2 Workers and Their Alter Egos as Consumers

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DOI: 10.1177/030981680809400103 2008 32: 31Capital & Class

Steve FleetwoodWorkers and their alter egos as consumers

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Workers and their alter egos as consumers 31

Workers and their alteregos as consumersSteve Fleetwood

While socialists hardly need reminding that employersoften mistreat their workers, we tend to overlooksituations in which workers mistreat other workers. Thistendency is exacerbated by discourses that urge us toact as consumers, and to treat cheap commodities asbargains rather than, for example, as the result ofsomeone elses poor working conditions. This paper usesarguments from political and moral economy toillustrate some of the ways in which workers, in theiralter egos as consumers, are causally implicated in thepoor pay and conditions of other workers, and usesMarxs notion of commodity fetishism to explain whywe tend to overlook this.

Introduction

In all buying, consider first, what condition of existenceyou 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,1997 [1862]: 227)

Afew years ago, I stopped at a motorway caf for lunch.I was pouring myself a cup of tea when I noticed awaitress crouched under the table next to me,cleaning up crumbs with a dustpan and brush. Feeling a senseof discomfort, perhaps embarrassment, I jokingly said thatwe had moved on since the nineteenth century and that wenow had vacuum cleaners for that kind of thing. I was not

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expecting her reply: The manager, she said as she stood up,doesnt like us using vacuum cleaners, because it puts thecustomers o. I mumbled something about not beingbothered; but actually, I was extremely bothered about thefact that this young woman was on her hands and kneesrummaging under tables so that I would not be put o mysandwich 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 ofworkers by employers. But this situation was dierent and itcaught me o-guard. Here was I, a worker, causally implicatedin another workers undignified working practices. After sometime spent reecting upon this episode, an extremelyuncomfortable question emerged: Do working people, in theiralter egos as consumers, adopt behaviours and attitudes thatcan cause low pay and detrimental working conditions forthe workers who provide the goods and ser vices theyconsume? I arrived at an equally uncomfortable answer: Yes,in part. The aim of this paper is to present some of thethinking underlying this question and its answer.*

The article begins by looking at the political economy ofconsumer society before turning, in the second part, to theless familiar terrain of moral economy. The third part illustratessome of the ways in which consumers can create low pay anddetrimental working conditions for workers. The final partconsiders cases in which consumers are more attuned to theplight of workers before concluding with a brief attempt toexplain why none of this is obviousat least, not until it ispointed out. It is worth noting that since most of the conceptsI employ are well known, I leave myself open to the charge ofsaying nothing new. My justification for saying what I do liesin 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 ofthose singing the praises or bemoaning the ills of theconsumer society in order to recognise the ubiquity of whatmight be called a hegemonic discourse of consumers, consumptionand consumer society. To a greater or lesser extent, this discourseencourages us to think in terms of consumption, consumersand consumer society, while discouraging us from thinking



in terms of production, producers and the productive aspectsof societyindeed, the fact that there is no term producersociety is revealing in itself. It is unnecessary to have recourseto conspiracy theory to explain the ubiquity and hegemonyof the discourse. Corporations and their spokespeople,management consultants, think tanks, the media, consumergroups, economists, policy advisors and government ministersall promote this discourse in the course of promoting theirown interests, while some institutions (e.g. advertisingagencies) specialise in consciously promoting it. Thishegemonic discourse is anchored in the notion of consumersovereignty and its more recent derivative, the customer-drivenfirm.1

While consumer sovereigntythe sovereign-like rule ofconsumers over producersis a well-established concept usedby economists,2 the technicalities of the concept areunimportant. Much more important is the normative messagethat has steadily and relentlessly leached its way fromeconomics text books into the popular imagination: thatconsumption is not only good for you as an individual, but itis good for the economy as a whole; and that people shouldfeel no shame or guilt in asserting their individual, perhapseven selfish wants, because if we each look after our owninterests, the greatest good will accrue to the greatest numberof people.

