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Capital & Class
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DOI: 10.1177/030981680809400103
2008 32: 31 Capital & Class
Steve Fleetwood
Workers and their alter egos as consumers

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by Pepe Portillo on July 29, 2014 cnc.sagepub.com Downloaded from by Pepe Portillo on July 29, 2014 cnc.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Workers and their alter egos as consumers 1
Workers and their alter
egos as consumers
Steve Fleetwood
While socialists hardly need reminding that employers
often mistreat their workers, we tend to overlook
situations in which workers mistreat other workers. This
tendency is exacerbated by discourses that urge us to
act as consumers, and to treat cheap commodities as
bargains rather than, for example, as the result of
someone elses poor working conditions. This paper uses
arguments from political and moral economy to
illustrate some of the ways in which workers, in their
alter egos as consumers, are causally implicated in the
poor pay and conditions of other workers, and uses
Marxs notion of commodity fetishism to explain why
we tend to overlook this.
Introduction
In all buying, consider first, what condition of existence
you cause in the production of what you buy; secondly,
whether the sum you have paid is just to the producer,
and in due proportion, lodged in his hands. (John Ruskin,
1; [186z]: zz;)
A
few years ago, I stopped at a motorway caf for lunch.
I was pouring myself a cup of tea when I noticed a
waitress crouched under the table next to me,
cleaning up crumbs with a dustpan and brush. Feeling a sense
of discomfort, perhaps embarrassment, I jokingly said that
we had moved on since the nineteenth century and that we
now had vacuum cleaners for that kind of thing. I was not
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Capital & Class ( z
expecting her reply: The manager, she said as she stood up,
doesnt like us using vacuum cleaners, because it puts the
customers o. I mumbled something about not being
bothered; but actually, I was extremely bothered about the
fact that this young woman was on her hands and knees
rummaging under tables so that I would not be put o my
sandwich by the noise of a vacuum cleaner.
I was not only bothered, I was also confused. As a socialist,
trade unionist and academic working on employment matters,
I am sensitive to conict arising from the mistreatment of
workers by employers. But this situation was dierent and it
caught me o-guard. Here was I, a worker, causally implicated
in another workers undignified working practices. After some
time spent reecting upon this episode, an extremely
uncomfortable question emerged: Do working people, in their
alter egos as consumers, adopt behaviours and attitudes that
can cause low pay and detrimental working conditions for
the workers who provide the goods and ser vices they
consume? I arrived at an equally uncomfortable answer: Yes,
in part. The aim of this paper is to present some of the
thinking underlying this question and its answer.*
The article begins by looking at the political economy of
consumer society before turning, in the second part, to the
less familiar terrain of moral economy. The third part illustrates
some of the ways in which consumers can create low pay and
detrimental working conditions for workers. The final part
considers cases in which consumers are more attuned to the
plight of workers before concluding with a brief attempt to
explain why none of this is obviousat least, not until it is
pointed out. It is worth noting that since most of the concepts
I employ are well known, I leave myself open to the charge of
saying nothing new. My justification for saying what I do lies
in the way the concepts are put together, such that the whole
(article) becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Political economy
We do not have to accept the often exaggerated claims of
those singing the praises or bemoaning the ills of the
consumer society in order to recognise the ubiquity of what
might be called a hegemonic discourse of consumers, consumption
and consumer society. To a greater or lesser extent, this discourse
encourages us to think in terms of consumption, consumers
and consumer society, while discouraging us from thinking
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Workers and their alter egos as consumers
in terms of production, producers and the productive aspects
of societyindeed, the fact that there is no term producer
society is revealing in itself. It is unnecessary to have recourse
to conspiracy theory to explain the ubiquity and hegemony
of the discourse. Corporations and their spokespeople,
management consultants, think tanks, the media, consumer
groups, economists, policy advisors and government ministers
all promote this discourse in the course of promoting their
own interests, while some institutions (e.g. advertising
agencies) specialise in consciously promoting it. This
hegemonic discourse is anchored in the notion of consumer
sovereignty and its more recent derivative, the customer-driven
firm.
