Labor control

Labor control can be defined as “the ability of capitalists and/or managers to obtain desired work behavior from workers,”Footnote ⁷ following labor process analysis (LPA) originating in Braverman’s work,Footnote ⁸ which was inspired by Karl Marx’s Capital. LPA analyzes the antagonistic relations between capital and labor, and emphasizes that due to the insecurity of the outcome in the labor process – indeterminacy of labor powerFootnote ⁹ – control is central to a capitalist organization having its hired workers accomplish tasks in a defined time and manner. However, workers respond in various ways to managerial control for limiting or eliminating worker autonomy to ensure unrestricted production for capital.Footnote ¹⁰

Edwards originally defined three main forms of labor control in the manufacturing industry, developing historically in a linear fashion: simple, technical, and bureaucratic.Footnote ¹¹ Since then, the study of workplace controlFootnote ¹² has been enriched by contributions that focus on work life in the service sector and the development of technology. Emotional labor,Footnote ¹³ normative control or control by culture,Footnote ¹⁴ and the role of ICTFootnote ¹⁵ have been analyzed in these novel studies.

Reed suggests that regimes of workplace control consist of a “complex and dynamic configuration of mechanisms and practices” and are inevitably embedded within the general power relationships in a society that inform economic, institutional, organizational, and thus employment outcomes.Footnote ¹⁶ In contrast to Edwards, he acknowledges that the new organizations rely on “hybridized control regimes” that selectively incorporate complementary and competing control logics.Footnote ¹⁷ The hybrid workplace control model combines objective statistical information, bureaucratic value and behavioral standards, and normative measures to raise worker commitment rather than relying on a certain mode at a specific setting.Footnote ¹⁸

Although labor control in modern organizations is considered to rest on hybrid mechanisms, this article draws attention to the employment of simple forms of control not in smaller but in large-scale modern organizations due to increasing market pressures. Simple forms of control are associated with the fiercely competing small-scale manufacturers of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ In this form, power is exercised arbitrarily by the bosses and/or managers who use sanctions and incentives and intervene in the labor process, “often to exhort workers, bully and threaten them, reward good performance, hire and fire on the spot, favor loyal workers, and generally act as despots, benevolent or otherwise.”Footnote ²⁰ Edwards explains that the “direct and immediate tyranny”Footnote ²¹ of the capitalist evolved into the “petty tyranny” of foremen as firms grew complicated while increasing competition pushed manufacturers to extract more labor from workers who were threatened with the “reserve army” if they did not comply.Footnote ²² Later, through structural forms of control that were incorporated in the physical and social structure of production (i.e. the technical and bureaucratic), control became more formal, institutional, and covert.Footnote ²³

Burawoy similarly analyzes the stages of managerial control from despotic to hegemonic regimes, associating the transitions with the autonomy of the reproduction of labor power.Footnote ²⁴ Under the despotic regimes – what Marx called market despotism – of the nineteenth century of liberal, post-intervening states such autonomy was low and workers were subject to arbitrary decisions as a factor of the unregulated interfirm competition. Under the hegemonic regimes, state intervention, welfare institutions, and strong union representation enhanced the autonomy of the reproduction of labor power while regulation of interfirm and interclass conflict solved the problem of underconsumption in the twentieth century. Workers were empowered and enriched, and management sought their consent, but this created the base for another profitability crisis.Footnote ²⁵ According to Burawoy, international competition under globalization erodes the powers that labor earned during the hegemonic period. As capital mobility increases, “hegemonic regimes are developing a despotic face.”Footnote ²⁶

Following Burawoy, Padmanabhan suggests that the intensified competition compels firms to reduce wages, increase flexibility, and ignore environmental standards in a “race to the bottom.”Footnote ²⁷ He states that Burawoy’s new despotism becomes more widespread in the periphery under the dynamic of global capital meeting local capital and local cheap labor, often provided by a vulnerable, feminizing workforce.Footnote ²⁸ Some scholars suggest that due to competition in product markets firms impose despotic control on workers and curb worker autonomy, given the erosion of labor’s powers.Footnote ²⁹ Post-1980 neoliberal policies have been responsible for the weakening of unions and collective labor and the creation of flexible labor markets and economic insecurity.Footnote ³⁰ It is in this context that simple/despotic control is a tool for management under market pressure and imposed over weakened labor.

