Customer service in a post-capitalist society

For those of us who toil for long hours every day as soldiers in the movement, our visions of the classless society we're working towards (whether or not we expect to arrive within our lifetimes) function either as a kind of escapist fantasy (it's easier to fantasize than it is to organize) or as a source of emotional sustenance, giving us the energy to keep going day after day. Either way, an organizer theorizing about socialism is not unlike an evangelist imagining strumming a harp in Heaven, a Jew thirsting for the land of milk and honey as he follows Moses across the desert, or a jihadist daydreaming about the forty virgins that await him should he die fighting the infidels.

This is not to say that it's useless to imagine what a socialist society would be like. For example, Michael Albert's concept of "parecon" is an impressively detailed account of how a non-capitalist economy would work. This kind of technical description is important because it helps reassure us that a non-capitalist society is indeed possible.

But organizers are not machines. Our hopes and dreams, not just our concrete plans, are what keep us going. For this reason, the emotional aspects of our socialist fantasies can be just as useful as the technical ones. Different fantasies will strike a chord with different people, but for me there's nothing more appealing than Marx's vision of the communist Renaissance man:

"As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."

This is the fantasy of the organizer who laments the fact that all those hours spent knocking on doors keep him from pursuing his artistic, academic, athletic, or other interests. Of the organizer who, when he was in college, could never decide what to study because too many course descriptions caught his eye. And it's a refreshing change of pace from the pseudo-scientific jargon a student of Marx routinely slogs through.

In this spirit, let's ask ourselves what it would be like to live in a socialist, anarcho-syndicalist, or any kind of non-capitalist society. Michael Albert tells us plenty about what it might be like to produce, consume, and allocate after capitalism, but what would it be like to live there? What's the non-technical, experiential description of the fantasy?

To narrow that question down a bit, let's consider what such a society would be like for workers in the increasingly dominant service sector. Whereas the American economy was once based on manufacturing jobs, which are perfectly compatible with socialism as long the goods being manufactured aren't being sold for private profit, more and more workers are performing customer service duties that put them at the mercy not only of their bosses but of their customers as well. One could argue that customer service is inherently incompatible with the kind of society we imagine, in that "customers" are an element of markets and "service" implies class division. But wouldn't people still eat in restaurants from time to time, or stop for a cup of coffee? Wouldn't people still travel, and therefore need to stay in hotels? Wouldn't we still need to call a "customer service" hotline for technical assistance with our computers or cell phones?

To resolve this dilemma, I'd like to make a distinction between "customer service" and "hospitality." Under capitalism, customer service workers are nice to, go out of their way for, and kiss the asses of their customers because their livelihoods depend on it. Every worker knows that if the customer isn't satisfied, he or she can complain to the manager and get the worker in trouble. (Sometimes such a complaint isn't even necessary; we all know that every call we make to a customer service hotline "may be monitored or recorded for quality purposes.") On the other hand, if a customer is rude or verbally abusive to a worker, there is usually little or no remedy. Anyone who has worked as a waiter, a cashier, a hotel desk clerk, or a customer-service agent knows how common this is, and every interaction between a customer and a worker is premised on this power imbalance.

Absent this power imbalance, however, it is perfectly unobjectionable to greet a traveller with a smile, or to pour a stranger a cup of coffee. That humane impulse, as distinct from the coerced politeness inherent in the customer-service ethic of the "hospitality industry," is what I would call true hospitality.

Alas, it would take a wholesale elimination of class divisions to replace the customer-service economy with a true hospitality economy, but if we're willing to be creative with collective bargaining, we don't have to wait for revolution to start moving in that direction.

