Under Pressure (2019)

Book Review from the May 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain’. by James Bloodworth (Atlantic £8.99)

This is a report on time spent living in various towns and working in insecure badly-paid jobs. It gives a vivid and depressing picture of what life is like for so many people who are near, if not quite at, the bottom of the social pyramid.

Bloodworth began in Rugeley, Staffordshire, working in an Amazon warehouse. Most workers there were recruited through one of two agencies, often on a zero-hours contract. The work was ‘physically exhausting’ and ‘mentally deadening’, as it involved walking around ten miles a day in the enormous warehouse, and it was particularly hard on those who were overweight or elderly. Simply walking to the canteen or queuing to have your pockets checked could take ten minutes or so, and that time was not paid for. Workers’ every move was tracked by management, and they could be told to speed up. Six disciplinary points would lead to you being sacked (‘released’ was the euphemism used), and points could be awarded for being ill or being late because Amazon’s bus had broken down. Few local workers would put up with the conditions for long, hence the high staff turnover and the many Eastern Europeans employed there. And the agencies would often pay workers late or underpay them.

Then he travelled to Blackpool, where he worked in the adult home care sector. Again there was a high staff turnover here, partly caused by the low wages but also by the fact that workers often had to rush around to complete their calls, making their working day very long and giving them barely enough time to deal with each person they visited. Many isolated elderly people just wanted a bit of a chat but there was rarely time to do more than the bare minimum of caring. The private companies to which home caring has been outsourced just saw the people being looked after as ‘first and foremost pound symbols on a balance sheet’.

In South Wales Bloodworth worked at a call centre in Swansea for the Admiral insurance company. He found working there relatively positive and tolerable, though there were still league tables for performance, and staff turnover was above the national average.

His final destination was London, where he worked as a cab driver for Uber, though strictly he was an ‘independent contractor’ in the gig economy. Industries like this are full of nice-sounding terms that mask the underlying reality: so the money earned at Deliveroo is called a fee rather than a wage. Uber benefits from having lots of drivers on call, with all the risk of going some time without a fare passed on to the drivers. The pay earned is unpredictable, and there are limits on how many trip requests can be rejected. He reckoned that his annual take-home pay would have been £15,600, about £7.50 an hour.

Besides describing the work he did, Bloodworth also says quite a bit about the towns he stayed in. Rugeley is one of several former mining areas that are now home to Amazon warehouses, but have seen little ‘economic regeneration’. Of Ebbw Vale, he says it ‘remains trapped in limbo between an industrial past and a future that has yet to arrive’. Blackpool, where the tourist trade has drastically shrunk, has some of the most deprived areas in England, a big homelessness problem and a suicide rate almost twice the national average.

He says that consumers have become used to products that are cheap because of places like the Amazon warehouse. But the blame lies in the system, not in those who are themselves victims of it.

Paul Bennett

Revenue Streams (2018)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the internet came along, we’ve got used to having instant access to whatever information or services or media we want (or are supposed to want) whenever we want it. This easy availability has left many older ways of doing things lagging behind: online shopping is pushing out the high street, newspaper sales have declined as we increasingly turn to our smartphones for fake news, and traditional broadcast television has similarly been under threat. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 started to lose their market dominance when satellite and cable channels popped up, and now all of them have to compete with streaming media platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. These let us watch any of their programmes at any time (for a price), so waiting for a show to come up on a channel’s schedules now seems as old-fashioned as a squarial. 

 Younger people are particularly likely to embrace newer ways of watching telly. According to a recent report by Ofcom, teenagers and young adults now watch around 40 per cent less through old-school channels than they did seven years ago. This has meant fewer people watch the adverts between shows on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, with the consequence that their advertising revenue fell by 7 percent in the last year due to ad agencies turning to the internet. There’s less money in all of the terrestrial channels, who now spend 28 percent less on programming than they did twenty years ago. And for the first time, streaming media has overtaken older paid subscription channels in the race for customers. 

