Screened Out

2011-12-04T00:26:00.001Z

All work and no pay - the rise of workfare

2011-09-07T20:11:00.003+01:00

This article (discovered via this excellent post at Marginal Utility) describes in a chillingly casual way the Smile Or Die-style employment practices currently being implemented by Pret A Manger in London and elsewhere. By way of recruitment on the basis of a "cheerfulness" assessment and a "teamwork" ethos built on peer pressured positivity and micro-monitoring, "Pret has managed to build productive, friendly crews out of relatively low-paid, transient employees. And its workers seem pretty happy about it", according to a New York Times journalist, after his jaunt around the company's aspirational granary outlets with its CEO. Well obviously they "seem" happy if their jobs depend on it (and even during your lunch hour you might be unmasked by a senior functionary), but that isn’t a cause for celebration. And if people really are happy to be used as low-paid, disposable service fodder, then that’s even worse. It’s a recipe for exploitation.

In the shaping of workers into tasteful human commodities, as in the treatment of the edible products, latent contradictions are made palatable by a calorific dollop of marketing mayonnaise. Just as Pret wraps its standardised food preparation process in a cosy narrative where every sandwich is apparently unique and "handmade", so also its employees are urged in their transactions with aspirational lunchers not to "hide” their "true character", while at the same time they are fitted as generic components on a performative production line. The result is an impression of synthetic authenticity which has migrated from the wholesome packaging of the food to the corporate seasoning of bodies and minds, whether they like it or not.

I’m not a regular Pret visitor myself (how did you guess?), but still, this set-up is surely a target for some sort of counter-alienation intervention. For instance, how about a campaign of one-off purchases made while showing staff specially prepared cue cards? "Don't worry, I won't demand a side-order of smalltalk with my tea." "Workers have a right to be miserable". "Nod if you are being held hostage by the Happy Police". Admittedly this wouldn’t of itself bring the great capitalist smoothie machine grinding to a halt, but at least it might draw momentary attention to the artificiality of such apparently natural interactions and communicate a hint of genuine - not painted on - solidarity between customer and labourer, which would be a start.

2011-09-05T22:33:00.000+01:00

2011-04-14T19:44:00.000+01:00

I'll be talking about Non-Stop Inertia at The Cowley Club in Brighton on Monday 18th April. 7.00pm, free admission, open to the public. More information here.

Stop the Clock

2011-04-07T20:27:00.006+01:00

[Note: I finished writing this post a few hours before seeing the above picture (from http://reallyfreeschool.org/, via @RobWhite00). An encouraging sign. As far as warnings of the coming apocalypse can be encouraging, that is.]

Visiting London on 26th March for the anti-government protests, for the first time I found myself in close proximity to the Olympic Countdown Clock, that grotesque emblem of immaterial capital and PR, fake unity and compulsory inclusivity. The Clock is in many ways the ideal symbol, not just for the Olympic brand but for contemporary life as a whole; not so much a memorial as an ‘amnesial’, a monument not to an event but to a non-event, not place but placelessness, not the passing of time but its erasure.

By 6pm Trafalgar Square had resolved itself into a familiar carnival/rock-festival set-up. The space in front of Nelson’s Column was a dancefloor and marchers rested their feet on the steps of the National Gallery, watching the spectacle. The police were happy to allow people to climb the statues and decorate them with revolutionary slogans, but across the Square the Clock was practically untouched. A few people were sitting underneath it, chatting and eating, and as I watched, one of them was instructed quietly but firmly by a police officer standing some distance away to remove a tiny anti-cuts sticker which had been placed on its surface. The citizen obediently unpeeled the sticker, smiling nervously.

Could it be that because of the virtual power transmitted through its digits, the Clock also paradoxically presents itself as a target, an opportunity? This would explain its apparently sacred, totemic position. Of course the failure of the Clock to work properly after its unveiling was symptomatic of the faulty discourse of the Olympic ‘project’ and its style-over-substance marketing; and yet this apparent bumbling ineffectiveness also conveniently conceals the underlying interests which it represents - what might be termed the ‘Boris Johnson defence’. Such gimmicks have apparently been part of the Olympic tradition for years, but this particular structure, appearing at this particular time, seems to function not just as a logo for a sports tournament but as part of the ideological state apparatus. For the protests to move on to the next stage and truly upset the ruling consortium, the Clock must somehow be defeated. For the multitude to stop the Clock would be a huge symbolic act: a chance to switch off the ridiculous work-or-die admonishments of ‘Alarm Clock Britain’; to reject the all-in-this-together austerity script barked at us by our economic masters throughout our duties of somnolent commuting, stupefying labour and competitive jobseeking; to ditch the empty promise of a great corporate experience in which we could all generically ‘participate’. It would mean a historic regaining of temporal territory and an instant unplugging from the Coalition’s ‘Big Society’ Newspeak.

Indeed, the tyrannical timepiece might have been transported from the dystopian future of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or the film Children of Men, in which downtrodden everyman Clive Owen moves through a shabby wasteland of decay and sterility in a blood-stained 2012 Olympic sweatshirt. For this is the kind of reality which the reverse-time of the Clock ominously counts down towards; the implosion of public space, the draining of life-force out of the cultural body. A noiseless, limbless clock for a silenced, immaterialized population.