The customer-driven firm encourages workers to putthemselves in their customers shoes, and oer them the sortof service they themselves would ideally like to receive (DuGay, 1996: 79). The doctrine is encapsulated in the followingadvice to businesses from Spacia, the property division ofBritish Rail and a founder member of the Institute ofCustomer Services:

Try to be as exible as you can. Make it clear to yourcustomers that your business is run to suit themnot foryour own convenience. Provide the most convenientservice you can:z Organise delivery schedules that take account of yourcustomers needs.z Oer the longest and most convenient opening hoursyou can aord.z Make life as easy as possible for your customerstheeasier it is for them the more likely theyll return time andtime again. (Spacia, 2005, emphasis added)



The customer-driven firm seeks to instilwhich is not tosay it necessarily succeedsin its workers the idea that ifthey do not give complete satisfaction to customers in alltheir activities, then some other firm will. The implicationsof 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 producersqua workers. They also hide the fact that most people, for mostof their working lives, are simultaneously consumers andworkers, or are reliant on workers. This extremely importantinsight comes from Carrier & Haymen (1997: 370).

Moral economy

Sayers (2005) work on moral economy also containsimportant insights. According to Sayer, humans care not onlyabout things that aect their well-being but also about thoseaecting the well-being of others. They care about humanourishing. This is a deliberately ambiguous term used torefer to the kinds of processes that allow human beings notonly to live with adequate levels of food, shelter, clothing andother basics, but also to live fulfilled social, cultural andpolitical lives. It does not matter, at least at this level ofanalysis, what constitutes human ourishing precisely, butwe need the category in order to dierentiate it from itsopposite state of aairs, namely suering. This term denotesthe results of all activity that causes physical or socialpsychological harm to peoplelike detrimental workingconditions, for example. Human ourishing depends uponmaterial, socioeconomic, socialpsychological andinstitutional phenomena such as food and shelter,employment and income, recognition (elaborated uponbelow), and organisational forms such as democratic andempowering institutions.

Humans also care about normative and moral issues: whatis 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 withthe economic, like low pay and poor working conditions, areoften driven by a sense of injustice or moral sentiment. Indeed,without it, any normative claim could founder on the sowhat? argument. Sayer (2005: 99) not only makes this point,but he also suggests what is wrong with the argument:



Logically, we could react to references of domination bysaying: Yes, why not?whats wrong with domination?That few readers are likely to respond in this way reectsthe fact that in such cases, description and evaluation areinseparable.

Notice that in opposing injustice of this kind, we very oftenappeal to values and not just to personal preferences and/ormere convention. After all, if paying women less than menwere in fact not a bad thing to do, then it would be pointlesspursuing equal opportunities policies. Normative moralityfor Sayer, then, is ontological. In ways reminiscent ofHeideggers Dasein, he suggests that human beings simplyare normative, moral entities.

Low pay and detrimental working conditions often causedby consumers

This section considers some of the ways in which consumerscan cause low pay and detrimental working conditions forthose who produce the goods and services they consume.3

While factors other than low pay can be the cause ofrelatively inexpensive commodities, there are many instancesin which low pay is indeed the primary cause. Manyconsumers are able to take advantage of relatively inexpensivecommodities precisely because these commodities get ontosupermarket shelves via a chain of low-paid overseas anddomestic workers. While consumers do not set workers paylevels, this does not mean that consumers are not implicated.The hegemonic discourse encourages consumers to seerelatively inexpensive commodities in terms of their being abargain, rather than the result of someone elses low pay.

Flexible working is another way in which costs and pricescan be reduced. While temporally exible working practiceslike exi-time, job sharing and term-time working arepotentially worker friendly, other practices such asinvoluntary temping, annualised hours, shift work, overtime,standby and call-out arrangements are typically workerunfriendlyand these practices remain worker unfriendlyeven if they attract premium pay rates. Flexible working mayor may not coincide with working unsocial hours. In somecases, exible and/or unsociable working hours are necessary,caused by our legitimate need for emergency services. In othercases they are unnecessary, caused by capitals desire to



maximise returns on capital equipmentor by (employersresponse to) consumers demands for cheap commodities andconvenient opening or servicing times. Consumers aretypically unaware of the fact that commodities are cheap andopening/servicing times are convenient precisely becausesomeone, somewhere, is suering from worker-unfriendlyexible and/or unsociable working practices.

A recent ar ticle in the Times Higher EducationSupplement (2005) noted that consumer culture is changingthe relationship between universities and students. Manyuniversities are faced with demands from their customersi.e. studentsto keep their libraries open 24-7. As studentsexercise their consumer sovereignty and universities becomecustomer-driven, someone (not academics on permanentcontracts!) will have to work unsocial hours in universitylibraries. The point is not altered if the workers in questionare relatively poor students working unsocial hours in orderto serve the needs of relatively rich students.

