Let me explain why I described the meet-up as fiery and then perhaps you’ll see the point. In the red corner, ‘Muriel’, the pink-haired vegan activist and Lynne, the lecturer in the sociology of gender. In the blue corner ‘Des’, attention-seeker with wandering hands, every other word a swear word. Face-off: I shout at him not to fondle me. Later, there’s been more drinking. Des throws my King Creosote[i] cd on the fire. Acrid smoke and no-one knows quite what to do, certainly not Des, who laughs. I don’t understand such pointless destruction. Now the fall out: I get Des to replace the cd; John must manage his future involvement in the site.

Whilst organisations appear to operate in the sphere of rationality, anyone who has ever worked in one knows this is an illusion: emotion is never absent; and nor is sex (Brewis and Linstead, 2000). The office party appears – in public discourse — as a liminal space where boundaries, particularly around sex at work, are transgressed. Holliday and Thompson, however suggest that

far from being a space where one is beyond organisational control, the real function of the office party is to further refine the organisational subject.

(2001: 127)

That is, Des forced the group to notice him as the opposite of a desexualised, disembodied, rational worker: at the office party he was re-embodied (as was I, through his actions). And he then must be scrutinised and his future behaviour regulated. I had no qualms in complaining about Des’ behaviour, as I didn’t have to face him on Monday morning.

That we did not have an established daily relationship might also have contributed to his actions; would he have dared to behave badly if he had more to lose from being known as a wrong ‘un?  On the other hand, I wonder if Des wouldn’t have been shamed more effectively if surrounded by people who see him day-in, day-out; if the collective strategies for managing him had been refined over time, if there was a well-established idea about what was acceptable. Working in proximity to colleagues produces a sort of cohesion in the way home-working never can, even as it also makes for daily frustrations.

It might seem like this is an unusual case and therefore has little to say about the ordinary experience of sex at work. Certainly, few organisations are as decentralised as this one, even as homeworking, flexibility and outsourcing have been growing for years, producing organisations that are not made up of company men, but individualised workers. Cohesion and collectivity are hard under such atomised circumstances. But too often harassment is seen as rare and individualised, not systemic and therefore impossible to generalise from. Sex, violence and work are entwined in ways that are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, wound into the fabric of working lives.

References

1. Brewis, J. and Linstead, S. (2000) Sex, Work and Sex Work: Eroticizing Organization. London:

   Routledge.

2. Holliday, R. and Thompson, G. (2001) ‘A Body of Work’ in Holliday, R. and Hassard, J. (eds.) Contested Bodies. London, Routledge: 117–133

Your first appointment is at nine o’clock. (This leisurely start gives you a chance to answer emails and telephone messages from the previous evening.) As you enter the hall of an elegant townhouse, the smell of fresh coffee greets you. The good news doesn’t end there. The client has just bought a fifteen year-old Yamaha upright piano: a fine instrument in good condition. You have been highly recommended by their piano teacher so you do not have to prove yourself. Clients who have not owned instruments before will stand around the piano and watch you work. They will ask how you became a piano tuner, when pianos were invented, and how they work. This is a great opportunity to show off and a wonderful antidote to the highly skilled but somewhat lonely tuning process. So, allow plenty of time.

Next stop: a converted barn a few miles out of town. You have to walk past a four-wheel drive BMW and a top of the range Mercedes to reach the door. As before, a new client, but this piano that has been bought on Ebay for fifty pounds. On first inspection you reel off a well-rehearsed list of conditions and provisos: ‘When we spoke price on the phone you didn’t say there were six broken hammer shanks. Do you realise that if I repair these, the others (clearly in a fragile state) will probably break too? Because it is so far out of tune it may take a couple of sessions to get it up to pitch,’ and so on. The status of the piano tuner swiftly goes from one that is up with the GP or family accountant, right down to general dogsbody who earns money for old rope, and whose visit is an unwelcome irritation that has to be slotted in between getting children to riding lessons and shopping at Waitrose.

Because you did so much extra work on the Ebay piano, you eat your lunch as you drive to the local jazz venue. The band want the Steinway tuned before they rehearse in the afternoon — and for you to call back before the gig in the evening to check and tidy. You work in the half light as roadies clatter about with mike-stands and ladders, but you’ve tuned it a thousand times before and it is second nature, almost.

