The New Economy Heralds the
Return of Taylorism
Given that the net
has proven to be a superb tool for comparing consumer prices and
obtaining cheaper products and services it, perhaps, should not be a
surprise that the hidden costs of some of the fast growing businesses
in the world amount to a return to Taylorsim as the people management
norm. As I have noted elsewhere previously, this may be dressed up
as talent management, but for the average employee it means low paid
insecure employment, with exhausting targets, overbearing managers
and pressure to conform to company policies. Amazon, SportsDirect,
RyanAir, Tesco and others have all come under intense media scrutiny
for their employment practices.
Ryanair, it seems
runs league tables for pilots fuel loading, employs over 70% of
pilots on zero hours contracts, makes ground and stewarding staff pay
for their own uniforms and drinks (at airport prices). Whilst
Channel 4s Dispatches reports pilots feeling under pressure to
cut corners, to save money, whilst their feedback is ignored. So bad
has it got at RyanAir that pilots are cooperating, via a WhatsApp
group, to refuse to help the company to overcome a pilot scheduling
error that is causing the cancellation of thousands of flights this
winter. The energetic CEO of RyanAir; Michael O’Leary, makes no
secret of the fact that it is a low cost company. However, one
wonders how appropriate a pure hard HR model is in the airline
business, given the paramount importance of safety, especially when
that regimes extends even to the pilots. This does look like an
accident waiting to happen.
Amazon, eBay and
Starbucks have all become notorious for their aggressive approach to
corporate tax, but Amazon, in particular, has come under fire for its
employment practices. Recent reports in the Sunday Mirror and
The Independent newspapers suggest that the pressure to
achieve targets is causing employees to literally collapse at work.
In common with Sports Direct, Amazon is timing toilet breaks,
targeting employees to process a parcel every 30 seconds, and
discouraging trade unions, in a focused effort to squeeze
productivity to the limit. Both companies are also reported to be
making extensive use of zero hours contracts in the UK, which offer
no guaranteed hours and considerable insecurity, in exchange for
(mostly) minimum wage earnings. Precisely the sorts of conditions
which gave rise to trade unions and would be described as sweatshop
conditions during the industrial revolution.
Such conditions gave
rise to the emergence of the human relations school of people
management, exemplified by the likes of Cadbury’s and Saltaire. In
contrast to their competitors, the Cadbury brothers and Titus Salt
saw their employees as a source of competitive advantage, rather than
a cost to be minimised. For them quality (of product and work), not
only price, was central to their business model. An investment in an
employee wasn’t just about improving productive capabilities, it
was about creating a more civic society, without which it was
recognised that order breaks down, life becomes more brutal for most
and those lucky enough to escape the daily grind are forced to
abandon any sense of virtue, just to sustain their status and
position.
One of the
contradictions of the new economy is that the networked ability to
search out the lowest price is really no more than a global means of
identifying the most exploitative means of production and
distribution. With electronic distribution costs close to zero, the
pressure to lower the cost of any human interaction with value
creation that can be standardised is immense in a global marketplace.
Of course, wherever possible people will be replaced: with
driver-less cars, drones, robots, or outsourced to cheaper locations.
Even supposedly higher value functions, such as HR and finance, are
now being outsourced, in so-called shared service centres in low cost
locations around the world.
People are being
squeezed financially and diminished morally, whether they be
operational staff, with fewer rights, higher targets and kept in line
through the fear of outsourcing, or Managers required to oversee this
monstrous machine. Something that Marx could have described very
well indeed is hardly something that we could proudly call the
triumph of liberal capitalism, and we must hope is certainly not the
end of history, as Fukayama infamously described the end of the cold
war. Although The Conditions of the Customer Service Classes in
Digital Land might be a good book title for our times…
A major part of
management responsibility used to be mentoring more junior staff, not
just as employees, but as civic people. Increasingly that
responsibility is being discharged to professional coaches who focus
upon the professional in good times and are there, on employees own
tabs, when things are not so good. The reasons for this include the
declining age of managers and the ambition of younger employees, who
are in a hurry. However, intimately tied up with talent management,
this is primarily about focusing upon the numbers earlier, faster and
more efficiently. The job for life has died and so employers have no
reason to even pretend to invest for the long term. Employment is
now a purely transactional relationship, with less and less moral
baggage to contend with in the search for bigger margins and lower
costs.
It is not that
globalisation is, in itself, a bad thing. However, just as occurred
in the tail of the last economic long wave, during the 1930’s, the
dehumanising consequences of rapid economic change re having social
and political consequences. Our failure to come together and reject
the pure hard HR model is symptomatic of our failure to learn from
the 1930’s. Work needs to become more than just a source of
income, with which to passively consume more branded goods. It needs
to be a vehicle for each of us to grow as individuals and as a
society. For the alternative: atomisation, widening inequality and
the victory of utilitarianism over virtue will create a world so
hollow that it will result in war. And not just a war for talent!
The seeds are
already sown and the trends in place. A casual glance at the Brexit
vote, the election of Trump, or the surge of support for LePenn are
clear indicators of a rejection of the new order by those at the
bottom of society. People want more than to be mindless consumers of
whatever they can afford from the crumbs left from the digital pie.
The zero hours part-timers are trying to tell the elites that they
are sick of their reduced lives being used to bail out bankers. HR
executives produce much hot air on the subject of leadership.
Perhaps now is the time that they started to show some and remember
that work can be a chance to express the development and growth of
us, individually and collectively, as our output exceeds the sum of
our parts. To do that means to go beyond league tables, targets and
time clocks though and not be afraid to accept that the organisation
of work is much a moral challenge as it is an economic one.
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