1
While consumer sovereigntythe sovereign-like rule of
consumers over producersis a well-established concept used
by economists,
z
the technicalities of the concept are
unimportant. Much more important is the normative message
that has steadily and relentlessly leached its way from
economics text books into the popular imagination: that
consumption is not only good for you as an individual, but it
is good for the economy as a whole; and that people should
feel no shame or guilt in asserting their individual, perhaps
even selfish wants, because if we each look after our own
interests, the greatest good will accrue to the greatest number
of people.
The customer-driven firm encourages workers to put
themselves in their customers shoes, and oer them the sort
of service they themselves would ideally like to receive (Du
Gay, 16: ;). The doctrine is encapsulated in the following
advice to businesses from Spacia, the property division of
British Rail and a founder member of the Institute of
Customer Services:
Try to be as exible as you can. Make it clear to your
customers that your business is run to suit themnot for
your own convenience. Provide the most convenient
service you can:
Organise delivery schedules that take account of your
customers needs.
Oer the longest and most convenient opening hours
you can aord.
Make life as easy as possible for your customersthe
easier it is for them the more likely theyll return time and
time again. (Spacia, zoo, emphasis added)
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The customer-driven firm seeks to instilwhich is not to
say it necessarily succeedsin its workers the idea that if
they do not give complete satisfaction to customers in all
their activities, then some other firm will. The implications
of this do not need to be spelled out to workers.
Notions of consumer sovereignty and customer-driven firms,
however, fail to dierentiate between producers qua employers
(i.e. as owners and/or controllers of capital) and producers
qua workers. They also hide the fact that most people, for most
of their working lives, are simultaneously consumers and
workers, or are reliant on workers. This extremely important
insight comes from Carrier & Haymen (1;: ;o).
Moral economy
Sayers (zoo) work on moral economy also contains
important insights. According to Sayer, humans care not only
about things that aect their well-being but also about those
aecting the well-being of others. They care about human
ourishing. This is a deliberately ambiguous term used to
refer to the kinds of processes that allow human beings not
only to live with adequate levels of food, shelter, clothing and
other basics, but also to live fulfilled social, cultural and
political lives. It does not matter, at least at this level of
analysis, what constitutes human ourishing precisely, but
we need the category in order to dierentiate it from its
opposite state of aairs, namely suering. This term denotes
the results of all activity that causes physical or social
psychological harm to peoplelike detrimental working
conditions, for example. Human ourishing depends upon
material, socioeconomic, socialpsychological and
institutional phenomena such as food and shelter,
employment and income, recognition (elaborated upon
below), and organisational forms such as democratic and
empowering institutions.
Humans also care about normative and moral issues: what
is of value, how ought we to live, how ought we to behave,
how ought we to treat others, how ought we to be treated?
and so on. Even matters seemingly concerned purely with
the economic, like low pay and poor working conditions, are
often driven by a sense of injustice or moral sentiment. Indeed,
without it, any normative claim could founder on the so
what? argument. Sayer (zoo: ) not only makes this point,
but he also suggests what is wrong with the argument:
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Workers and their alter egos as consumers
Logically, we could react to references of domination by
saying: Yes, why not?whats wrong with domination?
That few readers are likely to respond in this way reects
the fact that in such cases, description and evaluation are
inseparable.
Notice that in opposing injustice of this kind, we very often
appeal to values and not just to personal preferences and/or
mere convention. After all, if paying women less than men
were in fact not a bad thing to do, then it would be pointless
pursuing equal opportunities policies. Normative morality
for Sayer, then, is ontological. In ways reminiscent of
Heideggers Dasein, he suggests that human beings simply
are normative, moral entities.
Low pay and detrimental working conditions often caused
by consumers
This section considers some of the ways in which consumers
can cause low pay and detrimental working conditions for
those who produce the goods and services they consume.