In these cases, the hegemonic discourse is at work. Itencourages consumers (and students) to see customerconvenience almost as a natural right rather than as the resultof someone elses having to work exible and/or unsocialhours, while discouraging them from seeing the detrimentaleects their consumption activities can have on workersconditions. Many consumers are able to take advantage ofrelatively inexpensive services such as those of windowcleaners, rubbish clearers, fence painters, weed pullers and,increasingly, artisans and childminders because they areprovided by workers who are self-employed, working in theinformal economy, or employed in various forms of precariouscontractual arrangements. Many are, increasingly but notexclusively, migrants. Many operate on the margins offinancial viability, health and safety and legality, and oftenhave to work long, intense, unsocial hours for very little rewardin order to oer their services cheaply enough for consumersto use them. Again, the hegemonic discourse encourages thosewho make use of these services to see them in terms of theirbeing a bargain, rather than the result of someone elsesprecarious working conditions.

This is a good point at which to pause and consider someof the wider implications and contradictions raised by theseexamples. Imagine the case of a part-time, temporary (exible)lecturer working the night shift in a university library, nowopen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to make a little



extra cash. This exemplifies a more general case. As thenumber of people working unsociable and/or exible hoursincreases, these workers have no choice but to carry out theirown consumption activities at unsociable hours, which causesa further increase in the number of people working unsociableand/or exible hours, and so on. We also have to recognisethat (worker-unfriendly) exibility and/or unsocial hours allowfirms to cut costs and reduce prices, and thereby provideconsumers and workers with cheap goods and services attimes convenient to them. Moreover, low-paid windowcleaners, rubbish clearers et al. possibly benefit even morefrom low prices. There is a temptation to conclude, therefore,that 247 opening/servicing hours and (worker-unfriendly)exibility and/or unsocial hours are good things. We shouldresist this temptation, because it ignores a seriouscontradiction. While these things may oer solutions toindividuals, individual solutions do not necessarily add up toa solution for the working class as a whole. Overall, even ifconsumers gain something on the roundabout ofconsumption, they lose it on the swings of production. WhileI gain today by having a new hi-fi installed in the convenienceof my home at a time that suits me, at just a few hours notice;you lose by having to work (possibly unpaid) overtime withjust a few hours notice, and missing your childs school play.But tomorrow, while you gain by being able to shop for clotheson a Sunday; I lose by having to work on Sunday, missing aday out with my partner.

Let us move on, because there are cases in which there isno such contradictionthe actions and attitudes ofconsumers can also cause detrimental working conditions withno gain to themselves. Broadbridge makes the point as follows:

Six of the discussion groups mentioned customer attitudesas being a source of stress. This resulted in frustration,anger and displays of emotive dissonance: No answer isgood enough for some customersI mean it doesntmatter what you say or what you do. These feelings wereintensified during times of peak trading. (Broadbridge,2002: 179)

A survey by the retail-trade recruitment website Retailchoice(2005) reveals not only the quantitative aspects of theproblems faced by workers as a result of rude customers (forexample, 43.2 per cent of respondents encountered rude



customers on a daily basis), but also some of the undignifiedways in which sta can be treated by customers. These includebeing spat at in the face for refusing to give a refund forallegedly stale cornakes, which were half-eaten and not staleat all; being told to get on the fucking till and serve me;customers urinating in the fitting room; a member of stabeing told by a customer that if they had as much money asthe customer, they would be standing on the other side ofthe counter; having a shopping trolley pushed into the backof their legs and being shouted at to move; being told thatthey 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 outby usdaw (the Union of Shop, Distributive and AlliedWorkers) (2003) reveals high levels of physical and verbalabuse, ill health and people leaving their jobs because ofconsumer actions and attitudes.

It is true that, quite apart from the inuence of thehegemonic discourse, the asymmetrical nature of theconsumer-worker relationship can generate these pathologies.The act of being rude to a shop assistant does not endangerthe customers livelihood, whereas replying in kind and/orrefusing to be deferential might endanger the shop assistantslivelihood, especially when the employment is precarious. Butthe hegemonic discourse encourages us as consumers to makedemands on workers while simultaneously discouraging usfrom considering the stress or loss of dignity we may thuscause. It might even play a role in creating an environment inwhich some feel suciently emboldened to express theirconsumer sovereignty through violence.

