No Way To Make A Living » building work

Moments of Domesticity

Lynne Pettinger — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:00:43 +0000

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 house-building site, the kettle was abandoned, as was the empty bottle of that Scottish staple, Irn Bru. Work is powered by hot and cold sugary drinks.

Domestic appliances and accoutrements helped my carpenter-friend’s work A hot iron made stikcing things together much easier; cling film over the paint tray stopped it skinning over whilst he took a tea break, and dishclothes wiped up the spills and splashes of paint and varnish.

In these three male worlds of paid work, there existed small moments of domesticity.

Road Building, or What I Did on my Holidays (part 2)

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:38:38 +0000

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 through The Trossachs, an area in the middle of Scotland, a little south of the Highlands, where the pictures, below, were taken. This is a road said to have been built for the pleasure of driving it (BBC 4, 25–10-11).

The car is the “quintessential manufactured object” (Urry, 2006: 17), and its production the object of some curiosity, whether from Goldthorpe, et. al. (1968) wondering what these affluent workers were like, or from Durand and Hatzfeld (2003), what working on the Peugeot line was like. The road on which the car’s success rests so heavily is less fascinating, existing as a frustration for the traveller and a taken-for granted by researchers. There needs to be more gratitude for this work, and more attention to the affordances offered by roads. They make possible being a tourist in the Trossachs, and getting to work in one Highland village from home in another. The kinds of roads that exist in rural places don’t have the promise and frustrations of the motorway or the by-pass: they don’t carry as much traffic, and they don’t have traffic lights and roundabouts, just passing places and warning signs. They make hills manageable.

In contemporary accounts of movement and change in social life, the way movement relies on the fixity and certainty of the road beneath our tyres is not much thought of (see Sheller, 2004). In the city, tarmac is taken for granted. Joe Moran’s On Roads tells us about the politics of road building, and the organisation of road systems, but tells us little about road work as part of the everyday (though its lovely to hear how road bases are formed from the detritus of industrial life: broken up tarmac from elsewhere, or crushed Robbie Williams cds (Moran, 2010: 256).)

The Pochain digger sits up high on a pile of gravel, with its own tracks visible on the leftover gravel, though not on the smoothed out road surface it will leave behind. It sits above the mountains, having opened them up to drivers. It’s been parked for a while as, though the road it built is finished, it’s no easy matter to get it back down the mountain. The rainy Highlands weather is taming the machinery, rusting it up.

References

Durand, J. P. and Hatzfeld, N. (2003) Living Labour: Life on the Line at Peugeot France Palgrave Macmillan.
Goldthorpe, J.H., Lockwood, D., Bechhofer, F., and Platt, J. (1968a) The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moran, J. (2010) On Roads: A Hidden History. Profile Books, London.
Sheller, M. (2004) ‘Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car’. Theory, Culture & Society. vol. 21 no. 4–5 221–242.
Urry, J. (2006) ‘Inhabiting the Car’. The Sociological Review. Volume 54, Issue Supplement s1, pp 17–31.
Richard Wilson/Jonney Steven Britain’s Best Drives, BBC4, October 25th 2011.

Divine Command Theory

Lynne Pettinger — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:10:59 +0000

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 together. I catch the guy inside the shelter pulling up his reflective safety trousers and tightening the drawstring. He pretends not to see me until they’re properly fastened.

His mate, a Geordie, comes up and says to me – I know, you’re looking for a bit o shelter. No, I say, I’m just being nosy. Trousers says ‘nothing’s going on here’, and we all laugh. I listen in. The Geordie has a bit of A4 paper he’s found tucked behind the seats in another shelter. It’s someone’s university work.

‘Your task today is to explain and discuss Divine Command Theory’.

‘Aye’, says Trousers. ‘After I’ve spent the day knocking down bricks, I’ll do that’.

‘That’s your thesis, is it?’ Geordie says. He folds the paper neatly and puts it into his pocket.

‘Sci-Fi’ says Trousers, and they take it in turns to list sci-fi films. The train arrives as they’re squabbling about whether Blakes 7 can count because it was on the telly.

The new shelters are transparent all the way: there’s nowhere to sneakily pull your trousers up, or to leave your essay on Divine Command Theory.

Dancing

Lynne Pettinger — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:43:26 +0000

Being on the Northern Soul scene, with its all-nighters, amphetamines, and obsessive pursuit of obscure and rare records, didn’t suit those with a steady day job. And, as is so common with research into subcultures, Andrew Wilson’s ‘Northern Soul’ (2007) doesn’t offer much by way of insight into how a person makes a living at the same time as living the subcultural life. (The same is true of, say Paul Hodkinson on Goth (2002), although — now a middle aged Goth himself — Hodkinson (2011) finds other middle aged Goths more much interested in talking about work.

