One of the most widely discussed societal impacts of Covid, mentioned on p.121 of the latest edition of my book, has been the shift from working at work to ‘working from home’, to the extent that the acronym WFH has entered everyday vocabulary. Many believe that, even as lockdowns and restrictions end, it may permanently change the way much work is organized. In line with the overall framework of my book, such changes can’t be separated from wider social and political issues.
An acrimonious discussion
Even during lockdowns and other restricted periods there was some acrimony in the WFH discussion. On the one hand, it was said with some justification that WFH was a luxury for those in certain kinds of white-collar and professional jobs leaving those in manual, retail or, most obviously, healthcare roles with much greater exposure to infection. On the other hand, and again with justification, it was clear that WFH was experienced very differently according to whether ‘home’ was a small urban apartment or a large house with a garden; and to whether it also doubled as a makeshift school or play group, and if so who took responsibility for that. In this way, inequalities of wealth, income and gender are inseparable from WFH.
Beyond those issues, WFH brought other features of work into a new focus. Some found it liberating in all kinds of ways – from ending the hassle of commuting and other work travel, to avoiding the strictures of office dress codes, to gaining greater control over when and how to work and, with that, a better work-life balance. Others (or even the same people at different times) missed the social interaction of the workplace, felt tyrannized or intimidated by working on-line, resented the costs, found it impossible to juggle the competing demands of working and living in one space, and were exposed to a much greater degree of on-line surveillance.
Back to work
It’s a discussion which has become even more highly charged as restrictions have eased. Many people have not wanted to return to the old ways, and want to continue WFH for all or part of the time. Many employers have accepted or even welcomed that, others have resisted or even, as at Elon Musk’s Tesla, refused to accommodate it.
This has become a politically high-profile issue in the UK because the government has been keen to make civil servants stop WFH, with Jacob Rees-Mogg – the Minister for government efficiency – being an especially strong advocate for this. Notoriously, he has even taken to leaving passive-aggressive notes on the desks of civil servants who are WFH, cajoling or shaming them to return to the office. One obvious aspect of this politicization is that it is part of a populist narrative in which WFH is depicted as a cushy perk for ‘the elite’, denied to ‘the people’, although doing so ignores, amongst other things, the fact that so much call centre work has been transferred to WFH.
Within this populist narrative, there is also a certain kind of managerial understanding whereby workers are seen as skivers, and need the discipline of being ‘at work’ in order to work. That, too, ignores the at best mixed evidence about whether WFH is less productive than working at work, as well as the fact that, wherever work is done, electronic surveillance is far more prominent in the modern workplace than personal overseeing. Indeed, images of Rees-Mogg’s work desk, bereft of any kind of computer, were widely mocked as indicative of his ante-diluvian understanding of this entire issue.
An (ex-)academic’s interest
The WFH debate is obviously of interest from an organization studies point of view, but it also interests me personally. The first UK lockdown started just as I handed in my resignation in order to take early retirement. I thus spent the last few months of my academic career working entirely from home, and have not experienced ‘going back normal’. But, like many academics, I have always worked from home when possible. This can, I suppose, be regarded as a perk or a privilege, but it arises from the nature of at least some academic work in that, apart from teaching and meetings, there’s really no need to be on university premises for a lot of the time. Things like teaching preparation and marking, for example, can easily be done at home, as can writing up research and many kinds of data analysis.
That varies by discipline, of course, because for engineers, experimental scientists and others much research work needs to take place in laboratories (for that matter, many humanities and social science academics need to do research in libraries, archives or, in the many various senses of the term, the field). It may perhaps also be affected by seniority, in that the more senior you are the more likely you are to need to attend meetings because you are more likely to have extensive managerial responsibilities.
