How can anthropological studies help us understand the changing conditions of labour in the contemporary world?
What labour entails is ever evolving and constantly adapting to new technological advancements and contemporary realities. Quality, quantity, nature, or purpose of work is subject to change. Working now requires vastly different sets of skills, novel forms of interaction, and capacity to acclimate than it did in the past or will in the future.
This essay will assess how anthropological studies can help us understand the changing conditions of labour in the contemporary world. It will focus on understandings and conceptions of time, place, bodies, and relationality to expose the innately malleable nature of labour and what constitutes it.
Conceptions of and expectations regarding time are variable in labour relations, with labour conditions being upheld to certain standards vis a vis hours of work, overtime, leaves of absence, holidays. Importantly, these standards change over time; thus, anthropological inquiries into the workplace provide useful insight into how contemporary realities might come to alter them. Mankekar and Gutpa (2016), in their work on affective labour in Indian call centres, bring forward temporal realities associated with this form of labour. They argue that call centre employees’ labour is ‘thoroughly enmeshed in temporalizing processes on multiple level’, writing that, crucially, the shifts they worked were dependent on the place for which they were providing services, with workers catering to US clients working one of three shifts, 6.30pm to 3.30am – i.e. ‘the most desirable’ shift –, 9.30pm to 6.30am, and 12.30am to 9.30am – i.e. ‘the graveyard shift’ –, each in its own way disruptive to workers’ physical, emotional, and social wellbeing. In fact, Mankekar and Gupta stress the disruptive quality of such work, noting how agents’ experience of time being shaped by the time of another place engenders a disruption of their body clocks. Indeed, working at night and sleeping in the day disrupts sleep cycles, resulting in ‘chronic insomnia, depression, a suppressed immune system, and, in the case of young women, the disruption of menstrual and ovulation cycles’. Additionally, however, Mankekar and Gupta observe that additionally to the innately intimate and private experience of having their circadian rhythms altered, calls centre agents’ social lives are also subject to disruption insofar as ‘their interactions with family members, neighbours, and friends – indeed with all those who [do] not work the same hours – [are] severely curtailed, resulting in what A. Aneesh has termed ‘social death’’. Hence, the splitting and scrambling of temporalities brought on by the global nature of call centre work have both adverse social and bodily impacts, with a disturbance of healthy bodily processes as well as stress put on social and intimate relations.
Temporal disturbance manifests in a different way in Millar’s (2015) work on the tempo of wageless work in Rio de Janeiro. She argues that catadores working in garbage dumps suffer disruptions to their sense of time not only in their work but also in relation to their potential to find work. Indeed, increasing precarity in opportunities for work leaves individuals vulnerable since lack of stable employment, notably among youth, reshapes orientations to the future with ‘life stages [being] delayed or altogether disrupted’ (Hansen, 2005). Allison (2012) notes how modernist narratives depicting time as ‘linear progress toward an incrementally better future’ are becoming unsettled; a sentiment echoes by Berlant (2011), suggesting that the present is increasingly felt as ‘ongoing or suspended’. Millar (2015) echoes this in writing that ‘the very concept of precarity is often expressed as a relationship to time caught between a nostalgic attachment to (Fordist) norms of the past and anxieties over uncertain futures. Individuals’ sense of time is further altered by virtue of becoming catadores. Indeed, the absence of fixed work schedules enables catadores to integrate ‘work, play, meals, rest, and socialising while on the dump’, standing in stark contrast to waged employment requiring clocking in and out from shifts. What emerges from catadores attitude to time is the reality of ‘woven time’, a time sense diverging both from industrial capitalist ‘clock time’ and ‘ruptured time’, increasingly associated with post-Fordist and precarious employment. Chiefly, woven time, instead of regimenting work and leisure, ‘threads activities together into a single tapestry of the everyday’. In fact, woven time allows for alternation between social life and work, with catadores temporarily pausing work to go visit friends or family, but also for the very merging of work and aspects of everyday life, with catadores enjoying social breaks, called breque, while ‘on the clock’, as well as being able to adjust their work to their lives by doing double time when necessary. As such, conversely to ruptured time, which at times suspends life trajectories, woven time ‘enables catadores to earn a living while attending to tother demands and desires in their lives’. Millar underlines that woven time gives ‘momentum to the everyday’ and facilitates the piecing together of dimensions of catadores’ lives in ways that make sense to them, but, principally, it constitutes an ‘art of living that catadores perceive as part of what makes life liveable’. Crucially, Millar emphasises that while the present is durative because ‘unrealised visions of the good life are future-oriented’, woven time ‘emerges from and enables a conception of the good life as realised in the unfolding of the everyday’ (emphasis mine), considering that catadores believe the ability to fashion daily rhythms of work on their own terms and their own time to be an important aspect of living the good life. Thus, in a line of work that can from the outside be perceived as precarious, catadores find ways to make sense of times and fashion temporal realities that fit their needs and desires, breaking away from traditional understandings of time, subverting conceptions of time inherent to wage labour, exposing contemporary actualities.
