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Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. Madeleine Bunting
Читать онлайн.Название Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007405305
Автор произведения Madeleine Bunting
Жанр Зарубежная деловая литература
Издательство HarperCollins
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.
How Information Technology Makes for Hard Work
The biggest single factor driving work intensification is information technology, argues Francis Green. It enables greater use to be made of time and ‘fills up gaps that would otherwise be natural breaks in the pattern of work’. He backs up his argument by pointing to research showing that 42 per cent of workplaces which had introduced new technology in the previous five years experienced a substantial increase in the pace of work, compared with 31 per cent of workplaces where no new technology had been introduced.11 Often the introduction of information communication technologies (ICT) leads to changes in both the job process and the whole way the work and the organisation is structured. Green found that where there had been reorganisation the rates of intensification were dramatic, with 45 per cent reporting a substantial increase, compared to 29 per cent where there had been no change. If that reorganisation introduced a greater involvement of workers – i.e. they were required to take on more responsibility for tasks – the proportion of workplaces experiencing work intensification increased again, to 48 per cent compared with 30 per cent where there was no increased worker involvement.’12 Nor is such reorganisation a one-off adjustment; it becomes a continuous process as a response to constantly evolving ICT and changing market conditions.
Information technology also increases the pressure on employees to perform, as companies themselves are subject to more exacting regulations and quality control. There is less room for shoddy work, for an absent-minded moment on the assembly line, because the technology enables tracking of products; for example, if a hair was found in one of Saltfillas’ packets, the company would be able to track, out of the thousands packed every day, who the packer was at the time the packet went through.
The technology to measure every moment of the employee’s performance has enabled the extension of Frederick Taylor’s dream into white-collar work, bringing unprecedented control and time efficiency. It transforms the traditional hierarchical structures of bureaucracy, by facilitating supervision and removing