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

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…

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…

I had my eye­brows threaded at the Beauty Plus con­ces­sion in my local depart­ment store.  Thread­ing, very com­mon in Asia, uses twis­ted lines of cot­ton thread to remove hair. It’s low-tech, and demands crafty fin­gers. Ten minutes of rel­at­ive pain, some rose­wa­ter and an hour of red­ness and then ready-made arched eye­brows. The last time…

There are a lot of pos­sible situ­ations when a sales rep­res­ent­at­ive might greet a cus­tomer. It could be in a store, at the street or in their offices. And it is in the lat­ter situ­ation when a simple “Hi, good after­noon” could become com­plex, as this is right when your body starts to speak before…

I was sat in the taxi office, nos­ing around as I waited. The wait­ing area was as much back­stage as front­stage; the place where the drivers came for their breaks. There’s a towel sqaushed over a rail, just out­side the toi­let door, and a reminder to keep on top on the domestic work. At a…

In 1945, Ger­trude Wil­li­ams pub­lished Women and Work (part of the New Demo­cracy Series, Nich­olson and Wat­son, Lon­don), ques­tion­ing ‘women’s place’ in the post-war indus­trial world in which many ‘cher­ished pre­ju­dices have been turned topsy-turvy’ (1945: 9). I came across a copy of this book for the first time just a few weeks ago, and…

At 11am this morn­ing, the phone rings. Someone has tried to buy nearly three hun­dred pounds worth of ‘women’s coun­try cloth­ing’ online in my name (not a very likely scen­ario). A sales­per­son was aler­ted by some­thing about the dif­fer­ence and dis­tance between the alleged buyer (me) and the deliv­ery address (in Glas­gow). It’s part of…

When mak­ing counts and com­par­is­ons of those in employ­ment, the canny stat­ist­i­cian knows to take account of sea­sonal work. Labour­ers are taken on to har­vest crops in late sum­mer, even in this age of mech­an­ised agri­cul­ture, and tem­por­ary Christ­mas work­ers boost December’s employ­ment fig­ures. Late Octo­ber is not a com­mon time for sea­sonal work, but…

Last night, I caught a minute or two of a tv pro­gramme about driv­ing. An eld­erly Scot­tish actor drove an eld­erly Eng­lish car along “one of Britain’s best drives” (defined accord­ing to an algorithm based on nos­tal­gia for a time where driv­ing was a select pleas­ure not a uni­ver­sal pain). This epis­ode showed a road…