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

Wester Ross in Scot­land is a sparsely pop­u­lated and beau­ti­ful area of moun­tains, lochs, heather and midges. I went there on hol­i­day. Here at nowaytomakealiving.net we don’t like to blog about our own lives too much, but I’m going to break with tra­di­tion in this post, and a couple more in the future. I like to notice work, even when – as here – work is not obvi­ously present.

At Loch Coire nan Arr, just up from the pho­to­graphic oppor­tun­ity provided by Rus­sell Burn, there’s a water man­age­ment sys­tem that drains from a reser­voir down to a loch that’s farmed for sal­mon. On this August day, the water was low.

The unspoiled wil­der­ness of the tour­ist bro­chures turns out to be a highly man­aged envir­on­ment, with walk­ways and raft. (more…)

It’s the after­noon rush hour on the Lon­don tube. There are at least three people asleep in the row of seats oppos­ite me, the phys­ical impact of work (I’m assum­ing) vis­ible in their faces and pos­tures. It’s already been a long day.

Towards the end of the first series of the Emmy-award win­ning US drama, Mad Men, set in the fic­tional world of the New York advert­ising agency, Stirl­ing Cooper, in the early 1960s, there is a scene which offers a seduct­ive vis­ion of the work of advert­ising prac­ti­tion­ers and their role in weav­ing com­mer­cial fables. The scene fea­tures the drama’s cent­ral prot­ag­on­ist – and cent­ral enigma – Don Draper. Draper is Stirl­ing Cooper’s key cre­at­ive asset and their top ‘cre­at­ive man’. Not only is he viewed within the agency as the source of some of the most innov­at­ive and invent­ive advert­ising ideas, but also as some­thing of a star per­former when it comes to selling these ideas to cli­ents. The scene shows Draper pitch­ing his ideas for a cam­paign to the cli­ent. In this case the cli­ent is Kodak, the makers of cam­eras, film and pho­to­graphic equip­ment. They have asked the agency to help them mar­ket a new piece of domestic tech­no­logy – a device that allows a smoother and more con­veni­ent show­ing of pho­to­graphic slides. Kodak calls the device the ‘donut’ or ‘the wheel’ because of its cir­cu­lar shape. This is how the scene unfolds:

Kodak Man 1: ‘So have you figured out a way to work the wheel in?

Kodak Man 2: ‘We know it’s hard, because wheels aren’t really seen as excit­ing tech­no­logy, even though they are the original’.

Don Draper: ‘Well, tech­no­logy is a glit­ter­ing lure, but there’s the rare occa­sion when the pub­lic can be engaged on a level bey­ond flash. If they have a sen­ti­mental bond with the product. My first job, I was in-house at a fur com­pany. This old-pro copy­writer, Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most import­ant idea in advert­ising is ‘new’. Cre­ates an itch. Put your product in there as a kind of calam­ine lotion. We also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nos­tal­gia. It’s del­ic­ate, but potent…

[Pro­jects slides of his chil­dren, his wife and him­self eat­ing on hol­i­day, a shot of his wife pregnant.]

… Teddy told me that in Greek, nos­tal­gia lit­er­ally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more power­ful than memory alone. This device isn’t a space ship, it’s a time machine. It goes back­wards and for­wards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the carou­sel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and round and back home again. To a place where we know we are loved.’ (more…)

The shel­ters on plat­form 3 are behind royal blue ply­wood. National Express ask for my patience. I can’t see work, but I can hear it. Around the side of the hoard­ing, away from the wind there’s the entrance: a door propped open by a trailer filling up with knocked down walls, some bricks still cemen­ted together. I catch the guy inside the shel­ter pulling up his reflect­ive safety trousers and tight­en­ing the drawstring. He pre­tends not to see me until they’re prop­erly fastened.

His mate, a Geordie, comes up and says to me – I know, you’re look­ing for a bit o shel­ter. No, I say, I’m just being nosy. Trousers says ‘nothing’s going on here’, and we all laugh. I listen in. The Geordie has a bit of A4 paper he’s found tucked behind the seats in another shel­ter. It’s someone’s uni­ver­sity work.

‘Your task today is to explain and dis­cuss Divine Com­mand Theory’.

‘Aye’, says Trousers. ‘After I’ve spent the day knock­ing down bricks, I’ll do that’.

‘That’s your thesis, is it?’ Geordie says. He folds the paper neatly and puts it into his pocket.

‘Sci-Fi’ says Trousers, and they take it in turns to list sci-fi films. The train arrives as they’re squab­bling about whether Blakes 7 can count because it was on the telly.

The new shel­ters are trans­par­ent all the way: there’s nowhere to sneak­ily pull your trousers up, or to leave your essay on Divine Com­mand Theory.

Being from the United States where work is mostly about money and where organ­ized labor is fre­quently demon­ized, when trav­el­ing it’s quite refresh­ing to encounter museums devoted to work­ers. One such museum is Copenhagen’s Arbe­j­der­museet (Work­ers’ Museum). Among the many stim­u­lat­ing items is a plate from the early 1970s depict­ing a woman who needs eight arms to juggle all of her responsibilities—taking care of her fam­ily, tend­ing to her house and house­hold chores, and work­ing out­side the home, all with a smile.

