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 Detroit Sym­phony Orches­tra (DSO) has been on strike for 19 weeks now. This is not Detroit’s first exper­i­ence of con­flict between cap­ital and labour: after all, this is the city where Henry Ford learned how to con­trol dis­sat­is­fac­tion and labour turnover, where Ford — like GM and Chrysler — have spent years man­aging layoffs…

Up the lad­der, to unscrew the old satel­lite dish. Down the lad­der, it’s tucked under his arm. Back up the lad­der. You’ve got to be care­ful get­ting onto the roof, with that thing under your arm. The rest’ve already fin­ished work, they carry on drinking.

I’ve seen two bril­liant things this week about unpaid work. The first is a blis­ter­ing cri­tique of the ‘Big Soci­ety’ by Philip Pull­man. A lot has been writ­ten on this over the past few months but little makes so elo­quent and so dir­ect a hit on the found­ing premises of the Tor­ies flag­ship policy. Pullman…

Daniel Bell died this week. He was 91. He wrote (amongst other books) The com­ing of post-industrial soci­ety: a ven­ture in social fore­cast­ing [1] (1973), where he foresaw a change to the social struc­ture of the US, and com­par­able soci­et­ies. Indus­trial pro­duc­tion will mat­ter less than ser­vice and know­ledge indus­tries; man­u­fac­tur­ing and pro­duc­tion work will decline…

These days, when I travel from Brad­ford to Col­chester, I change at Peter­bor­ough onto the slow National Express East Anglia ser­vice through Ely, Whittle­sea, March, Stow­mar­ket, Diss and Ipswich. It’s an alien land­scape to me; no moor­land, no dry stone walls, no curves, it has neither the soft­ness nor the drama or the green of…

New­castle He left school at 16. Left before he was thrown out, that’s how it felt. Out, and straight to the dole office. Twenty years earlier and he’d have gone up to the shipyards, with his Dad. Twenty years after and it’d be the call centres, where his sis­ter is now. But it was 1992,…

‘When I first came to the caffè as a child, I thought it was a fant­astic place!’ Dav­ide recounts. ‘There were sweet jars on the bar, like those ones in the cup­board now, and ice-cream just over there where that counter is…’ Forty years on, Dav­ide is run­ning the place. He’s the third gen­er­a­tion of…

Man­age­ment con­sult­ants are one of the pro­fes­sions who are more often cited as emblem­atic of the trans­form­a­tion into post-industrial soci­ety, which since the ‘70s has marked the advanced cap­it­al­istic eco­nom­ies. If I wanted to try the mis­sion impossible of sum­mar­iz­ing this com­plex­ity in just one single word, the one that comes to my mind is…

Oh it’s snow­ing. Par­ents stay at home because the kids’ school is closed. Not even the 4x4 drivers can get up the hill to work; the buses have been can­celled, and it’d be a long walk in. And count­less pounds are being lost as the work­force stays away (snow chaos costs £1.2bn a day). It’s…