The global tourism industry accounts for 10 percent of global employment with a 25 percent share in all new jobs created between 2014 and 2019,Footnote ³¹ and is a first step for many young people into the labor market. The industry contributes to global labor mobility as well as offering possibilities for managerial and technological innovations.Footnote ³² It is a sector, however, where a large number of low-skilled, low-paid jobs persist. Therefore, it is important to analyze the labor relations in order to understand the prevailing poor working conditions in this competitive and labor-intensive industry, which offers insights in terms of workers’ well-being and the future of work.

Labor in the tourism sector

Recent critical work suggests that tourism literature has only superficially dealt with the themes of tourism as an element of capital accumulation, hospitality work, and tourism and hospitality workers.Footnote ³³ Labor-intensive hospitality work is often seasonal and migratory, employing part-time, low-skilled, and casualized laborFootnote ³⁴ and does not promise structured career paths and career development.Footnote ³⁵ There is strong presence of young people, women, and migrant labor of different ethnic backgrounds.Footnote ³⁶ In the industry, the majority of workers struggle with poor financial conditions and perceive the degradation of their work.Footnote ³⁷

As in any other business, tourism work is gendered,Footnote ³⁸ and women are part of the diverse workforce in this global industry.Footnote ³⁹ Their efforts often remain invisible, as in the case of room attendants in hotels.Footnote ⁴⁰ Labor flexibility in hotel and catering jobs also has a gender dimension;Footnote ⁴¹ finding immigrant women in cleaning jobs has become common in the neoliberal era.Footnote ⁴²

Tour operators, especially those few big groups in Europe, are the key players who developed and promoted the AIS. The use of AIS augments their ability to control the market and exert pressures on accommodation providers for reducing prices.Footnote ⁴³ A recent study finds out that hoteliers, becoming dependent on the tour operators for occupancy and income, tend to cut costs in response to such pressure and this in turn decreases the quality of the service.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the AIS customers prepay for a package of services offered in the holiday villages, including all three meals of the day, soft drinks, and various experiences. Vacationing on a tight budget, customers do not leave the resorts in destinations where they do not stay long.Footnote ⁴⁵

Besides its benefits in terms of occupancy levels, the AIS has been a matter of controversy for promoting overconsumption and creating environmental problems and regional inequalities.Footnote ⁴⁶ The AIS promotes seasonal tourism relying on temporary migrant staff over which unsociable, irregular, and long working hours are imposed, resulting in deskilling, income loss, and high employee turnover.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, a large portion of the tourists’ expenditures stays in the tourists’ country of origin.Footnote ⁴⁸

Development and labor relations in the tourism sector in Turkey

Turkey made considerable advances in terms of both arrivals and tourism income from 1982 onwards. From 1963 to 2007, Turkey’s share of world tourism revenue had increased from 0.06 percent of $10.8 billion to 2.2 percent of $856 billion, while the number of arrivals increased to 2.45 percent of 903 million tourists worldwide.Footnote ⁴⁹ In terms of tourism development Turkey is part of the wider Mediterranean region where a mass tourism market emerged from the late 1950s and integrated Spain, Italy, the former Yugoslavia and the Greek islands, as well as Malta and Cyprus.Footnote ⁵⁰ Turkey and later North African destinations along with other destinations in the western Mediterranean became competitors in this mass tourism market dominated by the tour operators. Tourism destinations emerging elsewhere in the world and the ensuing competition, however, caused a gradual decline in the market share of Mediterranean destinations.Footnote ⁵¹

Mass tourism development in Turkey coincided with the maturation of the export-oriented economic model instituted after the 1980 military coup. This development was encouraged through laws and “incentives provided to private entrepreneurs who in return undertook fixed investment in hotels, holiday villages, yacht ports, entertainment and retail centers” along the southern coasts of Turkey.Footnote ⁵² Serving mostly international tourists through prepaid package tours, the holiday villages should be regarded part of mass tourism with their strong bed supply entrusted with earning foreign currency within the new economic model to improve the balance of payments (Table 1).Footnote ⁵³

Table 1.