Place is a non-negligeable variable in the changing conditions of labour in the contemporary world. Mankekar and Gupta (2016) observe that call centres’ modified sense of time impact on agents’ sense of place. Indeed, while work and intimate relations are often kept separate, the uprooting of past intimacies due to hours worked can result in reliance on workplace for intimacy. Yet, while managers and supervisors claim to adopt a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy regarding sexual liaisons at work, most were wary of workplace romances; as one COO underlines: ‘I don’t want to care what my agents do outside this building but I have to – because it affects how they work’. Consequently, managers feel compelled to keep an eye on what happens after agents leave work, keeping tabs on taxi drivers’ logs and instructing them to let supervisors know whether agents asked to be either dropped off or picked up from an address different from those in their respective files. The question of privacy and intrusiveness in the workplace is further accentuated by Mankekar and Gupta’s finding that although permitted bathroom breaks, whenever an agent leaves their cubicle to go to the bathroom, they are expected to log off and then back on when returning – information recorded in employees process logs. Employees perceived and experienced this as a ‘humiliating invasion of their privacy’, notably agents who were ill or women suffering from period related issues. As such, the workplace is rife with paradoxes; while hindering agents’ opportunities for social relations outside the workplace, it discourages them both in the workplace and beyond the workplace with fellow workers; productivity is strived for, but lack of privacy and intrusiveness create discomfort in workers, impacting their productivity.
Conversely, some workplaces are not physical in nature. Exemplar of this is Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Mechanical Turk, a new technology he categorised as ‘humans-as-a-service’, similar to established ‘software-as-a-service’ systems, offering programmers the opportunity to ask people, rather than algorithms, for help. Irani’s (2015) inquiry into Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers outlines some issues with digital workplaces. Digital work enables employers seeking quick turnaround data processing to no longer need to employ more employees or get in contact with outsourcing firms, and scraps the requirement to meet employees, online or in person, needing ‘simply [to] place their data processing tasks online, set a price for each task, and design algorithms to receive, validate, and integrate workers’ data into computer systems’. Yet, while this kind of labour allows for work to be carried out at new speeds and on new scales, given that ‘instead of hiring hundreds of homeworkers for a few weeks, a single person can hire sixty thousand workers for two days’, this shift in both speed and scale produces a ‘qualitative change in which human workers come to be understood as computation’. In fact, employers are able to delegate management of these workers to algorithms, ‘pushing labour relations into the server and out of the manager’s work day’. Nonetheless, digital workplaces can lead to a lack of accountability, leading to wage precariousness. Indeed, Irani contends that ‘once a worker submits completed work, the employer can choose whether to pay for it’. Hence, discretion of this form allows employers to reject work unsuited to their needs, but also ‘enables wage theft’. What is more, she posits that because AMT’s participation agreement ‘grants employers full intellectual property rights over submission regardless of rejection, workers have no legal recourse against employers who reject work and then use it anyway’. Thus, while advantageous in some respects, AMT, on account of being virtual in nature, strips employees of important rights and protections, curbing responsibility by arguing that it is the employee’s choice.
Changing labour conditions have marked effects on bodies. Mankekar and Gupta’s (2016) work on affective labour in call centres demonstrates this, and how this quality to labour produces individuals as particular kinds of labouring subjects. They contend that this conceptualisation of labour as affective promulgates a conception of the work in call centre ‘not solely in terms of their interpellation by ideological or disciplinary apparatuses of labour but also in terms of their capacity to act and be acted upon, to navigate space and time, and to experience and inhabit their bodies in specific ways’. In fact, agents’ capacity to meet quotas is considered contingent on their ‘ability to assume culturally appropriate affects in interactions with their clients’, an ability cultivated through various means. For instance, affective training was designed to ‘reconstitute the work habits, daily routines, and speech patterns of call centre agents – habits of the mind as well as the body’. Primarily, emphasis was put on cultivating attention, empathy, solicitude, and intimacy, affective regimes understood to ‘blur the distinction between thought, feeling, and corporeality’. In equal respects, agents were taught to make calls and conduct business, as well as grooming themselves, using deodorant, properly entering and exiting elevators, correctly standing in hallways, and rightly use Western-style toilets. Likewise, agents’ body and voice were retrained to produce the adequate affect in unscripted encounters with customers, often being told to ‘smile when speaking to customers’. One agent, Veronica, stresses that ‘It is all in the voice. You have to distill your emotions into your voice’. Accordingly, contemporary realities produce new corporealities; workers must adapt to a global customer range and the potential absence of social cues given the fragmented and geographically scattered nature of their work.
