throughout UK manufacturing, of how increased competition coupled with de-industrialisation has enabled employers to push through, bit by bit, a process of work intensification. Management’s increased communication with workers reinforces the sense of the precariousness of a company’s survival in the global market. This awareness reconfigures older perceptions of the distinct and often conflicting interests of management and employees: the ‘We’re all in this together’ line has been amply used by management to exact higher levels of effort or flexibility. This is what labour economist Andrew Scott found in his study of three British factories in the early nineties: threats of closure, unemployment, of being uncompetitive mean that it ‘may be that the modern wage-effort bargain has become still more elastic, capable of being stretched well beyond the limits to which it was subject in the past.’10 Workers find it harder and harder to construct a credible case against this piecemeal encroachment on the pace and nature of their work. ‘You can’t buck the market,’ intoned Margaret Thatcher in the eighties, and her words still resonate on the factory floor.
How Information Technology Makes for Hard Work
The biggest single factor driving work intensification is information technology, argues Francis Green. It enables greater use to be made of time and ‘fills up gaps that would otherwise be natural breaks in the pattern of work’. He backs up his argument by pointing to research showing that 42 per cent of workplaces which had introduced new technology in the previous five years experienced a substantial increase in the pace of work, compared with 31 per cent of workplaces where no new technology had been introduced.11 Often the introduction of information communication technologies (ICT) leads to changes in both the job process and the whole way the work and the organisation is structured. Green found that where there had been reorganisation the rates of intensification were dramatic, with 45 per cent reporting a substantial increase, compared to 29 per cent where there had been no change. If that reorganisation introduced a greater involvement of workers – i.e. they were required to take on more responsibility for tasks – the proportion of workplaces experiencing work intensification increased again, to 48 per cent compared with 30 per cent where there was no increased worker involvement.’12 Nor is such reorganisation a one-off adjustment; it becomes a continuous process as a response to constantly evolving ICT and changing market conditions.
Information technology also increases the pressure on employees to perform, as companies themselves are subject to more exacting regulations and quality control. There is less room for shoddy work, for an absent-minded moment on the assembly line, because the technology enables tracking of products; for example, if a hair was found in one of Saltfillas’ packets, the company would be able to track, out of the thousands packed every day, who the packer was at the time the packet went through.
The technology to measure every moment of the employee’s performance has enabled the extension of Frederick Taylor’s dream into white-collar work, bringing unprecedented control and time efficiency. It transforms the traditional hierarchical structures of bureaucracy, by facilitating supervision and removing the need for layers of managerial control. Here’s how Liz, working in the mortgage department of a major bank in Yorkshire, describes how the computer has replaced the clerical supervisor:
We had a laminated sheet of barcodes representing a series of tasks on our desk, and every time we did anything we had to swipe the appropriate barcode with a laser reader pen. We had seventeen minutes to get out a mortgage offer. If the phone went, we had to answer it within two rings and all the calls were recorded and monitored to check whether we were giving out accurate information and the manner with which we dealt with the call. Every time we made a call we had to swipe the pen, and every time we answered the phone we had to swipe. You had to swipe if you were going to the toilet or to get a coffee. If you wanted to talk to a colleague you had to swipe, so that all interactions with colleagues were being monitored. When we had finished for the day, we had to log in and out. The whole thing was then downloaded to the supervisor, who could look at the log to check productivity.
It was like working for Big Brother. Some of my colleagues would say it’s for the greater good – trying to get profits up. The people I worked with came from very varied backgrounds. Some women who had worked in factories didn’t mind it because they were used to being closely monitored. It was the younger ones who resented it, or those who came from managerial backgrounds or were college-educated; they wanted more freedom and initiative.
The log Liz describes can be programmed to highlight any departure from the required routine – such as too many toilet breaks or too many ‘consultations with colleagues’. The level of supervision is superior to anything that even the most beady-eyed boss could achieve.
At the lower levels of the labour market, information technology has frequently been used to increase pressure and reduce autonomy. In professional and managerial jobs the story is rather different: it has increased both pressure and autonomy. The higher the level of the employee’s computer skills, the greater the degree of anxiety. Research on the impact of information technology on the upper end of the labour market is still in its early stages, but the indications are that it has significandy increased workloads. How do we use email, mobile phones, the internet and laptops, and why haven’t they lived up to the promise of the advertising of making our lives easier? Why do so many people say that they have in fact made their jobs more difficult?
There are two separate issues about how technology can increase the burdens of work: the volume of information it makes available to us, and the way in which it increases our own accessibility. Firstly, the volume of information to which the internet provides access is obvious within a few minutes: a Google search under almost any heading will bring up thousands of relevant items. Eighty-two per cent of managers mentioned the proliferation of the information they had to deal with as a cause of long hours.13 Material which would once have been kept within the company or department is now widely available on the internet or intranet. The knowledge economy has transformed the circulation of data so that anywhere on the net there could be exactly the information you’re looking for. So when do you settle for anything less?
What accelerates the flow of information is that the whole balance of effort involved in its distribution has reversed: once, a request for a particular bit of information might have required typing it out or photocopying it and putting it in the post; now, it simply requires an email with an attachment. The marginal costs incurred by the sender have shrunk to a few minutes, while the costs to the receiver to read, digest and consider the information are as time-consuming as ever. Far more information is being distributed than ever before, but what has not changed is our capacity to absorb and process it. In fact there is some evidence that the increased flow of information actually hinders our mental processes, making us less productive, not more. Psychologist David Lewis described in Information Overload (1999) how the brain becomes tired trying to keep up, and loses its powers of concentration and the ability to think clearly or rationally. He cited Stephen Grossberg’s studies of mind and brain, which warned that one of the strategies the brain uses to reduce fatigue is ‘to pay attention to anything new, while taking no notice of what is unchanged’.14
Secondly, many of the new information technologies transform accessibility. The mobile phone dismantles many of the spatial boundaries of work introduced by industrialisation. It was the development of factories which bounded work spatially, separating it from the home. For the middle classes the spatial differentiation became even more clear-cut with the growth of suburbs and commuting. In the last twenty years mobile phones, laptops, company intranets and home PCs have dissolved the separation between our work and our private lives. It’s true that the spillover is both ways – children phoning their parents in the middle
