few of them, the majority because of the low value and low productivity of their labour.
Keep and Payne go on to argue that the key to unlocking higher productivity is the patient, long-term work of job redesign to ensure the optimal use of skills. That crucially involves high levels of ‘semi-autonomous group working’, or teams of workers largely managing themselves, and in 1998 such self-management covered only 5 per cent of British workplaces.33 Britain has a dire record on this kind of work redesign, unlike many parts of Europe where the ‘quality of working life’ movement got government and employer backing in the seventies and eighties. Countries such as Italy, Germany and France pursued the principle of worker participation to ensure that work was really paying off, rather than the much more conflictual model of management, adopting specific efficiency criteria, which prevailed in Britain through the seventies and eighties. The ‘humanisation of work’ agenda which was pursued in Scandinavia was strangled in Britain by the country’s history of poor industrial relations, with employers resisting any formal negotiation with trade unions over ‘production issues’, and the unions being forced to restrict their bargaining to wages and conditions. Interestingly, a TUC survey in July 2003 showed that potential members put job design and productivity as key issues for negotiation by trade unions, ahead of pay.34 But the kind of social partnership between trade unions and employers that could bring about this kind of work reorganisation – a slow and very complex process, admit Keep and Payne – would require much stronger unions, and has lacked government support.
Research shows that people are well aware of how unproductive long hours can be. Between 1998 and 2003 there was a sharp increase in the number of workers reporting how tiredness led to mistakes, and tasks were taking longer to complete. Nearly three-quarters of long-hours workers (over forty-eight hours a week) said their work took them longer and their performance suffered.’35 While long hours are still regarded as evidence of superior commitment, there is research to show that, particularly in high-skill areas of the labour market where creativity and innovation are required, they damage performance. Respondents to the ‘Working Lives’ website had strong views on the relationship between long hours and productivity. Their experience – and many of them had worked in Europe or the US as well as Britain – was that people wasted a lot of time. Effective intense work could only be managed over a certain number of hours. Much more than thirty-two hours a week and time was wasted because of distractions and poor concentration. It provoked considerable frustration that advantage was gained by staying late, rather than by working productively. As one civil servant emailed:
I often feel guilty for leaving at 5.30 or 6 even though I have done a full and productive day’s work, when I know colleagues will be staying on for another hour or two or three. I do not believe that because someone puts in a marathon day they are ‘better’ workers. In fact, I think that excessive hours make people less efficient – I think people end up thinking they have to work these hours to be seen as good workers, and so end up filling extra hours by doing work that they don’t actually need to do. I think long hours can cause you to lose the ability to focus on what really needs to be done and what can wait. Sadly, to progress to a higher grade in my job, it is given that you work the mad hours.
Depressingly, our overwork has been used to mask our economic underperformance. This is an option which Professor Porter believes has largely outrun its usefulness. We can’t now work any harder, and any future gains in productivity will have to be found through another formula; the win-win option is that productivity and quality of working life could be two sides of the same coin, an issue to which I will return in the final chapter.
3 Putting Your Heart and Soul Into it
The two ways of measuring the demands of a job which we have considered – time and effort – have defined industrial relations since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but a third is a phenomenon of the last few decades: emotional labour. It’s not just your physical stamina and analytical capabilities which are required to do a good job, but your personality and emotional skills as well. From a customer services representative in a call centre to a teacher or manager, the emotional demands of the job have immeasurably increased. Emotional labour has become one of the hardest parts of many jobs. So just why is your employer after your heart?
The demand for emotional labour is driven firstly by the growth of the service economy. Companies are increasingly competing to provide a certain type of emotional experience along with their product, be it a mobile phone or an insurance policy. Where once muscle-power was crucial to the employment contract for millions of manual workers, its modern-day equivalent is emotional empathy and the ability to strike up a rapport with another human being quickly. Employers believe customers will stay loyal, and will sometimes pay a premium, for a certain kind of interaction – they want to be treated as individuals, with a personalised service in a mass consumer market driven by technology. The standards are exacting: employees are instructed to provide service with personality, ‘naturalness’, spontaneity and warmth; qualities which they must, paradoxically, provide consistently.
Another kind of emotional labour is also in increasing demand. It is a response to the changing structure of organisations. The clearly denned hierarchical bureaucracies which served industrial society well in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been outstripped by the pace of change; only much flatter, more fluid organisations can adapt and continuously re-adapt in different formulations of networks. But as the lines of authority become less clear, much more falls to the individual employee to negotiate, influence and persuade. This is often called the ‘relationship economy’, and what makes it particularly hard work is that it requires skills of empathy, intuition, persuasion, even manipulation, for which there is little preparation in an educational system focused exclusively on analytical rather than emotional skills.
Speak As If You’re Smiling
The phrase ‘emotional labour’ was first coined in 1983 by the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her study of how flight attendants were trained to provide their customers with a particular emotional experience.1 The concept has spawned a large academic literature analysing the emotional demands of the service economy on the workforce. Call centres, one of the fastest-growing sources of employment in Britain, represent perhaps the most intensive form of emotional labour. Nearly half a million employees are handling around 125 million calls a month in centres which have clustered in areas of high unemployment such as around Glasgow, Tyneside, South Wales and South Yorkshire.
Projecting warmth on the telephone is a skill which Claire and Tracey, in an Orange call centre in North Shields, Tyneside, have perfected. Both in their early twenties, they are paid to talk – all day. My conversation with Claire is punctuated every few sentences by her incantation, ‘Hello, this is Claire, how may I help you?’ She says it with the same tone of friendly helpfulness every time, only to then explain to the customer that the system is down and she can’t do anything. Nothing rattles her, nothing alters her wording or the tone of her voice; it is entirely consistent. Ironically, what is less consistent on this particular afternoon is the technology; but Claire continues to give the cheerful, good-natured emotional interaction which is expected of her.
They work on the site of an old colliery, but there are few clues to that now. The land has been levelled apart from one hump in the distance which is the last slagheap, now grassed over. The pit was called the ‘Rising Sun’, oddly echoing Orange’s famous slogan, ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Orange’. Both speak to an optimistic aspiration of a dawning new future. In the past it would have been
