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[...] the issue of pay was ‘seen as being unwinnable’. This was partly due to the charity fundraising that the call centre was engaged in. As mentioned earlier, the managers would apply a kind of ‘moralism’ to workers: soldiering at work would only hurt the charity, a pay rise would mean less money…

[...] work under contemporary capitalism can be categorised into three types based on the direction of struggle [...] The first is work in which the demand for workers’ control does not makes sense. The call centre is an obvious example as it would be difficult to imagine why it would be brought un…

The strategy of refusal builds on the notion of the flight from work. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, ‘the refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics’. However, they also add to this that ‘the refusal in itself is e…

[...] As Mario Tronti put in clear terms, ‘we have to invert the problem’; instead of starting with capital, ‘change direction, and start from the beginning – and the beginning is working-class struggle’. The difficulty with this approach is that there are not a wide variety of open struggles from …

[...] In the workplace the manager is formally in control, yet still has to achieve this in practice. Goodrich uses the notion of a ‘frontier of control’ in the workplace to capture this dynamic. Imagine the workplace as a battlefield. On one side is management, and on the opposing side workers. Th…