International arrivals, tourism income, average tourist spending, and share in gross national product (GNP)

Source: Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. “Tourism Income and Expenses.” 2020. https://yigm.ktb.gov.tr/TR-9851/turizm-istatistikleri.html.

The workforce employed in the Turkish tourism industry consisted mostly of former villagers who were proletarianizedFootnote ⁵⁴ – transformed from being independent agricultural producers into wage laborers – as a result of exposure to global capital. Aykaç analyzes the diversification of economic activities and income of agrarian households through integration into the tourism industry. She states that proletarianization was a continuing process in which women also became wage earners outside the household but continued to shoulder the work at home.Footnote ⁵⁵

There is a gap in the Turkish tourism literature with no study adapting LPA to tourism work. The literature has covered tourism’s impact on the increase in inequality between regions and classes, and on problems in tourism employment, education, and training.Footnote ⁵⁶ Women are employed,Footnote ⁵⁷ but they are underrepresented at 27.3 percent, below even the national employment rate of 29.8 percent for women. This is expected to rise to 36.5 percent by 2023.Footnote ⁵⁸ Perceptions of tourism employees have been documented,Footnote ⁵⁹ but there has been little elaboration on the problems of immigrant workersFootnote ⁶⁰ and the activities of trade unions.Footnote ⁶¹

Local capital dominates Turkish tourism businessFootnote ⁶² and a majority of the large-scale hospitality establishments on the southern coast of Turkey operates on the basis of the AIS.Footnote ⁶³ This was not the case before the 2000s. The rising competition in the 1990s after the brief blow of the Gulf War (1990–1) to Turkish tourism pushed the firms to look for new marketing strategies. As a result, Turkish entrepreneurs adopted the AIS utilized by southern European countries for capital concentration from the mid-1990s onwards.Footnote ⁶⁴ As demand rose againFootnote ⁶⁵ more hotels were constructed applying the AIS, and as the number of hotels and their bed capacity increased (Table 2) interfirm competition intensified. In Turkey, as the AIS became dominant from early 2000s onwards the tour operators put downward pressure on prices, directing tourist flows across various destinations with high number of bed supplies. Occupancy levels and income increased definitely, but adoption of AIS in Turkey has been a matter of controversy regarding socio-spatial segregation, local development, regional inequality, environmental degradation, seasonal employment, and low levels of profitability.Footnote ⁶⁶

Table 2.

Bed capacity

Source: Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. “Tourism Certified Establishments.” 2019. https://yigm.ktb.gov.tr/TR-9860/turizm-belgeli-tesisler.html.

In the global value chain of tourism production, holiday villages are highly dependent on international tour operators such as Alltours, Tui, Thomas Cook, and others in order to sell their AIS packages. Using their stronger bargaining power tour operators take advantage of pressuring firms into competing with each other to procure more services on site for lower prices. Hotels try to reach deals with these tour operators before the season starts, and according to the occupancy rates bargaining continues during the season. By 2001 Turkey was ranked seventeenth in terms of international arrivals and thirteenth for tourism receipts. Apparently AIS helped Turkey to rise from seventeenth to sixth position in terms of international arrivals within ten years and increase tourism income.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, its rank in terms of tourism income decreased from a top-nine position in 2008 to twelfth in 2012 and fourteenth in 2018,Footnote ⁶⁸ suggesting a decrease in profit levels due to increasing competition with the AIS.