Let us now consider some of the more socialpsychologicalways in which workers can suer, such as the denial ofrecognition to workers by consumers. To deny a personrecognition (when they deserve it) is a kind of socialpsychological domination. According to Sayer:

Recognition matters to people, not just for their statusin adulthood, but as a condition of their earlypsychological development as subjects and for theirsubsequent well-being. They need recognition of boththeir autonomy and ability to reason and their needinessand dependence on othersindeed, recognition of their



need for recognition [I]t is important to note thatrecognition is not a luxury that ranks lower than thesatisfaction of material needs, but is essential for well-being. (Sayer, 2005: 54)

Three of Sayers ideas are worth elaborating on: conditionaland unconditional recognition; mutual recognition amongequals; and equality of moral worth.

Conditional and unconditional recognition

Charles Taylor draws a distinction between unconditionaland conditional respect. The former is or should begranted simply in recognition of others humanity, evenin the absence of knowledge of their par ticularcharacteristics and behaviour. By contrast, the latter isconditional upon the particular behaviour of others,whether in terms of its moral or other qualities: it has tobe earned. (Sayer, 2005: 60)

Unconditional recognition should be given simply on thegrounds of another persons humanity. Conditionalrecognition may be granted if earned by appropriatebehaviour. The asymmetrical nature of the employmentrelation combines with the nature of competition to createthe conditions in which employers can exert implicit orexplicit pressure on workers to provide unconditionalrecognition to consumers. Employers demand this not onthe (legitimate) grounds that consumers are people and assuch command it; nor on the (legitimate) grounds thatconsumers might have done anything to warrant thisrecognition; but on the (illegitimate) grounds simply that theyare consumers. Indeed, workers are often asked to provideunconditional recognition even when the consumer behavesin a totally inappropriate manner, as we saw above in thecases in which workers dignity was violated.

Korczynski & Ott (2004: 588) usefully distinguish betweenempathy and deference. Customer-driven firms seek tostructure and encourage empathy in training andsocialisation. But unlike deference, empathy requiresconditional recognition, and that in turn requires groundswhich may or may not be present. Without these grounds,empathy cannot prevailbut mere deference might, turningthe act into a charade (see Bolton, 2005).



Consider another piece of advice to businesses from Spacia:

Use your person-to-person skills: it is often the smallthings that can seal the deal. Greet the customer as if youare pleased to see them, at all timeseven if youre havinga bad day! Learn (and remember) their name and startusing it as soon as possible. The personal touch may soundlike a clich but if it is, then its one that works, and onecustomers appreciate. Show a personal interesttheresalways time to discuss non-business matters. Mostcustomers 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, italso subjects workers to conicting tendencies. Some workersare fully aware that their employer is likely to demand thatthey be pleasant to customers because it makes business sense.Yet many workers will be pleasant to customerssimply because this is part of what is considered generalpoliteness. Sometimes, workers respond to the demand thatthey be polite with cynicism, as they realise their own dignityis being put in jeopardy.

The request, especially in customer-driven firms, thatworkers should respect consumers simply on the grounds thatthey are consumers conates unconditional and conditionalrecognition, and turns recognition into something that is notfreely given, and hence is not recognition at all.

Mutual recognition among equals

The development of a sense of self-worth therefore requiresmutual recognition among subjects who are in a strong senseequal and free to exercise autonomy. (Sayer, 2005: 56)

[R]ecognition, is distorted by relations of domination. Inrelations amongst equals, where recognition is freely given,conditional recognition of someones exceptional virtuesmay give rise to (conditional) deference, but this is of adierent kind altogether from a deference within a relationof domination But deferential behaviour of thesubordinated towards the dominant [implies]resentment of advantages and contempt. (ibid: 62)

The ethos of consumer sovereignty and the customer-drivenfirm deny the possibility of mutual recognition among subjects



who are in a strong sense equal and free to exercise autonomy.An atmosphere in which the customer is always right (evenwhen he or she is actually wrong) renders the workersubordinate in the consumer-producer relation. Moreover,the worker may lose dignity and self respect, may behumiliated, and may even be expected to put up with beinghumiliated.