While factors other than low pay can be the cause of

relatively inexpensive commodities, there are many instances
in which low pay is indeed the primary cause. Many
consumers are able to take advantage of relatively inexpensive
commodities precisely because these commodities get onto
supermarket shelves via a chain of low-paid overseas and
domestic workers. While consumers do not set workers pay
levels, this does not mean that consumers are not implicated.
The hegemonic discourse encourages consumers to see
relatively inexpensive commodities in terms of their being a
bargain, rather than the result of someone elses low pay.
Flexible working is another way in which costs and prices
can be reduced. While temporally exible working practices
like exi-time, job sharing and term-time working are
potentially worker friendly, other practices such as
involuntary temping, annualised hours, shift work, overtime,
standby and call-out arrangements are typically worker
unfriendlyand these practices remain worker unfriendly
even if they attract premium pay rates. Flexible working may
or may not coincide with working unsocial hours. In some
cases, exible and/or unsociable working hours are necessary,
caused by our legitimate need for emergency services. In other
cases they are unnecessary, caused by capitals desire to
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maximise returns on capital equipmentor by (employers
response to) consumers demands for cheap commodities and
convenient opening or servicing times. Consumers are
typically unaware of the fact that commodities are cheap and
opening/servicing times are convenient precisely because
someone, somewhere, is suering from worker-unfriendly
exible and/or unsociable working practices.
A recent ar ticle in the Times Higher Education
Supplement (zoo) noted that consumer culture is changing
the relationship between universities and students. Many
universities are faced with demands from their customers
i.e. studentsto keep their libraries open z(-;. As students
exercise their consumer sovereignty and universities become
customer-driven, someone (not academics on permanent
contracts!) will have to work unsocial hours in university
libraries. The point is not altered if the workers in question
are relatively poor students working unsocial hours in order
to serve the needs of relatively rich students.
In these cases, the hegemonic discourse is at work. It
encourages consumers (and students) to see customer
convenience almost as a natural right rather than as the result
of someone elses having to work exible and/or unsocial
hours, while discouraging them from seeing the detrimental
eects their consumption activities can have on workers
conditions. Many consumers are able to take advantage of
relatively inexpensive services such as those of window
cleaners, rubbish clearers, fence painters, weed pullers and,
increasingly, artisans and childminders because they are
provided by workers who are self-employed, working in the
informal economy, or employed in various forms of precarious
contractual arrangements. Many are, increasingly but not
exclusively, migrants. Many operate on the margins of
financial viability, health and safety and legality, and often
have to work long, intense, unsocial hours for very little reward
in order to oer their services cheaply enough for consumers
to use them. Again, the hegemonic discourse encourages those
who make use of these services to see them in terms of their
being a bargain, rather than the result of someone elses
precarious working conditions.
This is a good point at which to pause and consider some
of the wider implications and contradictions raised by these
examples. Imagine the case of a part-time, temporary (exible)
lecturer working the night shift in a university library, now
open z( hours a day, ; days a week, in order to make a little
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extra cash. This exemplifies a more general case. As the
number of people working unsociable and/or exible hours
increases, these workers have no choice but to carry out their
own consumption activities at unsociable hours, which causes
a further increase in the number of people working unsociable
and/or exible hours, and so on. We also have to recognise
that (worker-unfriendly) exibility and/or unsocial hours allow
firms to cut costs and reduce prices, and thereby provide
consumers and workers with cheap goods and services at
times convenient to them. Moreover, low-paid window
cleaners, rubbish clearers et al. possibly benefit even more
from low prices. There is a temptation to conclude, therefore,
that z(; opening/servicing hours and (worker-unfriendly)
exibility and/or unsocial hours are good things. We should
resist this temptation, because it ignores a serious
contradiction. While these things may oer solutions to
individuals, individual solutions do not necessarily add up to
a solution for the working class as a whole. Overall, even if
consumers gain something on the roundabout of
consumption, they lose it on the swings of production. While
I gain today by having a new hi-fi installed in the convenience
of my home at a time that suits me, at just a few hours notice;
you lose by having to work (possibly unpaid) overtime with
just a few hours notice, and missing your childs school play.
