Time, Tea Breaks, and the Frontier of Control in UK Workplaces

Abstract

One of the by-products of the intensification and re-organization of work over the last four decades has been a squeeze and sometimes elimination of paid rest breaks for lunch, tea (or coffee), and individual ‘comfort’ breaks. This paper explores the history of such breaks, covering whims, fads and changes in management ideologies and practices as they apply to time discipline, as well as patterns of resistance seen through the lens of the ‘frontier of control’. More recent developments have seen a partial return to the ‘paid break’, running against the dominant trend of cutbacks in such breaks or conversion from paid to unpaid breaks.