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

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…

This really is no way to make a liv­ing… ‘I am doing this work because I am a Dalit’ This power­ful BBC Radio Today pro­gramme inter­view with a woman lat­rine cleaner in rural Bihar (and accom­pa­ny­ing pics) reminds us just how strong and ‘resi­li­ent’ caste and gender are in determ­in­ing occu­pa­tion in present day India. The…

In a state of hyper-precarity, work becomes chi­meric; you must aspire to it, to find it, to love it, but it dis­ap­pears in reces­sion, and with pub­lic sec­tor spend­ing cuts and private sec­tor retrench­ment. You must be work­ing, or you don’t count as a cit­izen. You’re lazy, work­shy, a bene­fit scroun­ger. Such is the political…

I’ve been giv­ing a lot of thought to wash­ing lately. I don’t have a wash­ing machine in my apart­ment in Cagliari which means that some­thing I usu­ally take for gran­ted – being able to wash and dry my clothes at home and whenever I like – imposes itself as an activ­ity to find a solution…