But tomorrow, while you gain by being able to shop for clothes
on a Sunday; I lose by having to work on Sunday, missing a
day out with my partner.
Let us move on, because there are cases in which there is
no such contradictionthe actions and attitudes of
consumers can also cause detrimental working conditions with
no gain to themselves. Broadbridge makes the point as follows:
Six of the discussion groups mentioned customer attitudes
as being a source of stress. This resulted in frustration,
anger and displays of emotive dissonance: No answer is
good enough for some customersI mean it doesnt
matter what you say or what you do. These feelings were
intensified during times of peak trading. (Broadbridge,
zooz: 1;)
A survey by the retail-trade recruitment website Retailchoice
(zoo) reveals not only the quantitative aspects of the
problems faced by workers as a result of rude customers (for
example, (.z per cent of respondents encountered rude
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customers on a daily basis), but also some of the undignified
ways in which sta can be treated by customers. These include
being spat at in the face for refusing to give a refund for
allegedly stale cornakes, which were half-eaten and not stale
at all; being told to get on the fucking till and serve me;
customers urinating in the fitting room; a member of sta
being told by a customer that if they had as much money as
the customer, they would be standing on the other side of
the counter; having a shopping trolley pushed into the back
of their legs and being shouted at to move; being told that
they were thick and that that was why they worked in a shop;
and being told to know my place and just do it.
This denial of dignity occasionally spills over into violence.
Tens of thousands of shop workers, for example, are attacked,
abused or threatened every year. A recent survey carried out
by csbaw (the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied
Workers) (zoo) reveals high levels of physical and verbal
abuse, ill health and people leaving their jobs because of
consumer actions and attitudes.
It is true that, quite apart from the inuence of the
hegemonic discourse, the asymmetrical nature of the
consumer-worker relationship can generate these pathologies.
The act of being rude to a shop assistant does not endanger
the customers livelihood, whereas replying in kind and/or
refusing to be deferential might endanger the shop assistants
livelihood, especially when the employment is precarious. But
the hegemonic discourse encourages us as consumers to make
demands on workers while simultaneously discouraging us
from considering the stress or loss of dignity we may thus
cause. It might even play a role in creating an environment in
which some feel suciently emboldened to express their
consumer sovereignty through violence.
Let us now consider some of the more socialpsychological
ways in which workers can suer, such as the denial of
recognition to workers by consumers. To deny a person
recognition (when they deserve it) is a kind of social
psychological domination. According to Sayer:
Recognition matters to people, not just for their status
i n adul thood, but as a condi ti on of thei r earl y
psychological development as subjects and for their
subsequent well-being. They need recognition of both
their autonomy and ability to reason and their neediness
and dependence on othersindeed, recognition of their
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Workers and their alter egos as consumers
need for recognition [I]t is important to note that
recognition is not a luxury that ranks lower than the
satisfaction of material needs, but is essential for well-
being. (Sayer, zoo: ()
Three of Sayers ideas are worth elaborating on: conditional
and unconditional recognition; mutual recognition among
equals; and equality of moral worth.
Conditional and unconditional recognition
Charles Taylor draws a distinction between unconditional
and conditional respect. The former is or should be
granted simply in recognition of others humanity, even
in the absence of knowledge of their par ticular
characteristics and behaviour. By contrast, the latter is
conditional upon the particular behaviour of others,
whether in terms of its moral or other qualities: it has to
be earned. (Sayer, zoo: 6o)
Unconditional recognition should be given simply on the
grounds of another persons humanity. Conditional
recognition may be granted if earned by appropriate
behaviour. The asymmetrical nature of the employment
relation combines with the nature of competition to create
the conditions in which employers can exert implicit or
explicit pressure on workers to provide unconditional
recognition to consumers. Employers demand this not on
the (legitimate) grounds that consumers are people and as
such command it; nor on the (legitimate) grounds that
consumers might have done anything to warrant this
recognition; but on the (illegitimate) grounds simply that they
are consumers. Indeed, workers are often asked to provide
unconditional recognition even when the consumer behaves
in a totally inappropriate manner, as we saw above in the
cases in which workers dignity was violated.
