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

Essex is a maligned county, present in pop­u­lar myth­o­logy as a home for trouble­some women – from Mat­thew Hop­kins’ 17th cen­tury witches, to the sexu­ally pro­voc­at­ive but appar­ently stu­pid 1980s Essex Girls, and today’s primped women of The Only Way is Essex. When J. B. Priestley wrote Eng­lish Jour­ney he was exer­cised by some troublesome…

These are dif­fi­cult times, and per­haps you’re hold­ing tight to your con­trac­ted hours and hop­ing that the downs­iz­ing fin­ger doesn’t point your way. You are not con­sid­er­ing approach­ing your head of depart­ment to sub­mit a request for a raise. And so you would not look at the shelf and think: oh, that’s the self-help book…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…