Elements of simple control in the two holiday villages

As discussed above, simple control refers to labor control mechanisms that rely on personal, arbitrary use of power by those who are in charge. In holiday villages the people in charge were the general manager (GM) and managers and supervisors down the hierarchy. The owners of the hotels also occasionally intervened and they frequently spent time in the holiday village as a family. The elements of simple control in these two holiday villages were arbitrary, personal rule from the managers regarding task assignment, rewards, and punishments that included verbal and physical violence, registration of overtime payments, promotion decisions, close monitoring of workers both at and away from work, clique formation that was also informed by hemşehrilik networks (those made up of people from the same hometown), and the management’s references.

It is possible to argue that simple control always existed as part of the labor regime because of the capital structure of many tourism firms in Turkey, which are mostly local and family owned. Both Escape and Dreams are family owned and family members are present on their boards of trustees. Formerly active in other sectors, both families entered tourism business in the early 1990s when it was profitable due to a lack of supply. The younger generation of these families grew up engaged in the management of the tourism business established by their parents rather than just leaving the matters to a GM alone.

It is my argument, however, that this mode of control has made a comeback in a time of increasing competition. In the interviews, long-time employees and managers stated that they had formerly more initiative that resembled “responsible autonomy” and closer contact with the customers as well as better remuneration and career prospects.

Despite the continuity in the capital structure of the Turkish tourism firms, interviews point to a change in terms of labor control methods. In the past decade, simple control of labor has become more accentuated due to increasing competition under the impact of the AIS, dependence on tour operators, labor market conditions, wage levels, decreasing career opportunities, and changing skill composition of the tasks. As such, the use of simple control methods points to an organizational transition. As wages/tips decreased it became harder to find skilled labor, and the owners did not want to employ skilled labor given the routinization of many tasks that had formerly been customized for relatively lower numbers of well-to-do customers. The managerial perception of the decrease in tasks’ skill composition and workers’ skills translated into lower trust in the workforce. This means that the managers felt the need to closely monitor the workers and intervene in work processes, resulting in conflicts, erosion of worker commitment, reduction in worker satisfaction, and eventually their leaving. This may be preferable to the capitalist in the short run for purposes of labor supply flexibility and cutting costs.

Close monitoring and interventions

At Escape, workers and mid-level managers regarded the GM as too harsh, acting arbitrarily and rudely. Additionally, workers complained about supervisors, who did not treat them well and pressured them with a heavy workload. The younger generation of the owners at Escape intervened with respect to the distribution of work tasks and remunerations on a frequent if not daily basis. In my interview with this harsh GM, who had been in this position for the past eight years, he stated that he maintained a delicate balance at a time when the owners of the enterprise were intervening more than before. However, he did not detail the compromises and bargains between himself and the owners. I did not have the chance to interview the GM at Dreams, who was an expatriate, to ask about this delicate balance. Escape’s male ex-maître d’hôtel (MdH) was disturbed when he saw entrepreneur family members often advising the GM on how to distribute tasks among the workforce in his division without knowing facts on the shop floor. He stated that such interventions made matters worse in the race against time. Work was barely completed by the reduced workforce that matched the entrepreneur family’s expectations. The family determined the limits of hotel’s budget as a whole and who would head certain departments. Thus, more personnel would not be forthcoming despite the need. This need could not even be spoken of. The author personally witnessed one of the younger family members asking the human resources (HR) office for the wage reports of the entertainment workers.

The GM at Escape often yelled at and rebuked the workers and managers. He closely monitored many operations himself, including the main meals and even the cleaning of certain zones in the premises. Interviews with veteran mid-level managers revealed that they had differing opinions about how work should be carried out, silently disagreeing with one another and with the GM. But they all agreed that things had changed since the introduction of all-inclusive packages. The male sous-chef complained, for example, that the GM sometimes intervened in the preparation of food: “The man [GM] comes and checks the amount of oil in rice. He [GM] told me to add more, but I warned him that customers could have diarrhea from this.” The male restaurant service supervisor was troubled about worn-out dishes and glasses being broken: “It is very normal that 10 percent of the kitchenware goes broken every year as things get worn out, but he does not listen.” The GM did not acknowledge the excuse and held him responsible for the losses. The dinnerware was not restocked that summer and the supervisor shouldered continuing rebukes. Asked whether managing necessitates being tough, in his rather patrimonial-style answer the GM stressed that even in families toughness could be necessary:

Many of these interviewees opining on the GM felt rather uncomfortable about the level of toughness. They did not feel free to express themselves thoroughly on the matter. Yet, they could talk about incidents whereby the GM yelled and swore at employees, something that did not take place infrequently. Only a few praised the GM’s toughness that they believed resulted in disciplined and subtle work. These few considered him to be an exterior eye looking at the operation with the eyes of the customers. Employees and departmental heads could not see the things the way he saw them because they were absorbed in the routine. The GM himself was busy and stressed with occupancy and sales levels, which were reported to him instantly on his office computer. Meanwhile, in order to realize preseason expectations and prepare for the next season he met with tour operators and local agents. This was how his performance was evaluated by the board of trustees: getting the numbers right. Such a tough and arbitrary attitude went down the hierarchy in all departments.

In the kitchen, for example, lower-level chefs complained about the harsh attitude of two brothers, the executive chef and the master sous-chef, who created their own micro “foremen’s empire.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Bullying, swearing, and even physical violence by chefs was common. Metin, a male demi-chef, gave details of such physical insults to him and to other pages that were slapped for the flimsiest excuse: “Pages in the kitchen often get a slap for fetching the wrong type of spoon or pan, making too much noise or quarrelling with colleagues or when they make a joke to have some fun.” He said that such harsh treatment was confusing and could eventually drive people to seriously harm one another with the sharp tools available in the kitchen. “I don’t know what to think and how to feel. One moment they are very friendly and the other they behave as if I am their enemy.” This was alarming. Frequent yelling and rebukes also existed in other divisions, but not direct physical violence as in Escape’s kitchen.

The chef brothers had created an informal clique of personnel both in the kitchen and other divisions, made up mostly of people from their hometown of origin (hemşehri). Clique members were favored with respect to the distribution of tasks, meaning that they worked on less strenuous tasks compared to others and hoped for some sort of employment security. In return they were loyal, committed, and spied on behalf of the manager or supervisor in question, gathering vital information on what was said, discussed, and planned among the workforce. Nevertheless, an increasing workload was inevitable for the clique members too. One female interviewee in the scullery, Handan, claimed that over the past couple years the workload had increased tremendously; the other day she had felt terrible, uneasy, and panicked because she feared that the work would not be finished on time. When I offered the word “stress,” she said yes, she felt stress, stating that working in tourism had become difficult. Handan generally worked very hard: “I work hard and with pleasure. I am a distant relative of Serhat (the executive chef) so I cannot let him down.”

As this reveals, managers controlled the workforce partly through creating cliques among the workers. Generally, but not necessarily, the cliques consisted of workers that came from the same village or town as the manager. At both workplaces, such hemşehrilik networks gave some protection and bargaining power to workers. Indeed, it was more effective in cases when in the network the hemşehri was an already established long-time manager at the workplace. It is important to note that the clique members were favored with respect to the distribution of tasks, meaning that they worked less strenuously compared to others and hoped for some sort of employment security. At Dreams, for example, Sevinç, an experienced female former housekeeping worker, stated that those favored by managers were given less tiring tasks: “If you are close to them [managers] they will send you to clean rooms and common areas that are close to the office, and then you come back earlier and have a longer in the air-conditioned office room.” In her own case she fell out of favor when she refused to do an unrelated task for the wife of the boss. Later she had hernia and had to quit when she was expecting an offer of a supervisory position. Housekeeping tasks were physically very demanding with high risks to health. In the hot and humid weather working within close proximity, completing tasks earlier, and resting in the air-conditioned office a bit longer made a difference. In return for such petty rewards in-clique workers remained loyal, committed, and at times spied on behalf of management when asked. They gathered information on what was said, discussed, and planned among the workforce.