What prevented me from attacking the damned thing myself? Maybe I would have felt differently if the Clock had been the locus of the demonstration, but as a marginal actor in the scene I felt restrained, not only by the watchful eyes of the police, but also more abstractly, by a kind of force field (and again, the safe distance kept from the Clock by the main body of protestors suggested that the structure operated an invisible and unconscious deterrent effect). I recognised this as the same vague constellation of fears – economic, juridical, social - which prevented me from walking out of a job I hated, or sitting in a near-empty First Class carriage on an otherwise overcrowded train. As a good neoliberal subject, I was a slave to my internalised self-disciplinary program. I knew that on its own my action would amount to nothing more than a tragicomic moment of self-destructive attention-seeking. Some sort of collective effort is needed, maybe a Fourth-Plinth-type counter-vigil to oppose the Clock’s 24/7 biopolitical discourse, with banners listing public services cut, unemployment figures, tax avoided etc., positioned prominently in front of the numerical display, directly in the line of the media/tourist gaze.

Taking my place under the Clock, I took a Biro out of my bag and scrawled across the top of the ‘No Cuts’ lollipop placard I had carried all day: ‘FUCK THE OLYMPICS’. I sat there, resting the modified sign on my shoulder. After a couple of minutes a photographer approached, knelt professionally in front of me and took a picture. He smiled and gave a thumbs-up sign – for the sentiment, or for a saleable shot, I couldn’t tell – before moving on to frame some people sitting on the steps nearby. I got up and left for the Tube.

It came as no surprise that the police onslaught aimed at the remaining protesters in Trafalgar Square later that night was triggered by a threat to the precious Clock. The force of the state was used to physically ‘contain’ those who might dare to challenge the authority of its apparatus, thereby proving that this is exactly what we must keep doing, in one way or another, in an attempt to rescue time itself from those intent on harnessing the future for their own profit.

2011-02-27T14:53:00.004Z

My book is out on 25th March, which is just as well as I can barely string a sentence together on here these days. It is a versatile text which can be used as a motivational performance-enhancing handbook, as light reading between job applications, or as fuel for a makeshift protest bonfire. The blurb is here. Many thanks to Angela at s0metim3s for the endorsement, and thanks also to those who have trailed the book on their much-more-widely-read blogs and Twitters.

The book is on sale through the usual virtual outlets. It will also be available, along with other Zero titles, in Brighton's lovely Cowley Club Bookshop, and possibly at other places too, to be confirmed. If you buy it, I hope you'll like it.

Estrangement

2011-02-20T17:39:00.002Z

So, having tripped over precarity at the start of my nerve-jangling journey into understanding the experience of temporary work and 'jobseeking', I seem to have stumbled upon autonomy on the way out.

There are some interesting parallels between the themes covered in my book and those in Bifo Berardi's The Soul at Work: for instance, the power of technology to restrict as well as liberate, and the use of anxiety and debt as control mechanisms. Berardi also explores abstract areas I was wary of straying too far into as a relative novice, particularly drawing on Deleuze/Guattari to contextualise these themes.

Most strikingly, from different starting points we both arrived at the idea of re-activating resistance through adopting a position of "estrangement". Signalling another autonomist, Mario Tronti, Bifo writes:

Only the estrangement from labor makes liberatory dynamics possible. ... The concept of estrangement implies an intentionality that is determined by an estranged behaviour. Estranged from what? From all forms of labor dependent on capital. Workers do not suffer from their alienation when they can transform it into active estrangement, that is refusal.

However, the integrated power of what Berardi calls "semiocapitalism", structured by the global reach of digital communication networks, has eroded those mental and geographical boundaries which the under-pressure worker/jobseeker/student/consumer would previously have fought to maintain. The duties of alienated labour are now diffused into every corner of life. Under such conditions it is increasingly difficult to impose temporal or spatial limits on work which is as mobile and insidious as its sources and products are seemingly ungraspable. "Both simple executing workers and entrepreneurial managers share the vivid perception that they depend on a constant flow that cannot be interrupted and from which they cannot step back save at the price of being marginalized."

The initial challenge, then, for the subject programmed to circulate inside this matrix of flexible labour and corporatized education, permanent debt and commodified emotion, is to try to step back from the semiotic flow and re-claim those spaces which have been lost to the rising tide of capital; to somehow distance oneself from the ideology while immersed in it, to find ways to refuse when refusal is impossible.

Overcoming these contradictions involves thinking tactically: opposing assumptions of endless flexibility and availability with suggestions of inflexibility/unavailability, highlighting the superficiality of the obligatory performances of customer service, disengaging from the incessant language of aspiration. These are all small attempts to direct alienation outwards into a relation of estrangement, and to collectively and cumulatively build this into a weapon of mass refusal.

Meet the Real Me

2011-01-10T23:16:00.002Z

Via a fellow Twitterer I recently became aware of http://www.meettherealme.co.uk/, a recruitment website which advertises in the Guardian’s online jobs section. Graduates are encouraged to post personal profiles and ‘Video CVs’ onto the site's database in the hope of attracting the attention of employers. As the blurb explains: ‘We offer jobseekers a way to stand out from the crowd ... We bring top candidates and employers together in a fresh, unique and fun environment.’ And, of course, ‘we save employers valuable time and money in the recruitment process too!’ Great!

I am about as fluent in Graduatese as I am in Klingon, but if I was able and willing to speak the language of this site and its ilk, how would I describe the ‘real me’? Would it turn out to be anything like this?

I am articulate, passionate, ambitious and a creative, original thinker who would be a genuine asset to any organisation. I am a strong and influential employee who prides themselves in being professional and creative within challenging situations. As a proactive organised multi-tasker with the ability to write, research and present material at a high level, I work equally well individually or as part of a team. I'm looking for work in an enthusiastic environment where I can show my true skills. I want to be part of a busy, pressurised, creative environment with everyone working towards the same goal. I can adapt myself to a variety of roles to develop and learn new skills to develop myself to progress in my career.

