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

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…)

For once, the big ques­tion of the Tour de France is not ‘who’s dop­ing?’, the ques­tion is ‘who’s crash­ing?’. The Tour hasn’t been this dan­ger­ous for years. Slip­pery roads, whether from rain or oil, are well-known haz­ards for the road cyc­list. And racing in a pelo­ton of 100+ riders at 30+kph does raise the chance of touch­ing someone’s wheel and com­ing off your bike. That the race needs tough bod­ies is obvi­ous, and rapid mobil­ity gen­er­ates all sorts of prob­lems for the work­ers who keep the race on the road: the team man­agers, tech­ni­cians and motor­cycle med­ics who patch up bikes and riders and keep them on tar­get. This year it’s not only the other cyc­lists or the roads that are gen­er­at­ing risk. It’s the tour’s own media circus.

Our exper­i­ence of watch­ing, for most of us fans, is one medi­ated by the cam­eras that scoot along­side the race. The close up shots of the break­away and of the agony on the face of the climber are pro­duced: this is not Baudril­lar­d­ian hyper­real­ity, sim­u­la­tions of sim­u­la­tions. There must be a zoom lens near the race, car­ried on a bike or car trav­el­ling at the same speed as the cyc­lists. Check out the motorcyclist’s pil­lion rider in this pic­ture (and yes sharp-eyes, this isn’t France, it’s Col­chester… it’s the best I can do). He’s facing back­wards, hold­ing that heavy cam­era, grip­ping the motor­bike under him, trust­ing his driver. This isn’t easy work; it needs a com­bin­a­tion skilled cam­era oper­a­tion and the tacit know­ledge of how to move your body with the mov­ing bike, as well as a fond­ness for speed.

(more…)

Being on the North­ern Soul scene, with its all-nighters, amphet­am­ines, and obsess­ive pur­suit of obscure and rare records, didn’t suit those with a steady day job. And, as is so com­mon with research into sub­cul­tures, Andrew Wilson’s ‘North­ern Soul’ (2007) doesn’t offer much by way of insight into how a per­son makes a liv­ing at the same time as liv­ing the sub­cul­tural life. (The same is true of, say Paul Hodkin­son on Goth (2002), although — now a middle aged Goth him­self — Hodkin­son (2011) finds other middle aged Goths more much inter­ested in talk­ing about work.

But in this pair of you­tube clips, we see middle aged men at work, in their high-vis vests, still able to glide – sub­ject to the con­straints of those train­ers and work­boots, and the absence of talc-covered floor. It aint as pretty as in the old days at the Twis­ted Wheel or the Wigan Casino. But once you’ve got it, you don’t lose it. “Keep Going, Tommo”.

Ref­er­ences

1. Paul Hodkin­son (2011) ‘Age­ing in a spec­tac­u­lar ‘youth cul­ture’: con­tinu­ity, change and com­munity amongst older Goths’. The Brit­ish Journal of Soci­ology. Volume 62 Issue 2, pp262-282.
2. Hodkin­son, Paul (2002) Goth : iden­tity, style, and sub­cul­ture. Oxford : Berg.
3. Andrew Wilson, (2007) North­ern soul : music, drugs and sub­cul­tural iden­tity. Cul­lomp­ton : Wil­lan Pub.

Born and raised in the same place in South­ern Sardinia, we, Valentina and Annal­isa, dis­covered some time ago that we share sim­ilar research interests in work and pre­cari­ous employ­ment. Sur­pris­ingly enough, we would add, as we lost sight of each other after school and met again ten years later, after hav­ing lived and stud­ied in dif­fer­ent coun­tries. So we meet from time to time and share our views on what’s going on, and it was on one such occa­sion when, in a sup­posedly Irish pub of this sup­posedly exotic island, we con­fessed to each other how much we were dis­turbed by some­thing we had noticed at a local super­mar­ket. Valentina remembered hav­ing stared in dis­be­lief at a flier whilst at the check­out, inad­vert­ently slow­ing down a long line of unsur­prised and numb buy­ers; Annal­isa had kept the same flier in her wal­let for months, just in case was any­one she encountered not yet aware of the ‘thing’.

This is the story in brief: in 2009, a Sardinian chain of super­mar­kets, called Despar/Sigma, launched the com­pet­i­tion: ‘Win your job’. To be eli­gible to par­ti­cip­ate, one needed only to do a shop worth 30 Euros (or mul­tiples thereof). In exchange for each 30 Euro spend, the cus­tomer received a ticket. If selec­ted in the sub­sequent lot­tery they would win one of 48 one-year job con­tracts with the super­mar­ket chain avail­able that year. To be eli­gible to work, inter­change­ably, as a cash­ier or on the counter, the only qual­i­fic­a­tion required was an age one: to be between 18 and 29 of age, rising to 32 if clas­si­fi­able as in long-term unemployment.

What a non Italian reader needs to know is that it is com­mon for Italian super­mar­kets to keep cli­ents close by giv­ing them little gifts, the eco­nomic value of which depends on how much they have spent in a given time. So, what’s dif­fer­ent here? (more…)