issues and Dilemmas’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 40(1): 29–53.
2. Blaauw, P F and L J Bothma (2003) ‘Informal labour markets as a solution for unemployment in South Africa – a case study of car guards in Bloemfontein’, Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the Economic Society of South Africa, 17–19 September, Cape Town.
3. McEwen, H and A Leiman (2008) ‘The Car Guards of Cape Town: A Public Good Analysis’, A Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit Working Paper Number 25. Cape Town: SALDRU, University of Cape Town.
4. Mizen, P and Y Ofosu-Kusi (2010) ‘‘Doing Work’ in the Informal Sector: The Work and Labour of Children of Accra’s Urban Poor’, Paper presented at the International Visual Sociology Association conference, Bologna, July 20–22.
5. Saunders, S G and M Lynn (2010) ‘Why tip? An empirical test of motivations for tipping car guards’, Journal of Economic Psychology 31: 106–113.

Enormous reductions in public sector spending produce unemployment. And unemployment makes for poverty, misery, hopelessness, illness and anomie. Some of the cuts to public sector spending will remove work from society: Forgemasters’ employees will join the queues outside Sheffield job centres, looking for jobs that don’t exist, living on the benefit breadline, sinking into depression, needing care.

Other public sector cuts will not remove work, but transfer it from public sphere to private sphere, from commodity form to non-commodity form. Children, the infirm elderly and the sick will carry on needing care (and social care isn’t part of the NHS ringfencing). Someone will have to step in when budget cuts mean fewer care assistants or fewer public nursery spaces. This might sound like Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ in action: neighbours helping because the fat state is ought to slim down. But care that is contingently gifted like that leaves the recipient at risk, even assuming that the needy are known and noticed (which might not be the case if layers of administration are removed). And it leaves the caregiver exhausted by the double burden of paid work and care.

It is often the case that unpaid care is done by women (see the Women’s Budget Group analysis), and, though the ideological conservatism that drives the desire for a small state is not quite the same conservatism that essentialises gender divisions and wants women to be placed in the home, married and looking after children, the coincidence might be felt to be fortuitous by some. At nowaytoamakealiving, we are always angered by the failures of imagination and empathy that generate policies intended to increase inequality and worsen lives.

taken with camera phone

To the left, big, bold letters and colours: the store is closing down and everything must go, “step right up, bargains galore”. Thrill at 20% off a new kettle. Take home a pottery owl, only £42.99 (down from £59.00). It’s an exciting chance, you consumer monkey. Be seduced by these prices.

taken with camera phone

The second is a different appearance of emotion in capitalism; this is not the capitalism of the romanticised commodity exchange discussed above (Illouz, 1997), nor quite the cold intimacy of managed emotion in capitalism (Illouz, 2007). It’s the organisation appealing to sentiment, to empathy, to feeling and not sensation. Fevre (2000) suggests this is rare, arguing that the triumph of ‘common sense’ as a form of reasoning means that rationality is imposed in places where it ought not be. That is, an organisation might easily fail to make the case for care, seeing the job losses that result from the store closing as merely the inevitable outcome of recession: there’s no use crying over spilled economic inevitabilities. After all, it’s common sense that unemployment rises in recession, but never mind, there’ll be a recovery eventually. Certainly, it seems that some of the customers have to be reminded to see past this, to connect the bargain to the pain. I can’t help thinking that there’s a few people making decisions about cutting the budget deficit who could do with a copy of this sign in their office.

References

1. Fevre, R. W. (2000) The Demoralization of Western Culture . Continuum, London.
2. Illouz, E. (1997) Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism . Berkeley: University of California Press.
3. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, London.

Since then, it’s fair to say that Sheppey has struggled. Although new industry has been established, Sheppey ranks highly on ‘indices of deprivation’ (health, poverty etc). It was hit badly in the 1980s recession, and the situation is mixed today. The steel mill remains a significant employer, as do the three prisons, but the local economy is now dominated by the import business – of cars and fresh produce. Overall, the picture is volatile with a high percentage of people employed in relatively vulnerable industries. Educational attainment is well below the average for the South East. And life expectancy is several years lower in some parts of Sheppey than it is in other areas in the borough of Swale and the South East more widely.

When Ray Pahl carried out research on Sheppey in the late 1970s and 1980s – published in what became a seminal sociological text, Divisions of Labour (1984) – he drew attention to social polarisation between households. Some combinations of work (paid and unpaid, formal and informal) allowed people to ‘get by’ effectively; others did not. There is ongoing concern that current developments (e.g. housing rather than jobs-led regeneration) may further reinforce social divisions across Sheppey.

The Living and Working on Sheppey project explores the recent history and changes in working lives on Sheppey in the last decades of the 20^th Century and into the 21^st. The project, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England through its South East Coastal Communities Programme, is a combination of new research and secondary analysis of Pahl’s earlier data. A first strand is based on interviews conducted by local people with older members of the community about their memories of Blue Town (Sheerness) and the naval dockyard before its closure in 1960 and their experiences of changing times since. A second strand invited young people about to leave school to write essays in which they imagine what their futures will hold in terms of work and family life, a repetition of an exercise undertaken by Pahl 30 years ago.

A montage of Blue Town High Street by TEA

The project team includes Dawn Lyon, Peter Hatton, Tim Strangleman, and Clive Arundell (University of Kent), Graham Crow (University of Southampton), Jenny Hurkett and Alice Young (Blue Town Heritage Centre), the UK Data Archive, the artists group TEA, and Ray Pahl as consultant. The contribution of the artists group TEA is the creation of a short film of a ‘walk’ along Blue Town High Street based on a model constructed from archives, the ‘reality’ in 2010, and imagination — a montage of past, present, and future (as in the image above).

A workshop on Saturday 12 June 2010 at the Blue Town Heritage Centre will present the work of the project and invite comment and discussion about it. This event is free of charge but places are limited and registration is required. Anyone interested in attending – or if you would like any other information about the project – please contact Alice Young, Project Coordinator, Blue Town Heritage Centre, 69 High Street, Blue Town, Sheerness, Kent ME12 1RW; telephone: 01795 662981; email: seccproject@hotmail.com.

References

Pahl, R.E. (1984) Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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.