 There are now 15.4 million subscribers to Amazon Prime, Netflix and Now TV (nearly 40 percent of households in the UK) compared with the 15.1 million who pay for satellite or cable channels like Sky, Virgin and BT. However, the pay channels are still raking in much more dough than their online rivals: yearly revenues for pay channels are £6.4 billion compared with a mere £895 million for streaming services (Link.).  Both are also contributing to the decline of the shiny disc; sales from streaming and downloads of films and TV shows are now greater than those of DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

Streaming media and traditional broadcast channels tend to lend themselves to different kinds of programmes. Netflix specialises in lengthy drama serials we can binge-watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon, with crime drama Breaking Bad being the first to benefit from the platform boosting its audience. Since 2013, Netflix has started producing its own shows and films as well as buying content from other studios. Recently, it has brought us popular series including House Of Cards, Orange Is The New Black and The Crown. And there have been a couple of transfers, with Netflix bagging the terrific anthology drama Black Mirror from Channel 4, and that irritating trio of presenters from the BBC’s Top Gear selling themselves to Amazon Prime with The Grand Tour. Broadcast channels suit ‘event television’ better, such as live coverage of sporting events and royal weddings, and shows which play out over a few weeks, like reality TV and The Great British Bake Off. They have also adapted to the internet age with catch-up and on-demand services like the ITV hub, Channel 4’s All 4 and the BBC’s iPlayer and BBC3. And the three channels have already started looking into collaborating on a joint streaming service to challenge Amazon and Netflix. 

So, the TV industry marketplace is split between the licence-funded BBC, channels paid for by advertising revenue, subscription-based satellite and cable channels and now streaming services, each competing for our attention and money. As streaming media fits in better with our have-it-now expectations, its popularity and profitability are growing. This doesn’t mean that corporations like Netflix have just been in the right place at the right time to cater for media-hungry millennials. 

 Their rise is largely down to knowing their customers well enough to churn out and effectively promote what’s going to attract viewers. As well as handing over their money, subscribers hand over large amounts of data about who they are, what they watch, when they watch it, how much they watch of it and how much they like it. Number-crunching this data enables Netflix not just to predict the kind of shows its customers want to see but to shape them. Algorithms can target particular shows at those people most likely to be receptive, and can even determine preferences for the styles, tones and designs of their content. In his 2014 book The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions, Phil Simon describes how data can be used to make decisions as specific as the colour schemes of promotional posters. The principles behind all this aren’t new, of course: the BBC is bound to use market research and focus groups to inform the kinds of programmes it makes, and adverts slotted in around Coronation Street, for example, have been placed there to appeal to its particular audience. The difference is that Netflix’s way of gathering and using data is personal and meticulous enough to smack of being insidious. 

 The technology’s already here to let us have any media we want delivered straight to our screens, and there’s something socialistic about this kind of ready access. Sadly, the reality is that this always comes at a price: what we can afford and what makes a profit for the media moguls. Bringing data and algorithms into all this gives streaming services more power over our choices, making them less of a choice than we think.

Mike Foster

Abolish Money – But Not Now (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the February 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists want to see money disappear, because of the rationing it means for most people, but only as a consequence of the establishment of the common ownership of the means of wealth production. This, in enabling production to be carried on to directly meet human needs, would render money redundant. With the end of production for the market and of buying and selling, there would be no need for money.

We do not envisage the ‘abolition of money’ with nothing else changing, i.e. its abolition while the rest of the economy remains capitalist. That would lead to chaos and hardship, as was seen when at the beginning of November the Indian government suddenly announced that all 500 and 1000 rupee notes (worth £6 and £12 respectively) still in circulation at the end of the year would be cancelled. Since these were used to carry out some 85 percent of cash transactions in India this was tantamount to abolishing 85 per cent of money. So as not to lose out, Indians had to exchange any such notes at a bank by that date.

Marx once remarked that, while no kind of bank legislation could eliminate a money crisis, ‘ignorant and mistaken bank legislation’ could intensify one (Capital, Vol. III, ch.30).  What happened in India has proved his point.  According to Ed Conway, Sky News’s economics editor writing in the Times (23 December), as less than half of Indians have bank accounts, this measure, aimed at catching tax dodgers and money launderers, hit the poorest half of Indians the most:

‘The real victims of demonetarisation are not wealthy ne’er-do-wells, who long ago shifted their money out of cash and into other currencies and assets: gold, Treasury bonds, apartments in London and New York. No, the real victims are, as so often, the poor.’

So, no, we are not envisaging the abolition of money within capitalism.

Meanwhile, in a more advanced part of the capitalist world, in Seattle on the West Coast of the USA:

‘Amazon has unveiled its first bricks and mortar grocery store, which does away with tills and queues and lets shoppers grab what they want and stroll out’ (Times, 6 December).

That’s more like what we envisage happening in socialism, except that, under capitalism, it is not as simple as that – the shoppers still have to pay in the end:

‘Shoppers will be billed using an array of cameras and sensors tracking their every move … Customers will need to download an Amazon Go app and tap in with their phone at special barriers when they enter, then they can take what they want from the shelves and walk out. When a customer leaves the shop the app adds up their purchases and charges their Amazon account.’