Korczynski & Ott (zoo(: 88) usefully distinguish between
empathy and deference. Customer-driven firms seek to
structure and encourage empathy in training and
socialisation. But unlike deference, empathy requires
conditional recognition, and that in turn requires grounds
which may or may not be present. Without these grounds,
empathy cannot prevailbut mere deference might, turning
the act into a charade (see Bolton, zoo).
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Consider another piece of advice to businesses from Spacia:
Use your person-to-person skills: it is often the small
things that can seal the deal. Greet the customer as if you
are pleased to see them, at all timeseven if youre having
a bad day! Learn (and remember) their name and start
using it as soon as possible. The personal touch may sound
like a clich but if it is, then its one that works, and one
customers appreciate. Show a personal interesttheres
always time to discuss non-business matters. Most
customers enjoy a bit of light-hearted, appropriate banter.
And make sure youre a good listener as well.
This kind of advice is not only likely to result in deference, it
also subjects workers to conicting tendencies. Some workers
are fully aware that their employer is likely to demand that
they be pleasant to customers because it makes business sense.
Yet many workers will be pleasant to customers
simply because this is part of what is considered general
politeness. Sometimes, workers respond to the demand that
they be polite with cynicism, as they realise their own dignity
is being put in jeopardy.
The request, especially in customer-driven firms, that
workers should respect consumers simply on the grounds that
they are consumers conates unconditional and conditional
recognition, and turns recognition into something that is not
freely given, and hence is not recognition at all.
Mutual recognition among equals
The development of a sense of self-worth therefore requires
mutual recognition among subjects who are in a strong sense
equal and free to exercise autonomy. (Sayer, zoo: 6)
[R]ecognition, is distorted by relations of domination. In
relations amongst equals, where recognition is freely given,
conditional recognition of someones exceptional virtues
may give rise to (conditional) deference, but this is of a
dierent kind altogether from a deference within a relation
of domination But deferential behaviour of the
subordinated towards the dominant [implies]
resentment of advantages and contempt. (ibid: 6z)
The ethos of consumer sovereignty and the customer-driven
firm deny the possibility of mutual recognition among subjects
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Workers and their alter egos as consumers (1
who are in a strong sense equal and free to exercise autonomy.
An atmosphere in which the customer is always right (even
when he or she is actually wrong) renders the worker
subordinate in the consumer-producer relation. Moreover,
the worker may lose dignity and self respect, may be
humiliated, and may even be expected to put up with being
humiliated.
While workers are encouraged to defer to consumers, we
should not make the mistake of thinking that workers are
entirely passive and do not have ways of responding to
awkward or bad-mannered customers. The Retailchoice
(zoo) survey lists several possible responses: mild sarcasm;
overcharging; deliberately losing paperwork in order to delay
the customer even further; finding a customers registration
number and damaging their car later; running credit cards
over the electronic de-tagger in order to render them useless;
and spitting in a customers mashed potato and rolling their
sausages on the oor before serving them. While perhaps
understandable, such responses are hardly conducive to
human ourishing on the part of the worker (and clearly not
on the part of the consumer), and would result in disciplinary
action from the employer if the employee was caught.
Mutual recognition among equals does not, of course,
mean that the related people are equal in every sense of the
word, and recognition may be granted by people in unequal
situations. Students, for example, are in a subordinate position
for all sorts of reasons, but this does not hinder them from
granting conditional recognition to their teachers. Recognition
is often granted because students admire certain qualities in
their teachers. Conversely, although teachers may realise that
they are in a superior position, they may still grant conditional
recognition to their studentsoften, in turn, because they
admire certain qualities in them. The consumer culture
creeping into our universities, however, threatens to destroy
this delicate situation. Jamieson and Naidoo (zoo(: 1() grasp
the point, writing:
The consumerist model transforms relationships inside
the university. The integrated relationships of students and
academic sta, where learning was essentially seen as a
joint activity with each playing multiple roles, is now
rendered as a consumer nexus, and the joint endeavour
now recorded as one where there are potentially
oppositional interests. (See also Baty & Wainwright, zoo)
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Customer-driven universities are likely to transform teachers
(and administrators) into subordinates in a consumer-worker
relation. Teachers and administrators will be expected to
unconditionally defer to customers, thereby putting at risk
the situation of mutual recognition between them.
