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

The hotel inspector Dawn met judges stand­ards in B&Bs, mak­ing a vir­tue of clean­li­ness and ‘good’ ser­vice. B&B own­ers, in turn, judge and reg­u­late their cus­tom­ers. Chris Grayling, cur­rently shadow home sec­ret­ary, thinks chris­tian B&B own­ers should be allowed to turn away guests they con­sider to be sin­ners. Mar­kets don’t just reflect (notion­ally private) moralities;…

I was stay­ing in a B&B last night and found myself hav­ing break­fast this morn­ing with a Hotel Inspector. He didn’t quite have the style of Alex Polizzi, pic­tured above (of the cur­rent Chan­nel Five Hotel Inspector series) but it was still the most inter­est­ing early morn­ing con­ver­sa­tion I’ve had this week. I’m not sure…

H&M, the Scand­inavian fast fash­ion brand has just opened a store in the town I live in. It opened a few days after a fire killed 21 employ­ees of a knit­wear fact­ory in Bangladesh which is sub­con­trac­ted by H&M to make those cute stripy jump­ers, and that really use­ful little black cardy.

Flight attend­ants are an extraordin­ar­ily pop­u­lar sub­ject of study (Hoch­schild, 1983; Taylor and Tyler, 2000; Wil­li­ams, 2003). Research focuses on the emo­tional labour and body work involved, as Dawn high­lighted recently. The cus­tomer here is a power­ful, but shad­owy fig­ure, who extracts and deserves ser­vice, and whom the cabin crew must please. These aca­demic concerns…

Life as a soci­olo­gist of work isn’t inev­it­ably amus­ing, but Friday’s news that a group of French postal work­ers had taken La Poste to court for recom­pense for the labour involved in clean­ing their uni­forms made me smile. I did enjoy the chal­lenge this court case makes to the idea that all labour that (re-)produces…

My Dad has a story about how he came to get a job. It was the mid-60s, and he was going to leave school with a mis­cel­lany of o-levels. The teacher called him in and said,  “well Pet­tinger, what’s it to be”. “dunno sir” Mr Heck­thorpe starts read­ing from the list of pos­sible careers, start­ing at A. “Accountant?”

I got lost last week­end, end­ing up at Tolles­bury Mar­ina. I was think­ing about Kat Riach’s piece on sound, as I walked around (it’s not that I’m a work­aholic, but a deeply incul­cated soci­olo­gical ima­gin­a­tion isn’t eas­ily switched off; it’s a gov­ernance of the soul). There was no-one else around, but it was not quiet. They…

Richard Alcock in The Guard­ian writes today about the ever-increasing pay gap in the UK between rich and poor. I do like his idea that pro­fes­sional hater Melanie Phil­lips be nom­in­ated for a nice big pay cut to see the effect on her work motiv­a­tion (though if Alcock’s eco­nom­istic account of what drives people to…

What’s the fast­est grow­ing occu­pa­tion in the UK, quiz-fiends? Well, the smart-Alecs amongst you will point out that with unem­ploy­ment rising, there’s very little growth in any part of the labour mar­ket. But you will have slipped into the trap