No doubt, in socialism, in some stores in some parts of the world, electronic devices will help stock control by automatically noting what has been taken, but there will be no need to record what each particular individual has taken, only what has been taken in total over a given period.

Conway, whose article is headed ‘Cash belongs in the past so let’s abolish it’, favours a cashless society because this would be ‘a hammer blow to the black market and the corrupt criminals and cronies who benefit from the anonymity of paper money.’ But the price would be an increase in the surveillance state in which the authorities would be able to know how all of us spent our money. Besides, some geniuses have invented an anonymous electronic money – bitcoins -- another waste and misapplication, alongside Amazon’s app, of human ingenuity and IT brought about by capitalism.

Please Don’t Feed the Drones (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The announcement in December that Amazon planned to start delivering goods by helicopter microdrones prompted a flurry of media excitement prematurely extinguished by the two-faced hagiographic orgy following Nelson Mandela’s demise shortly afterwards. But still the story buzzed round the pubs and offices like whirring rotor blades. What if someone nicks your delivery after the drone has dropped it off? What if someone shoots it down with an air rifle or radio pulse? What if there’s a mid-air collision? What happens to all the plastic delivery boxes afterwards? And what of civil aviation control systems? Will all these drones flock in droves to Trafalgar Square looking for someone to feed them?

Some po-faced commentators were quick to identify the story as a piece of misdirection from a company already under fire for its working practices, including poor pay, punishing targets and round the clock surveillance, but this was merely journalistic contrariness.  Amazon can scarcely be worried given that such bad publicity is old and dog-eared news (see for instance ‘UK workforce attacks Amazon’, Guardian, 14 April 2001). Besides, shock revelations about Foxconn workers jumping in desperation off factory rooftops in China have not raised an eyebrow among Apple’s loyal devotees in the west, and Nike and Primark shoppers don’t pause for guilty reflection either, so why should Amazon lose sleep?

The risk that these drones would be hacked went from likelihood to certainty after news that another drone had suffered a similar fate (‘Parrot drones 'vulnerable to flying hack attack'’, BBC Online, 4 December). We therefore await with baited breath a near future when Black Friday Christmas online shopping extravaganzas are followed by a mass exodus of all UK deliveries to a single offshore pirate tanker registered in Liberia, or else combined into a festive Stuka dive-bombing raid on Westminster.

And what will these little Santas in their micro-sleighs be carrying to your back door in years to come? The answer is ‘wearables’. Not socks or pants, you understand, or at least not in the form you know them, but electronic wearables that ‘do’ things. Several companies are engaged in a high-street battle to corner the smart watch market, but this must surely be a minor skirmish compared to the battle for the smart bra, the smart wig and the mood sweater. The bra will tell you what mood you’re in, the mood sweater will tell everyone else (by lighting up in different colours), and the wig will allegedly let you see in the dark with bat-vision and control computers telepathically. With your Google glasses to complete the look you will be at the electronic leading edge of every fancy dress competition going. Just don’t go out in the rain.

Sound ridiculous? Well, it is. But that’s the future for you. Or at least it’s the future as projected by company sales executives on fire with the possibilities of technology to give an already overstuffed population more of what it’s already got.

There are worrying developments in amongst all this that you have to watch out for. Computer viruses are getting cleverer, and now passing themselves off as free virus-checkers. Spammers are overcoming their bad English and sending phishing emails, supposedly from your bank, that are starting to look convincing. Now the game is ‘ransomware’, a stroke of genius whereby the spammers don’t have to be sly, they can just barge right in, lock up your whole computer and then charge you a fortune in untraceable bitcoins before vanishing into the night – without bothering to release your data. Cue a new term and possibly criminal charge of – ‘dataknapping’. Remember, you read it here first.

But despite the concerns, is the future in capitalism any scarier because of this technology than it would otherwise be? Futurologists like Alvin and Heidi Toffler have made careers since the 1960s out of claiming so. Their influential notion of ‘future-shock’ has just been revisited by Douglas Rushkoff of Cyberia (1994) fame in his latest book Present Shock (2013), the idea being that the future is no longer the future but is smacking us in the face like a wet herring in today’s present. Interesting though these ideas are, socialists tend to take such things with a spoon of salt. For one thing, futurologists like the Tofflers and Ray Kurszweil (long-time predictor of the history-shattering Singularity) tend to overlook class relations as a social dynamic and motor of change. Even Rushkoff, politically more clued-up than them, is in danger of being dazzled by his own hype, coining terms like ‘fractalnoia’ (the construction of arbitrary patterns out of masses of data, leading to conspiracy theories) and ‘digiphrenia’ (the ability to be in multiple places and cyber personalities at once) as if these were fundamentally new human behavioural phenomena. In fact, everyone operates multiple personalities, at home, at work, on the phone, at job interviews, in the pub, and humans are forever building baroque theories out of bare bone facts. The underlying tendencies have always been there, so there’s no reason to get too excited about new manifestations of them.

