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

I had my eye­brows threaded at the Beauty Plus con­ces­sion in my local depart­ment store.  Thread­ing, very com­mon in Asia, uses twis­ted lines of cot­ton thread to remove hair. It’s low-tech, and demands crafty fin­gers. Ten minutes of rel­at­ive pain, some rose­wa­ter and an hour of red­ness and then ready-made arched eye­brows. The last time I went, though, it tickled; this threader’s tech­nique was not assured and she takes 5 minutes longer to fin­ish than does Shruti, work­ing on another cli­ent next to me. Lying there, teary-eyed (as I learned from watch­ing Grease a hun­dred times as a 13 year old, ‘beauty is pain’), I think about why Carly, who has NVQ level 2 in Beauty Ther­apy and is now the only white girl work­ing at Beauty Plus, doesn’t have the craft in her fin­gers like her col­leagues do.

Carly was appoin­ted to do eye­lash exten­sions and was trained to do this at col­lege. She has since been taught to thread by her Beauty Plus col­leagues: there just weren’t enough takers for the exten­sions to keep her busy. She learned wax­ing dur­ing her NVQ, an alto­gether more bru­tal and messy hair removal tech­nique. The shift to thread­ing doesn’t come eas­ily to her– as Ingold says, part of skill is the “coup­ling of per­cep­tion and action” (2011; 53), and Carly can’t help but to stop and think. Whilst the other women who do the thread­ing are employed because of their eth­ni­city — they learned to thread as a mat­ter of course, as part of being a girl with Indian her­it­age — Carly is employed des­pite her eth­ni­city. She has her qual­i­fic­a­tions but few of the skills of her col­leagues.  It’s been a few months since I saw her work­ing there.

Ref­er­ence

Ingold, T (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Move­ment, Know­ledge and Descrip­tion. Lon­don and New York: Routledge.

There are a lot of pos­sible situ­ations when a sales rep­res­ent­at­ive might greet a cus­tomer. It could be in a store, at the street or in their offices. And it is in the lat­ter situ­ation when a simple “Hi, good after­noon” could become com­plex, as this is right when your body starts to speak before you do.

It is not sur­pris­ing then that com­pan­ies spend a lot of money on sales tech­niques train­ing pro­grammes for their employ­ees; per­son­ally, I have been in a couple of those sem­inars and work­shops. They’ll tell you that, usu­ally, a meet­ing with a cus­tomer could last up to 1 hour (rarely two), and a well-trained sales per­son would know what to do to take advant­age of every minute. For now, let’s talk about the first seconds.

Ima­gine for a moment that you are the sales rep­res­ent­at­ive. (more…)

I was sat in the taxi office, nos­ing around as I waited. The wait­ing area was as much back­stage as front­stage; the place where the drivers came for their breaks. There’s a towel sqaushed over a rail, just out­side the toi­let door, and a reminder to keep on top on the domestic work.

At a house-building site, the kettle was aban­doned, as was the empty bottle of that Scot­tish staple, Irn Bru. Work is powered by hot and cold sug­ary drinks. (more…)

In 1945, Ger­trude Wil­li­ams pub­lished Women and Work (part of the New Demo­cracy Series, Nich­olson and Wat­son, Lon­don), ques­tion­ing ‘women’s place’ in the post-war indus­trial world in which many ‘cher­ished pre­ju­dices have been turned topsy-turvy’ (1945: 9). I came across a copy of this book for the first time just a few weeks ago, and was amazed to see such a wealth of pho­to­graphs of women work­ing (65 in total) and the use of ‘13 pictorial charts in col­our designed by the Iso­type Insti­tute’. (The Inter­na­tional Sys­tem of TYpo­graphic Pic­ture Edu­ca­tion is an inter­est­ing story in itself – see for instance, Iso­type Revis­ited.)

Accord­ing to Wil­li­ams, the Iso­type charts used in the book are ‘not intro­duced for dec­or­a­tion, though their col­ours do cer­tainly enliven the page’. She con­tin­ues: ‘if you look at them with atten­tion you will find that they sug­gest all sorts of rela­tion­ships between dif­fer­ent bits of our com­plex soci­ety that prob­ably would not jump so vividly into your mind simply from look­ing at rows of fig­ures or read­ing descrip­tions of facts’ (1945: 10). Visual soci­ology in a nutshell!

The charts that stuck me most were two entitled, ‘The Chan­ging Home’. The first, imme­di­ately below, rep­res­ents a pre-industrial world in which the home is centre-stage. With the estab­lish­ment of schools, and the exten­sion of pro­duc­tion includ­ing food pro­duc­tion bey­ond the home and for more than sub­sist­ence needs, there is an over­lap in what takes place ‘Inside the Home’ and ‘Out­side the Home’ by the ‘19th Century’.

