No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

There’s a lot of con­struc­tion work gone into the high-tech sport ven­ues that are now lit­ter­ing the coun­try. Some­times it’s the smal­lest things that mat­ter. These screws are some of the ‘miss­ing masses’, as mundane and as import­ant as can be (Latour, 1992).

(source: cyclingweekly.co.uk via Ewen Speed)

On your hands and knees: your mate lines up the screws, as straight as can be, and you drive them right in. All the way. On any cyclist’s list of the things that mat­ter, avoid­ing a punc­ture is up at the top.

Ref­er­ence

‘Where Are the Miss­ing Masses? The Soci­ology of a Few Mundane Arti­facts’ in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shap­ing Technology/Building Soci­ety: Stud­ies in Soci­o­tech­nical Change Cam­bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 225–258

Since read­ing Ewen Speed’s piece about work­ing con­tracts in the NHS, I’ve been think­ing more about the exper­i­ence of health care work. I’ve just read a fas­cin­at­ing and per­plex­ing tale of the con­tin­gen­cies of work in health­care.

The first time I saw a pager, in 1994, I though it was a pretty clever device. You page me, I see your num­ber, and I find a land­line and give you a ring. It’s a very effect­ive way of being con­tact­able when you’re out and about but still on-call. It’s hard to believe, though, that given the ‘com­mu­nic­a­tions revolu­tion’ of mobile tele­phones and wi-fi inter­net, that the pager is still the device of first resort when a doc­tor needs to be called to a patient’s bed­side. And it’s not hard to believe that the pager isn’t that effect­ive in get­ting through to the right person.

source: http://handihealth.me/2012/03/18/bleep-bleep-stone-age-technology-in-the-21st-century-nhs/

The handi­health account tells us of all the con­tin­gen­cies and uncer­tain­ties that might get in the way of this work­ing well, from not being able to find a phone lines that’s free, to not know­ing if you’ve got in touch with the right per­son. It’s stress­ful and it takes time in cases where speed really mat­ters. It’s hard to ima­gine that the bleeper is the best tech­no­logy to make the work hap­pen. But it’s cheap to run, and it’s well embed­ded in work­ing prac­tices, so per­haps it’s stuck.

As Froud et al (2011: 6) com­ment, ‘Gov­ern­ments decide value for money by con­sid­er­ing only price and qual­ity on an indi­vidual pur­chase basis’, and by this reck­on­ing, a bleeper’s pretty cost effect­ive. This con­cern with upfront price frames all forms of eco­nomic action in the lan­guage of microe­co­nom­ics — simple mar­kets and indi­vidual buy­ers — and hence applies simplistic under­stand­ings of ‘value for money’ to very com­plex prac­tices of provid­ing care. Think­ing about the unit price for indi­vidual pur­chase gets in the way of more subtle (but not so subtle as to be invis­ible to even a half-awake mind) think­ing about what is worth spend­ing money on to make care pos­sible. (The out­rage earlier this year at the head­line cost of the Met­ro­pol­itan Police’s use of the speak­ing clock (£35,000 a year!) is a good com­par­ison. Per­son­ally, I’d rather not be the cop­per wait­ing to start the raid whose watch was a minute fast.

I remem­ber some time ago watch­ing a tele­vi­sion pro­gramme which sent the boss back to the shop­floor. A ‘top’ man­ager in a major super­mar­ket chain went to work on the till, and dis­covered just how fiddly it was to remove dis­count stick­ers in order to scan the bar­code beneath. The sticker glue was later changed. I have a child­ish idea to remove first the sec­ret­arial sup­port and then the mobiles of Andrew Lans­ley, David Nich­olson, the heads of vari­ous private health­care com­pan­ies com­pet­ing for a share of the NHS pie, and their mana­gerial sub­or­din­ates. Instead, each can have a pager and shared access to a land­line to get some insight into the chal­lenges of care in an old-tech world.