So much for standing out; as illustrated by the quotes collected above, the candidates’ statements are interchangeable, like the copy-and-paste products of a random CV jargon generator. Stock adjectives – creative, passionate, ambitious – float past, adrift from any clear object. Could someone really recognise themselves in any of those phrases? Are they meant to communicate anything to potential employers beyond a familiarity with grad-speak and a supine compliance? Do they not rather evoke some sort of generic immaterial worker defined by form over content and purged of individuality? In addition, the juxtaposition between academic achievement and career expectations can be unintentionally hilarious. One profile reads as follows: ‘My academic career has seen me achieve consistently excellent marks across a broad range of disciplines, and having completed a Masters in History, I am looking to gain experience in an area where the exceptional literary and analytical skills I have developed will be put to best use.’ And the candidate’s preferred work sector in which to deploy these exceptional literary and analytical skills? ‘Media Sales’.

But wait. The ‘realness’ of meettherealme.com is clearly supposed to be encapsulated in the Video CVs, webcammed elevator speeches uploaded by the candidates for public viewing (click the boxes next to the generic questions on the profile pages). Presumably the idea is to simulate an actual interview, without the awkwardness of proximity and edited down to a 45 second spurt of positivity. Unsurprisingly then, these video auditions resemble Apprentice-themed speed-dating exercises. They are mostly limited to people talking up their leisure interests, with work only mentioned in passing, but with keywords like ‘competitive’ nevertheless dropped in conspicuously. Travel and socialising are mentioned again and again, pre-empting the expected demands for mobility and networking. There is a kind of desperation about the clips which makes them almost unwatchable, and in this sense I suppose they do indeed point towards something real, but rather than a shining enthusiasm it is the prospect of the all-encompassing black hole of emotional labour, the excruciating spectacle of a personality harnessed and put to work. Snowboarding or playing the guitar are not so much interests as convenient props, seamlessly incorporated into the performative repertoire, augmenting the generic boardroom patter and suggesting an upbeat, accept-anything attitude.

Thankfully I have no access to video-making technology, so even if I did feel compelled to humiliate myself in this way, I'd be excluded. I would have to upgrade my kit and smarten up my act if I wanted to compete with these fresh-faced performers and unlock my potential in the 21st century professional jobseeking marketplace. Besides, I am too old and curmudgeonly to ‘put myself out there’, as I believe is the expression. But could this be a glimpse of the routine horror which awaits those students leaving the talent schools of the future, already inducted into the education/jobseeking/networking/self-marketing ‘corporate skills’ circuit?

Scanning for new sales interns, the Project Manager scrolls through dozens of virtual presentations, ‘meets’ another hopeful. Enthusiasm, confidence, adaptability – all the buzzwords are there and the script is impeccably delivered. But there is perhaps just the faintest trace of doubt in the candidate’s voice, behind her smile a grimace which seems to be saying: Is this what I really want? Is this what I really bought with those tuition fees and I’m now starting to pay for? Is this really all I’ve learned? Is this really me?

(January 2010)

2010-11-30T19:54:00.004Z

A search on the Jobcentre website showed a newly added vacancy for warehouse assistants at a well-known building materials company. I called the phone number on the site and was given an appointment for an interview the following day at an office in the city centre.

Dressed in my regulation jobseeker’s suit and holding a piece of paper on which I had scrawled the address, I walked up and down the relevant street a couple of times without success before noticing a small sticker bearing the company’s name by the intercom of an otherwise anonymous-looking building. I buzzed, a voice answered, the door clicked open.

The space on the third floor had obviously only just been moved into, no doubt evacuated by a bankrupt predecessor. Pot plants were dumped randomly on the floor and men strode in and out of rooms furnished only with chairs and wallcharts, leaving the doors wide open and booming across the corridor to each other, Clarkson-style, about football results and sales figures. I was directed to a seat in the reception area and waited there, nervously re-arranging my suit jacket and fearing accusations of impersonating an office worker.

The warehouse manager was unavailable so instead I was seen, bizarrely but predictably enough given the seemingly arbitrary set-up, by the regional sales co-ordinator. A middle-aged man, his generic trustworthy face had been cleansed of all traces of personality by decades of implementing marketing strategies and chasing corporate targets. He set me to filling in an application form (gripped by the task, I went further into it than I needed to; only my name and contact details were required, the rest could be completed later), and rubbed the ring on his finger in a distracted way while he talked in a friendly tone about flexibility and how we all have lives to lead outside work, whether it’s kids, or sailing (oh yes, me and my yacht are inseparable...). This by way of explaining the reasoning behind the 24 hour seven-day-a-week shift system.

I nodded, shaping my mouth into a series of calibrated grins, while scanning the featureless desk and noticing how he continued to stroke his wedding ring while he talked, as if it were somehow the source of his script. Yes, that’s fine, I said. I had assumed that such a rota would be due to the company wanting to squeeze every last drop of profit out of its workforce, but now I understood how such an arrangement is actually in my interests. You’re right, regular hours are so restricting aren’t they, I didn’t realise until now how liberating 24/7 availability could be.

And so the sales-talk came around to the job itself. The company was setting up a distribution base in the area, requiring a whole new industrial team. The warehouse – which was located on the other side of the city, quite near to my home, luckily enough - was brand new. In fact, they hadn’t actually finished building it yet, but they were recruiting in advance, hence the interviews here. I’d be directly employed by the company, not through an agency, he assured me, with a wink of sincerity. There would be a week covering induction, orientation, health and safety, all the usual preparatory requirements. Minimum wage to start with, of course, but prospects for more. And the products? Glass, mostly. Windows; window frames; double glazing; conservatories. Home improvement materials. You know the sort of thing. Another familial twist of the ring, a fatherly glint of the eye. Hmm, yes, I lied, thinking of our rented flat, undecorated since the Seventies. I know the sort of thing.