Socialists are futurologists too, because socialism is a theory of the future, but we live in the present and our feet are on the ground, where workers actually live. The offices may buzz today with the latest talk of drone deliveries as if it was science-fiction come to life, but tomorrow people will be ordering by drone without a second thought. Workers don’t trip over the future and suffer some existential crisis, they simply lengthen their stride. Indeed, the main proof against the futurologist notion of future-shock is the futurologists warning us about it. Forewarned, we forestall any sense of surprise.

Besides, if you look around you and then compare it to any cinema film from the 1960s and 70s, when futurologists were first writing about brave new worlds of the year 2000, what do you see? You see pretty much the same clothes and hair, the same houses, buses, cars and trains. You see the same food, the same language, the same social mannerisms. About the only difference is that the TV cops back then didn’t have computers on their desks and they had to call the station from call-boxes. Oh, and they all smoked like chimneys.

That’s not to say the world hasn’t changed, or that technology has not been instrumental in the changes, but the real differences lie underneath the gadgets, in social attitudes. Far from being paralysed by the blinding speed of change, we are learning to change ideas at blinding speed. Social relationships have been revolutionised, at least in some ways, offering an instant intimacy and membership of identity groups at the touch of a button, thus promoting a new sense of commonality and debate among the young just when old curmudgeons are throwing earth on the grave of supposedly deceased ‘community spirit’. From the once-a-day stuffy announcements of old BBC six o’clock headlines, news now travels at light speed via a million channels, challenging the ability of conventional ‘stop press’ media to keep up, or of governments to keep down, and political movements and trends form literally overnight, challenging regimes from Syria to Ukraine. The future isn’t a shock. What is a shock is the discovery that we can make our own future, and that it doesn’t have to be what our masters tell us it should be. That’s encouraging to anyone who wants progress, and especially to socialists, who can easily feel marginalised and ignored in all the hubbub. The world might not be listening to us today, but give it 24 hours and all bets are off.

Back to the Future for Working Conditions (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conditions for workers today in Britain are moving back towards those in Victorian Britain. The struggles of the working class in Britain in the nineteenth century to ensure better working conditions and humane working hours are documented by Marx in Chapter ten The Working Day in Capital Volume 1. With zero hours contracts we have gone 'back to the future'.

The capitalist class in the UK have about 1 million workers on zero-hours contracts. These contracts mean there is no guarantee of work and pay each week, no holiday or sick pay. The balance of power favours the employer and makes it hard for workers to complain. Workers are often only told how many hours they will work when weekly or monthly rotas are worked out, but are expected to be on call for extra work at short notice, like the day before. If you don't comply you don’t get any work. Cinema chain Cineworld, Buckingham Palace's 350 summer workers, retailer Sports Direct (20,000 of its 23,000 staff), Pub group JD Wetherspoon (24,000 of its staff  - 80 percent of its workforce), 1/3 of the voluntary sector, 1/4 of the public sector , McDonalds, Boots, Amazon, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Tate Galleries all use workers on zero hours contracts.

There are now fees for lodging claims at industrial tribunals. A worker has to pay a fee when a claim is lodged at the tribunal and another one at the hearing. Level 1 claims include those for unpaid wages, payment in lieu of notice and redundancy payments which cost £160 and a hearing fee of £230. Level 2 claims include unfair dismissal, discrimination, equal pay and whistle blowing which cost £250 and a hearing fee of £950. There will be higher fees for those cases where there are multiple claimants.

Currently an employer could discuss offers of settlement with a worker to terminate his or her employment on a 'without prejudice' basis, which means they could not be divulged in future tribunal proceedings as evidence against that employer. There would need to be a prior 'dispute' for an employer to take advantage of this protection. Under new rules, employers will now be able to engage in pre-termination negotiations/ early exit discussions with a worker even where no formal dispute has yet arisen. The new law allows employers a free reign at any time to enter termination discussions with their staff without fear of it being used against them.

The maximum compensation that could be awarded for routine unfair dismissal claims at an employment tribunal was £74,200. Now it will be the equivalent of 52 weeks' pay or £74,200, whichever is the lower. Average salary today is £26,500 for full time workers.