Shirking, flexibility and productivity
At all events, overall, over the years, I probably worked at least as many days at home as I have ‘in the office’. That did not become more true over the years in that it is not particularly an artefact of new technologies, although they have also had an impact. It’s certainly the case that doing so always engendered a certain amount of resentment or misunderstanding from neighbours, friends and family who often assumed that WFH meant not working at all or, at least, that you are available for interruption in way that would not be the case when ‘at work’. That is clearly a version of the view that WFH is shirking.
It was a view shared by at least some university administrative and support staff, who did not have this flexibility and had to work normal office hours ‘in the office’, and I think did sometimes feel that academics were privileged and even lazy. And it has to be admitted that this was sometimes true. It’s also the case that over the years university senior managers have become more hostile to academics WFH, and have (increasingly successfully) sought to control and restrict it. Again, that is not entirely without justification in that some academics do use WFH as a way to avoid things they don’t like doing. There is also a certain irony in the extreme resistance of many, especially older, academics to losing exclusive work-space (i.e. single-occupancy offices) even though it quite often sits empty.
Against all that, in my experience the vast majority of academics are not in any sense shirkers, and used WFH responsibly and sensibly. Personally, I would say it made me more ‘productive’ and certainly more flexible, in that, it’s true, there might be days when I was ostensibly working from home but in fact doing something else, and sometimes somewhere else. But, invariably, that was far more than compensated for by working at home but outside of normal office hours.
If anything, my experience is that being flexible in practice meant working longer hours, precisely because ‘home’ was also a place of work and, in that sense, evenings and weekends don’t have the same separate status from work that they otherwise might do. Equally, I can recall periods in my career when I used to go into my university office at weekends to do certain kinds of work for which I needed what in those days were paper files, and by doing so could work uninterrupted in a way that I couldn’t when in the office during normal working hours.
WFH: a privilege?
I appreciated that flexibility, but I am not sure that it is quite right to regard it as a privilege. In one particular respect, and despite the strictures of some university managers against it, it arises partly from the need of universities to recruit in a rather specialised labour market. This, combined with the nature of academic salaries, the housing market, and the realities of dual-career families, means that in many parts of the country universities could not staff themselves without appointing people who live many miles, in some cases many hundreds of miles, away, and even in different countries. That is viable only because of an unwritten understanding (often in direct contradiction of what is in the written employment contract) that it is possible to WFH for a good proportion of the time.
That has had some good consequences for universities in terms of increasing the scale and diversity of the employment pool. I think it has also had some adverse impacts in terms of sustaining academic culture. For example, it has become much harder than when I started as an academic to get large attendances for departmental research seminars and the social events that often used to come after them. That’s partly because of increasing workloads, but I think it is also a consequence of a more geographically dispersed faculty.
Equally, although the erosion of the traditional notion of universities as ‘self-governing communities of scholars’ has mainly occurred for other reasons, I can’t help thinking that this geographical dispersal has been a contributing factor. Communities do need some degree of presence and, rather as with the issue of the social interactions of the workplace, these can’t be altogether technologically mediated.
Interpreting WFH
Aside from universities, for years, indeed decades, now, organizations and organizational theorists have been heralding – under all kinds of different labels – the rise of flexible work patterns in which the ‘when and where’ of work have been de-coupled, and the strict binary of work and non-work eroded (see p.84 of my book). The debates about that very much mirror the current ones about WFH. In brief, it can be regarded as giving people more choice and autonomy, whilst serendipitously making them more productive. Or it can be regarded as encroaching on, even absorbing, the non-work spaces and times of people’s lives in the relentless pursuit of productivity. It can be regarded as more controlling, or as less so; as supporting work-life balance or as eroding it.
That contestability of interpretation might, amongst other things, suggest that the ‘answer’ to the desirability of WFH does not inhere in WFH itself. Rather, it depends upon the specific contexts and ways in which WFH occurs. It’s not on the face of it clear why anyone would regard working in the putting-out system as desirable or privileged compared with working in the factory system, or vice versa. By the same token, whilst WFH may have revealed many kinds of inequalities it is not the cause of them and they will persist regardless of whether people return to the office or not. And the inequality with which WFH can be enmeshed is quite different to the question of whether or not it is a productive way of working.