While workers are encouraged to defer to consumers, weshould not make the mistake of thinking that workers areentirely passive and do not have ways of responding toawkward or bad-mannered customers. The Retailchoice(2005) survey lists several possible responses: mild sarcasm;overcharging; deliberately losing paperwork in order to delaythe customer even further; finding a customers registrationnumber and damaging their car later; running credit cardsover the electronic de-tagger in order to render them useless;and spitting in a customers mashed potato and rolling theirsausages on the oor before serving them. While perhapsunderstandable, such responses are hardly conducive tohuman ourishing on the part of the worker (and clearly noton the part of the consumer), and would result in disciplinaryaction 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 theword, and recognition may be granted by people in unequalsituations. Students, for example, are in a subordinate positionfor all sorts of reasons, but this does not hinder them fromgranting conditional recognition to their teachers. Recognitionis often granted because students admire certain qualities intheir teachers. Conversely, although teachers may realise thatthey are in a superior position, they may still grant conditionalrecognition to their studentsoften, in turn, because theyadmire certain qualities in them. The consumer culturecreeping into our universities, however, threatens to destroythis delicate situation. Jamieson and Naidoo (2004: 14) graspthe point, writing:

The consumerist model transforms relationships insidethe university. The integrated relationships of students andacademic sta, where learning was essentially seen as ajoint activity with each playing multiple roles, is nowrendered as a consumer nexus, and the joint endeavournow recorded as one where there are potentiallyoppositional interests. (See also Baty & Wainwright, 2005)



Customer-driven universities are likely to transform teachers(and administrators) into subordinates in a consumer-workerrelation. Teachers and administrators will be expected tounconditionally defer to customers, thereby putting at riskthe situation of mutual recognition between them.

Equality of moral worth

[G]rounds for an egalitarian politics of distribution lie inan egalitarian politics of recognition: any arguments fordistributional equality must ultimately appeal to criteria ofrecognitionthat all are of equal worth. (Sayer 2005: 65)

For workers to have dignity at work presupposes that they aretreated as having moral worth; indeed, it presupposes that theyare as morally worthy as consumers, and that this is why theyought not to be abused by consumers. Issues of moral worth,however, come under the auspices of moral economy, whereasissues 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 areincommensurable, there is a tension between them that rarelysurfaces, because discussion of moral and political economy rarelyoccurs together. Sayer does, however, discuss them together.

Recognition of the level of discourse and attitudes is ofcourse important, but it is not enough, and at worst maybe tokenistic. It is easy for the dominant to grant discursiverecognition and civility to the dominated or sociallyexcluded; giving up some of their money and otheradvantages to them is another matter. (ibid: 64)

Consumers may act perfectly properly in their dealings withworkers, not compromising their dignity, treating them as equalsand so on, while simultaneously not being prepared to pay themenough (directly, or indirectly) so that they can be economicallyequal. In this case, equal recognition would be revealed as atoken, a sham, by the unequal distribution of income.

Cases in which consumers are attuned to the plight ofworkers

While the hegemonic discourse generates tendencies thatencourage working people, in their alter egos as consumers,



to adopt behaviours and attitudes that can cause low pay anddetrimental conditions for other workers, there are alsocounter-tendencies. Some consumers are attuned to the plightof workers. Let us consider two such cases.

First, recent empirical work suggests that workers andconsumers might actually relate to one another as moral agents,thereby aligning their interests. Bolton and Houlihan (2005)oer a nuanced account of consumers, dividing them into threetypes: (i) mythical sovereigns, who seek to exercise theirperceived right to demand not just service but servitude fromservice providers; (ii) functional transactants, who simply wishto carry out a transaction in the simplest manner possible; and(iii) moral agents, who treat workers as human beings. Boltonand Houlihan are keen to point out that despite the hegemonicdiscourse, customers often treat workers as fellow humanbeings, and that this treatment is often reciprocated, as isevident in the following comment made by a customer:

I must admit I find dealing with people over the phonedicult. I rang one day to sort out my insurance and feltquite put out by the whole experience. We were half-waythrough the list of never-ending questions and I must sayI was doing a lot of sighing and so when this girl on theother end of the phone says to me, boring this isnt it? Ireplied yes straight away. She then said to me, well hon,if you think this is boring, think about doing it over andover again 50 times a daynow doesnt that make youfeel better? I had to laugh and agree with her. Yes, shehad made me feel better. It was the way she said it really.(Derek, call centre customer quoted in Bolton & Houlihan,2005; see also Carrier & Millar, 1999)

This reciprocal treatment is, of course, unsurprising if weaccept the lessons from moral economy sketched out above:that workers and consumers often do grant conditional andunconditional recognition to one another, and this can beseen in acts of friendliness, empathy or civility.

