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

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…

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…