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

There’s a lot of con­struc­tion work gone into the high-tech sport ven­ues that are now lit­ter­ing the coun­try. Some­times it’s the smal­lest things that mat­ter. These screws are some of the ‘miss­ing masses’, as mundane and as import­ant as can be (Latour, 1992). (source: cyclingweekly.co.uk via Ewen Speed) On your hands and knees: your mate lines…

Since read­ing Ewen Speed’s piece about work­ing con­tracts in the NHS, I’ve been think­ing more about the exper­i­ence of health care work. I’ve just read a fas­cin­at­ing and per­plex­ing tale of the con­tin­gen­cies of work in health­care. The first time I saw a pager, in 1994, I though it was a pretty clever device. You…

Hav­ing a job is one thing, some­thing to be grate­ful for. Hav­ing a job that grants you ‘dig­nity at work’ is some­thing bet­ter. In the UK, a long­stand­ing Unite the Union cam­paign for dig­nity stresses free­dom from bul­ly­ing as mak­ing for a decent work­place and happy work­ers. An obvi­ous example of bul­ly­ing is the bad…

My GP writes notes straight onto the com­puter, and I’ve seen stu­dents try to keep up with lec­tures by typ­ing on an ipad. In these days of cheap laser jet print­ing, where even the smal­lest of busi­nesses can usu­ally afford to type up their signs, and there are few spaces left for pub­lic dis­plays of…

Search is the meta­phor for the inter­net age (Stark, 2009). Google’s a verb, and you can access the world from your smart­phone. And so who has any use for the fat, heavy paper dir­ect­ory, search­able only in the sense that entries are organ­ised in alpha­bet­ical order? Well, someone still wants and needs it, and someone…

Of course not. Bore­dom, one of the ‘minor’ and ‘non-cathartic’ Ugly Feel­ings that fas­cin­ate Sianne Ngai (2005), is the lot of the ser­vice sec­tor worker. Whether bored by the repe­ti­tion of script — of which ‘have a nice day’ is the most clichéd, and ‘who’s next please?’ the most com­mon — or bored by the…

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…