Ref­er­ence

Froud, J., Johal, S., Law, J., Leaver, A. and Wil­li­ams, K. (2011) ‘Know­ing What To Do? How Not to Build Trains’. CRESC Research Report . Open University/University of Manchester.

The 2012 Health and Social Care Act (HSC) marks the de-regulation of primary health care in Eng­land. Much of the crit­ical response to the legis­la­tion has been con­cerned with the implic­a­tions for patients: what will the reforms mean for the broad polit­ical com­mit­ment to provid­ing free uni­ver­sal health­care? The pro­gnosis for the NHS is not good but there is a faint glim­mer of hope, given the high esteem in which it is held by the elect­or­ate. The pop­u­lar com­mit­ment to the NHS as a social good is still strong. There is, how­ever, a far more imme­di­ate threat to the every­day work­ing of the NHS that needs to be con­sidered — NHS staff and the prac­tice of TUPE’ing. The NHS as a health ser­vice is not just a social good; it is a col­lect­ive social good. It can­not be sep­ar­ated from its staff and their con­di­tions of employ­ment, but this is exactly what the Coali­tion gov­ern­ment is cur­rently doing.

Under the terms of the 2012 Act, ‘any qual­i­fied pro­vider’ (AQP) can sub­mit a tender to the local Clin­ical Com­mis­sion­ing Group to provide health­care ser­vices. Since the act was passed in March, Serco, act­ing as AQP, have been awar­ded a £140 mil­lion con­tract to provide Com­munity Ser­vices in Suf­folk. Sim­il­arly, and without a trace of irony, Vir­gin Care will be provid­ing Sexual Health Ser­vices in Milton Keynes. Accord­ing to Uni­son, the Serco con­tract in Suf­folk will res­ult in 1000 staff being ‘TUPE’d’ from NHS con­tracts onto Serco contracts.

TUPE or Trans­fer of Under­tak­ings [Pro­tec­tion of Employ­ment] arrange­ments are noth­ing new. Ruane (2007) describes TUPE arrange­ments under New Labour PFI schemes, where many sup­port ser­vices, such as hos­pital port­ers, pre­vi­ously provided by salar­ied NHS employ­ees, came to be provided through private sec­tor com­pan­ies (and Serco has form here). Staff ended up per­form­ing exactly the same duties, but under dif­fer­ent con­di­tions of employ­ment. For example, Ruane details how port­ers in Durham repor­ted a £30-£40 per week short­fall in salary between TUPE and non-TUPE staff doing the same work. Between 2003 and 2005, and on the back of trade union mobil­isa­tion, agree­ment was reached over a pub­lic sec­tor ‘two-tier code’. This code meant that any pub­lic sec­tor employ­ees who were TUPE’d to private sec­tor organ­isa­tions could not be offered a con­tract deemed to be ‘over­all less favour­able’ than their pre­vi­ous pub­lic sec­tor con­tract (with the excep­tion of pen­sion pro­vi­sion). The two-tier code was imple­men­ted in health­care through the ‘Agenda for Change and NHS Con­tract­ors Staff – a Joint State­ment’, which was agreed in 2005.

On 13December 2010 the Cab­inet Office with­drew the ‘two-tier’ code across all pub­lic sec­tor ser­vice con­tracts, without dis­cus­sion. It was replaced by six ‘Prin­ciples of Good Employ­ment Prac­tice’ These new prin­ciples are vol­un­tary and have not been nego­ti­ated between gov­ern­ment, employ­ees, employ­ers and trade uni­ons as the two-tier code was. The require­ment to avoid less favour­able con­di­tions is replaced by a com­mit­ment to ‘fair and reas­on­able terms and con­di­tions’, such that;

Where a sup­plier employs new entrants that sit along­side former pub­lic sec­tor work­ers, new entrants should have fair and reas­on­able pay, terms and con­di­tions. Sup­pli­ers should con­sult with their recog­nised trade uni­ons on the terms and con­di­tions to be offered to new entrants.