There were other similar cliques competing to remove and replace existing supervisors through “coups.” The ex-MdH at Escape explained that after the replacement of a supervisor, the new supervisor would be offered a reduced wage. The discretion enjoyed at the position would also be lower: “She/he cannot remain in that position very long, either. Someone else will replace him/her and their career in tourism will end.” The MdH actually complained about a general loss of skills: “We are always racing against time since we have a lack of personnel. Those employed do not know how things are in tourism. I am myself an educator, but due to lack of time we are pushing these kids on a battlefield without properly training them.” The managers, however, claimed they could not trust personnel who did not have the necessary qualifications to provide customer service. Even those who were tourism majors at universities were not trusted fully since they did not understand all-inclusive service thoroughly, they said. This was another dimension to the resurgence of simple control, paving the way for the close monitoring of personnel by supervisors who did not trust these workers.

What mattered was that this mechanism ran according to close personal monitoring and the arbitrary rule of department managers side by side with the bureaucracy of hotel management. This included bullying, swearing, and even physical violence as mentioned above. As such, the arbitrariness created many quarrels in the workplace, especially between the younger single male personnel and managers. Some of these younger workers left the workplace if tensions persisted and looked for employment elsewhere. They could succeed in finding employment depending on the strength of their network, on the one hand, and the tightness of the labor market in that particular week or month, on the other.

The restaurant service supervisors were mobile in the dining hall and frequently visited the posts of the service workers. Muharrem, the male headwaiter in the main restaurant at Escape, explained his personal method of control frankly:

Intending to make friends with the workers is arguably an attempt to extend his control over them beyond working hours. Through this he even tried to scrutinize discussions among young personnel during their time off, which the author experienced first hand. While the author was talking to two female and two male restaurant workers after their work time at the worker’s cafeteria the headwaiter came by and asked how they were doing. The workers immediately excused themselves. The female workers with whom I could not talk on that occasion were very disturbed by his rude attitude, slang language, and frequent yelling and rebukes during the meetings. They were willing to give more details about such an attitude, but were prevented from doing so by the headwaiter and his captains. As suggested, cliques close to managers created fear among workers, giving them the sense that they were being listened to and watched all the time.

Close monitoring was also the case at reception, where a more educated labor force was employed. The employees were generally computer-literate students or graduates. The male front office manager at Escape, Hakan said:

Another advantage of being close to workers was that when he sensed that there was a complication beyond a receptionist’s skills, he would intervene immediately before the issue became troubling. “I treat the young personnel here as if we are friends and try to play the role of an elder brother when I feel that they need such a figure.” Emine, the female housekeeping manager at Escape stated:

Close monitoring, a harsh attitude, and showing a degree of friendship or brotherliness, which would expand managerial intervention into the private sphere as well as allow closer monitoring even after work on campus, were aspects of simple control at Escape. At Dreams the front office supervisor observed the workflow from a back office that was separated from the front by a glass door. Managers interviewed at Dreams also admitted to monitoring personnel closely. They refrained from building friendships and preferred to keep their distance from workers, however, but maintained a relaxed method of communication. This being the case, restaurant service workers complained of being rebuked at times for slack service. The author, being employed in the GR unit, experienced occasional rebukes from the rooms division manager, who was a polite and intelligent person. Yet she often patrolled the campus to observe how her personnel in all divisions performed. She would appear at moments and in places that no one would expect. And if this was inconvenient for service then she complained and rebuked. The experienced GR personnel would then talk to her at length, making apologies for all, and reassuring them that mistakes would not be repeated. Of course, workers did things that management perceived as mistakes.