The salesman glanced at my superfluously filled application form. He was audibly impressed by my academic qualifications and said there was no doubt I’d be an asset to the team. As none of these qualifications were actually relevant to the job, however, I thought it judicious to mention that more importantly I had a year’s experience of warehouse work. Yes, of course, of course. “We’ll definitely be in touch.” A slippery handshake and I was back on the street, my walk-on role finished, offstage again and itching to get rid of the stifling jobseeker’s costume of suit and tie.

Then, nothing.

This was not surprising; it happened all the time, even after the interview stage, especially with vacancies advertised online or via agencies: a mouse-click or phone call that goes nowhere, an empty exchange of formalities. Such is the usual story of contemporary jobseeking; as elsewhere in life, all that is solid melts into air. But in this case the intangibility of the experience somehow challenged me to test its (un)reality. I wondered whether I’d imagined the whole episode, the unfinished office and gimcrack appointment, which had scrolled by as if someone had got halfway through designing a job interview simulation program and got bored. I suspected that attempting to gain any sort of human ‘feedback’ would be like groping a mannequin; but still, there was the distant chance that they had forgotten me, lost my details, or that only those applicants who were persistent enough to follow up the appointment would be taken on. As I hadn’t made a note of the phone number (the vacancy having since disappeared from the website), the only way of making contact again was to go back and ask in person. So after three weeks I returned to the anonymous office building and pressed the intercom. I prepared to be greeted by silence, but again a voice answered and I was buzzed in.

The place was still barely there. The same receptionist sat in the foyer, although of course she gave no indication that she remembered me (recognition had not been written into the program?). There was no sign of the sales executive, but a young man of indeterminate status who just happened to be standing nearby led me into the same generic office and explained that all the vacancies had been filled – that’s odd, I said, I applied the same day the vacancy was listed, and the interviewer sounded hopeful - and besides, the location of the warehouse had since changed(!). The only jobs left were door-to-door sales.

An image came to mind of myself approaching some suburban porch with a stack of ropey brochures, aiming to wheedle my way into some citizen’s misplaced trust: the stuff of nightmares. How desperate would I have to be to take a sales job? Debt arrears, imminent homelessness, starving child? If you ever see me loitering in a residential area with a zip folder under my arm and a freshly painted smile on my face you’ll know it’s a hostage situation. The deep sadness in my eyes will confirm it. In this case it is your duty to stab me in the throat before I speak. Death would be a merciful release.

I wondered whether this was in fact the ploy all along: draw people in with the prospect of imaginary jobs and mitigate their disappointment with the offer of commission-only sales work. It would explain the presence of the oily salesman at the interview; but why recruit from a pool of people like me, under cover of manual labour? Surely there wasn’t much of a crossover between shifting pallets and shifting units? Or perhaps it’s my perspective that I need to shift, and learn to accept that everything is now interchangeable, homogenised. A job is a job. Personal preference or ability, like the work itself, is immaterial.

I declined the young man’s offer and headed for the exit, eager to leave this purgatorial non-place with its non-jobs. How many more offices like this were dotted around the city and the country, emptied of meaning, existing in a kind of amnesic void? These are the sorts of jobs and work practices on which this country is pinning its hopes for a brighter future.

I suspect that sooner or later, due to some combination of jobcentre bullying and cliff-edge precarity, I’ll fail to escape from one of these awful ‘opportunities’. By the time you read this I might already have fallen victim to such a fate. Look out for me, shuffling zombie-like towards your front door, wearing a rictus smile and clutching a home improvement brochure...

Satisfaction Guaranteed

2010-08-31T22:52:00.006+01:00

Lap dancers "motivated by career and economic choices, not coercion", according to study.

Apparently researchers found that "the vast majority of dancers reported high rates of job satisfaction. The main attraction of the work was the flexibility it offered to combine different work options and studying." One professional stripper said she welcomed the opportunity "to be self-employed, to not have a boss and to work as much or as little as you want." She also described her job in positive terms, as follows: "I get to choose my own music, my own clothes and perform my own show."

The headline that one in four dancers is a graduate is surely a non-story. Is anyone in the real world actually shocked by this? I was only surprised it is not three out of four. A degree just offers more material for exploitation: the virtuoso performer is required to add value by shaking her academic tassles, expected (recalling Annabel Chong's anecdote quoted in Nina Power's One-Dimensional Woman) to do her Foucault routine, while the customer gets off on convincing himself that he is engaged in an enlightened partnership (remember, the woman is supposedly 'her own boss') rather than an old-fashioned power-wank.

The myth articulated through this language of bodily and economic flexibility, that the university-educated freelance sexual labourer is somehow automatically liberated from male oppression, is illustrative of a culture of unfreedom and unquestioning positivity. Academia becomes a backroom of the hospitality industry, training up a steady supply of ultra-compliant and indebted female students ready to meet the demands of rich lecherous men. Presumably the next step will be to formalise this 'transferable skill' by including lap dancing modules on degree courses...

2010-08-17T17:40:00.008+01:00

In the light of recent official announcements about tougher sanctions and private bounty hunters, it seems that the future role of Jobcentres and the DWP and their business partners will be primarily to deter welfare claimants rather than help them, while also provoking and absorbing hostility from their 'customers' which will then be processed and returned to them in a safely institutionalised form.

