In John Lewis, Clothes Buy You!

Hey,

As you may or may not know, I do Central and Eastern European Studies (CEES) at University. What this means is that for the last year I've been learning about the Communist period in the Soviet Union (Lenin, Stalin, Breshnev, Gorbachev etc). The propaganda they used was farcical, ranging from calling each other "Comrade" to depicting life in the West as very similar to the musical "Oliver". In the 1970s. Seriously.

I bet for a second you thought I wasn't going to talk about TV for once (because this is what this blog has become effectively) but no. I'm going to stick to form. I write about the Soviet Union this morning due to the show on BBC the now "Inside John Lewis". Not a bizarre interactive biology experiment, "Inside John Lewis" follows the business which is trying to see out the recession successfully. It would be an interesting program as it is, but to make it a bit different is that John Lewis is not a business but a "partnership" which all the staff "own".

At John Lewis, you are not staff. You are a "partner". The pay structure restricts the men at the top getting extortionate wages (the chief executive can only get 75 times that of the lowest paid staff/partner, a lot of money nonetheless but significantly less to other companies).

The question I pose is this: is John Lewis the socialist ideal? The partners are effectively shareholders in John Lewis, meaning they are involved in a generous "profit share" system. John Lewis Partnership also own resorts for their partners to go on holiday to. The people who work there appear to love the place. They adhere to this "one for all, all for one" ideology.

John Lewis, like all businesses currently, are struggling in the current recession. "Slim-lining" the company has meant the "R" word: redundancies. It doesn't matter whether you are staff, comrade or partner. You are disposable, a weight that must be relieved to keep the business' head above water.

I don't know if John Lewis will suffer a similar fate to that of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I don't really "do" economics or business or anything like that. But by using my wee bit of political knowledge if I was to hear it were to fall I wouldn't be overtly surprised. The similarities are a bit odd, considering one was an empire (or as good as) and the other is a shop. Just a shop. John Lewis' unique "partnership" system is retail socialism. If John Lewis becomes an institution to be lost in this economic climate (ie like Woolworths) it will be because they tried to cover to many different objects on too vast a scale. With the internet and competitive high streets, to expect a shop to cover everything and more is just a bit too unrealistic. You can't expect the same shop to cover televisions as well as perfume? It's a bit like the Soviet Union trying to hold on to the Baltic States and the republics of central Asia. Fifty years ago both could be done, now not so much.

This is top-level procrastination, by the way. I have an essay due for Wednesday in CEES (of all subjects). To find a comparison between a shop and post-war Stalinism I think is quite impressive. It's not, but I'll keep telling myself this. It makes it better for me.

DC x