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…)
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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.
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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…)
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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.

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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…)
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Blue collar: maker
White collar: manager
Pink collar: data processor
Green collar: recycler
Open collar: homeworker
Scarlet collar: sex worker
Gold collar: consultant
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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.
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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…)
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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.
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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…)
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Comments
Hi Dawn,
Just wondered how you felt about taking this photo, and the ethics of not asking for permisson from the sleeping people (I am guessing?) this isn’t a loaded question (!!) just working on building a repository of practices of how people negotiate image ethics in their work.
Cheers!
Sam
At 6:17 pm on October 11, 2011 Sam Warren said:
Hi Sam,
Thanks for your comment. I certainly hesitated before posting this picture on the site but decided to go ahead as the post was not about the people in the image in any personalised way but about the phenomenon of the physical exhaustion of work. I think I especially wondered about it though because of the content of the image of people sleeping which we tend to think about as a private activity — although Simon William’s problematises that – even if in this case it was happening in a public setting. I also thought about the photograph in relation to seeing more generally and all that we ‘take in’ about other people’s lives from casual observations in public.
Dawn
At 12:54 pm on October 24, 2011 Dawn Lyon said: