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

Being on the North­ern Soul scene, with its all-nighters, amphet­am­ines, and obsess­ive pur­suit of obscure and rare records, didn’t suit those with a steady day job. And, as is so com­mon with research into sub­cul­tures, Andrew Wilson’s ‘North­ern Soul’ (2007) doesn’t offer much by way of insight into how a per­son makes a liv­ing at…

Born and raised in the same place in South­ern Sardinia, we, Valentina and Annal­isa, dis­covered some time ago that we share sim­ilar research interests in work and pre­cari­ous employ­ment. Sur­pris­ingly enough, we would add, as we lost sight of each other after school and met again ten years later, after hav­ing lived and stud­ied in…

On a recent trip to Hong Kong, I crossed over the bor­der into main­land China and headed for Dong­guan, a sprawl­ing mass of three, four, five storey fact­ory com­plexes pump­ing out some of the toys and tex­tiles that have helped pro­pel the Chinese eco­nomic ‘mir­acle’. Trav­el­ling its streets by taxi and minibus and walk­ing through…

On the 69th Floor This is one of the most fam­ous pho­to­graphs of work, Charles C. Ebbets’ ‘Lunch­time atop a Sky­scraper’. It’s the sort of image that counts as iconic – that is, you can buy a poster ver­sion of it. Taken in 1932 as the 69th Floor of the Rock­e­feller Cen­ter was being built,…

I’m chat­ting to the ticket seller and the train driver at a sta­tion with one plat­form. The driver’s done Lon­don and back this morn­ing, and now he’s on the third of seven trips between the same two sta­tions. The jour­ney is seven minutes each way, round the back of the allot­ments, across a couple of…

Carers UK have just released new fig­ures cal­cu­lat­ing the value of the work of unpaid carers. Some time ago I wrote about being a carer, and these latest fig­ures do noth­ing to chal­lenge the argu­ment in that piece to take care ser­i­ously. Carers UK/University of Leeds cal­cu­late the eco­nomic value of caring as £119 billion…

Since post­ing Work at Height and Work at Great Height, I’ve seen a couple of inter­est­ing things. The first is a clip sent by a col­league at the OU, Simon Carter, shows what its like to work 1768 feet in the air, mend­ing anten­nae. Phew. I could scarcely watch. Notice that they show the ascent,…

A few weeks ago, I pos­ted a clip of a man fix­ing a satel­lite dish. I called it work at height, and I wrote it because the idea of climb­ing a lad­der to make a liv­ing made me shiver. The satel­lite dish engin­eer has noth­ing on the four man team keep­ing the Eif­fel Tower’s lifts…

A few months ago, I pos­ted a piece on the web­site about work undone. A fire des­troyed some trees, a fence, a shed and a car oppos­ite my mother’s house as the neigh­bour­hood watched. After a while, we got used to see­ing the blackened fence (what was left of it) and the exposed trunk of…

On Wed­nes­day 5 Janu­ary 2011 the Uni­ver­sity of Kent’s Occu­pa­tion came to an end after 4 weeks. The Sen­ate build­ing, nor­mally used for admin­is­trat­ive meet­ings, saw a very dif­fer­ent kind of decision-making as the group of stu­dents who occu­pied the build­ing worked on a fully con­sen­sual prin­ciple to cre­ate a base for polit­ical action across…