Fulfilling the ‘British way’: beyond constrained choice—Amazon workers' lived experiences of workfare

• Author: Phil Taylor,Kendra Briken
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12232
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018

Fulfilling the ‘British way’: beyond

constrained choice—Amazon workers’lived

experiences of workfare

Kendra Briken and Phil Taylor

ABSTRACT

This article makes a distinctive contribution to critiquing the Taylor Review of

Modern Working Practices (TRMWP). Rejecting TRMWP’s abstracted concept of

‘choice’and its celebration of the ‘British way’of job creation, it emphasises the

degree of compulsion experienced by low-pay, temporary workers in local labour

markets. The empirical focus is on Amazon’s‘fulfilment centre’at Swansea and draws

on testimonies of ‘associates’, both permanent and, mostly, agency temps including

migrant workers. The article situates these worker experiences in job-starved labour

markets, considering the role of temporary worker agencies (TWAs) and the effects

of workfare and benefit sanctions. The evidence compels a reconceptualisation of

the triangular relationship between TWAs, employers and temp workers as quadrilat-

eral, emphasising the role of the state. A brutal, digitally enabled lean workplace

regime intersects with a brutal, digitally enabled workfare regime which serves to

thoroughly critique Taylor’s absurdly optimistic characterisation of choice.

1 KENDRA BRIKEN AND PHIL TAYLOR (UNIVERSITY OF

STRATHCLYDE)

The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices (TRMWP) is riddled with contra-

dictions. The most egregious concerns its relentless advocacy of the ‘distinctive

strengths of [our] existing labour markets and framework of regulation’, its celebra-

tion of the ‘British way’, which it claims, has been unequivocally successful in creating

jobs. Yet, this paean of praise to flexibility must be set against the labour market

iniquities which prompted the Conservative Government to commission the review

in the first place. Context is important. The year 2016 saw media exposure of the

employment rights’deficit in the ‘gig’or platform economy, particularly at Deliveroo

and Uber. Relatedly, awareness grew that much self-employment was bogus, with

deleterious consequences for the many workers, not employees, involved. The appall-

ing employment and work conditions revealed at Sports Direct’s Shirebrook ware-

house (BIS, 2016) epitomised the ills of many contemporary workplaces; low-paid,

insecure, arduous toil performed by disposable workers lacking basic rights and for

whom in-work poverty is inescapable.

❒Dr. Kendra Briken and Professor Phil Taylor, Department of Work, Employment and Organization,

Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Correspondence should be

addressed to Phil Taylor, Department of Work, Employment and Organization, Strathclyde Business

School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G1 1XQ, UK. E-mail: philip.taylor@strath.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 49:5-6, 438–458

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Faced with this outpouring, Prime Minister May’s Government sought to minimise

political damage by embracing a discourse of empathy with British workers, the

so-called just about managing. Political repositioning required an initiative. Some-

thing had to be done or, more appositely, seen to be done. However, the outcome

was a report that is ill-informed, evidence-light or plainly deficient and which glosses

over, or misses entirely, realms of workers’experiences at the bottom-end of the la-

bour market (Bloodworth, 2018). If its feeble recommendations were implemented,

they would patently fail to meet its ‘overriding ambition’to ensure that ‘all work in

the UK should be fair and decent with a realistic scope for development and fulfil-

ment’(TRMWP, 2017: 6).

This article welcomes the trenchant analysis of TRMWP’s limitations by Bales

et al. (2018) and Moore et al. (2017). They interrogate its conceptual flaws, exposing

its neo-liberal and New Labour ideological underpinnings, its lack of international

comparative perspective, its disregard of ILO’s binding decent work standards and

rights and the European Social Charter. Bales et al. (2018) highlight Taylor’s lacuna

with respect to trade unions’ability to deliver meaningful participation for workers to

remedy problems. The report’s preference for ‘light regulation’contrasts sharply with

the government’s actual preference for strict legislation with the Trade Union Act

(2016) and curtailment of workers’rights, considerations that Taylor evades.

This article makes a distinctive contribution to this critique by emphasising the

compulsion experienced by vulnerable, low-paid temporary workers in local labour

markets. Dominated by neo-liberal assumptions TRMWP is predicated on the

leitmotif of choice, so that in employment and jobs, ‘individuals should be able to

decide’, their choices facilitated by light touch legislation and (minimal) regulation

but not prescription. A telling foregrounding sentence declares: ‘The most important

factors determining people’s experience of work lie in the relationship between those

who hire employ and manage on the one hand and those whose services they employ

on the other’(Bales et al., 2018: 7). Here the employment relationship is depicted as

an individualistic, fair and implicitly equal exchange between the buyers and sellers

of services, where the latter exercise choices that improve their work situation. In

Taylor’s Panglossian world, ‘the vast majority of employers understand the value of

good employment practice’.

The TRMWP fleetingly acknowledges that certain labour markets may lead to

poor outcomes at ‘the individual level’. In a few paragraphs (p.26), it claims to

address the question, ‘Why the labour market does not work for everyone’. For

Taylor the ‘key factor is an imbalance of power between individuals and employers’,

where dominant local employers or dominant employers of certain skills constrain

employees over ‘who they work for’, conceding that they ‘could struggle to get

another job if they were to leave an unsatisfactory job’. This brief admission was

prompted by the Sports Direct ‘scandal’(BIS, 2016). However, these instances are

treated as aberrant, localised exceptions to successful job creation and exercise of

choice. Regarding Taylor’s celebration of choice, which draws on preference theory

(Moore et al., 2017), TRMWP overlooks how workers’options are pre-determined,

not merely by government policy, but by the construction of labour markets accord-

ing to employers’interests (Bales et al. (2018: 50). Such neglect is consistent with

approaches that abstract the constituent elements of good work from their institu-

tional settings and contexts (Findlay et al., 2017).

The worst Taylor conceives of is the exceptional case of monopsony, where a

dominant local employer engages in ‘exploitation’of surplus labour. Yet, for

439Working at Amazon—Beyond Constrained Choice

© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd