Having a
rather sad life I have to admit one of my favourite TV programs
is the US prison series “OZ”. The setting of this series is a
fictional prison called “OZ” – short for The Oswald State
Penitentiary. Within this facility is a special section called
“Emerald City”. I’ll return to OZ in a minute or two.
A recent ABC
“4 Corners” program was about the way Telstra treats its
workers. I have known quite a few PMG, Telecom and now Telstra
workers in my time and the one thing that stands out about them
all is the pride they take in their work. Unfortunately their
bosses don’t hold to the same ‘customer’ focus as the rest of
the front line staff.
As you well
know our government decided to flog off what is, perhaps, the
biggest piece of integrated infrastructure in the country. In
working towards that end they employed a bunch of Americans. The
top few of these, when one does a background check, are credited
with grinding into the dust at least one US telco and sending
thousands of employees and customers to the wall. Their
belligerent and money focused rhetoric demonstrate that their
concerns are with money and not providing the highest quality
service. Rather than focus on success they are totally focused
on getting rich … quick.
During the 4
Corners program we hear about the ways in which call centre and
other staff are monitored for “performance” and how they are
pressured to not focus on solving a customer’s problems but
selling them something or doing a ‘quick fix’ rather than
actually diagnosing the underlying causes of the problem. We
also heard about the suicides caused by the stress brought on by
Telstra staff having to comply with the central demands of the
money grubbing bosses. Technology has made tremendous leaps. So
much so that people can now be remotely monitored without really
being sure they are being watched. In short, their bosses adhere
to that long held tradition that people are inherently bad and
need to be disciplined and punished if they don’t meet
‘performance targets’. This brings me back to OZ.
In the TV
series, the ‘Emerald City’ facility, within the toughest prison
in the US, was set up as a model correctional facility in which
the layout was very reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.
The Panopticon was first envisaged as a way to arrange a prison.
A central guard tower was surrounded but separated from a
circular arrangement of cells. The cells had windows on the
outside and inside walls and the layout meant that inmates could
not communicate with each other but could be viewed at all times
by a guard in the central tower. This is what Michel Foucault
had to say about the way these Panopticons worked:
“The major
effect of the Panopticon [was] to induce in the inmate a state
of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance
is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its
action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its
actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus
should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation
independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the
inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they
are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too
much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly
observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that
he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no
need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the
principle that power should be visible and unverifiable.
Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the
tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon.
Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being
looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always
be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector
unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even
see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the
windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside,
partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in
order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but
zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a
brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of
the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the
see / being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally
seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees
everything without ever being seen.”
What Foucault
was getting at was fully understood by Bentham but it was
Bentham who articulated one of the main factors driving the
development of such a “machine”. Money. Bentham wanted to sell
his idea to the British government and put it to them that if
they funded the construction he would take over the management.
He told a Committee for the Reform of Criminal Law, “I will be
the gaoler. You will see ... that the gaoler will have no salary
- will cost nothing to the nation.” He also told them that any
profit made would be his to keep. Does this sound familiar?
The beauty of
the Panopticon was that no individual would know if they really
were being monitored or at what time they were being monitored
but would come to believe that their every move was being
watched. Foucault argued that under this constant state of
surveillance people would begin to regulate themselves and that
rather than having to pay someone to stand over them exercising
direct power, individuals would begin to regulate their
behaviour to conform to the expectations of the central power.
In the capitalist model this means you can sack middle
management – the usual enforcers of the corporate line – and
replace them with surveillance technology to make sure your
employees stay in line. Up go the profits but down goes morale.
You see, the people who work under the direction of Sol
Trujillo, Phil Burgess and Greg Winn are not prisoners but free
people. However, if it’s good enough for Kevin Rudd to sack
tough talking union bosses from the Labor party, the question
is, will Sol sack one of his mates who views his employees as
target practice. In the 4 Corners program it was revealed that
Telstra’s Chief Operations Manager, Greg Winn told a meeting of
fellow managers, “We're not running a democracy. We don't manage
by consensus. We're criticised for it but the fact of the matter
is we run an absolute dictatorship … If you can't get the people
to go [where you want] and you try once and you try twice, which
is sometimes hard for me but I do believe in a second chance,
then you just shoot 'em and get them out of the way you know and
put people in that you can teach the new business process to and
drive on.”
“Shoot ‘em … and drive on …” Telstra’s top management see
themselves like the OZ Warden, Leo Glynn. He only sees good and
bad and no matter how hard he tries he believes that all his
inmates are bad, bad, bad. His foil is the Emerald City
director, Tim McManus who, somewhat idealistically, believes
that all people are good but get corrupted by the ‘system’.
Warden Glynn would rather ‘shoot’ all the inmates because that
would make his job so much easier. McManus, on the other hand,
would rather see power dispersed and set up the conditions under
which the inmates would regulate their own behaviour.
Telstra was once ‘ours’ it is now ‘theirs’. The unfortunate
thing is that in the quest to perfect power, accumulate wealth
and control the actions of free men and women, the constant
surveillance imposed by the Panopticon like structures imposed
by Telstra’s bosses and sanctioned by our government does not
bode well for any of us.