In the second chart (below), the first half is devoted to ‘Today’ (as in 1945). There is a strict and per­sist­ent gendered divi­sion of labour and recog­ni­tion of work per­formed in dif­fer­ent socio-economic modes and spa­tial con­texts inside and out­side the home: child­care and edu­ca­tion, cook­ing and bak­ing, laun­dry, mak­ing clothes, and food pro­duc­tion. What is espe­cially fas­cin­at­ing is Wil­li­ams’ explor­at­ory rep­res­ent­a­tion of ‘The future?’ (more…)

At 11am this morn­ing, the phone rings. Someone has tried to buy nearly three hun­dred pounds worth of ‘women’s coun­try cloth­ing’ online in my name (not a very likely scen­ario). A sales­per­son was aler­ted by some­thing about the dif­fer­ence and dis­tance between the alleged buyer (me) and the deliv­ery address (in Glas­gow). It’s part of how she does her job, tak­ing the trouble to notice if there’s some­thing amiss. Some­thing about the sale didn’t add up, she explains. Did I really buy this stuff? Well no of course not! I exclaim. I get put through to the man­ager to be given more details of the card that was used. Gradu­ally I real­ise what an unusual situ­ation this is. Someone searched for my tele­phone num­ber in the phone book so they could talk to me dir­ectly to ascer­tain whether I made the pur­chase. I ask about the com­pany. It is small, based in a single shop in the north of Eng­land, with a paper cata­logue and web­site for online sales. (Now I actu­ally want to be their cus­tomer!) (more…)

When mak­ing counts and com­par­is­ons of those in employ­ment, the canny stat­ist­i­cian knows to take account of sea­sonal work. Labour­ers are taken on to har­vest crops in late sum­mer, even in this age of mech­an­ised agri­cul­ture, and tem­por­ary Christ­mas work­ers boost December’s employ­ment fig­ures. Late Octo­ber is not a com­mon time for sea­sonal work, but I saw just this on a trip to Lon­don yes­ter­day. I walked past a fancy dress shop, with a queue of cus­tom­ers 60 metre long stand­ing out­side. There were three black-jacketed secur­ity guards, one at the head of the queue with a mega­phone and a cigar­ette (1), two oth­ers chat­ting near a door that had been demarc­ated exit-only. One came over to mega­phone man, and they had a chat (2). These guys had been brought in* to man­age that new fest­ival of con­sumer cap­it­al­ism, Halloween**.

1

2

* and so I admit they were not ‘sea­sonal work­ers’, prop­erly defined, being employed by the secur­ity firms for other events; I used the term ‘sea­sonal work’ to make the point that many work tasks are not jobs for life.

** a non-commercialised ver­sion of Hal­loween, and (more dev­il­ishly) Mis­chief Night goes way back to a time before fancy dress shops were around to hire out sexy Zom­bie costumes.

Last night, I caught a minute or two of a tv pro­gramme about driv­ing. An eld­erly Scot­tish actor drove an eld­erly Eng­lish car along “one of Britain’s best drives” (defined accord­ing to an algorithm based on nos­tal­gia for a time where driv­ing was a select pleas­ure not a uni­ver­sal pain). This epis­ode showed a road through The Trossachs, an area in the middle of Scot­land, a little south of the High­lands, where the pic­tures, below, were taken. This is a road said to have been built for the pleas­ure of driv­ing it (BBC 4, 25–10-11).

The car is the “quint­es­sen­tial man­u­fac­tured object” (Urry, 2006: 17), and its pro­duc­tion the object of some curi­os­ity, whether from Goldt­horpe, et. al. (1968) won­der­ing what these afflu­ent work­ers were like, or from Dur­and and Hatzfeld (2003), what work­ing on the Peugeot line was like. The road on which the car’s suc­cess rests so heav­ily is less fas­cin­at­ing, exist­ing as a frus­tra­tion for the trav­el­ler and a taken-for gran­ted by research­ers. There needs to be more grat­it­ude for this work, and more atten­tion to the afford­ances offered by roads. They make pos­sible being a tour­ist in the Trossachs, and get­ting to work in one High­land vil­lage from home in another. The kinds of roads that exist in rural places don’t have the prom­ise and frus­tra­tions of the motor­way or the by-pass: they don’t carry as much traffic, and they don’t have traffic lights and round­abouts, just passing places and warn­ing signs. They make hills manageable.

In con­tem­por­ary accounts of move­ment and change in social life, the way move­ment relies on the fix­ity and cer­tainty of the road beneath our tyres is not much thought of (see Sheller, 2004). In the city, tar­mac is taken for gran­ted. J (more…)

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…)