ICT Professionals and the Denial of Dignity

Dignity of work is normally expected to be prevalent in the professional occupations. However, the evidence presented here demonstrates that such expectations for ICT professionals are misplaced. The nature of the ICT sector means that ICT professionals have to wait for work to be commissioned, either externally or internally. Within a company that employs this group of ICT professionals, work is distributed from higher-up and, despite a formal process offering choice, the professionals have little say on what they do. In in some instances, they can be deliberately excluded from work because of personal circumstances such as care responsibilities. The internal division of labour means that professionals are frequently pressured into taking work which they would rather avoid. When work is not available they are subject to enforced idleness via the bench system, which can have detrimental effects on self-worth, skill level, and on how they are seen by their colleagues.

Once work has been allocated, ICT professionals are required to complete their tasks by adhering to a strict set of given methodologies or templates. They are also expected to employ a range of standardised and commoditised products to achieve the objectives of a project. Thus, internal imperatives mean they have minimal control over the overall design of work, and over how it is dispersed and implemented.

There was a significant absence from both the group discussion and the individual interviews, in that none of the participants mentioned any informal strategies to reclaim personal interventions. There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that such possibilities just do not exist. Second, even within a safe and relaxed discussion where anonymity is guaranteed, the ICT professionals still could/did not want to articulate their views on this aspect of their working lives. Either way, it is indicative of the oppressive or dignity-denying environment within which these professionals work.

The onset of the economic crisis has provided further impetus for a wider and deeper application of short-term project contracts awarded to IT companies. Thus, ICT professionals can be transferred back and forth across employers, with all the insecurity this can bring. They can also be faced with having to cope with a different set of working practices. With a change of employer can come a change of work location. In addition, short-term employment contracts are becoming more prevalent within the profession. Although these are not always used by medium-to-large scale IT companies, it is not unusual to find a variety of non-standard employment methods such as the use of agency temps (usually in low- paid, lower skill jobs), use of contractors (usually in higher-paid, specialist skill jobs), and the use of zero-hour contracts^[1] through a separate subsidiary. With the use of TUPE and zero hours, these professionals experience what we can term a “body-shopping lite" contractual environment. Each element combines with others to create a working environment mitigates against the dignity of labour.

Further, these developments create competition between professionals, and encourage insecurity, frustration, friction, conflict, and an overall culture of blame. All of these have an adverse effect on interpersonal relationships. To this picture is added the complexities arising from professionals being held accountable to multiple managers. Here, management imperatives are focused on attempting to resolve the contradictions arising from horizontal forms of accountability by implementing mechanisms such as benching. In addition, managers are perceived as oriented on successful task completion with the well-being of staff a secondary priority, as is shown by the attitude towards training for ICT professionals.

For the ICT professional, the work process, like the products they produce, is, in the immediate sense, designed to deny them control. In a broader, more general sense, for example, in the development of lean IT and the extensive use of commoditisation, the work process creates an industry over which they have no control and which undermines what makes them professionals in the first place. Alienation and dignity denial are intrinsic to the process. The commodities being created and the way they are created come back to alienate the creators from the very creative activity which gives them a positive sense of themselves. The processes being described here dovetail neatly with Marx’s discussion about the nature of alienation and the lack of dignity of labour. By both creating products and processes, the ICT professionals are building the components of present and future states of alienation. Yet, it seems to be a perfectly natural and seemingly unstoppable state of affairs.

At the same time, the trends inherent within the development of the industry, accelerated by the recent economic crisis, offer no possibility of arresting let alone reversing this process. ICT workers, for we can no longer safely employ the term ‘professional’, are now locked into a seemingly unstoppable process of alienation. Given the above, it would seem that the second element of the Marx’s notion of alienation is relevant to the work process as experienced by the ICT workers employed by this company.

• [1] Increasingly industries are taking on staff on ‘zero-hours’ contracts—that is, where people agree tobe available for work as and when required, but have no guaranteed hours or times of work. Zero-hours contracts effectively provide employers with a pool of people who are ‘on-call’ and can beused when the need arises. For more information, see http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=3886.