Despotic Time in the UK

This chapter traces the historical evolution of working time and internal labor markets in the United Kingdom. The term “internal labor market” refers to the shielding of employment relations from the external labor market through mechanisms such as seniority policies, employment protections, internal promotion ladders, and differentiated job structures based on skill and knowledge development. The chapter then looks at the temporal organization of labor at PartnershipCo. It considers wage rates and pay structure, employment protections, mobility, and promotion opportunities, but finds that flexible scheduling is the most significant means of securing control. Flexible scheduling was found to be highly manager-controlled, even when institutionalized working time regulations were present.

Flexible Despotism

This introductory chapter provides an overview of flexible despotism. New economic processes are taking hold in the spaces opened up by the steady decline of collective workplace regulation. No longer is working time understood as a standard, stable eight hours, five days a week. Instead, working time is flexible, on demand, and 24/7. Consequently, many workers are increasingly employed flexibly, while others may not even have an employment contract at all, and instead be classified as self-employed—and yet have their labor controlled by a platform. Even workers with standard, full-time, permanent contracts can experience high levels of insecurity as a result of flexible scheduling within this new temporal order. As a result, the benefits and drawbacks of flexible scheduling have been widely debated. These discussions, however, have tended to focus on issues of job quality, work–life balance, and well-being. This book goes further, by drawing attention to important but under-researched issues of managerial power and workplace control. This is necessary, as it is only when one understands paid work as a power relationship that one is able to see how precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism—a new regime of control within the workplace.

Internal States in the U.S.

This chapter analyzes internal states in the United States, focusing on ConflictCo. Here, workplace institutions were found to do little to rationalize discipline or constrain its arbitrary application by managers. The chapter demonstrates that managers at ConflictCo typically gained compliance through threats and punishments, such as termination of employment and disciplinary action. However, managers' ability to secure control in this way was identified as being challenged by a union-backed worker association. The legal and media campaign waged by the union and the worker association successfully curbed the ability of managers to impose blatant despotism. The chapter then investigates the operation of normative control at ConflictCo, showing how in this workplace a heavy emphasis was placed on propaganda and rituals to try to legitimize control. These normative controls were found to be dysfunctional in that they actually legitimized resistance.

The Dynamics of Work and Scheduling Gifts

This chapter describes the main characteristics of retail work at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo, considering how managerial control at the two workplace regimes was aided through misrecognition by workers of the workplace relations. It provides a brief history of work games, that is, the manner in which workers create games that make their work more enjoyable but that also lead them to become complicit in their own exploitation, for winning these games invariably entails producing additional profit for their employer. The chapter then discusses the absence of work games at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. In place of the mystifying effects of work games, one finds that flexible working time aids control as a consequence of “schedule gifts” obscuring exploitation. Schedule gifts are found to be crucial for understanding control in the on-demand economy.