Obviously in this atmosphere people must be supported to claim the money to which they are entitled while refusing to accept the stigma that routinely comes with it (is this how the government plan to 'reduce' levels of unemployment - through a campaign of negative publicity and bureaucratic intimidation?). Rather than pointlessly petitioning the state on its own terms, however, the culture of precarious work and 'jobseeking' might be better attacked at those points where it is most flexible, and potentially most vulnerable. When workplace relations have been systematically fragmented while the conditions of unemployment have been intensified and privatised, maybe it is time to consider the possibility of a tactical withdrawal of the labour of jobseeking...?

How feasible, for instance, is the idea of locally organised and targeted actions to boycott individual recruitment agencies for short periods? Focusing on one agency at a time - arbitrarily, on behalf of all agencies, on say a monthly rotation - such action would involve asking people to withhold contact from that particular agency for purposes of registration, job searching etc. and decline any casual work it offers during that period. The aim would be to block that agency's assumed flow of short-term gap-filling candidates.

Some potential problems: in practical terms, how to make enough people aware of such a project to make a noticeable difference in any given area, especially when contact is often so remote and fleeting; and also whether people immersed in the individualistic, competitive jobseeking discourse would trust the idea of any sort of collective action. Even if they are sympathetic, if they are really desperate for money they might see even this small sacrifice as unrealistic...

As If By Magic...

2010-08-04T23:59:00.015+01:00

By the end of the third episode of The Fairy Jobmother, its narrative formula is clear. Unemployment, the programme suggests, is not the result of social factors (the concentration of capital in a few global corporations whose interests are served by maintaining competition for low-paid labour, the haemorrhaging of the public sector, the exporting of manufacturing, the uneven distribution of working hours, precarity etc.) but rather of personal failures. The UK, we are led to believe, is in the grip of an epidemic, not of poverty or insecure work, but of morally weak welfare-dependent individuals who can't be bothered to take their places as productive citizens. Given a short sharp shock, these people can be brought out of their self-induced torpor and empowered to realise their dreams. In a language familiar from private welfare-to-work schemes, we are told that the barriers to work are not external, but inside ourselves, in the forms of “confidence” and “self-esteem”, in not projecting the right sort of appearance or accept-anything attitude. What’s more, welfare is not a safety net but a system in which people get “trapped”, and which needs to be got rid of in order for us all to be truly free.

This approach obviously chimes in with the current liquidizing of the welfare state, and the resurgent stigmatising of the unemployed under cover of rehabilitation. Unemployment is viewed at best as a lifestyle choice, at worst a mental disorder, rather than an inevitable effect of a economy which routinely leaves dozens of applicants to fight over even the most poorly paid, tenuous job.

The character of the Fairy Jobmother herself is played by Hayley Taylor, last seen on Benefit Busters chivvying a group of single mothers into unpaid work trials at Poundland in her capacity as ‘tutor’ for private welfare-to-work provider A4E. Having been given her own somewhat implausible makeover and tooled up with some half-baked psychological exercises, Taylor now gets the opportunity to bully the jobless in their own homes, showing that there is no refuge from the jobseeking discourse, and, above all, there can be no excuse for not getting a job.

The story begins by setting up the conflict which is played throughout for comic effect: each week the participants - who, let us remember, have volunteered to take part in the programme, indicating just how desperate they must be to find work - are introduced with some predictable out-of-context soundbites: “There’s no point in working”, “I’d just rather lie in bed and do nothing” etc. As if by magic, the Fairy Jobmother then arrives and installs herself inside their home, where she turns her nose up at their meagre way of life, despises them if they get up later than her, and treats them like recalcitrant children. As Taylor explains in her introductory speech, she believes it is the “security” of welfare benefits which stops people “moving forward”: “the system makes it too easy for them.” So begins this particularly spiteful variant of the usual Reality TV script of contrived confrontations and reconciliations. Unemployment becomes a topic of entertainment, and the mundane and mostly futile administrative task of finding a job is turned into a kind of spiritual quest, a journey of self-discovery which reaches its happy-ever-after ending in a warehouse or on a retail sales floor.

It should be acknowledged that there are moments when this unpleasant domestic intimacy causes the series to stumble across a distinctly unfunny truth, especially regarding money. Living on welfare is not the easy ride Taylor imagines. The tabloid emperors-on-benefits myth is found to be utterly unsubstantiated in all three cases, and the Jobmother’s comparative cash calculations are soon revealed as irrelevant, even though the rewards of low-paid work are marginal. In one episode one can almost sense her disappointment when she opens the fridge to find it empty, and not stacked with ready-meals or booze. There are no plasma screens or nights out to counterbalance the poverty, and even Taylor is chilled by the vampiric presence of the neighbourhood ‘loan man’. But these insights are not allowed to divert the programme from its pre-set route.

Undeterred, the Jobmother rolls out a hotchpotch of crude pseudo-therapeutic interventions. Just as she opens up her hosts’ cupboards, she also pokes around in their minds, exposing their fears and playing on their insecurities. With the second family it soon becomes apparent that she is out of her depth here, as lack of work is the least of their problems. At the end, while the daughter gives thanks to Currys for a job as a sales assistant, the mother is offered a long-overdue course of counselling (which she could not otherwise afford), by which we are presumably asked to view the whole process as somehow worthwhile and not gratuitously traumatic.