The implic­a­tions of this change, in light of the AQP legis­la­tion and the bun-fight that de-regulated NHS pro­vi­sion is quickly becom­ing, are stark and imme­di­ate. The NHS, as a col­lect­ive social good, is con­sti­tuted as much by its staff — by what it does for its staff and what it garners from its staff in return — as it is by a com­mit­ment to uni­ver­sal health care, free at the point of need. The lat­ter isn’t pos­sible without the former. Such is the strength of feel­ing for these prin­ciples of free access to health­care, that attempts at their reform would be polit­ic­ally unsus­tain­able. Staff are alto­gether a softer, more indir­ect and more polit­ic­ally sus­tain­able tar­get. The with­drawal of the two-tier code coupled to the open­ing up of health­care to any qual­i­fied pro­vider, (and the con­sequent privat­isa­tion and trans­fer of large num­bers of NHS staff) is a far more imme­di­ate threat to the future of the NHS than the carve up of primary care that is cur­rently dom­in­at­ing the debate. The implic­a­tions of this privat­isa­tion of staff for the future of the NHS are far more invi­di­ous than people real­ise. There is a very clear danger that the NHS becomes noth­ing more than a brand, along­side Serco, Vir­gin Care and oth­ers. Once this hap­pens, what becomes of the com­mit­ment to free uni­ver­sal health­care as a col­lect­ive social good? I would argue the situ­ation becomes terminal.

Ref­er­ence

Ruane, S. (2007) ‘Acts of dis­trust? Sup­port work­ers exper­i­ences in PFI hos­pital schemes’, 75–92, in G. Mooney and A. Law (eds.) (2007) New Labour/Hard Labour? Restruc­tur­ing and res­ist­ance inside the wel­fare industry , Bris­tol: The Policy Press.

Hav­ing a job is one thing, some­thing to be grate­ful for. Hav­ing a job that grants you ‘dig­nity at work’ is some­thing bet­ter. In the UK, a long­stand­ing Unite the Union cam­paign for dig­nity stresses free­dom from bul­ly­ing as mak­ing for a decent work­place and happy workers.

An obvi­ous example of bul­ly­ing is the bad boss: per­haps he makes you work late and takes credit for your work; per­haps she puts you down in front of your col­leagues and blames you for mis­takes which are not yours. But bul­ly­ing is often not con­fined to this one-on-one rela­tion­ship between unequals. Mob­bing is the term in com­mon use in Europe for beha­viour in organ­isa­tions where gangs of col­leagues, with the de facto approval, and even sup­port of bosses, pick on, demean, exclude and push out the col­league who is dif­fer­ent in some way, and vul­ner­able for that difference.

The Unkindly Art

Ken­neth West­hues (2006) describes the pro­cess of The Unkindly Art of Mob­bing as ini­tially a “non­vi­ol­ent, polite, soph­ist­ic­ated” kind of action in “ostens­ibly rational work­places”, which begins by wear­ing “the tar­get down emo­tion­ally by shun­ning, gos­sip, ridicule, bur­eau­cratic hassles, and with­hold­ing of deserved rewards….If the tar­get refuses to leave or acqui­esce, the mob­bing may escal­ate to a formal out­burst of aggres­sion. Mob­bers seize upon a crit­ical incid­ent, some real or ima­gined mis­be­ha­vior that they claim is proof of the target’s unworthiness”.

There’s been extens­ive research into this beha­viour in hos­pit­als, uni­ver­sit­ies and else­where. This idea of the group oppos­ing the one, labelling them as wrong and mak­ing them feel their dif­fer­ence is troub­ling. Want to read more about mob­bing? Click here.