Rewards and punishments

Arbitrariness functioned together with a larger mechanism of incentives and punishments. As mentioned above, the arbitrary assigning of tasks could be a reward or a punishment to favored or in-clique workers. Similarly, workers regarded the assignment of workstations on campus as well as scheduling a weekly day off as rewards and punishments. Such assignment and scheduling also followed no preset rules. For example, GR personnel never liked to work at the information desk because of the feeling of isolation from others and lack of action at that station. Some restaurant personnel wanted to be on show on certain days – that is, preparing things before the customers – and not be backstage. There was only one day off in hospitality work and at times even that was cancelled due to the intensity of the work. In the normal flow of work, however, the day of the day off was very crucial since workers who were friends wanted to spend their weekly holiday together. Some workers had to be in town or with their families on a particular date. When the scheduling did not meet their expectations they were sad and vulnerable because they could not socialize with their closer friends and wasted precious time. Management knew about such worker fragilities and used the tool of scheduling accordingly, sometimes as a reward and sometimes as a punishment, as mentioned by Wood in his discussion of flexible discipline where what he calls “schedule gifts” obscure control despite giving managers arbitrary power over workers’ work–life balance and “a potentially powerful despotic means of ensuring general control.”Footnote ⁷⁰ A reduction or increase in working hours has a direct impact on the material gains of workers in Wood’s case. In holiday villages, workers had to be on good terms with managers and show devotion at work to have their day off on a day that they could spend with their friends outside the campus and have fun.

Overall, what Wood discusses in terms of “scheduling gifts” also held true for holiday village workers in the sense that workers were expected to have good personal relations with their supervisors if they hoped to prolong their employment through the low season. In a bureaucratic structure, managers would decide on such matters based on specific objective criteria. But workers suggested that the decisions were not taken objectively, but based on personal relations and networks. So if a worker had to remain longer at work and be called the next season, she/he had to approach the manager of the division, showing extra work and loyalty. There were very few who could remain after the high season except the core employees that included mostly senior managers and their assistants along with certain chefs and technical personnel.

Overtime payment was another issue dealt with arbitrarily, causing confrontations between workers and the HR office. The HR manager said that responsibility for recording and reporting overtime belonged to supervisors and managers. Workers themselves did not always note their daily overtime work. The limits of overtime work were vague – not legally, but primarily because workers were neither sufficiently organized to track such matters nor to raise their voices in the face of violations of their rights for fear of losing their employment. A few managers, such as Emine, the housekeeping manager at Escape, did record overtime, while others were not much concerned with the matter: “The GM does not like me because I bring the issue up. They don’t want to pay much.” The GM did not favor the regular payment of overtime work, as both Emine and ex-MdH explained in interviews. Not paying overtime helped the GM to stay within his budget while exploiting labor, being able to report profits to the board of trustees.

Promotion decisions were subject to managerial arbitrariness and were used as a loyalty-building measure. Managers made the decisions that were eventually approved by the GM. Few promotions took place during my visit. Nonetheless, the promise and dream of promotion was important for keeping certain personnel on hand or for inviting and transferring workers from other enterprises. Arda, a male barman, was made such a promise by the supervisor of the special restaurants at Escape. He explained that in his third month he was given the new title, but that he would not remain with the firm the following season because of the low quality of service he encountered. On the author’s first week two workers resigned, to the author’s knowledge because of such arbitrariness in promotions. In one case the GM rejected the promotion decision taken by the manager. In the other the worker was very disappointed after experiencing a small pay rise of fifty Turkish lira attached to the promotion. At Dreams, before the author’s arrival Yağız, an experienced male GR representative, had been promoted to the position of shift leader and a couple of weeks later demoted due to differing evaluations of his work performance among managers. He was bitter at his boss, but kept working without losing his motivation.

Promotion decisions were once structured through written and oral exams, that is, through preset rules. At Dreams this was a crucial means for retaining enthusiastic personnel. This practice has died out in recent years, however, and receiving a promotion became difficult for the majority of workers. Gizem, a low-ranking female chef, stated that there was also a gender dimension to the issue. Given the same level of skill, effort, learning curve, and enthusiasm, a male rival would be promoted ahead of her. At both Escape and Dreams female personnel from reception, the kitchen, and entertainment complained about such discrimination in promotion decisions to the advantage of male personnel. Gizem said: “I actually quit this job and applied to another firm, but after spending a night in their dorms I came back.”

