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My Way or the Highway
Managerial prerogative, the labour process and workplace health
Dennis McIntyre
School of Behavioural and Community Health Sciences, The University of Sydney - Cumberland Campus, Sydney, New South Wales
Abstract
This paper, based on a study of the impact of workplace stressors on the health of bus operators, argues that occupational illness and injury are produced by the labour process. Further, the extraction and obfuscation of surplus value that occurs through the process ensures that working-class employees receive the lion's share of ill health. Such class-structured patterns of occupational illness are largely dismissed by corporate managements. Moreover, where employment relations are dominated by the ideology of neoliberalism, managerial bullying is a more visible feature of the labour process.
This reflects the organisational dominance of, the 'managerial prerogative' and its structural indifference and hostility towards actions to improve workplace health. The research concludes that until individual workers and managers become aware that the surplus extraction process is the fundamental mechanism by which poor workplace health is produced and reproduced, their attempts to improve workplace health will be frustrated.
Keywords
class struggle, alienation, labour process, managerial prerogative, neoliberalism, occupational stressors, sociology
Article Text
Many researchers have found that management's control over the labour process at a number of locations, not just at the point of production, contributes significantly to the creation of occupational illness and injury (see, for example, McIntyre 1991 & 1992; Peterson 1994; Mahony 2003). This research has understood work injury and illness as a social process in which class relations are a significant determinant. Treating occupational illness as a social process that is mediated by class relations has been used to investigate a range of illness phenomena, for instance, miners' nystagmus (Figlio1982) and Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) (Willis 1994). It is an approach that has been shown to demonstrate considerable utility in the sociology of occupational health.
A labour process approach directs our attention to features of the labour process such as physical and technological aspects of the work, division of productive tasks, timetables, breaks, overtime arrangements, management styles, and so on. These are the empirical data that a labour process perspective deems significant in analysing and understanding the organisation of work. Labour process theory, as introduced and developed by Henry Braverman in 1974 and refined since (see for example Bray and Littler 1988), builds on Karl Marx's theory of history. At its heart is the idea that a working class labours longer and harder than is socially necessary in order to produce a surplus that is appropriated by a ruling class for its own purposes. This relationship, established within the labour process at the site of production, is reflected within capitalist society more broadly as class relations. These produce workers' alienation (Marx 1989) and, in turn, occupational illness. As significantly, such relations are central in the naming and labelling of occupational illnesses.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is published posthumously. The author, Dennis McIntyre, passed away several days after his paper was accepted for publication. He was a tireless advocate of working-class rights, especially in relation to workplace health. He brought to research and teaching on the subject a passionate commitment and a humorous approach that endeared him to students and colleagues alike.
The editor would like to thank Kerry Mahony and Ellen Jordan for their assistance in enabling this paper to be published in this workplace health edition of Health Sociology Review.
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