On another occasion Taylor takes a penniless young woman to a cafe in order to show her all the signs of consumption she is missing. She makes her compare herself to a nearby woman who has a job and tells her she could have the same material rewards if she were to “stop hiding behind ... the fact that you’re a mum” (being a mother is just an excuse for economic inactivity!). Having cynically drawn attention to her lack of money, she makes the woman cry in order to then console her, telling her: “you can be whoever you want to be.” This is a recurring strategy. In the same episode she winds up the husband, making him angry in order to then admonish him, telling him not to raise his voice, as if he was in an A4E training room, not his own kitchen. As well as generating tawdry gobbets of entertainment, such exchanges lay the foundations for the Jobmother’s disciplinary-ideological role, showing how the barriers to work are supposedly internal, not external. Anger/sadness is portrayed as an irrational symptom (“He can’t face up to a lot of things”) rather than a rational response to social circumstances.

Having completed her observations, the Jobmother diagnoses her subjects as holding themselves back and being “stuck” in the benefits system. She arranges various days of work experience, which provide lots of some cheap and cheerful visual material and give the illusion of her approach bringing swift results (but don’t the TV producers and publicity-seeking employers ultimately gain more from this ‘work experience’ than the unemployees?). Having switched from caring counsellor to harsh interrogator, she is now in full-on Pauline Campbell-Jones mode, complete with ridiculous ‘Hayley’s drive to life!’ motivational roadmap: a picture of her fairytale world, far removed from reality.

Significantly, despite Taylor’s insistence that “the jobs are out there” only one of the three programmes includes any actual ‘jobseeking’, beyond made-for-TV work experience and confidence-building makeover exercises. A redundant warehouse manager (who does not even qualify for Jobseeker’s Allowance because his wife works full-time) is subjected to a regime of intensive job searching, while his understandable ambivalence after three years of rejections is used as a stick with which to beat him. “He has to get this job himself,” the Jobmother tells us in her best matronly voice. Yet none of the jobs that inevitably materialise in the series can be traced to any real applications, but seem rather to appear out of nowhere, with a wave of the Fairy Jobmother’s wand. “She’s heard about an opening at a local kitchen design company...”, “Hayley's introducing him to a recruitment agency who think they can help...”, “She’s heard of a couple of job vacancies...” The potential jobs are introduced over montages of purposeful walkabouts, but exactly how these vacancies were discovered is not explained.

How has she “heard of” them? Were they advertised anywhere? Were they set up in advance, or did they spontaneously spring up in the local area? Were the presence of the TV production company and the promise of positive publicity for the respective employers not factors in their discovery? Were all the other candidates for these positions also accompanied by camera crews during their interviews, in the interests of fairness? Unless there were no other candidates, in which case, why not?

The programme gives the impression that jobs are waiting to be picked like ripe fruit if only the hapless sofa-bound jobseeker would go out and look for them, and the viewer is asked to connect the earlier psychological shakedown or jobseeking frenzy with the appearance of these jobs, whereas in fact no real link is discernable between them. Such a connection, like the character of the Fairy Jobmother herself, is not real, but magical. Just as she descends from TV-land, these jobs fall from the sky like gifts from the capitalist gods, deus ex machina rescue-packages and plot resolution devices.

The participants’ motives for volunteering to taking part in the series now become apparent. The pay-off for enduring all this contrived humiliation is a chance of work and income which is desperately needed but would otherwise be unobtainable. While Taylor harangues the out-of-work husband for not trying hard enough and tells his wife he has deceived her about his efforts to find work, the couple sit together, stoically accepting this televised indignity because there will hopefully be a job at the end of it (just as, presumably, the promise of counselling was dangled in front of the depressed woman). And who can blame them? If you have a family, or your home is on the line, what wouldn’t you do to protect them? I certainly wouldn’t rule it out myself. They knew, after so many failed applications and in such a bleak environment, that this would probably be the only way to grab the attention of an employer. The rule of the makeover narrative means that, if you go along with it and play the role expected of you, it must succeed. All the resources of television and PR are poured into ensuring that it does.

Sure enough, in the preparation for interviews for these miraculous jobs the programme moves into familiar TV makeover territory. Regardless of the actual job, interview preparation becomes a kind of all-purpose theatrical rehearsal. Indeed, in today’s competitive human marketplace job interviews are routinely framed as talent show auditions, in which one plays a synthetically smoothed out and superficially enthusiastic version of oneself and fields generic, meaningless questions as if from a script. Of course the programme embraces this idea of style over substance and takes it to ludicrous lengths. So the jobseekers undergo coaching in speech and body language (“Never say ‘Hiya”’, “the walk is your biggest issue”), expensive hairdos and even cosmetic dental work to suppress their real identities and make sure they make the right televisually enhanced impression for that once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity.

After edited highlights of the interview itself, its back home for the predictable finale: the obligatory nervous finger-tapping waiting scenes anticipate the call from the employer and the job offer, which is greeted with squeals of delight and tears of relief, as if the candidate had won The X Factor. Hugged by her grateful subjects, the Jobmother then disappears back to her magical realm, where the minimum wage is a living wage, all jobs are life-enhancing, no-one needs welfare because everyone just makes the effort, and a dozen people fit into every vacancy.

Beneath its garish docu-comedy characterisations, The Fairy Jobmother conveys an aspirational message which is as serious as it is unrealistic and damaging: that under our current economic conditions anyone can become whoever they want to be, and all limitations are self-inflicted. The stereotype of the self-sabotaging welfare junky is reinforced, using those very people who are most desperate for work. The more these individuals are superficially transformed, the more society is allowed to stay the same.

2010-04-05T16:36:00.000+01:00

I have an email interview with Billie Ray Martin in the new Spring 2010 issue of Flux magazine.

Emotional Labour

2010-04-05T14:29:00.026+01:00

[Work-in-progress towards the book, in draft state without adjustments (except for removal of footnotes), so some terms are referred to which have been introduced previously and/or are returned to later.]