To put it another way, my years as an academic were privileged to the extent that being an academic used to be, and to some extent still is, a relatively privileged occupation. But that would still have been true even if I hadn’t WFH, and had I not been allowed to do so I would have been no more, and probably rather less, productive an academic than was, in fact, the case.
What is wholly illegitimate is for populist politicians like Rees-Mogg, themselves highly privileged, hugely invested in the perpetuation of privilege, and with no intention at all reducing structural inequality, to use WFH as a weapon in the faux-egalitarian politics of populism.
Friday 3 June 2022
Sunday 27 March 2022
P&O and Priestley's prophecy
In successive editions of my book since the second and including the latest, fifth, one, I have included the firm P&O in a long list of examples of what were once British companies that became internationally owned (pp. 109-110 of this edition). This forms the starting point of my analysis of the new capitalism as it relates to organization studies.
P&O has been much in the news this week, following the brutal sacking by Zoom of almost 800 workers in order to replace them with cheaper foreign labour. In fact, in illustration of one of the arguments I make in the book, even to speak of “P&O” is a misnomer, because what was once a company of that name has been endlessly diced and sliced in different configurations, so that the entity that actually made the sackings was P&O Ferries. That is part of the P&O Group, the modern-day history of which is an exemplar of the ‘new capitalism’ business model.
For example, from the 1980s onwards it diversified from shipping into a wide array of other areas such as construction and property management. Then, from the start of this century, it divested itself of those activities until, in 2006, it was bought by Dubai Ports World (DP World), a company owned by the Dubai government. However, P&O Ferries was shortly afterwards transferred to Dubai World (DW), the parent company of DP World and also owned by the Dubai government, until being re-sold to DP World in 2019. Meanwhile, P&O Ferries’ actual vessels are registered under a wide variety of flags of convenience.
So, this, in very brief, is the story of one example of what globalization means for corporate ownership – and it leaves out much else, including the interactions between DW and DP World and corporate entities in the US, China and Australia. At the end of the chain, and very much subservient to it, is the workforce of P&O Ferries, including both those who have been sacked and those who are being hired at pittance wages to replace them.
P&O was once a British company, but similar developments have occurred all around the world, although successive UK governments have been especially relaxed about corporate sell-offs. Moreover, certainly compared with most EU countries (and this was the same even when it was part of the EU), UK employment law offers workers fewer protections from sackings of this sort. In any case, by its own admission P&O deliberately broke at least parts of this law – regarding consultation with trade unions – apparently because it judged the penalties for doing so to be outweighed by the benefits.
The consequence of businesses being owned and run in this way is to sever the links that can – at least in principle - otherwise exist between owners, communities, and employees. Even in the narrowest of business terms this is problematic. For why, when business owners are so manifestly uncommitted to them should workers feel or show any commitment to their businesses? Similarly, to the extent that such sackings damage ‘brand image’ amongst consumers there may be a business price to be paid.
But its implications go much deeper than that, and are bound up with the massive increases in inequality which are part and parcel of the new capitalism. Both literally and metaphorically the owners and senior managers of such firms inhabit a different world to the people who work for them.
Of course, one shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about traditional capitalism in this respect. Nineteenth century factory owners were arguably similarly detached from, and ruthless about their workforces. I recently re-watched a TV version of J.B. Priestley’s classic 1945 socialist play An Inspector Calls (for more on the play and its relationship to Priestley’s politics, see Alison Cullingford’s essay). Set in Edwardian England just before the First World War, it depicts a police inspector arriving at the home of the Birlings, a wealthy mill-owning family. He tells them that a young woman has been found dead, having killed herself in an especially horrible way, and in the course of the evening demonstrates how each of them had played a part in the events that led to her suicide.