Second, evidence suggests that consumers do care aboutworkers, especially when the workers in question areperforming sweated labour under appalling conditions in thedeveloping world. Consider the public outrage when theactions of multinational companies like Nike, operating supplychains that involved extremely low pay and appallingconditions, were made public. This is one area in which the



relation between worker and consumers has been exploreddespite the geographical distance between them. It doesappear that consumers in the developed world are at leastwilling to recognise that their consumer interests in havingcheap commodities might conict with the interests ofworkers in the developing world. If this were not the case,then there would simply be no fair-trade movement. It isimportant not to exaggerate the scale of this movement, butit is equally important not to dismiss it. Consumers in thedeveloped world often feel morally obliged to at least try toalleviate some of the suering of workers in the developingworld, and on occasion are prepared to initiate actions rangingfrom consumer boycotts to more explicit politicalinvolvement.4 When it comes to the situation of workers inthe developing world, we are often prepared to exercise somekind of moral judgement and to recognise that our wants asconsumers might, at least in part, be responsible for theirappalling pay and conditions. What is extraordinary is thatthe same kinds of sentiments and actions are less likely to befound with respect to workers in consumers own countries,or even in their own regions or towns.

These examples demonstrate that some consumers areethically predisposed towards the workers producing thegoods and services they consume, resulting in importantcounter-tendencies to those generated by the hegemonicdiscourse. It is important to recognise these counter-tendencies, because it discourages a slide into fatalism andthe rueful acceptance of the status quo.

Conclusion

If the hegemonic discourse encourages working people, in theiralter egos as consumers, to adopt behaviours and attitudesthat can cause detrimental working conditions for those whoprovide the goods and services they consume, then why isthis not obviousat least, not until pointed out? Theexplanation lies, at least in part, in the Marxist notion offetishism. In capitalism, relations between people take the formof relations between people and things. Relations betweenworker qua consumer and worker qua producer are hiddenby the inevitable spatiotemporal separation between acts ofconsumption and production. This obscures the fact that mostpeople are simultaneously consumers and workers for mostof their working lives, or are reliant on workers. When engaged



in productive work, we typically do not consume goods andservices, and vice versa. It also obscures the fact that when weexchange money for a commodity, we actually exchange ourlabouring activity for other peoples labouring activity. Wecannot, typically, see the workers standing in the shadows,as it were, behind the commodities they produce, so when wepurchase commodities we do not usually think to enquire afterthese workers. This is exacerbated by the fact that ourpurchases are undertaken in order to satisfy some desire, andnot in order to provide workers with decent pay and workingconditions. These fetishised experiences provide the objectivebasis in which the hegemonic discourse of consumers,consumption and consumer society can exist and reproduceitself. Recognising that working people, in their alter egos asconsumers, can cause detrimental pay and conditions for otherworkers and rooting this in commodity fetishism makes iteasier to see that there is indeed a person standing in theshadows behind the commodities we purchase, and to seethat this person is a human being with needs just like ours.

Notes

* I wish to thank Andrew Sayer for his insightful commentson this paper, and for alerting me to the importance ofmoral economy during various cycle rides in the LakeDistrict.

1. For debates on consumer society, see Du Gay (1996,1997); Fine & Leopold (1993); Keat, Whiteley &Abercrombie (1994); Rosenthal, Peccei & Hill (2001),and Ransome (2005).

2. For an elaboration of consumer sovereignty, see Penz(1986) and Carrier & Miller (1999).

3. The negative aspects of exible working are welldocumented. Because my intention is simply to drawattention to some of them rather than to provide a detailedexplanation of each, I simply provide the followingreferences: Bergstrom & Storrie (2003); B. Burchell etal. (2002); Edwards & Wajcman (2005); Heery & Salamon(2000) and Purcell et al. (1999).

4. Prasad, Kimeldorf, Meyer & Robinson (2004) conductedan interesting experiment with (unknowing) consumersin the usa, revealing that a third of consumers in the study



would pay ten per cent more for fair-trade products.Incidentally, the fact that the fair-trade movement isrelatively small does not necessarily mean that consumersin the developed world do not care about workers in thedeveloping world; it might be that they do care, but thatthey do not think fair-trade consumer actions sucientto make a dierence. Moral sentiments might fail tomanifest in moral actions because the requisiteinstitutions were missing.

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2 Workers and Their Alter Egos as Consumers

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