 In Pre­cari­ous Times

West­hues’ descrip­tion of mob­bing pre­sumes work oper­ates within a bounded organ­isa­tion. But a deep under­stand­ing of how mob­bing comes about needs a broader under­stand­ing of eco­nomic activ­ity than this. Noelle Molé (2012) loc­ates her ana­lysis of mob­bing in a spe­cific labour mar­ket con­text, an Italy remark­able for the increas­ing pre­car­ity of its work­force. Molé tells how pre­cari­ous­ness — the uncer­tainty of work, the impossib­il­ity of rely­ing on the idea of a stable job — frames mob­bing. Work­ers who under­stand already that they are dis­pos­able, and in com­pet­i­tion with each other, exclude oth­ers through “sus­pi­cion, doubt and dis­trust” (2012: 49), mak­ing sense of their own exper­i­ences so that “ambi­val­ent, con­fus­ing, or dis­join­ted work rela­tion­ships become con­strued as mob­bing” (2012: 37).

I have heard many stor­ies of mob­bing, though I did not know the name. There was the whis­per­ing cam­paigns that ran through an organ­isa­tion sanc­tioned by man­agers against the worker who tried to uphold stand­ards; the sanc­ti­mo­ni­ous regrets of the former col­league who said one thing to the mob and another to the tar­get; the media reports about those who com­pile and use black­lists of Trade Union act­iv­ists: all mobbing.

Don’t Be a Minion

In Bri­tain, we’ve been see­ing another kind of mob­bing that is sanc­tioned and enacted by the power­ful. Rather than the increas­ing pre­car­ity employ­ment, as in the Italian case, it is increas­ing unem­ploy­ment and the ostens­ible wel­fare bur­den this gen­er­ates that pro­duces mob­bing. The indi­vidu­als being mobbed are not in secure or insec­ure work, but are judged – and mobbed — for their fail­ure to work, which is rein­ter­preted as a per­sonal fail­ure. They are deemed unworthy of dig­nity for being out­side work, because it’s their own fault if they are, they’ve simply not made them­selves suf­fi­ciently employ­able. These are the unem­ployed (read lazy scroun­gers), the dis­abled (read bene­fit scroun­gers) and the young NEETS (read feral youth). In media reports and gov­ern­ment policies around work­fare, we see the priv­ileged in-work min­ions ganging up on oth­ers to squawk and tweet their dis­gust. Why should that bloke with MS not be in work, he’s been labelled fit accord­ing to the cri­teria of a gen­eric ques­tion­naire admin­istered by a med­ic­ally untrained private sec­tor official?

Mob­bing is a good term for this kind of beha­viour, though it is not a strictly ‘cor­rect’ applic­a­tion of the concept. It’s a good because what hap­pens in work is not entirely sep­ar­able from what hap­pens out­side. The instabil­ity of eco­nomic sys­tems includ­ing the labour mar­ket con­di­tion beha­viour, so that — in this case — the fears and anxi­et­ies of those who have work, and must hold on to it become eas­ily trans­lated into oppro­brium for those who are not in work. You may say “what else can we do? We are in an Eco­nomic Crisis. There is no altern­at­ive”. And I would answer, “do not give me your ‘infernal altern­at­ives’”, because I agree with Stengers and Pig­narre, that “The ‘we have to’ to which min­ions adhere des­ig­nates some­thing of the order of the vin­dic­a­tion of a para­lysis” (2011: 34). The state is not at fault, cor­por­a­tions are not at fault, eco­nomic dif­fi­culties are the respons­ib­il­ity of indi­vidu­als and there is noth­ing else that can be done. This gives suc­cour to the private organ­isa­tions imple­ment­ing gov­ern­ment policy to reduce the bene­fits bill, by any means pos­sible, by car­ry­ing on mob­bing: “you could work. You just don’t want to”. But as all school­chil­dren are now taught – and it’s a les­son that adults seem to have for­got­ten — it’s just not right to bully people, even if they are dif­fer­ent to you. Think, think prop­erly of some alternatives.