Still at least, when prompted, members of the Birling family do recall the personal interactions they have had with the dead woman. No such connection exists between those who hold and dispose of the ‘human resources’ of companies like P&O and the real human beings on the receiving end of their spreadsheet-driven decisions. The geographical and social distance between them if not creates then at least exacerbates what philosophers from Aristotle to Levinas have identified as the problem of ‘moral distance’.
However, this does not undermine, so much as add new force to, the inspector’s prophetic closing words in Priestley’s play. With them, he enjoins the privileged family to remember that “we don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.”
P&O has been much in the news this week, following the brutal sacking by Zoom of almost 800 workers in order to replace them with cheaper foreign labour. In fact, in illustration of one of the arguments I make in the book, even to speak of “P&O” is a misnomer, because what was once a company of that name has been endlessly diced and sliced in different configurations, so that the entity that actually made the sackings was P&O Ferries. That is part of the P&O Group, the modern-day history of which is an exemplar of the ‘new capitalism’ business model.
For example, from the 1980s onwards it diversified from shipping into a wide array of other areas such as construction and property management. Then, from the start of this century, it divested itself of those activities until, in 2006, it was bought by Dubai Ports World (DP World), a company owned by the Dubai government. However, P&O Ferries was shortly afterwards transferred to Dubai World (DW), the parent company of DP World and also owned by the Dubai government, until being re-sold to DP World in 2019. Meanwhile, P&O Ferries’ actual vessels are registered under a wide variety of flags of convenience.
So, this, in very brief, is the story of one example of what globalization means for corporate ownership – and it leaves out much else, including the interactions between DW and DP World and corporate entities in the US, China and Australia. At the end of the chain, and very much subservient to it, is the workforce of P&O Ferries, including both those who have been sacked and those who are being hired at pittance wages to replace them.
P&O was once a British company, but similar developments have occurred all around the world, although successive UK governments have been especially relaxed about corporate sell-offs. Moreover, certainly compared with most EU countries (and this was the same even when it was part of the EU), UK employment law offers workers fewer protections from sackings of this sort. In any case, by its own admission P&O deliberately broke at least parts of this law – regarding consultation with trade unions – apparently because it judged the penalties for doing so to be outweighed by the benefits.
The consequence of businesses being owned and run in this way is to sever the links that can – at least in principle - otherwise exist between owners, communities, and employees. Even in the narrowest of business terms this is problematic. For why, when business owners are so manifestly uncommitted to them should workers feel or show any commitment to their businesses? Similarly, to the extent that such sackings damage ‘brand image’ amongst consumers there may be a business price to be paid.
But its implications go much deeper than that, and are bound up with the massive increases in inequality which are part and parcel of the new capitalism. Both literally and metaphorically the owners and senior managers of such firms inhabit a different world to the people who work for them.
Of course, one shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about traditional capitalism in this respect. Nineteenth century factory owners were arguably similarly detached from, and ruthless about their workforces. I recently re-watched a TV version of J.B. Priestley’s classic 1945 socialist play An Inspector Calls (for more on the play and its relationship to Priestley’s politics, see Alison Cullingford’s essay). Set in Edwardian England just before the First World War, it depicts a police inspector arriving at the home of the Birlings, a wealthy mill-owning family. He tells them that a young woman has been found dead, having killed herself in an especially horrible way, and in the course of the evening demonstrates how each of them had played a part in the events that led to her suicide.
Still at least, when prompted, members of the Birling family do recall the personal interactions they have had with the dead woman. No such connection exists between those who hold and dispose of the ‘human resources’ of companies like P&O and the real human beings on the receiving end of their spreadsheet-driven decisions. The geographical and social distance between them if not creates then at least exacerbates what philosophers from Aristotle to Levinas have identified as the problem of ‘moral distance’.
However, this does not undermine, so much as add new force to, the inspector’s prophetic closing words in Priestley’s play. With them, he enjoins the privileged family to remember that “we don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.”