Decisions regarding the prolongation of employment through the low season, promotion, and registration of overtime work were taken arbitrarily based on personal or hemşehri relations rather than preset rules. These were more means for loyalty-building than recognition of skill and seniority. Özgür, the male assistant HR manager at Dreams, pointed to the need to develop clear rules and procedures for the recruitment, hiring, and promotion of personnel. Without these, he added, everything would continue to look unorganized, and as such it was hard for HR to justify differing wages. Indeed, the department had recently started to intervene in the recruitment and hiring of workers by conducting its own interviews, which caused tension with other departments. This pointed to the centralization of management in contrast to earlier devolution.

Finally, the references of managers were vitally important for personnel leaving to search for a position in another hospitality firm. Although there are many holiday villages and hundreds of hotels, the hospitality industry is still a small community in which owners and managers know each other and rely on each other’s references about workers. The hospitality firms took notice of the references to ensure that the incoming worker would be a “good worker” in the sense Edwards’ used the term,Footnote ⁷¹ not causing the authorities problems. These helped managers maintain a power base within the holiday villages and in the hospitality subsector.

At Dreams simple control was not aggressive but still powerful. It existed despite a strong corporate culture and other structural elements of control that had been established. Supervisors and managers also continually monitored workers whether in their divisions or not. This monitoring was not so overt, and was subtle compared to that at Escape. Workers knew or thought that managers shared views and observations about them, especially regarding their manners during both working and non-working hours. For example, the GR supervisor shared her observations on her team. She said that observing, selecting, and eliminating workers was necessary to form a more harmonious group the following season. She was not pleased by the composition of the team in summer 2012. She occasionally took advice from the experienced rooms division manager who made her own observations of the team as mentioned above. While these managers did not seem to sit around watching over people, they made detailed observations about the efficiency of the work done and about workers’ manners during their service, although they did not intervene in the actual work directly. Yağız, the experienced GR representative, helped the author understand early on that there were unwritten rules in the workplace and that workers were monitored all the time, especially those in direct contact with customers. Thinking that they were being monitored compelled workers to be careful about their manners. Managers distributed the tasks, but more importantly influenced the pacing and styling of the work as a way of screening out workers for good performance. Some workers thus might not be recalled for the next season, or if a more suitable candidate became available they could be laid off mid-season.

The arbitrary and coercive rule has the potential to cause conflict between management and labor. Edwards suggests that simple control under hired bosses opens the way for the petty tyranny of managers – hence workplace conflict.Footnote ⁷² Although such conflict and related developments are hardly in capital’s interest, in the short run they contribute to efficiency and labor supply flexibility. In the holiday villages workers quit jobs in the face of such tyranny without compensation or incentives to stay. Occasionally personnel in holiday villages left or were laid off on the pretext that they violated workplace harmony or defied orders. Of course, for those who left on their own the firm had no legal responsibility for compensation. Those who were laid off after their two-month probation and those who were laid off after six months of employment were convinced by supervisors not to take the case to court.Footnote ⁷³ Their compensation was good references from their managers that laid-off workers would need in their search for work in other firms. If the workers insisted, they would have only negative commentary. That is, firms dissuaded workers from bringing the issue to court with the threat of unemployment, at least for a time.

Labor supply flexibility benefits firms competing in volatile markets with fluctuating customer demand. Being able to reduce and increase the number of workers according to that demand is crucial for these firms to remain in business. Although not public, I was shown (but could not get a copy of) weekly and monthly charts comparing the number of workers and labor costs with the level of room occupancy. This arguably suggests that holiday villages aimed at a just-in-time staffing strategy for just-in-time service production.Footnote ⁷⁴ This meant that they wanted to have the right amount of labor corresponding to work that sustained efficiency and the firms’ profitability. Accordingly, at times of increasing market pressure, when flexible labor contracts were not flexible enough for the entrepreneurs and the normative control devices of human resource management failed to create worker commitment,Footnote ⁷⁵ the arbitrary, coercive rule of the GM and managers emerged as a tool to provide efficiency and labor flexibility. In the holiday villages, flexibility through simple control was a device to reduce labor costs – adjusting the number of workers and labor efficiency according to demand and creating loyalty to the company.