Through observing the work and training of the employees of a US airline - particularly flight attendants - in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Arlie Russell Hochschild arrived in her book The Managed Heart at a theory of “emotional labour”, meaning “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display”. The emotional labourer is required to “induce or surpress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.” Hochschild’s thesis, informed by Marx’s critique of capitalist production, is that the construction of the persona of the emotional labourer through supervision, training and the shaping of customer expectations by advertising draws upon the personal material of relationships and domestic life and transforms this into a profitable commodity, in the same way that the worker was historically alienated from his physical labour by the factory owner.

The construction of the caring, cheerful or sexy flight attendant (or conversely the harsh, uncaring debt collector) therefore constitutes a form of labour in itself in which large amounts of energy are expended, whether through the external “surface acting” of gesture, language, facial expression etc. or at the internal level of “deep acting” through the evocation of personal memories and feelings required to play the role and a suspension of disbelief, akin to the techniques of ‘method acting’. In this way the worker-performer generates an emotional state, a “worked-up warmth” towards the customer. A large part of the effort of emotional labour, in effectively producing the desired state of mind in the customer, is of course involved in creating the impression that the act is itself natural and effortless, because to show that it is contrived would invalidate the exchange.

At times Hochschild’s analysis resembles a version of Foucault’s “biopower” narrowed down to the specific experience of customer service work, a sort of bodily discourse through which institutional authority is exerted and social interactions shaped. The corporate concentration of such performative and emotional work would become central to later critiques of the post-Fordist industries of services, hospitality, media and sales. Hochschild anticipates that particular sub-category of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “immaterial labour” concerned with the “production and manipulation of affect” - what they call “labour in the bodily mode” - as well as Virno’s concept of “virtuosity”: the worker as a “performing artist”. As such, the idea of emotional labour, with its interiorisation of production and re-making of identity, might be usefully updated and expanded in discussing the experience of the immaterialized precarious worker.

As Hochschild notes in her 2003 afterword to The Managed Heart, emotional labour has developed since her original study in two divergent ways. On the one hand, automation has reduced many interpersonal exchanges to computerised simulations (a cashpoint or website ‘thanks’ the customer, a digitally patched together human voice ‘apologises’ for a delay). On the other hand, she suggests, looking at the US labour market, jobs relating to the outsourcing of personal and family responsibilities (and the outsourcing of emotions?) have increased. To these new outlets I would add the proliferation of what I would call remote emotional labour - media work, advertising and marketing etc. - during the same period. These form a sort of virtual network of indirect emotional production.

Through automation and the parceling out to other countries of the manufacturing of physical goods, and a corresponding increase in new performative and emotional ‘products’ (the interior colonization of identity and relationships alongside the expansion of the capitalist empire into new territories), post-Fordism has arguably outlived the traditional customer-facing, explicitly gendered or sexualized model of emotional labour. Its scripts have become generalised, insinuating their way into the very fabric of everyday life. Explicit claims over the bodies of individual workers have been curtailed (one cannot imagine, for instance, an airline today getting away with submitting its attendants to the demeaning weigh-ins and “girdle checks” common in the 1970s), and the formulaic fictions of sales or politics are rarely believed any more, either by actors or audience, replaced by a postmodern pre-emptive ‘knowingness’ on both sides. But at the same time the implicit burden of emotional labour has extended far beyond the traditional spheres of sales or corporate hospitality. Emotions are foisted upon us as consumers, their virtual scripts accumulating in our consciousnesses like psychic junk, so that eventually it becomes impossible to differentiate between the real and the unreal, the personal and the corporate spheres; and through work we are asked, as responsible citizens, to recycle and reproduce these emotion-commodities, to sell them on to others.

There has been a diffusion of such labour as a sort of plug-in air-freshener to cover up the stench of precarity in every office, shop and warehouse. The atmosphere is permeated by a general emphasis upon presentation, positivity, confidence etc., and the discourse of ‘customer service’ has spread into public administration, health and education, areas which had previously cultivated a ‘sincere’, not-for-profit form of emotional labour distinct from the synthetic demands of business. In the flexible workplace the manager comes to take the position of the customer who must be satisfied, and to whom one has to continuously sell oneself. In the case of the temporary agency worker this old distinction between employer and customer is practically eliminated.

Back in 1983 Hochschild defined emotional labour as predominantly feminine and, perhaps more problematically, middle-class (while accepting the emotional duties assigned, for instance, to supermarket cashiers); but these demarcations, if they ever really existed, have since dissolved, enabling forms of emotional labour to circulate throughout society and conjure a convenient illusion of a genderless, classless workplace. The shift from manufacturing towards communicative labour and the intensification and individualization of work has meant, as discussed previously, that supposedly ‘feminine’ skills of emotion management have been imbued with a macho attitude of aggressive target-hitting and then sold back to women as a form of empowerment. Conversely, under the downward pressure of immaterial labour and the incursion of incentivizing strategies into what remains of traditional manual work, performative elements are now integral to jobs which would not be thought of in themselves as particularly emotionally laborious. Even warehouse assistants and data enterers have to present themselves as aspirational and dynamic, to be ‘effective communicators’, and to identify personally with the interests of the organisation. So regardless of whether the work itself is directly concerned with the production of affect, it contains elements of emotion management and virtuosity, both in terms of covering over true anxieties and hostilities and in summoning a contrived enthusiasm and commitment.