Sunday 13 February 2022
Electric blues
Over eight years ago, in 2013, I wrote a post on this blog about the absurdity of a supposedly competitive market for electricity, and energy more generally. That absurdity was incipient in the privatization of gas and electricity industries in the UK in the 1980s and early 1990s. It has now interacted with a global energy crisis to create a major problem which, in turn, is contributing to a wider cost of living crisis.
It was an accident waiting to happen. As I wrote in 2013, the idea of ‘shopping around’ between energy providers was a farce because there was no competitive market in what had long been recognized as a natural monopoly. What had been created was, at best, an oligopoly of the six major providers and consumer choice was illusory, That mattered, because the underlying theory of privatization was that choice would lead to competition which would lead to greater efficiency and lower costs. Knock away the first link in this chain and the whole concept (even if it had held water in other ways) was destroyed.
Since then, although the big six always remained dominant, the illusion of choice was sustained by a regulatory change in 2014 which allowed the entry of a large number of new firms. These did indeed sometimes offer consumers cheaper prices, although the highly opaque nature of charging often made comparison hard, and in some cases the option of greener and more environmentally sustainable energy. In fact, I was one of those who did exactly that.
Another way in which the ‘market’ was supposedly made more competitive was by introducing an energy price cap in 2019 to try to prevent companies charging extortionate amounts on their default or standard tariffs to those customers who didn’t ‘shop around’. Again, the very need to do this was an indication that this was not, and could not be, a market in the way envisaged by neo-classical economics.
In the autumn of 2021 these two developments came together to create a disaster. For as wholesale energy prices rose globally the cap meant that companies couldn’t pass on all of these rises to consumers, and it emerged that many of the new entrants did not have the financial resources to survive. In some cases they had also had a policy of last-minute buying of wholesale energy which meant that they had less of a time buffer against price rises. In consequence over twenty of them went out of business, including Bulb, the seventh largest firm.
Since then, the price cap has been raised, by 12% last October, with a further 54% rise to come into effect in April, leading to dramatic increases in consumer bills: the average household energy bill will rise from £1277 to £1971 per year. For poorer households this is a disaster.
And what, now, of choice? First off, the customers of most of those firms that went bankrupt were transferred to one of the big companies, with no choice of which one. My own experience of being transferred to a big firm – ironically, the one I had left a few months before – was a nightmare in itself (and I’ve heard similar stories from others), with incorrect transfers of meter readings, and endless arguments about what money was owed.
Some of these problems arise from the more general way that, for years now these firms have ceased to actually use meter readers, and the bizarre use of constantly updated estimates of future usage so as to set direct debit payments, rather than simply paying for what you use, as you use it. I simply don’t understand the bills I receive any more. Added to all that is the perennial problem of call centres you can’t get through to, or get cut off from, or which say they will call back and don’t. And added to that is the new reality of everything being done online, the chatbots, the inexplicable rules and all the rest of the hideous inconvenience of the most mundane of transactions that are now the norm.
And then what about choice of tariffs? I, like almost everyone transferred, ended up on the standard or ‘deemed’ tariff i.e. the maximum price allowed under the cap. So are people who never changed tariff or did so under a time-limited deal that has now ended, or who move house are also on the standard tariff. There may be a few options to find a cheaper alternative, but they are extremely limited, and the illusion of choice that I wrote about in 2013 has now entirely disappeared. With it, there has gone the last vestige of pretence that this is a market in any meaningful sense of the term.
Indeed this whole saga shows how, as with many other core goods and services, it is politically impossible simply to ‘leave it to the market’. Even if not very effectively, the government and the regulator is under pressure to, at the very least, ensure that the lights stay on. Yet at the same time, since the industry remains privatized, consumers are ultimately paying for the dividends and bloated salaries, as well as the malign effects of financialization.
