Workplace control

The focus of this book is on social harm within the context of work and the workplace. Social harm may be linked to ‘extreme’ processes (such as slavery) and outcomes (such as worker fatality) but it involves much more than this. The book is, therefore, interested in all workers and does not start conceptually with a single group or single problem. Instead, attention is directed towards controls, both from inside and outside the workplace, that are used to produce and reproduce ‘good’ and ‘better’ workers (however ‘good’ and ‘better’ are defined). The problem, as argued throughout the book, occurs when controls over workers become excessive and oppressive. In such instances the important point is to recognise exploitation and to identify the range of harmful outcomes that may result. The priority in the next three chapters of the book is to outline controls, largely legal and non-coercive, that could be deemed problematic and constitute part of the study of work-based social harm.

Controls over workers can exist within the workplace (this Chapter and Chapter Five) or within wider society (Chapter Six). In terms of the former, there is usually a combination of direct (this Chapter) and indirect (Chapter Five) control within any given workplace. The issue is not that controls exist per se but the nature, intensity and combination of control and whether or not it is exploitative or harmful in either intent or outcome.

The mechanisms and mechanics of worker control are complex. They exist because of the need to limit tensions between labour and capital that would be potentially detrimental to productivity. They also exist because of the need to manage labour into a position of strength, whereby work is embraced rather than resisted. Both deference and enthusiasm are required features of modern labour markets, though they are not always co-present, and capital has in its armoury various means to achieve these and to produce and reproduce ‘good’ and ‘better’ workers.

The core question, first posed by Lynd and Lynd (1929), is why workers work as hard as they do? An obvious starting point in this respect is to recognise that labour is treated as a ‘commodity’ (see Polanyi, 1944) but a commodity that is essentially of variable quality before and after its purchase.