In the Work­ers’ Museum, this is described as an octopus woman. (more…)

Blue col­lar: maker
White col­lar: man­ager
Pink col­lar: data pro­cessor
Green col­lar: recycler
Open col­lar: home­worker
Scar­let col­lar: sex worker
Gold col­lar: consultant

Tues­day night in North Lon­don. The pub is already shut des­pite 24-hour drink­ing. We head to a Tes­cos Extra store, bright lights and bustle whatever the hour. Late even­ing shop­ping has peaked but the place is still busy. It’s work­ers rather than shop­pers that pre­dom­in­ate now. In the first isle, music is blar­ing, help­ing to main­tain the rhythm of the work required to replen­ish the shelves. As we head towards the far side of the store, we see men and women, mostly middle-aged, put­ting cans, boxes and pack­ets in their places. The ‘Beer and Wine’ aisle is almost fully occu­pied by trol­leys packed with tomorrow’s drinks. We squeeze by to make our selec­tions then move towards the check­outs. But they are almost com­pletely obscured by more trol­leys piled high with stock (as in the image). The night-time shift in the char­ac­ter of the space from one geared to con­sump­tion to one geared to work is clear. It’s mostly self check­out at this hour.

When I can, I work at home on Thursdays. From my desk in a down­stairs room, I look onto the street. This view has fuelled my long held obses­sion with time and speed at work, and in par­tic­u­lar with people whose jobs require them to run in order to fin­ish their work to time.

Thursday is bin morn­ing on my street. The rules are: bins out before 7; bins must be at the edge of the prop­erty, handles must point the pre­scribed way to help the load­ers grab the bins and man­oeuvre them quickly. I obey these rules to the let­ter, ter­ri­fied that my bin will be deemed incor­rectly placed and pub­licly rejec­ted. I also sneak­ily watch the refuse work­ers on my street whenever I can. This is because their job demands that they run. Run really, really fast.

The bin load­ers run down the street, col­lect­ing groups of bins together, load­ing the bins onto the bin wagon, put­ting bins back onto the road (in a lovely neat row. See image, plus weeds!), and run­ning off – really fast — to the next group of bins. Their pace is set by the driver of the wagon who keeps his (it’s always been a he so far) vehicle mov­ing all the time. This morn­ing I passed as the load­ers were head­ing to the next road. I think sprint­ing is the best descrip­tion of their speed between streets.

Soci­ology has had a great deal to say about time and the con­trol of work, draw­ing on other dis­cip­lines like his­tory and eco­nom­ics too. (more…)

A simple form of dir­ect tax­a­tion, intu­it­ive: you work a week, you pay a pro­por­tion of your week’s wages. You work a month, then you pay a pro­por­tion of that month. No cal­cu­la­tions at the end of the year, no need to keep a piggy bank to put it by. It goes before you know it’s there.
A bur­eau­cracy lies behind it, a bur­eau­cracy of rules, codes and tiny slips of paper, where indi­vidu­als are iden­ti­fied by name, address, num­ber and bank account, employ­ers by name and code, and amounts and jus­ti­fic­a­tions are numbered: 620 means basic rate. The slip is covered in a jumble of num­bers, not all read­able. Part human, part machine. In part a story of my past, and in part noth­ing to do with me.

BEEFEATER STEAK HOUSES — I was a bar­maid, later pro­moted to a wait­ress. I was a veget­arian.
03/01/97 — The first paycheck of the new year. Those two hours of over­time coun­ted as my New Year’s Eve bonus.
HOURLY RATE £3.2800 – not much of a liv­ing wage.
DO NOT DESTROY – I took this ser­i­ously.

There are plans afoot for a new bur­eau­cracy, an updated com­puter sys­tem enabling ‘RTI’ (Real Time Inform­a­tion) so that deduc­tions are repor­ted by employ­ers to the HM Rev­enue and Cus­toms as they hap­pen, not at the end of the year – the idea being to avoid over– and under-payment. This new com­puter sys­tem is a new a grey media you wont often think about, but which will re-write your payslip.

1. It’s a PR World

It used to be that the news­pa­per report would say “The police were tipped off about the where­abouts of the gold bul­lion”. And in Evelyn Waugh’s, Scoop, that sort-of journ­al­ist Wil­liam Boot, who hoped to go to Ish­maelia as a spy but ended up being sent as a journ­al­ist, finds that “Now he had some­thing under his hat; a tip-off straight from headquar­ters, news of high inter­na­tional import­ance” (Waugh, 2003: 101), Boot might have found a red under the bed.

Tip-offs make the world go round; they are a flow of secret know­ledge. Ima­gine this as a tip-off story: the police tip-off a bunch of journ­al­ists about the com­ing arrest of an ex-journalist for pos­sibly hav­ing hacked a phone to get a tip-off to write a scoop. The police employ an ex-journalist who hacked a phone for a tip-off in order to bet­ter man­age their pub­lic pres­ence and this ex-journalist is mates with another ex-journalist who has the ear of the PM. The police know the journ­al­ists who know the politi­cians who know the police. They’re tipping-off to their hearts con­tent, from behind the smokescreens of pub­lic rela­tions who keep on say­ing no-one knows about this tip-off circle.

2. Stra­tegic Ignorance

Mur­doch, R., Mur­doch J. and Brooks, R. appear before a Select Com­mit­tee of elec­ted MPs to explain phone hack­ing. The Chair­man and CEO of News­Corp, the Chief Exec­ut­ive of News­corp and the Chief Exec­ut­ive of News Inter­na­tional and former news­pa­per editor know noth­ing now and knew less then. They’re shocked and hor­ri­fied, but they deny. They employ­ing “stra­tegic ignor­ance”, (more…)