You may have met a manager like this before:
They don’t wear ties because they had a boss once who wore a tie, and he ran himself to the ground, things are easier now, so much so that his (or her) top three shirt buttons are undone, and (s)he’s leaning on the radiator while addressing your team – where you’re all key players.
They are realistic about the working day, having read somewhere, in a Zen capitalist rag, that if a team member (not worker, not staffer, not peasant) relaxes, listens to their personal music player perhaps, then more will get done in the long term, way more than a frazzled brain taking 9-5 too literally.
Want to wear shorts on a hot day? You got it! Want to drink coca cola between tasks, laughing and talking about big brother while the managing director is behind you doing the same? They’ll join you! Want to go for a beer after work, no can do, they’re off to Nobu with their buddies.
This isn’t capitalism, baby. This is capital 2.0 – but it’s virtually the same thing, and it amounts to smoke and mirrors.
Changes the working day doesn’t it! Well, it’s all for nothing!!!
Consider what Roy Mayall, the pseudonym for the postal worker/blogger and occasional comment is free writer, has said about his line of work, on the subject of new Royal Mail investment in multimillion-pound walk-sequencing machines “as part of their new modernisation and investment programme”:
What the new machines have done is to take away the last element of skill from our job. There’s no memory involved any more. We pull out a letter, and we stick it in a slot. We pull out the next letter and stick it into the same slot, depending on the address. Once all the letters from the first address are finished, we move on to the next address. We carry on and on like this until all the letters are sorted.
This does not necessarily speed up the process of throwing off the frame, as most postal workers know their frame so well they can sort it almost as fast without the walk-sequencing technology. Estimates are that it will save about six minutes a frame. Previously, it took about an hour and a half to throw off an entire frame, so six minutes doesn’t really make all that much difference. But what it does mean is that the Royal Mail can now use unskilled labour to do what was once a moderately skilled job.
The optimist may believe that Royal Mail is just buying into more efficient tools to save time in an ever-competitive world, particularly in their industry. But anyone can see, by what Roy Mayall describes, that this new programme has given licence to invest a lump sum into machinery that will undercut skilled work in that industry, saving money in the long term on wages and paying for unskilled workers where skilled ones were needed previously, reducing the need for employment overall.
People tend not to think of this in economic debates, but the supermarket self-service checkout; this machine allows sometimes up to 12 machines to be manned by one person. That is 11 jobs undercut in one shop alone. If a shift is on average eight hours, and the shop is open 24 hours a day, that is 33 less people needed to be employed on minimum wage for the single purchase of 12 machines.
Consider this by regional and then national figures – that’s many jobs, and a lot of money saved.
I could make examples ad nauseum, but I have designated these to show that for all the supposed change in managerial and organisational ethos, across all sectors, the main problem still remains – and always was – in the logic of capital itself, which at its heart sacrifices staff for illusory appeals to efficiency.
by Carl Packman
You can read more of Carl’s thoughts and articles on his blog Raincoat Optimism.
“since labour expenditure is cut by self service machines, and by some random cause and effect food prices are lowered also, that will mean that both wages are depressed and the price of buying and selling food will be cheaper so small farmers and landowners lose out.”
Store prices lowered by cutting labour expenditure have no effect on the price supermarkets would pay for their produce.
My point is simply that in a given town if shopping budgets are reduced by cost cutting on the part of businesses that ‘saved’ money will be spent by consumers on other purchases which require employment to provide.
My last paraghraph is unclear, what you have responded to is not my view. It would be clearer if it read (additional info in brackets):
“If you were to introduce a law requiring tesco to employ more people than is needed (ie man more checkout machines than are wanted by customers), you are simply forcing the townspeople to indirectly pay those workers to do something that they (the townspeople) may not want (man checkout machines) instead of something they do want (any other service they might choose to pay for).
you have an oversimplified view of economics, but i’ll play you at your own game; since labour expenditure is cut by self service machines, and by some random cause and effect food prices are lowered also, that will mean that both wages are depressed and the price of buying and selling food will be cheaper so small farmers and landowners lose out.
The point it that the machines imply that shops aren’t employing more people than is needed, they are cost cutting, and I can assure you that if the choice was something the worker may not want to do (work a checkout) or no work at all, my guess is they would choose the former.
It’s absurd to suggest in your economical debate that someone might not want to do something – if that’s how we measured work then we’d have 6% employment (I’m open to other details of the amount of people by percentage who enjoy their job).
“I agree. I mean, I don’t want to sound like a luddite, but I think that looms should be smashed”- Stewart Lee
What’s missing from this that the money saved by improving labour efficiencies is then spent elsewhere.
By not rationalising production, you deny jobs to the workers who would have been employed to meet this demand.
For example, if Tesco, by introducing self service checkouts, keeps their food prices in a particular town lower than otherwise, this results in more disposable income for the townspeople, who might spend it any number of other local businesses who will now need new workers.
If you were to introduce a law requiring tesco to employ more people than is needed, you are simply forcing the townspeople to indirectly pay those workers to do something that they may not want (man checkout machines) instead of something they do want (any other service they might choose to pay for).