In the afternoon you visit an old client, a retired GP for whom you tune twice a year, as regular as clockwork. He is particular, and wants to discuss any tiny problem with the piano. But when you finally iron out any niggles, he is extremely appreciative and you leave feeling highly valued. Many tunings are on pianos for children learning, but amongst adult musicians, Doctors, University lecturers and school teachers seem to rank high in number.

You head home to telephone messages and emails. Piano tuners do not earn enough to employ secretaries and the administrative side of business stretches into the evening — an intrusion that has been eased to an extent by the mobile phone and computer. Usually, your working day ends here as you settle in for dinner with the family. But don’t forget, you must return to check the Steinway for the jazz.

The stage is cramped and you have to untangle the vocal mike-lead and the stage-light from the music desk before you can check the tuning. It has barely shifted. They could have managed without the extra visit, but you can always make some improvement. You spend ten minutes on the top octave. Money for old rope, you wonder? No, money for peace of mind; peace of mind for the pianist who can feel confident that the piano will not reflect badly on her playing. And for you, knowing that if the pianist is happy, you will be asked again.

In the early seventies, before the advent of Human Resources, Health and Safety and union-bashing Tory governments, there was work aplenty in Essex for anyone who could present themselves at the Colchester Odeon at 7am. At that time, a bona fide existence for us hippies, school drop-outs and squatters revolved mainly around smoking dope and doing as little work as possible. The words work and ethic never appeared in the same sentence. There was a lot of labouring work around for those who could be bothered, some of it ‘casual’ or ‘off the cards’, i.e. cash and tax free. In fact if you were a bloke with long hair just about the only work you could get was labouring. (It was difficult to rent a flat too and I was also turned down by the Technical College for refusing to get a hair-cut.) The railway job was relatively well paid — £40 a week take home as long as you did a weekend shift. To put this in perspective: the car I bought as a result of this employment cost £15, and the insurance, £40. Driving lessons were £3.50 at the BSM and my total outlay to get a driving licence was £73.

So one morning, I found myself waiting at the cinema with a few others. This was recruitment at its most informal. No-one spoke to me and I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going there to do. A ropey-looking bus full of grim-faced old men smoking roll-ups pulled up and I got on, sat down and rolled a cigarette too. I was feeling slightly out of place as a seventeen-year-old, bespectacled, middle-class ex-public schoolboy.

We were a track-relaying gang working for Balfour Beatty sub-contracted to British Rail, consisting of Poles (by far the best workers), Irish and locals from Suffolk and Essex. I have never since met such tough men. The work consisted of wielding implements such as pickaxes, shovels, sledge-hammers, six-foot crowbars, scythes and large forks. Track that has been in situ for ten years or so cannot just be lifted out since the stones that the track is laid on (known to us affectionately as slag) set solid after a while so it all has to be dug out. Most people find digging the garden quite hard work. Multiply that by ten.

To begin the process of relaying track the gang would spread out over a section, three beds  to a man. A ‘bed’ was the area between the sleepers. If we wanted to be more precise we used the terms four foot and six foot, - the four foot being the area between the running rails and the six foot the area between pairs of tracks. (The term four foot comes from the standard railway gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches). To dig out your beds you had to stand on a sleeper, then raise your fork high above the slag and smash it down just next to the sleeper. It would take a few goes to get to any depth at all; if and when you did, you could lever the fork against the sleeper to remove (hopefully) a decent amount of slag which you’d then chuck to one side. If you missed the slag and hit the sleeper a huge, jarring shock would be transmitted up your arm. We sometimes used pickaxes to loosen the slag but most just relied on brute force and a fork. Once you had removed some slag you could then use a foot on your fork and your entire body weight to attack the slag from less of an angle. Once you had finished excavating your beds you could have a smoke for five minutes or so before moving on to the next section.

