Kirsty Newsome

‘Too Scared to Go Sick': Reformulating the Research Agenda on Sickness Absence

This article argues that our understanding of absence and absenteeism, deriving from seminal studies in the sociology of work and employment, has been overtaken by hugely significant developments in political economy, regulation and employment relations. A new research agenda that addresses the changed organisational politics of absence management and the consequences for employees is urgently required.

‘You Monitor Performance at Every Hour’: Labour and the Management of Performance in the Supermarket Supply Chain

With reference to the performance management research agenda, this article focuses on the politics of production in food manufacturing and distribution companies in the supermarket supply chain. Burawoys concept of ‘factory regimes’ is utilised to explore the broader context of labour process change in inter‐linked organisations in the retail supply chain. The article examines the extent to which new despotic or coercive regime characteristics are emerging that weakens the power of both suppliers and labour. In revealing changes in the nature and dynamics of performance regimes within these organisations, the article exposes the connections and linkages between workplaces as distinct moments in the integrated circuit of capital.

Work and Employment in Distribution and Exchange: Moments in the Circuit of Capital

This article examines the ‘politics of production’ within grocery warehousing and distribution. In doing so, it highlights the complex linkages between logistics companies and their dominant supermarket customers. Building on the work of Glucksmann and the notion of the ‘total social organisation of labour’, the article reveals how an understanding of employment change within grocery distribution necessarily involves mapping these linkages, thereby examining how they impact on the labour process. Drawing on case-study evidence from two third-party grocery distribution companies, it examines empirically the nature of the linkages between these organisations and their effects on the labour process. It also explores the extent to which organised labour within these interconnected distribution companies is able to mediate and re-shape the requirements placed upon them by their customers. It concludes by highlighting how the power of the retailers and the corresponding ‘logistics revolution’ has reshaped the politics of production. In addition, it calls for an understanding of work and employment in warehousing and distribution, which engages with the complex articulation between production, distribution and exchange.

Exploring changes in the organisation of work in the graphical industry – Threats to union organisation

This article is concerned with exploring changes in the organisation of work in the graphical industry. The aim is to examine the link between employer attempts to restructure work and resilience of the prevailing machinery of collective regulation within the sector. It is structured around three main areas of work organisation change, notably the search for organisational flexibility, attempts to recast the nature of work and finally the intensification of work. It concludes by arguing that threats to union organisation emanating from the restructuring of work currently appear to be at the “edges”. The argument is that a “community of interest and identity” predicated upon strong levels of union organisation has created the necessary apparatus to redress or resist attempts to dilute unionism. However the article closes by highlighting the continuing gender segregation within the sector and argues that this community of interest must extend to cover all workers within the industry.

Paying for Free Delivery: Dependent Self-Employment as a Measure of Precarity in Parcel Delivery:

This article explores supply chain pressures in parcel delivery and how the drive to contain costs to ‘preserve value in motion’, including the costs of failed delivery, underpins contractual differentiation. It focuses on owner-drivers and home couriers paid by delivery. It considers precarity through the lens of the labour process, while locating it within the supply chain, political economy and ‘instituted economic process’ that define it. Focus on the labour process shows how ‘self-employment’ is used to remove so-called ‘unproductive’ time from the remit of paid labour. Using Smith’s concept of double indeterminacy the article captures the dynamic relationship between those on standard and non-standard contracts and interdependency of effort power and mobility power. It exposes the apparent mobility and autonomy of dependent self-employed drivers while suggesting that their presence, alongside the increased use of technology, reconfigures the work-effort bargain across contractual status.

The Dynamics of Dignity at Work

Abstract Randy Hodson’s categories offer an ambitious, comprehensive framework for analysing the objective and subjective conditions that shape dignity and resistance at work. In this chapter, we engage with Hodson and his collaborators work through exploring its potential usefulness in helping understand the experience of low-skill and low-paid factory workers at the end of supermarket supply chains in the United Kingdom. In emphasising the purposeful and strategic actions of workers to attain and maintain dignity within work, and management-influenced conditions that destroy or deny it, Hodson’s perspectives overlap with themes in more recent labour process theory that elaborate expanded notions of labour agency. While we share such concerns, we also identify some limitations to the framework and its explanatory powers, particularly where threats to dignity are associated with concepts of abuse and mismanagement. Our investigations of the supermarket supply chain reveal that management, authority and work organisation in these plants is not, by and large, ‘abusive’, ‘chaotic’ or ‘anomic’. Such terminology creates the unavoidable impression of pre-rational workplaces based on arbitrary, personal power. In our cases, the plants are not much ‘mis-managed’ as managed rationally according direct and indirect pressures exerted through supply chain power dynamics. Hodson’s framework for addressing issues of dignity and to a lesser extent resistance, remain an indispensable but incomplete entry point for understanding its dynamics.

‘Fits and fancies’: the Taylor Review, the construction of preference and labour market segmentation: The Taylor Review and the construction of preference

The Taylor Review asserts that ‘certain groups are also more likely to place a greater importance on flexibility such as carers, women, those with disabilities and older workers’. This article draws upon the experiences of workers on non‐standard contracts to explore the notion of worker preference and to expose how the discourse of work–life balance is usurped to provide justification for flexibility in the interest of employers rather than workers, reconstructing labour market segregation.

(De) regulation of working time, employer capture, and 'forced availability': a comparison between the UK and Cyprus food retail sector

Abstract This article is concerned with exploring how working time is regulated and experienced in the international food retail sector in the UK and Cyprus. Following Martinez-Lucio and Mackenzie the article accepts that regulation in employment relations is a multifaceted phenomenon shared by a number of competing actors at different institutional levels. The paper highlights the limitations of working time regulation in the two countries and argues that employers are increasing their control over the timing and allocation of shifts and working time. The paper illustrates how employers ‘capture’ working time regulation by exercising their prerogative to more closely match working time with the exigencies of customer demand. In this environment, the paper reveals how employees are experiencing practices such as ‘forced availability’, coupled with pressure to extend working hours as well as facing increasing levels of unpredictability as to when they are required to attend work.

European co-ordination of collective bargaining: the case of Uni-Europa graphical sector

Analyses the UNI‐Europa Graphical Sector (UEGS) agreement on European co‐ordination of collective bargaining initially made in 1999. Explains the purpose of the agreement, its objectives, its main components, the principles underpinning it and the mechanisms by which it is reviewed. Provides empirical data on the extent to which graphical trade unions (all affiliated to the UEGS throughout Europe, in their 2000 collective bargaining round with graphical employers, were able to make accommodations consistent with the spirit of the co‐ordination of collective bargaining agreement. The research is based on official publications of UEGS, the Minutes of its Collective Bargaining Committee, the reports of its annual general meetings and attendance at its Annual Collective Bargaining Conference for Negotiators.