The choices we make: a ‘sliding doors’ moment

Much of the structural growth in new service sector jobs is in occupations that involve personal interactions. These jobs put demands on employees that were relatively unknown in manufacturing or mining – demands for the use of ‘emotional labour’. Employees are asked to evoke emotional reactions in clients or customers that bring about sales or at least make the targets feel more satisfied. From waitresses, bar attendants, sales assistants and customer sales representatives in call centres to air stewards, aged care workers and child carers, employees work with what Arlie Hochschild called the ‘managed heart’.

They may be required to ‘put on a face’ to boost sales, stressfully pretending to feel something they do not (Hochschild calls this ‘surface acting’), like in a ‘smile’ campaign documented by Emmanuel Ogbonna but seen many times over by bewildered customers of numerous firms. Or employees may actually embody, deep down, the emotions that are needed, for example in care work (Hochschild calls this ‘deep acting’). Often these skills are associated with ‘women’s work’. Often they are seen as ‘attributes’ rather than ‘skills’. Often, therefore, the jobs undergo ‘undervaluation’ and the workers are poorly paid for what the work requires.

Other emerging jobs in the service sector, though, may be alienated from human interaction. The rise of internet sales has caught many storefront retailers off guard, replacing shop visits with screen clicks. There are no book sales assistants in Amazon warehouses, where mobile technology monitors and directs workers to use the quickest route between two points. ‘You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,’ said one manager to the Financial Times. Not just emotionless labour, some jobs are thoughtless labour.

As employment becomes more insecure, and as management strategy toughens, work also becomes harder. Through the twentieth century, workers gradually achieved shorter and shorter working weeks through various rounds of industrial action and advocacy. Yet in the 1980s, this started to change. Working hours for full-time workers increased and continued to do so in the 1990s. Surveys showed large numbers of workers reporting increases in how hard they had to work and in the pressure they felt at work. They also showed increasing difficulties experienced by workers in balancing their work and family lives, and problems of work interfering in their personal lives.

No small part of this reflected the changing regulation of working time. Hourly wages with penalty rates and overtime premiums became less common; annualised salaries that ‘incorporated’ these things became more common. Employers no longer paid the full cost when employees worked extra hours. So management could raise expectations, employees would inculcate them, and the extra work would get done. Some universities, for example, regularly expected their staff to increase research outputs annually with 10 per cent geometric growth.

If wages and premiums stayed in place, then employers might push for the introduction of rotating twelve-hour shifts, as in mining, already mentioned (now working the second longest hours of any industry), or some parts of manufacturing.

Alternatively, employers might push for the abolition of penalty rates and other time-elated premiums. The Howard Government’s ill-fated WorkChoices legislation was a temporary culmination of such efforts. Despite its demise, employers in retailing and hospitality still push for the reduction or removal of penalty rates, and now they again look to government for support.

But these are not processes that can continue indefinitely. Eventually, increases in work intensity or working hours become unsustainable. Resistance grows, both organised – through unions and industrial action – and unorganised – through absenteeism, quits, losses in loyalty, problems in quality of output, even possibly sabotage. The employee goodwill or ‘organisational citizenship’ that firms come to expect and indeed rely upon (often without realising it) may disappear. It’s in this context that employee demands for greater flexibility in behaviour by employers have expanded. Some workers have the labour market power to achieve this; many do not.

So, too, resistance may grow to increasing insecurity, and be manifested in the same ways. We see evidence for this in the way that casualisation of the employee workforce has peaked. It reached a quarter of the workforce in 1998 but has been roughly that level since.

Indeed the rapidly growing fascination that employers had with part-time, casual employment (for a long time, the growth in part-time hours was mostly through growth in casual employment) has tapered off. Whereas two-thirds of part-time jobs were casual in 1996, by 2012 just over half were casual. In its place has come a growing recognition of the need for permanent, part-time employment (perhaps also partly under pressure from the demands of women returning to work from maternity leave).

On the other hand, employers continue to be interested in casual full-timejobs, with the proportion of full-time jobs that were casual growing from 8 per cent in 1992 to 13 per cent in 2007, though even that has since declined slightly.

Meanwhile, the growth in the working week for full-time workers has halted. The proportion of full-time workers putting in more than fifty hours in a week rose from 19.5 per cent through 1978 to 30.5 per cent through 2000. It gradually eased to 26.5 per cent through 2012. The unsustainability of such practices was apparent for employers to see. That said, the rotating twelve-hour shift still rules in mining and other areas; employers there still seek an increase in maximum shift length, and the attack on penalty rates in the service sector continues. But employer effort now seems focused on getting employees to work whenever suits employers, regardless of the cost to employee health or social life, rather than on getting individual employees to work longer and longer hours each week.