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 piece of rail­way track in my house. It looks, unsur­pris­ingly, out of place. It wasn’t inten­ded for the man­tel­piece or to be a door­stop. But now it’s here it would be quite a job to take it any­where else. You see, it’s incred­ibly heavy. You need two hands to lift it even though…

I was walk­ing through New Cross in South East Lon­don recently when I saw these pho­tos of fire-fighters’ hands. They were fixed to the rail­ings out­side the fire sta­tion, as a kind of heroic cel­eb­ra­tion it seemed to me — and with just cause — of the work that fire-fighters do.

Stud­ies of home work (Fel­stead and Jew­son, 2000; Nippert-Eng, 1996) focus on the exper­i­ence of doing (paid) work in your own home. They point to how the bound­ar­ies between pub­lic and private are eroded. Some home­work­ers engage in a range of strategies to sep­ar­ate home and work tem­por­ally and spa­tially – through clos­ing the ‘office’…

In Decem­ber 2005, just a few months into a two-year research con­tract at Essex, the bull-dozers arrived and star­ted dig­ging dir­ectly out­side my office. Con­struc­tion of the new Social Sci­ence Research Build­ing was finally under­way. A good thing for sure, in prin­ciple but not in such close prox­im­ity. Still, I took to look­ing out of…

Sat­urday used to be a stand­ard work­ing day. Factor­ies deman­ded a 6 day week, And if there was an extra day off to be had on top of a silent Sunday, it would be Saint Monday. Shops opened late on Sat­urdays for these 6 day week work­ers. As first Sat­urday after­noons and then Sat­urday mornings…

There are forms of work which are unamen­able to tech­no­lo­gical change. The ques­tion of tech­no­logy repla­cing labour is an ongo­ing story in the study of work (see Braver­man on deskilling, or Sen­nett on the loss of craft skills). Some accounts of ser­vice work sug­gest that these are the least ‘vul­ner­able’ to replace­ment, although research­ers at…

I got talk­ing to these reed­cut­ters in North Nor­folk one sunny Janu­ary Sunday. They were sad about the decline of this tra­di­tional industry and the dearth of young people want­ing to work in it, and also com­plained about the high cost of thatched cot­tages in con­trast to their own low wages. 

I recently spent the night above a Tube sta­tion in North Lon­don. A friend of mine has moved into the sta­tion house there which is lit­er­ally built around the ticket office. You wouldn’t really notice it as a dwell­ing unless you knew, you’d just assume it was offices or some­thing. Any­way, the line is overground…

par­ti­cip­at­ory art at work
I recently co-organised an exhib­i­tion work : place explor­ing the exper­i­ence of work at the Uni­ver­sity of Essex. We pro­duced a col­lect­ive artistic inter­ven­tion to describes the Uni­ver­sity on ‘What a Day’, the 18th March 2009. We received almost sev­enty entries into a com­pet­i­tion that asked for an artistic rep­res­ent­a­tion of the working…