Equality of moral worth
[G]rounds for an egalitarian politics of distribution lie in
an egalitarian politics of recognition: any arguments for
distributional equality must ultimately appeal to criteria of
recognitionthat all are of equal worth. (Sayer zoo: 6)
For workers to have dignity at work presupposes that they are
treated as having moral worth; indeed, it presupposes that they
are as morally worthy as consumers, and that this is why they
ought not to be abused by consumers. Issues of moral worth,
however, come under the auspices of moral economy, whereas
issues of economic worth or, as it is more commonly known,
economic value, come under the auspices of political economy.
While moral worth and economic worth/value are
incommensurable, there is a tension between them that rarely
surfaces, because discussion of moral and political economy rarely
occurs together. Sayer does, however, discuss them together.
Recognition of the level of discourse and attitudes is of
course important, but it is not enough, and at worst may
be tokenistic. It is easy for the dominant to grant discursive
recognition and civility to the dominated or socially
excluded; giving up some of their money and other
advantages to them is another matter. (ibid: 6()
Consumers may act perfectly properly in their dealings with
workers, not compromising their dignity, treating them as equals
and so on, while simultaneously not being prepared to pay them
enough (directly, or indirectly) so that they can be economically
equal. In this case, equal recognition would be revealed as a
token, a sham, by the unequal distribution of income.
Cases in which consumers are attuned to the plight of
workers
While the hegemonic discourse generates tendencies that
encourage working people, in their alter egos as consumers,
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to adopt behaviours and attitudes that can cause low pay and
detrimental conditions for other workers, there are also
counter-tendencies. Some consumers are attuned to the plight
of workers. Let us consider two such cases.
First, recent empirical work suggests that workers and
consumers might actually relate to one another as moral agents,
thereby aligning their interests. Bolton and Houlihan (zoo)
oer a nuanced account of consumers, dividing them into three
types: (i) mythical sovereigns, who seek to exercise their
perceived right to demand not just service but servitude from
service providers; (ii) functional transactants, who simply wish
to carry out a transaction in the simplest manner possible; and
(iii) moral agents, who treat workers as human beings. Bolton
and Houlihan are keen to point out that despite the hegemonic
discourse, customers often treat workers as fellow human
beings, and that this treatment is often reciprocated, as is
evident in the following comment made by a customer:
I must admit I find dealing with people over the phone
dicult. I rang one day to sort out my insurance and felt
quite put out by the whole experience. We were half-way
through the list of never-ending questions and I must say
I was doing a lot of sighing and so when this girl on the
other end of the phone says to me, boring this isnt it? I
replied yes straight away. She then said to me, well hon,
if you think this is boring, think about doing it over and
over again o times a daynow doesnt that make you
feel better? I had to laugh and agree with her. Yes, she
had made me feel better. It was the way she said it really.
(Derek, call centre customer quoted in Bolton & Houlihan,
zoo; see also Carrier & Millar, 1)
This reciprocal treatment is, of course, unsurprising if we
accept the lessons from moral economy sketched out above:
that workers and consumers often do grant conditional and
unconditional recognition to one another, and this can be
seen in acts of friendliness, empathy or civility.
Second, evidence suggests that consumers do care about
workers, especially when the workers in question are
performing sweated labour under appalling conditions in the
developing world. Consider the public outrage when the
actions of multinational companies like Nike, operating supply
chains that involved extremely low pay and appalling
conditions, were made public. This is one area in which the
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relation between worker and consumers has been explored
despite the geographical distance between them. It does
appear that consumers in the developed world are at least
willing to recognise that their consumer interests in having
cheap commodities might conict with the interests of
workers in the developing world. If this were not the case,
then there would simply be no fair-trade movement. It is
important not to exaggerate the scale of this movement, but
it is equally important not to dismiss it. Consumers in the
developed world often feel morally obliged to at least try to
alleviate some of the suering of workers in the developing
world, and on occasion are prepared to initiate actions ranging
from consumer boycotts to more explicit political
involvement.