But in this pair of youtube clips, we see middle aged men at work, in their high-vis vests, still able to glide – subject to the constraints of those trainers and workboots, and the absence of talc-covered floor. It aint as pretty as in the old days at the Twisted Wheel or the Wigan Casino. But once you’ve got it, you don’t lose it. “Keep Going, Tommo”.

References

Paul Hodkinson (2011) ‘Ageing in a spectacular ‘youth culture’: continuity, change and community amongst older Goths’. The British Journal of Sociology. Volume 62 Issue 2, pp262-282.
Hodkinson, Paul (2002) Goth : identity, style, and subculture. Oxford : Berg.
Andrew Wilson, (2007) Northern soul : music, drugs and subcultural identity. Cullompton : Willan Pub.

Terrible Necessities

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:01:40 +0000

On the 69th Floor
This is one of the most famous photographs of work, Charles C. Ebbets’ ‘Lunchtime atop a Skyscraper’. It’s the sort of image that counts as iconic – that is, you can buy a poster version of it. Taken in 1932 as the 69th Floor of the Rockefeller Center was being built, here are 11 behatted men stopping for a break.

It’s dangerous work, yes. You can guess that from seeing how far away the ground is. Though it’s the insouciance in the face of danger that we admire from where we sit comfortably inside our offices, 80 years on. Construction work is perilous work, always was, always is. There are ways to make it safer: hard hats and care: a zero approach.

Although as Johann Hari wrote in the Independent in 2008 when he told the story of Patrick O’Sullivan and of Kieron Deeney, these tokens mean little in the face of attacks on even small protections.\ In 2011 he wrote again, as powerfully, as angrily, about other threats to life at work, setting the story of Mark Wright against mocking attacks on the very idea of health and safety at work, and alongside cuts to the already fairly toothless Health and Safety Executive.

If you die at work and it’s your organisation’s fault, then (in Britain, and since 2008) the employer could face a charge of corporate manslaughter. This means that the company can be held responsible, not one individual. The 1st case came to court in February of 2011, though it didn’t really test the legislation’s possibilities (Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings was run by one man. No chain of command). The power of the act to scope up and down the ladder of senior management to determine culpability is yet to be tried. But one day, perhaps, the minions will be held to account.

Staying indoors
These are deaths in hazardous jobs. Mining, construction, fishing and the like are inevitably risky – people aren’t strong in the face of gravity, big machines or powerful waves. Indoors, though, in well-inspected factories producing high-end consumer goods, you’d be safer…hopefully. Though not if your workplace, say a Foxconn factory in China, explodes whilst you’re in the middle of a long shift making i-pads for tech-hungry Apple addicts. Then you’re a victim of the ‘terrible necessities’ of consumer capital.

And what if it’s not that the machinery’s at fault, it’s not that you’ve tripped and fallen, nor have you been hit by a reversing truck. It’s that the day-after-day existence surviving long working hours, living in overcrowded dormitory accommodation, being bullied by management, feeling insecure, hating work but not being able to leave it, well, it all gets too much. Suicide. Whose fault is that?

In both the Foxconn suicides of 2010 and the recent years of ‘suicide contagion’ at France-Telecom-Orange, relatives and workmates – and suicide notes — have blamed indecent working conditions for the deaths. In the most recent case at France Telecom, a man set fire to himself in the work car park. Corporate denial here is easy – as it is in the case of Karōshi in Japan (‘death by overwork’). It’s easy to blame the individuals, not companies, or economic structures. Choice, personal responsibility, finding the man who made the mistake that led to the explosion: these are easy explanations, but they’re not enough.

The situation is ripe with ‘infernal alternatives’:

“that set of situations that seem to leave no other choice than resignation or a slightly hollow sounding denunciation” (Pignarre and Stengers, 2010: 24).

Accept deaths as an inevitable product of the crazy pace of production in this competitive world of commerce? Callous. Regulate to protect vulnerable bodies? You’re an “Elf ‘n’ safety zealot” (Daily Mail).

“Let us recall the Black Book that added up all the deaths ‘caused’ by communism. This type of calculation is impossible with capitalism, because there are always other actors on stage who seem much more concrete… Danone closes a factory? One can criticise the directors of Danone, or – to hear them talking – the terrible necessities of international competition, or the selfish demands of shareholders.” (Pignarre and Stengers, 2010: 12).

