Morning fire

The individual worker discusses her suffering with others who have different sufferings. Some convergence points are found: the arrogance of the supervisor (that fuck!), work conditions (as if we were slaves!), the wage rate (I can't pay my rent!), the amount of hours worked (I never see my children!), the absence of physical activity in mental labor (I've grown so weak). They arrive back in the workplace, more confident.

Despite these valuable convergences, they find that their dissent takes its strength from its disunity (the collective groan). Dissatisfaction remains in a clamor because the clamor holds the most potential. As the dissatisfied begin to express themselves, supervisors, managers, quality circles etc. are interrupted with complaints and dissent. Face-to-face meetings become difficult to manage. The supervisors promise they'll 'try to get to the bottom of things'. Elsewhere, the message board and e-mail are alive with a visible frustration that seems to have no handles. Some workers express themselves through absenteeism ('Out sick today' or even 'I'm simply exhausted'), others peek at the internet when the supervisor cannot see or occupy themselves with something or other on 'company time' (in Japan, this is referred to as naishoku, wheedling away at private projects on company time). With enough volume, persistence and coordination (taking place on work-time), the supervisors feel compelled to intervene to rescue productivity. They attempt to shuck away the frustration and anger which aims at everything and look for what is unifiable (even before they look for what is "possible").

7. To amplify their clamor, which has no necessary unity, the employees must try to seize objective moments of opportunity which occur outside of their control but present a venue for critiquing the workplace. These moments are unpredictable yet may have a pattern that develops out of the dissent thriving in the office. For instance, one, two, three employees may quit in quick succession, as in my workplace. More simply, a flood of work may come through that exceeds the normal workload and the employees judge it to be intolerable. A supervisor may say something rude to an employee. An incident of sexual harassment may occur. In critiquing objective moments, the employees learn to vocalize themselves and their dissatisfaction, and also to act on the moment. This breaks the silence of the technological workplace, a pre-requisite for engineering innovation (concentrate!), and diminishes the importance of e-mail and other substitute communication methods. Vocal interruptions recompose the employees as critics of their own responsibilities. Initiative lies with them, not the supervisor structure, which slowly finds itself without an audience.

This is because so far, the employees have grounded their words in their private (and therefore social) difference with the workplace (the groan) while holding back on specificity. They know that their power lies in the potential for workplace disruption and lost work time. Their grievances, which have become social, must retain their wholeness and not collapse back onto anti-social ground i.e. how can the company 'solve the problems'.

8. Management's main line of defense against the accumulating groan which seems to have no source is linguistic attack. Supervisors attempt to adapt the antagonism into a dialogue between two powers, and this adaption takes place on the field of vocabulary. They try to change complaints such as 'I'm always so exhausted' into 'What if we implemented 15 minute breaks every four hours?', or 'The workload is killing me' into 'Let's make the work flow more efficient', and 'I'm rotting not moving all day' into 'Let's sponsor 50% of employee gym memberships!'. Every meeting held to mediate worker frustrations is a venue for this kind of re-wording. Mainly the supervisors will press these 'subtle' linguistic changes outside of the collective venue and on a person-to-person level within the workplace (or at group dinners where conviviality is implied). The employees, who are not unified in their demands, must maintain the heterogeneity of their critiques and refuse their integration into easy solutions. A workplace at a certain level of dissatisfaction forebodes dysfunction and lost capital. Such a situation will always force management, or an intermediate, to come running with proposals for compromises. At this point, having refused to present unified demands can allow:

a. The formation of a collective struggle for individual demands instead of a collective struggle for collective demands. This allows the employees a unity from which to attack collectively in the form of slow-downs, absentia or even a strike if individual demands (which already include collective demands) are not met via individual consultations. At the same time, the employees evade the attempts of the company to bind concessions to a restored or even increased loyalty.

b. The preservation of the different vectors of those individual demands (from the housewife to the recent graduate, the part-time artist to the workaholic) also preserves the social nature of the confrontation, which takes place at one location of a circuit on which individuals confront capital (other locations being housing [rent, mortgage], transport [fares] and so on). In protecting their individual demands, the employees build ladders outside of their office windows. Outside is the city.

9. At some stage however the employees will be brought into a meeting with the supervisors. Hopefully they will have had the foresight to refuse to elect 'representatives' for negotiating on their behalf, and the meeting will feature the numerical advantage of the frustrated. Management will open by emphasizing its openness and 'flexibility', although the purpose of the meeting is to quiet dissent in the office. The employees who have been strong through their cacophony have limited goals here. They must show themselves willing to take action (or worse) maintain demoralization if not provided with individual consultation and satisfaction. They must also prevent the supervisors from ordering the proceedings and asserting the office as management's terrain. True enough, the meeting is management's terrain. It is structured linguistically to ensnare the employees, who will be questioned and asked to come up with solutions for draining their own antagonism.

In such a setting, the workers can invert the 'serious efforts' of management via sarcasm and skepticism, which are methods of critique that don't stand on any ground, moving with a mocking breeze. For the employees, the meeting is no place for 'pointing out contradictions'. Here, every contradiction has an explanation and every problem a solution. When a solution is not favorable to the employees, they may be forced to threaten action while on very weak ground. A 'ceaseless advance' of angry confrontation will no doubt be advocated by people who maintain themselves by organizing others (unionists). No. Here the employees should choose a passive withdrawal, one that does not delight itself in the concessions made by the management (which could suddenly make 'the concessions' into contractual guarantees of hard work!), nor acknowledge the 'unity of demands' among the collective groan that management has endeavored to create. The passive withdrawal is active because it refuses to comment, never mind integrate. The workers remain intransigent. Paradoxically, the potential for a contiguous struggle that wants to protect itself from being mutilated thus hinges on a retreat that refuses capture.

10. The workers, who now have no obstacles towards a sustained and much wider conflict (because they have not been bound) must at this point retreat from the workplace and locate similar antagonists in the wider social context. Not only because their own office is duplicated across the social terrain, and by making links to those in similar circumstances, they strengthen themselves. The workers must also explore the poles of capital they confront beyond the workplace, looking for weak points that amplify the struggles they already wage. In doing so, they meet others much like them. Group lunches are arranged on the roofs of the city.

When they have made inquiries at every end of the structures which regulate them, they begin naturally to do the most dangerous thing possible, to theorize themselves and their labor. 'Why do I work for a wage?' 'Why can I not live comfortably without one?' 'What do we make here?' 'Why are we making it?' 'How are we making it and why do we make it that way?' Like this, their struggle in the workplace, which was once so unspeakable, has given them room to breathe against the suffocation of all the coercions they endure. With the space that they have carved out, they begin to re-arrange what is in front of them.