Mark Rowe writes: If you come into Harlesden high street in north London from Wembley from the north and walk on the left hand side of the road, long before you come to the bakery that sells hot Jamaican patties in the morning you pass a supermarket that has a bank of television screens above the check-outs. Each screen shows video surveillance of the entrance. Shops commonly do this, but usually only with a single screen. The silent multiple screens have their effect; they are telling everyone that they are being watched, because they are not trusted.
It came to mind when I went in my local Sainsbury’s supermarket for the first time in a few months. The store has ripped out some of the check-outs and replaced them with more self-serve points, still staffed as before by a single worker. A new feature of the self-service points is an upright A4-sized screen that shows video surveillance of you. The implication again, that you aren’t trusted to self-scan without taking something without paying. Yet the retailer expects the surveillance tech to pick up the slack left by the smaller amount of human oversight; that the retailer has decided upon for the sake of reducing its wages bill.
No system of asking shoppers to pay is without risk; at the check-out with a member of staff comes the risk of ‘sweet-hearting’; that the check-out operator in league with the shopper will let through items without paying, or by inputting a smaller charge.
The drive to self-scan, and the greater use of video, imply that at the same time that the shopper can be trusted, and that they are the main cause of loss, rather than the more unsettling possibility that the insider, the staff, pose the greater threat.
Any business crime figures are problematic because all crime figures are, because of under-reporting and –recording (not the same things); besides, business may genuinely not be able to tell apart outright theft from other sorts of shrinkage – things genuinely going missing, or items dropped and broken, possibly on purpose so that staff can then take something or buy it at a discount. One finding from the annual British Retail Consortium crime survey was that theft by staff was of larger amounts than by customers, suggesting that staff once they find a way of stealing, keep on using it.
At the extreme, which has happened, pilfering may expand so that the crime becomes a parasite upon the host organism, or even takes it over; while the legitimate business goes on, staff siphon off goods for themselves – valuables from passenger luggage or cargo at an airport, mail or parcels from a sorting office, retail goods from a warehouse. The criminals take control so that they hire other criminals and give the sack to anyone honest who complains.
Last year I sensed, heard confirmed by others and reported on a feeling of carelessness – that some workers, having endured covid restrictions or furlough, were taking a don’t care attitude. It was one finding in the Baroness Casey review of the disorder at the July 2021 England-Italy Euros final at Wembley – not as important as the ‘near miss’ of crushings to death; that witnesses reported seeing stewards asking for and accepting cash bribes to let in fans without tickets.
That threat – in a word, corruption – applies more generally to zero-hour contract workers, faced by a cost of living and energy crisis. Without being judgemental about it, it’s worth wondering whether the call by Marx and Engels at the end of their Communist Manifesto to workers to ‘lose their chains’ and unite seldom came to pass because most workers preferred to pilfer from their employer. It serves two purposes; it makes workers slightly better off materially, and it may give them a sense of satisfaction that they are getting one over the boss.
It’s little studied let alone measured because to do so you would have to be inside a workplace culture, let alone someone’s head. A further reason it’s not aired is that it’s not only the shop floor that may be the insider threat, but the higher-ups also. Thus the criminologists harping on about ‘crimes of the powerful’ have a point, though they do so for their own left-wing political reasons. One head of security who had uncovered fraud by someone at least as senior in the business as them said to me in recollection: “It’s a lonely place.” As for what a business does about having someone senior doing crime against the business, it’s as likely to dislike the security manager for raising something so embarrassing; the security manager moved elsewhere.
What is that workplace culture? It’s as well expressed as anywhere in the World War Two memoir by William Harding, A Cockney Soldier (1989). The ‘old sweats’ never seemed short of a bob or two, he wrote:
Thieving was a serious crime in the Army, which would invoke severe punishment if a culprit was caught. But the skill and craftiness of some, resulted in hardly anyone ever being caught. It came home to me one day, following pay parade, changing my clothes by my locker, I emptied my pockets on to my bed and turned away, but on looking back, there were two half-crowns missing. I angrily asked if anyone was seen near my bed, but it was the code never to ‘shop’ anyone, so receiving stony glances, I learned the hard way.
So much for wartime solidarity. Harding went on to the story of a man whose soap went missing in the washhouse:
…. he decided to catch the thief, so he pushed two needles into his soap and washed with another, when there was a yell, and there was a man with his hands bleeding. The thief was caught and received two black eyes for his trouble, plus a badly bruised face, and from then on he was a marked man. The motto was to steal as much as you could from the Army, but never from a comrade.
