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

H&M, the Scand­inavian fast fash­ion brand has just opened a store in the town I live in. It opened a few days after a fire killed 21 employ­ees of a knit­wear fact­ory in Bangladesh which is sub­con­trac­ted by H&M to make those cute stripy jump­ers, and that really use­ful little black cardy.

Flight attend­ants are an extraordin­ar­ily pop­u­lar sub­ject of study (Hoch­schild, 1983; Taylor and Tyler, 2000; Wil­li­ams, 2003). Research focuses on the emo­tional labour and body work involved, as Dawn high­lighted recently. The cus­tomer here is a power­ful, but shad­owy fig­ure, who extracts and deserves ser­vice, and whom the cabin crew must please. These aca­demic concerns…

Life as a soci­olo­gist of work isn’t inev­it­ably amus­ing, but Friday’s news that a group of French postal work­ers had taken La Poste to court for recom­pense for the labour involved in clean­ing their uni­forms made me smile. I did enjoy the chal­lenge this court case makes to the idea that all labour that (re-)produces…

My Dad has a story about how he came to get a job. It was the mid-60s, and he was going to leave school with a mis­cel­lany of o-levels. The teacher called him in and said, “well Pet­tinger, what’s it to be”. “dunno sir” Mr Heck­thorpe starts read­ing from the list of pos­sible careers, start­ing at A. “Accountant?”