All work and no pay - the rise of workfare

Boycott Workfare

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.

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

[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.

Advertisement

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

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

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)

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

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...