Restoring the UK industry to common ownership wouldn’t solve the many complex environmental and geo-political problems facing the production, distribution and consumption of energy, but it would at least end the farce and failure of the pretence that there is a market for consumers. There’s already been something like a de facto re-nationalisation of railways (£), and it’s well overdue for something similar to happen to the energy industry.
It was an accident waiting to happen. As I wrote in 2013, the idea of ‘shopping around’ between energy providers was a farce because there was no competitive market in what had long been recognized as a natural monopoly. What had been created was, at best, an oligopoly of the six major providers and consumer choice was illusory, That mattered, because the underlying theory of privatization was that choice would lead to competition which would lead to greater efficiency and lower costs. Knock away the first link in this chain and the whole concept (even if it had held water in other ways) was destroyed.
Since then, although the big six always remained dominant, the illusion of choice was sustained by a regulatory change in 2014 which allowed the entry of a large number of new firms. These did indeed sometimes offer consumers cheaper prices, although the highly opaque nature of charging often made comparison hard, and in some cases the option of greener and more environmentally sustainable energy. In fact, I was one of those who did exactly that.
Another way in which the ‘market’ was supposedly made more competitive was by introducing an energy price cap in 2019 to try to prevent companies charging extortionate amounts on their default or standard tariffs to those customers who didn’t ‘shop around’. Again, the very need to do this was an indication that this was not, and could not be, a market in the way envisaged by neo-classical economics.
In the autumn of 2021 these two developments came together to create a disaster. For as wholesale energy prices rose globally the cap meant that companies couldn’t pass on all of these rises to consumers, and it emerged that many of the new entrants did not have the financial resources to survive. In some cases they had also had a policy of last-minute buying of wholesale energy which meant that they had less of a time buffer against price rises. In consequence over twenty of them went out of business, including Bulb, the seventh largest firm.
Since then, the price cap has been raised, by 12% last October, with a further 54% rise to come into effect in April, leading to dramatic increases in consumer bills: the average household energy bill will rise from £1277 to £1971 per year. For poorer households this is a disaster.
And what, now, of choice? First off, the customers of most of those firms that went bankrupt were transferred to one of the big companies, with no choice of which one. My own experience of being transferred to a big firm – ironically, the one I had left a few months before – was a nightmare in itself (and I’ve heard similar stories from others), with incorrect transfers of meter readings, and endless arguments about what money was owed.
Some of these problems arise from the more general way that, for years now these firms have ceased to actually use meter readers, and the bizarre use of constantly updated estimates of future usage so as to set direct debit payments, rather than simply paying for what you use, as you use it. I simply don’t understand the bills I receive any more. Added to all that is the perennial problem of call centres you can’t get through to, or get cut off from, or which say they will call back and don’t. And added to that is the new reality of everything being done online, the chatbots, the inexplicable rules and all the rest of the hideous inconvenience of the most mundane of transactions that are now the norm.
And then what about choice of tariffs? I, like almost everyone transferred, ended up on the standard or ‘deemed’ tariff i.e. the maximum price allowed under the cap. So are people who never changed tariff or did so under a time-limited deal that has now ended, or who move house are also on the standard tariff. There may be a few options to find a cheaper alternative, but they are extremely limited, and the illusion of choice that I wrote about in 2013 has now entirely disappeared. With it, there has gone the last vestige of pretence that this is a market in any meaningful sense of the term.
Indeed this whole saga shows how, as with many other core goods and services, it is politically impossible simply to ‘leave it to the market’. Even if not very effectively, the government and the regulator is under pressure to, at the very least, ensure that the lights stay on. Yet at the same time, since the industry remains privatized, consumers are ultimately paying for the dividends and bloated salaries, as well as the malign effects of financialization.
Restoring the UK industry to common ownership wouldn’t solve the many complex environmental and geo-political problems facing the production, distribution and consumption of energy, but it would at least end the farce and failure of the pretence that there is a market for consumers. There’s already been something like a de facto re-nationalisation of railways (£), and it’s well overdue for something similar to happen to the energy industry.
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