Illustrating this move towards communicational production, Virno suggests in A Grammar of the Multitude that the old Fordist production line with its sign “Silence! Men at work” has been replaced by a new post-Fordist cognitive factory run under the imperative “Men [and Women?] at work – talk!” But, it should be added, this talk is strictly regulated so as to maintain the correct ‘mindset’. An added performative and emotional burden is added to the workload. Indeed, under the flexible conformity of precarity, there is no end to the personal resources of the worker upon which the employer can draw in the service of the company. Consequently not talking becomes as potentially disruptive as talking used to be. Manual workers, as Virno suggests, are encouraged to contribute ideas for improving efficiency, which are then absorbed into official company policy, rather than being shared informally as ways of making the job easier. Even if such exercises are of no practical use to the management (i.e. in streamlining staff levels), they still serve a symbolic and ideological purpose by eliciting consent under a banner of ‘participation’. The same can be said for ‘huddles’ and ‘team-building’ exercises, which paradoxically promote an individualised workplace in which informal social contact is compulsorily directed towards formal corporate goals, rather than work being a mere setting for social life. So, a performance of informality might actually cover over a formality which is all the more powerful for being unacknowledged; and this (in)formality, like the orientation of the precarious worker, is internalised and becomes self-perpetuating.

Finally, and crucially for my purposes, emotional labour can be broadened beyond the traditional boundaries of work and applied to the whole para-occupation of ‘jobseeking’, which fills so many hours and has arguably taken over the structural role that work itself used to provide. The repertoire of skills required to present oneself to employers as sufficiently competitive and confident in interviews and recruitment exercises constitutes a new untrammelled form of emotional labour, driven by insecurity, which leaks over into leisure and consumption and colonizes the social life whose energy it has drained, transforming the home into an office and friendship into a self-promotional network. Up-skilling and presentational readiness give the candidate a head-start and mean s/he is instantly deployable, having started ‘putting in the hours’ prior to receiving a wage.

Even ‘at work’ there is no respite from this extracurricular labour; in fact here is it possibly at its most intense. There may not be an official requirement to ‘perform’ as part of the job description, but the worker is still expected to perform in the job in order to keep it, possibly in competition with other worker-performers, while also talking oneself into a state of enthusiasm regarding future changes and ‘opportunities’. This once again connects the new all-pervasive form of emotional labour to Virno’s concept of virtuosity, which as well as performance, also implies a skill of improvisation. The act must be kept up and continually refreshed, using whatever props or people are nearby. Every interview is an audition, every job an audition for the next one.

Neither is this type of emotional labour limited to the supposedly professional, highly communicative jobseeker depicted on job agency websites or in corporate newsletters. Under the law of aspirational inclusivity, everyone is required to participate, whether or not they are ‘natural performers’; the forced smile of compulsory enthusiasm is stretched across the welfare-to-work programmes, and reflected in the unglamorous depths of the economy. I recently underwent a recruitment process for pre-Christmas shelf-stacking work at Asda which involved, first of all, filling in a multiple choice questionnaire ostensibly “designed to let us know more about the type of work you enjoy and the kind of person you are”. This consisted of twenty pairs of either/or statements. Some examples:

A) I am orderly B) I am easy going

A) I am absorbed with ideas B) I notice things around me

A) I follow the rules B) I try to find short cuts

A) I am calm B) I am lively

A) I work best without pressure B) I enjoy time pressure

A) I am argumentative B) I respect authority

Of course the answers given say nothing about your personality, other than showing that you understand the expectations of the workplace you will be entering, and that you are willing to conjure up a version of yourself which fits in with that workplace – showing respect for order, rules and authority, and displaying enjoyment linked to productivity (Oh yes, I enjoy time pressure), supplying practical energy rather than calm absorption and abstract ideas. Many other retailers have similar recruitment Q&As, whose pseudo-psychological classification is merely a cover for testing one’s capacity for conformity. The statement on the form that “there are no right or wrong answers” shows that the illusion of choice is crucial to the ‘realism’ of the act. By circling the correct statements and signing the form, the candidate ‘takes ownership’ - in the current therapy-speak - of this ultra-complaint persona, gives it his name, and consents to its future on-demand production.

The Q&A was followed by a ‘group screening’ session in the ‘training room’ of an Asda store. There twelve of us were shown a corporate documercial in which various beaming employee-performers listed the company’s supposed “values” and “beliefs” (unsurprisingly portraying these as saving its customers money and looking after its employees, rather than making money for itself out of those customers and employees), before being divided into groups, given a large sheet of paper and coloured pens, and told to design a poster, based on the content of the video, which would “sell” Asda to its potential employees. Each group then had to stand up and present its poster to the other groups and the assessors.

It might seem odd to approach retail recruitment from the point of view of promoting the company to its own staff, rather than to its customers; but then, as noted earlier, this process is not so much about ‘selling’ in the old sense, but about instilling a particular way of performing-thinking-feeling; making the candidates claim this positive attitude as their own and recognise it in others, as something natural and almost spiritual, rather than artificially imposed.

Under cover of a teamwork exercise, this was effectively a task of emotional labour; to induce and surpress certain feelings in such a way as to satisfactorily identify Asda/WalMart as the caring, happy “family” of the corporate video, presumably with the managers cast as parents and ourselves as innocent children, in a felt-tipped, primary coloured world where the reality of consumer capitalism was unthinkable, or at least unspeakable. As with the questionnaire, this exercise (which, behind the façade of ‘selection’, was surely self-eliminating) demanded an act of emotional virtuosity; to use various given materials to improvise the sort of generic character which was expected of us – positive, unquestioning, enthusiastic, ‘extra mile’-going – and to offer this version of ourselves willingly, to plant in our minds and those of our colleagues a suitable emotional orientation which could later be harvested for a profit.

2010-02-06T19:00:00.002Z