Activity

[...] Bentham argues that when dealing with workers: ‘whatever be the manufacture, the utility of the principle is obvious and incontestable, in all cases where the workmen are paid according to their time’. He foresaw an application for the Panopticon to remedy the indeterminacy of labour power. B…

The buzz session is one example of how supervisors attempt to motivate workers in call centres. The two trainers who led these sessions always stressed how important it was to be in the right mood to sell. The problem for management is how you go about doing this. None of the workers want to be at …

The manipulation of the work schedule returns to the key problem of the capitalist enterprise, which bosses have grappled with since the inception of capitalism itself: how to extract the maximum amount of surplus value from workers during their time on the job. In this regard, the theories of Tayl…

Within mental labour it is possible to distinguish between ‘brain workers’ and ‘chain workers’. Whereas ‘brain workers’ are harnessed for their ‘communication, invention and creation’, the ‘chain workers’ are those ‘people who sit at their terminals in front of a screen, repeating every day the sam…

It is therefore possible to identify a shift from the exploitation of the bodies of workers during the Fordist mode of production to exploiting the minds of workers in increasingly larger numbers. These shifts towards the exploitation of mental labour – whether communicative, emotional or affec…