Every now and then, the arrival of a train would be heralded by a blast on a kind of tin bugle by a one-armed man who then shouted either ‘up road’ or ‘down road’ depending on the train’s direction of travel (up being towards London and down away from London). We would stand by the side of the track until the train had passed. Once a fast train took the lid of our oversize tea-can with it which could well have resulted in an Odd-Job-style decapitation. Train toilets emptied straight onto the track at that time and we often admired the results or in some cases were sprayed. Other diversions included executing myxomatosis-infected rabbits with shovels and merciless piss-taking. Generally the Poles were the quietest, the Irish the most philosophical and the locals the most garrulous — most of their opening conversational gambits consisted of the words: ‘I tell you what…’

During the six months or so that I worked there, I saw new blokes start almost every day; some lasted an hour or so and most just one day. Absenteeism was commonplace and generally tolerated. Inactivity was not. I once made the mistake of sitting down for a breather. Luckily an old bloke called Fred advised me: ‘you can have a smoke but don’t sit down otherwise he’ll be on to you’. He being the foreman or ganger. All I remember about him is that he was Welsh and used to hold his dick with an unusual reverse grip when pissing by the side of the track. Funnily enough the sunken area to the side of the track was known as the cess.

In addition to digging stuff out, we would also pack slag under sleepers to bring the track up to the right level – a process known as tamping. This involved jacking up the track and ramming the stones home with a shovel. When we were done, or if a train was coming, the jacks would be released, the only warning being a shout. You had to learn not to have your feet under a sleeper when this happened unless you wanted a couple of tons of steel and concrete dropping on your toes. Another process was lining. Twenty men with six-foot crowbars, ten to each rail, would dig the bars in and lever against the track to push it in whatever direction was required according to a man sighting down the rail from a distance. To synchronise the pulls there would be a rhythmic shout: hey — hup hup hup, the hups being when you pulled.

The clacketty clack rhythm of train wheels hitting the joints between sections of rail bolted together with plates has largely disappeared with the advent of long-welded rails. As in all engineering of this type, expansion is a factor that needs to be catered for and in this case we used a process known as de-stressing. It was pronounced distressing which gave the activity a certain poignancy. To de-stress a section of track (usually about a quarter of a mile long), we would unclip the rails from the sleepers, cut out a small piece (about nine inches long) and stretch the remaining rail with a hand-operated hydraulic gizmo before re-clipping. The clips were sprung S–shaped steel affairs which could be removed quite easily with a well-aimed blow from a sledge hammer. I say well-aimed because you needed to have your foot on top of the clip when hitting it to keep it from shooting off. Replacing them however was much more difficult. Being sprung they had to be hit very hard and in exactly the right place, otherwise a kilo of steel would go flying off usually into your shins or worse, into someone else’s. This job was always done at night of course which didn’t help. We had a variety of lights though including Tilley lamps (run on pressurised paraffin) and lengths of cable with bulbs every few feet — as seen in miniature on your Christmas tree.

Although there were machines to do all these tasks, they were generally only available for weekend engineering works when there was a deadline to meet. That often meant very long shifts starting at midnight on Saturday and going right through until the following afternoon. The weekday work was a picnic compared to the weekend as we could stop for rain and smokes and cups of tea were brought to the track in the huge white enamel can. Weekends we worked in all weathers and snatched breaks only if the work was going well.

Night-work was conducted with a sense of urgency in an eerie half-light. Mostly there was no conversation, just gangers shouting orders. Weird-looking machines with sirens that sounded like air-raid warnings would appear for tamping and lining and there were others that ran on the adjacent track with cranes that brought lengths of rail. If there was no adjacent track we would erect temporary rails supported by devices known as pots to allow a machine to deliver rails. In the absence of machinery, we did everything by hand. It took four men to carry a sleeper with devices known as dogs and many more were required to move rails — either with dogs or crowbars. One night we moved eighteen pairs of long rails from one side of a track to the other using crowbars. It took all night with much hey-hupping. There was another huge machine which had a kind of conveyor belt that excavated under the track and dumped the resulting mixture of earth and slag on the embankment. We would spend days moving this stuff with shovels to clear up the mess.

New slag was delivered in hoppers and we had to turn a kind of steering wheel to let the stuff out (hopefully in the right place to save too much shovelling later on) then jump off and run round to the next un-manned hopper. I once jumped off onto the adjacent track right in front of an oncoming train. A slow one, luckily. No sympathy to be had though — just a bollocking.

There were no toilets or washing facilities of any kind and the only safety equipment I had was a dirty orange vest. I enjoyed my sandwiches though — and the fags, and even the disgusting tea made with Carnation tinned milk.

Further reading

Coleman, T. (1965) The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men Who Built the Railways. Hutchinson.