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

Wester Ross in Scot­land is a sparsely pop­u­lated and beau­ti­ful area of moun­tains, lochs, heather and midges. I went there on hol­i­day. Here at nowaytomakealiving.net we don’t like to blog about our own lives too much, but I’m going to break with tra­di­tion in this post, and a couple more in the future. I like…

It’s the after­noon rush hour on the Lon­don tube. There are at least three people asleep in the row of seats oppos­ite me, the phys­ical impact of work (I’m assum­ing) vis­ible in their faces and pos­tures. It’s already been a long day.

The shel­ters on plat­form 3 are behind royal blue ply­wood. National Express ask for my patience. I can’t see work, but I can hear it. Around the side of the hoard­ing, away from the wind there’s the entrance: a door propped open by a trailer filling up with knocked down walls, some bricks still cemented…

Being from the United States where work is mostly about money and where organ­ized labor is fre­quently demon­ized, when trav­el­ing it’s quite refresh­ing to encounter museums devoted to work­ers. One such museum is Copenhagen’s Arbe­j­der­museet (Work­ers’ Museum). Among the many stim­u­lat­ing items is a plate from the early 1970s depict­ing a woman who needs eight…

Blue col­lar: maker White col­lar: man­ager Pink col­lar: data pro­cessor Green col­lar: recycler Open col­lar: home­worker Scar­let col­lar: sex worker Gold col­lar: consultant

Tues­day night in North Lon­don. The pub is already shut des­pite 24-hour drink­ing. We head to a Tes­cos Extra store, bright lights and bustle whatever the hour. Late even­ing shop­ping has peaked but the place is still busy. It’s work­ers rather than shop­pers that pre­dom­in­ate now. In the first isle, music is blar­ing, help­ing to…

When I can, I work at home on Thursdays. From my desk in a down­stairs room, I look onto the street. This view has fuelled my long held obses­sion with time and speed at work, and in par­tic­u­lar with people whose jobs require them to run in order to fin­ish their work to time. Thursday is…

A simple form of dir­ect tax­a­tion, intu­it­ive: you work a week, you pay a pro­por­tion of your week’s wages. You work a month, then you pay a pro­por­tion of that month. No cal­cu­la­tions at the end of the year, no need to keep a piggy bank to put it by. It goes before you know…

1. It’s a PR World It used to be that the news­pa­per report would say “The police were tipped off about the where­abouts of the gold bul­lion”. And in Evelyn Waugh’s, Scoop, that sort-of journ­al­ist Wil­liam Boot, who hoped to go to Ish­maelia as a spy but ended up being sent as a journ­al­ist, finds that…

For once, the big ques­tion of the Tour de France is not ‘who’s dop­ing?’, the ques­tion is ‘who’s crash­ing?’. The Tour hasn’t been this dan­ger­ous for years. Slip­pery roads, whether from rain or oil, are well-known haz­ards for the road cyc­list. And racing in a pelo­ton of 100+ riders at 30+kph does raise the chance…