Where you need a doctor's note to use the bathroom

Why the workplace is a dictatorship Kate Jeffreys 23 February 2010

“Capitalism tells us constantly that we have an infinite amount of choice – but you can’t choose any meaningful things about your life. You can choose from one thousand varieties of orange juice.” – socialist and speculative fiction author China Miéville Capitalism is perpetually telling us how much control we have over our lives. We can choose our electricity provider, where to eat, what brand of clothing to wear or which phone company overcharges us. In Australia we have a democratically elected government, in that we decide which set of people will pursue imperialist wars overseas and cut social spending. But for the most part, these choices are superficial. A majority of people in Australia are wage workers. We might spend forty to fifty hours a week earning our living, so work is a defining feature of our lives. Waged work generates all profits and sustains society – yet workers themselves have almost no choice over how this work is organised. The reality is that most workers’ experience of the capitalist workplace is much more totalitarian than democratic; much more characterised by how we don’t have choices than by what we do have choices about. For construction workers, a building site can resemble a police state – and that’s not hyperbole. In an average year for the construction industry, almost one worker per week dies due to a work-related incident or illness. Yet the Rudd government is far more concerned with continuing Howard’s crackdown on trade unionists than with preventing these deaths or bringing to justice the employers responsible. The law is on the side of business, and Labor intends to keep it that way. The hugely unpopular Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), dubbed “Gillard’s Gestapo” by union officials, is soon to be replaced – by a body with exactly the same powers to harass and intimidate workers. So we shouldn’t be surprised to hear more stories like that of Ark Tribe. In May 2008, Ark, a rigger and construction union member, worked on the Flinders University building site in South Australia. The building contractor ignored the workers’ concerns over dangerous conditions on the site. Eventually the union took industrial action over a long list of basic health and safety concerns, including overhead protection and clean drinking water. The Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) investigated the site, interrogating workers and demanding to know who had said what during the dispute. Ark refused to co-operate and now faces six months in jail. Miner Larry Knight died in the rock fall at Beaconsfield gold mine in 2006. In a stellar example of callousness and greed, a building contractor used Howard’s WorkChoices legislation to dock the pay of three Victorian construction workers who had taken fifteen minutes longer than planned to deposit the money they’d collected for Knight’s family. Although other sections of the workforce don’t necessarily have government thugs policing their every move, no capitalist workplace is really “free” in any meaningful sense of the word. In fact, as you enter your workplace you might lose some rights that in other situations you would take for granted. Anyone who has worked in retail could relate stories of induction training sessions in which new staff are taught that they no longer have the right to their own facial expressions – they have to smile, no matter how they feel. At work, you might not even have the right to your own body functions. The workplace safety magazine Hazards reported in 1998 that staff at British Telecom had been forced to raise their hands to get permission if they needed to go to the toilet; and that permission could be denied if another worker could not be found to cover for them. Modern call centres are run by computer systems that time workers’ movements to the second. Quality control systems force call handlers to project a specified tone of voice and to use an approved vocabulary – in essence, to subordinate their personalities to an invented corporate image. High-pressure sales targets drive workers to inordinate amounts of stress, prompting one 21-year-old Telstra worker to commit suicide in 2007. Capitalism tells us that we can express our individuality, while simultaneously crushing it at work. Control and creativity are stripped away from human labour – an activity that should benefit from the free contribution of ideas from the people who actually perform it. In the end the only way we’ll get to choose compassion and self-respect as a way of life is to have democratic control over how we work. And that means socialism.