(
When it comes to the situation of workers in
the developing world, we are often prepared to exercise some
kind of moral judgement and to recognise that our wants as
consumers might, at least in part, be responsible for their
appalling pay and conditions. What is extraordinary is that
the same kinds of sentiments and actions are less likely to be
found with respect to workers in consumers own countries,
or even in their own regions or towns.
These examples demonstrate that some consumers are
ethically predisposed towards the workers producing the
goods and services they consume, resulting in important
counter-tendencies to those generated by the hegemonic
discourse. It is important to recognise these counter-
tendencies, because it discourages a slide into fatalism and
the rueful acceptance of the status quo.
Conclusion
If the hegemonic discourse encourages working people, in their
alter egos as consumers, to adopt behaviours and attitudes
that can cause detrimental working conditions for those who
provide the goods and services they consume, then why is
this not obviousat least, not until pointed out? The
explanation lies, at least in part, in the Marxist notion of
fetishism. In capitalism, relations between people take the form
of relations between people and things. Relations between
worker qua consumer and worker qua producer are hidden
by the inevitable spatiotemporal separation between acts of
consumption and production. This obscures the fact that most
people are simultaneously consumers and workers for most
of their working lives, or are reliant on workers. When engaged
by Pepe Portillo on July 29, 2014 cnc.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Workers and their alter egos as consumers (
in productive work, we typically do not consume goods and
services, and vice versa. It also obscures the fact that when we
exchange money for a commodity, we actually exchange our
labouring activity for other peoples labouring activity. We
cannot, typically, see the workers standing in the shadows,
as it were, behind the commodities they produce, so when we
purchase commodities we do not usually think to enquire after
these workers. This is exacerbated by the fact that our
purchases are undertaken in order to satisfy some desire, and
not in order to provide workers with decent pay and working
conditions. These fetishised experiences provide the objective
basis in which the hegemonic discourse of consumers,
consumption and consumer society can exist and reproduce
itself. Recognising that working people, in their alter egos as
consumers, can cause detrimental pay and conditions for other
workers and rooting this in commodity fetishism makes it
easier to see that there is indeed a person standing in the
shadows behind the commodities we purchase, and to see
that this person is a human being with needs just like ours.
Notes
* I wish to thank Andrew Sayer for his insightful comments
on this paper, and for alerting me to the importance of
moral economy during various cycle rides in the Lake
District.
1. For debates on consumer society, see Du Gay (16,
1;); Fine & Leopold (1); Keat, Whiteley &
Abercrombie (1(); Rosenthal, Peccei & Hill (zoo1),
and Ransome (zoo).
z. For an elaboration of consumer sovereignty, see Penz
(186) and Carrier & Miller (1).
. The negative aspects of exible working are well
documented. Because my intention is simply to draw
attention to some of them rather than to provide a detailed
explanation of each, I simply provide the following
references: Bergstrom & Storrie (zoo); B. Burchell et
al. (zooz); Edwards & Wajcman (zoo); Heery & Salamon
(zooo) and Purcell et al. (1).
(. Prasad, Kimeldorf, Meyer & Robinson (zoo() conducted
an interesting experiment with (unknowing) consumers
in the csa, revealing that a third of consumers in the study
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Capital & Class ( (6
would pay ten per cent more for fair-trade products.
Incidentally, the fact that the fair-trade movement is
relatively small does not necessarily mean that consumers
in the developed world do not care about workers in the
developing world; it might be that they do care, but that
they do not think fair-trade consumer actions sucient
to make a dierence. Moral sentiments might fail to
manifest in moral actions because the requisite
institutions were missing.
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