ILPC 2027

 This paper will explore whether and how the work, labour and collective organisation of UK telecommunications workers accords with that of others whose labours create and maintain global supply chains. Telecommunication networks could be viewed as an enabling infrastructure for logistic services because they facilitate fundamental adjustments of space-time realities. Yet research into the political, cultural and material dimensions of telecommunications have been just a small sub-section of infrastructure studies (Larkin, 2013).

The strategic importance of telecommunications for UK economic development has been at the heart of a recent public debate on the future of the industry. The government's regulatory body Ofcom is championing faster broadband (through more comprehensive fibre technologies), and swift progress in developing telematics (e.g. the Internet of Things). To achieve this, Ofcom does not propose major state intervention. Instead they propose breaking up British Telecom's comprehensive control over the “local loop” section of the telephone/broadband network. Also known as “The Last Mile”, this section of the network is the most complex and the most fragile. BT Openreach (which maintains the local loop) and the BT parent company will be effectively separated. This will, Ofcom argues, allow more competition.

This paper will draw on the background and early findings of ethnographic research into how Open Reach engineers and their union the CWU is responding to, and adapting to the dramatic reorganisation of their industry. Engineers have experienced many upheavals through successive waves of “liberalisation” since the 1984 privatisation of the state-owned industry. They have experienced deskilling, flexibilisation of the work, and job losses. The union fears many new pressures and that established industrial relations will be thrown into turmoil. For example, the reorganisation could include a very large TUPE transfer. In opposing or overcoming the reorganisation there may be political as well as industrial strategies and choices available to the union. For instance, do they defend BT's monopoly, or do they mobilise the strength of engineers — as essential to the project of infrastructure renewal — in order to resist?

Another discussion point of this paper will be that the renewal will not necessarily succeed. The engineers who repair, maintain and build the “local loop” already encounter many choke points in their work because of a lack of clarity over who controls the network. Therefore more competition, new network builders and providers, may not speed up telecommunications as much as the government, Ofcom and businesses would wish.

Toscano (2014) notes the significance of logistic workers' position in critical-vulnerable areas of capitalist accumulation is in the potential for new forms of class conflicts. While telecommunication workers are situated in the same spaces of accumulation their historical and present experiences of collective organisation may be very different. This is a relatively stable workforce and a more-or-less intact industrial union with very high density of membership across BT. Therefore this case study may provide useful contrasting as well as similar examples of workers' responses to industrial change.