As long as workers are struggling to make ends meet, wage and benefit demands will remain the backbone of most contract fights, but there is a long history of unions demanding and winning other kinds of on-the-job rights, from the basic "just cause" provision to complicated work rules. Many of these contract clauses have become part of the boilerplate union contract, but there is always room for innovation. For example, HERE Local 11 (whose membership includes a large percentage of Mexican and Central American immigrants) began to push for immigrants' rights language in its major hotel contracts during negotiations in the 1990s, winning the right for undocumented immigrant workers to take as much as a year off to return to their home countries, fix their immigration status, and return with full seniority rights. Since then other UNITE-HERE locals, and other unions, have followed suit.

These fights are important not only for the concrete benefits they achieve, but also as organizing tools. In order for union members to take ownership over their fights and their unions, they have to be fighting for what is important to them. Workers, after all, like organizers, are not machines, and their desires do not pertain solely to wage scales and benefits packages. John Wilhelm, co-president of UNITE-HERE, owes his first major organizing victory, the successful clerical and technical workers' strike for a first contract at Yale University, to this principle, and every organizer starting a new organizing drive should follow his example. Here's how the beginning of the campaign, which Wilhelm led as an organizer for HERE Local 34, is described in the book "On Strike for Respect":

"When the drive began officially in November 1980, Local 34's organizers believed that one of their first responsibilities was to stimulate discussion among the C&Ts about how a union could affect their work lives. They encouraged employees to abandon preconceptions about what unions do and how they operate. The organizers told the workers that Local 34 could be whatever its members wanted it to be, and could take on whatever issues the members cared about."

But given that a union contract is between the workers and their employer, is it even possible for such creativity to address the problems inherent in the relationship between the worker and the customer? If we're willing to "abandon preconceptions," I think we'll find that it is. And my experience organizing customer-service workers suggests that we have no choice but to make such a leap, since many such workers go home after their shifts more angry at the abusive customers they dealt with that day than with their managers. Although they have the same problems with pay, benefits, workload, scheduling, and seniority as any other worker, their most deeply felt complaint about their employer often has to do with their managers' failure to back them up against the customers who make their lives miserable.

Fortunately, there is some precedent for addressing one kind of abuse that workers suffer at the hands of their customers: UNITE-HERE Local 26 has organized around some unique contract language in its contracts at major Boston hotels, with the aim of defending workers against sexual harrassment perpetrated not only by managers and coworkers, but also by guests. "A Troublemakers Handbook" quotes local president Janice Loux:

"'We took a pretty radical position on it,' says Loux, 'that if a case is substantiated, then the person is terminated, whether it be a manager or a worker. And if it's a guest then we demand that they be barred from that hotel permanently.'"

It's not a huge leap from there to more comprehensive contract language designed to allow workers to demand respect from their customers. Employers often tell their customer-service workers that, although it's their job to take care of upset guests, they don't have to put up with abusive guests. In reality, workers know such assurances are just empty promises, designed to improve morale. But why not call the boss's bluff? Why not call for contract language stipulating that workers not be disciplined for walking away from abusive customers, or putting them in their place, politely but firmly? And that when the abuse rises to a certain level, whether it's blatant sexual harrassment, threats, outright yelling, or even violence (all of these things really happen), the customer be kicked out of the establishment?

Such a demand carries a great deal of potential, not only to improve the lives of customer service workers, but also to occasion constant organizing and mobilizing (not only when the contract is up, but every day) around fundamental issues of dignity and respect. Such fights would have the effect not merely of ameliorating the poverty in which non-union service-sector workers are currently trapped, but also of chipping away, slowly but surely, at the nature of capitalism itself.

In the great industrial uprisings of the 1930's, workers won not only basic economic gains, but also the right for their bodies to be respected, to be treated as people rather than parts of the machine. These rights became the complex health and safety regulations we have today. Insofar as customer-service workers are part of a different sort of machine--not the physical machinery of a factory, but the social machinery of our service economy--shouldn't our spirits, not only our bodies, be respected?

[Update: just a day after I posted these ruminations on socialist hospitality, this article about a worker-run hotel in Argentina showed up on the front page of LabourStart.]