Ref­er­ences

1. Molé, N (2012) Labor Dis­orders in Neo­lib­eral Italy: Mob­bing, Well-being, and the Work­place. Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity Press.
2. Pig­narre, P and Stengers, I (2011 [2005]) Cap­it­al­ist Sor­cery: Break­ing the Spell. trans Gof­fey, A. Pal­grave Macmillan.
3. West­hues, K (2006) ‘The Unkindly Art of Mob­bing’ Aca­demic Mat­ters: the Journal of Higher Edu­ca­tion, OCUFA, Fall 2006, pp. 18–19.

My GP writes notes straight onto the com­puter, and I’ve seen stu­dents try to keep up with lec­tures by typ­ing on an ipad. In these days of cheap laser jet print­ing, where even the smal­lest of busi­nesses can usu­ally afford to type up their signs, and there are few spaces left for pub­lic dis­plays of hand­writ­ing. Where I see them, I like to keep a record.

The Lon­don wine­bar has its menus hand­writ­ten, it’s a form of dis­tinc­tion don’t you know.

The writing’s a dif­fer­ent size, and is made with dif­fer­ent mater­ial to that used on adverts and pub menus. Liquid chalk pens are easy to use, it’s the writ­ing on a ver­tical sur­face that’s hard.

My favour­ites are the make-do notices. In, Out, and we’re not here.

Search is the meta­phor for the inter­net age (Stark, 2009). Google’s a verb, and you can access the world from your smart­phone. And so who has any use for the fat, heavy paper dir­ect­ory, search­able only in the sense that entries are organ­ised in alpha­bet­ical order? Well, someone still wants and needs it, and someone else will deliver it to their door.

I walked past here a while ago, and amused myself — if not my com­pan­ion — by pre­tend­ing that who­ever lived at this house was a very act­ive user of the telephone.

This was just a weak joke on my part. These are to be unwrapped and delivered, and someone was going to deliver them. Are they safe out­side? Well, no-one’s going to steal some­thing that they’re about to be given for free, are they? And it prob­ably wont rain.

I didn’t meet the per­son who pushed one through my let­ter­box that week. But a day or so later, I saw the fruits of their work else­where in the neigh­bour­hood, neatly propped up, too big for the letterbox.

Ref­er­ences

1. Stark, D. (2009) The Sense of Dis­son­ance: Accounts of Worth in Eco­nomic Life Prin­ceton Uni­ver­sity Press.

Of course not.

Bore­dom, one of the ‘minor’ and ‘non-cathartic’ Ugly Feel­ings that fas­cin­ate Sianne Ngai (2005), is the lot of the ser­vice sec­tor worker. Whether bored by the repe­ti­tion of script — of which ‘have a nice day’ is the most clichéd, and ‘who’s next please?’ the most com­mon — or bored by the absence of stim­u­la­tion, bore­dom is an ordin­ary state for many.

In small out­lets, without a brand-driven man­ager pump­ing inspir­a­tion into the atmo­sphere, there is one nice way to respond. Accept the silence, and steal 40 winks.

Ref­er­ences

1. Ngai, S. (2005) Ugly Feel­ings Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press. Cam­bridge, Mass. and London.

Essex is a maligned county, present in pop­u­lar myth­o­logy as a home for trouble­some women – from Mat­thew Hop­kins’ 17th cen­tury witches, to the sexu­ally pro­voc­at­ive but appar­ently stu­pid 1980s Essex Girls, and today’s primped women of The Only Way is Essex. When J. B. Priestley wrote Eng­lish Jour­ney he was exer­cised by some trouble­some 1930s women: lip­sticked, dressed up to the nines to ape Hol­ly­wood glam­our on light industry wages. These were the women of the third England.

“the Eng­land of arter­ial and by-pass roads, of filling sta­tions and factor­ies that look like exhib­i­tion build­ings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bun­ga­lows with tiny gar­ages, cock­tail bars, Wool­worths, motor-coaches, wire­less, hik­ing, fact­ory girls look­ing like act­resses, grey­hound racing and dirt tracks, swim­ming pools, and everything given away for cigar­ette coupons.”