Relationality and what it involves is very much circumscribed by changes to labour conditions. Call centres’ productivity measures evolve over time to adapt to changing goals of the company. While in earlier years the company’s placed emphasis on the time agents spent on each call, criteria shifted in favour of ‘handling the largest number of calls while, simultaneously, ensuring that customers were happy with the service they received’, resulting in the effectivity of affective labour being measured by the ‘happiness’ of the person on the other end of the call rather than any ‘objective’ measure. Thus, despite not knowing what might constitute a ‘good’ versus a ‘bad’ rating from one call to the next, workers must focus on pleasing customers. Yet, since affective labour is dependent on interaction, the ‘output’ is always uncertain, with workers exerting even less control than they would over a product being made on an assembly line. That productivity be measured in satisfaction creates a novel form of precarity, the interactive nature of the work leaving agents treading carefully call after call. Further, the quasi effacement of physical workers, replaced by only a voice on the phone, creates new, at times uncomfortable, forms of intimacy. Certainly, despite agents being unable to see who they are on the phone to, inbound calls allow agents, through the elicitation of basic data, to know about the customer’s spending habits, household, and so on. Agents thus procure themselves with intimate details about their customers life to ensure the highest client satisfaction regarding how the call is handled. One agent argues that they ‘learn as much about a customer as their own family – in some cases, we know things about them that even their own family members don’t know’, thus entrapping agents in an intricate non-mutual limbo between anonymity and intimacy.
This difficult encasing in relatively one-sided webs of intimacy is echoed in Stacey’s (2011) work on the work experiences of home care aides. Many care aides emphasise the relational facet of their work, with many workers underlining the ‘fictive kinship’ they sustain with clients. Yet, despite the longstanding need for care, its value is still inadequately determined, with Himmelweit (1999) suggesting that care work is ‘incompletely commodified work’, where both alienating and empowering forms of emotional labour exist. With many stating the incompatibility of love and money, care aides find themselves in a difficult position, needing to justify their labour, at once championing its authenticity without undermining its monetary value. Stacey argues however, that, ‘walking the ‘love or money’ line is particularly cruel for home care aides, who commit themselves both physically and emotionally to clients for a paltry minimum wage’.
Importantly, anthropological inquiry into the convolutions of care work allows often omitted or overshadowed realities come to the forefront. Stacey posits that front line workers like nursing aides are after missing from public conversation about long-term care. Yet, it is precisely these men and women, who ‘staff nursing facilities; who travel daily to care for clients in the home; and provide the bulk of companionship services and custodial care to the disabled, mentally ill, and elderly’, who uphold communities. Without them, ‘bodies would not be washed, dressed, or exercised; medications would likely go unadministered; and many elderly and disabled people would spend much of their time completely alone’. Inasmuch as they do the ‘dirty work’ that families cannot or will not do, which doctors and nurses provide at higher costs, direct care workers are ‘the backbone and driving force of long-term care in the United States’, and probably the most effaced from civic discourse. Conceptions of care are complicated by the inherently gendered and essentialised language, undermining aides’ ability to ‘employ a language of labour to talk about what they do’. Indeed, while most aides are aware of the wage penalty they suffer, very few can articulate and formulate what their care is worth in terms of a wage, caregiving being a difficult thing to ‘put a price’ on because of emotional and relational tasks associated with the work. Precarity shows its face quite dramatically in the context of care work, ironically one of the most understated, undervalued, necessary, essential, draining, reward, forms of labour.
To conclude, anthropological studies focused on the changing conditions of labour in the contemporary world are insightful insofar as they observe what most see, encounter, engage in, but don’t notice. They subvert misconceptions of universal ideas applied to particular situations and reveal lived realities that often go amiss in an attempt to conceal precarity, interactions, emotions, involved in multiple contemporary forms of work.
Bibliography
Mankekar Purnima, and Akhil Gupta. 2016. “Intimate Encounters: Affective Labor in Call Centers.” Positions 24 (1): 17–43.
Muehlebach, Andrea. 2011. “On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (1): 59–82.
Millar, K. 2015. “The tempo of wageless work: E. P. Thompson’s time-sense at the edges of Rio De Janeiro.” Focaal (73): 28-40.
Irani, Lilly. 2015. “Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114 (1): 225–234;
Stacey, Clare L. (2011). The Caring Self: the work experiences of home care aides. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.