These changes prompted Elizabeth George, a barrister in the employment team at law firm Leigh Day to say:

'This sends a very dangerous message to employers who will be less inclined to abide by their legal obligations as the risk of being challenged will be much reduced, these fees will disproportionately hit those suffering discrimination because of their age, race, disability and gender, the disproportionate fees will mean many people having to put up with discrimination and unable to challenge unfair dismissals, however badly they had been treated. We have already seen guidance from lawyers advising employers to wait to fire people as it will be cheaper and the chances of being taken to tribunal will be less following the introduction of fees. Instead of standing up for people suffering unlawful discrimination in the workplace, the government is doing the exact opposite'. (Guardian, 29 July)

Online retailer Amazon opened a huge processing centre in Rugeley, Staffordshire in 2011. Arthur Valdez, vice-president operations Amazon said at the time: 'We look forward to assembling a team of talented people who will play their part in ensuring that customers receive the millions of items that will be ordered' (Daily Telegraph, 10 July 2011). Mike Dell, president of the Black Country Chamber of Commerce concurred: 'It's excellent news. It brings jobs to an area that desperately needs it'. Aidan Burley, local Tory MP put his tuppence in: 'It's absolutely fantastic news for Rugeley. People are crying out to get back into work'. (BBC News Stoke and Staffordshire online, 10  July 2011)

A recent Channel 4 investigation discovered at the Amazon factory in Rugeley timed toilet breaks, workers' movements were monitored by GPS trackers, workers given 30 minutes for lunch in a ten-hour shift, 20 minutes of which were spent walking to and from the canteen, workers were issued penalty points for talking to colleagues, taking sick leave, or even spending too long in the bathroom. This all on a 'three strikes and you're out' basis. Workers were searched for stolen goods at airport-style security checkpoints before going into the canteen, and temporary staff laid off to avoid giving them the same benefits and rights as permanent workers. Zero hours contracts were used extensively which meant those staff having no job security and were forced to make themselves available for work with no guarantee they will be offered a shift on a particular day. Also Amazon tried to avoid paying out hundreds of pounds in accrued holiday pay to agency staff by instructing agency representatives not to inform employees that it was owed to them.

We should always remember that the capitalist class demand the free exploitation of working class labour-power. Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and Marx's Capital came out in 1867. There are differences between life today and life then but fundamentally there is no change as the capitalist mode of production grinds relentlessly on, a person has to 'sell their labour or starve'. Capitalism can never operate in the interests of the working class.

Steve Clayton

Big Brother and the Robots (2009)

From the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few weeks ago we held a meeting in London entitled 'Here Come the Robots'. It was a look at the impact and implications of technological advance on society. A lively discussion followed with various opinions and reservations expressed.

Few people would deny that among the changes technology has brought there have been tremendous improvements to our productive capabilities, if not always to our personal circumstances, or that in a socialist society modern technology will be vital in making sure everyone gets adequate food, housing and medical care.

Not everyone is happy with the intrusions and impositions made on our lives by new technology, however, or the fact that many of us seem content to be constantly connected to our computers, mobile phones or iPods. "Don't people read books anymore?" asked one visitor, and he was not entirely reassured when it was pointed out that it is now possible to walk round with a digital bookcase of books in your pocket.

The question that concerns most of us, of course, is who is in control of all this technology? Under capitalism, it's not us. A couple of stories recently in the papers highlighted the question. Ironically, the first one concerned George Orwell's novel, 1984. "Big brother would have approved", said the article. (Guardian, 20 July).

In a mix-up over copyright, Amazon, the online booksellers, have, without warning, used their remote technology to erase customers' digital copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984. The cost of the books, which had been bought and paid for, was refunded we are assured. But how reassuring is it to know that someone, at an anonymous desk somewhere has the power to do that? In Orwell's novel a device known as a "memory hole" was used to eradicate unapproved literature. Amazon can do the same, it seems, at the touch of a computer keyboard.

The second story is nothing to do with fiction. It involves the latest must-have military toy being tested by the US army. Unfortunately, this is no high-tech cuddly teddy bear.

Rumours have been coming out about the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR for short) an unstoppable military robot that powers itself by devouring any organic material in its path - trees, grass and even, according to some reports, dead bodies on the battlefield.

Its inventors are horrified that such suggestions have been made. Although the EATR does indeed power itself on organic material, it is not intended to be fuelled by dead soldiers they say. "We completely understand the public's concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission" they assure us in the Guardian article (21 July).

The machine apparently has a built-in system which helps it determine the nature of the material being ingested. And according to Dr Robert Finkelstein, one of its inventors, "If it's not on the menu, it's not going to eat it".

It's all about good taste, then?

NW