Priestley, 1984 [1934]: 375

These fact­ory girls were an object of con­cern and scru­tiny, troub­ling the estab­lished cat­egor­ies of class with their out­spoken, per­formed fem­in­in­ity. A new, light, indus­trial labour force destabil­ised the estab­lished under­stand­ings of gender and class. The Bata fact­ory in East Tilbury was staffed, in part, by this kind of woman: mak­ing shoes in order to pay for new shoes and hand­bags and lip­sticks. And to keep their fam­il­ies: women’s work is not all about pin money and frivolity, J. B..

There are, or have been, Bata factor­ies all over the world, mak­ing shoes for Africa, Asia, Europe and the Amer­icas, as well as the Czechs. Haresh Khanna, the shoemaker-suitor of Lata Mehra in Vikram Seth’s A Suit­able Boy has Bata at the top of his list of pre­ferred employ­ers “I’ve been try­ing Bata and James Haw­ley and Praha and Flex and Cooper Allen” (2003: 620). Haresh even­tu­ally nego­ti­ates his way to tak­ing a supervisor’s pos­i­tion with the effi­cient Czechs, and stands out from fel­low Indian employ­ees by mov­ing into the com­pound with the ‘Pra­hamen’ in ‘Pra­hapore’, pseud­onyms for the real Batanagar. In 1932, Bata arrived in East Tilbury, UK (and in the 1940s in Mary­port, Cum­bria), down at the bot­tom end of the Essex coast, the dirty part, near where the Thames spews out.

Bata built a new, mod­ern fact­ory, and a new, mod­ern town around it. It brought Czech man­agers, men, and their fam­il­ies from HQ in Zlin, and recruited local women and men to work the pro­duc­tion lines. East European migra­tion isn’t such a new thing. (more…)

These are dif­fi­cult times, and per­haps you’re hold­ing tight to your con­trac­ted hours and hop­ing that the downs­iz­ing fin­ger doesn’t point your way. You are not con­sid­er­ing approach­ing your head of depart­ment to sub­mit a request for a raise. And so you would not look at the shelf and think: oh, that’s the self-help book for me. This is a good thing. Perec offers no guide for the eager.

George Perec’s The Art and Craft of Approach­ing your Head of Depart­ment to Sub­mit A Request­For A Raise tells the tale of a man’s decision and inde­cision as he wor­ries and won­ders and wanders around his office looking for the right time and the right way to ask Mr X for a pay raise. He vis­its Ms Wye at times. He pays atten­tion to what was on the cafet­eria menu. He hopes Mr X’s daugh­ters are well and don’t have measles. He cir­cump­er­am­bu­lates the office wait­ing for the right moment. This comes at “the two hun­dred and fifty-fifth bid” (2011:79) and it isn’t an instant success.

What I love about this piece is how all those moments of uncer­tainty that make up organ­isa­tional life, all the things that go through your mind when you’re at work but not work­ing, the pos­tur­ing and the won­der­ing and the pos­i­tion­ing are brought into a for­mula of no/yes, 0/1, recur­sion and slight devel­op­ment. The book’s about the sys­tems that lie within the messi­ness of liv­ing and work­ing. It is pre­faced and inspired by a flow­chart illus­trat­ing com­pu­ter­ised decision mak­ing pro­duced by Perec’s fel­low Oulipian, Jacques Per­ri­aud. Perec makes ‘real’ the grey media of the flow­chart adding the uncer­tain­ties, false steps and coin­cid­ences that make up a work­ing life. Almost real: it’s a story with just one full stop.

Play the game your­self theartofaskingyourbossforaraise.com

Ref­er­ence

1. Perec, G (2011) The Art and Craft of Approach­ing your Head of Depart­ment to Sub­mit A Request For A Raise, trans David Bel­los. Lon­don: Vin­tage Books.