‘Capitalism kills’ sloganeering doesn’t suit any better than ‘shit happens’: neither grandstanding narrative nor depressing (and insulting) fatalism are helpful in examining the tragedy of death at work.

Reference

Pignarre, P. and Stengers, I. (2011) Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Palgrave Macmillan. Trans. Andrew Goffey.

Falling from Great Height

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:16:10 +0000

Since posting Work at Height and Work at Great Height, I’ve seen a couple of interesting things.

The first is a clip sent by a colleague at the OU, Simon Carter, shows what its like to work 1768 feet in the air, mending antennae.

Phew. I could scarcely watch. Notice that they show the ascent, but no word on the descent.
The second thing I want to show you is at the heart of the fear watching this work generates in me. It’s a painting by Hubert Robert I saw in the Musee Cognacq-Jay, Paris.

L’Accident, by Hubert Robert, Musée Cognacq-Jay

There he goes.

Work at Great Height

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:22:33 +0000

A few weeks ago, I posted a clip of a man fixing a satellite dish. I called it work at height, and I wrote it because the idea of climbing a ladder to make a living made me shiver. The satellite dish engineer has nothing on the four man team keeping the Eiffel Tower’s lifts in working order:

The man has a safety harness, two carabiners attaching two ropes, moved alternately each time he descends three more rungs of the ladder. He has a helmet, gloves and all his tools are attached to his belt. And that’s one long, strong steel ladder.

Work at Height

Lynne Pettinger — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 14:31:38 +0000

Up the ladder, to unscrew the old satellite dish.
Down the ladder, it’s tucked under his arm.
Back up the ladder.
You’ve got to be careful getting onto the roof, with that thing under your arm.

The rest’ve already finished work, they carry on drinking.

Snow

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 14:25:26 +0000

Oh it’s snowing. Parents stay at home because the kids’ school is closed. Not even the 4x4 drivers can get up the hill to work; the buses have been cancelled, and it’d be a long walk in. And countless pounds are being lost as the workforce stays away (snow chaos costs £1.2bn a day). It’s a staple media story, one that usually arrivse a couple of days after the snowfall (after the story of the stranded commuter). Similar productivity losses are caused by heat in summer, holidays in August, the world cup and the Olympics, Christmas, and many other ordinary alterations to daily routines. But these estimates of loss are daft. They rely on a naive conceptualisation of the consumer (that if I don’t spend money today, I’ll never spend it), and, more importantly, a misunderstanding of work productivity. Productivity is linear, measurable and certain. This is what makes it knowable. But the urge to maintain productivity doesn’t reflect the rhythms of living, rhythms which are central to understanding what it is to do work. Time in industrial capitalism is regimented by the clock, and this is a rationality that is imposed – a technical condition and a means of disciplining workers (as E.P Thompson tells us). But work is not a defined object, done in a steady state, but always a becoming, something emergent. Thus productivity has to slip and slide sometimes because the temporalities of the worker, their ongoing connection to seasonal rhythms, doesn’t quite fit the temporality of the machine.

And what are people doing with their “snow days” off work? Mimicking work:

Work Undone

Dawn Lyon — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 19:59:07 +0000

There was a fire opposite my mother’s house, behind the bungalow on the other side of the green. I’ve been looking at that bungalow a lot lately as builders have been carrying out what seems to be a major refurbishment. I’ve seen so much stuff go into the skip on the front drive that I’ve wondered what could be left inside. It was hard to see where the fire was coming from to start with. A tall fir tree was like a single flame but not much else seemed to be burning around it. The builders were replacing the windows on the day the fire started. PVC. My first thought was whether or not they would melt.

This all happened shortly before midnight and the scene it produced highlighted things we know but don’t often get to see about the different rhythms and temporalities of work that coexist. The bungalow in front of the burning tree was dark and quiet, locked up after the builders’ day was done. In neighbouring houses, it was mostly the bedroom lights that were on. Of the stream of people that formed in the street, many were wearing dressing-gowns and slippers. The hour and the emergency permitted that. Then the fire engines arrived and men on a night shift, their job to be ready for an incident like this, worked in protective clothing in front of an audience in nightwear (unfortunately I don’t have a photo of that).

The next day it was possible to see what might have happened. A car, a shed, a fence and a tree were destroyed. The tree will probably find new growth from its roots whether or not anyone does anything. The car was removed, no life left in that. The remains of the fence and the shed point in two directions: to the labour that put them there in the first place, now undone; and to the processes of work that will come next, from demolition (most likely) to reconstruction. The windows, I was glad to see, survived intact, and building work on the bungalow continues.