The Photographic Unit of the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information took thousands of photographs during the decade from 1935 – 1945. They reflected all aspects of American life in the period, not just work, but the online collection (of over 160,000 photographs) has a ‘search by subject’ facility. The collection includes, for example, Dorothea Lange’s well-known pictures of a migrant worker family’s living conditions.

The New Deal Administration provided much of its relief to the nation’s unemployed in the form of work relief. The New Deal Network has an extensive collection of photographs, searchable by subject or by agency responsible, as well as other primary source material.

Some of the public work schemes allowed white-collar workers, or those in the creative arts, to use their existing skills. Graphic designers were employed to produce ‘public information’ posters, some directly relating to the world of work. There is a detailed index by subject.

The Federal Writers Project for unemployed writers carried out a number of projects with reference to the world of work. For example, they conducted interviews with ‘ordinary’ Americans to capture their life histories, including information on education, qualifications and work. For an account of the Federal Writers’ Project, and a sample of the life histories they collected, see this online collection.

The same project also interviewed many elderly African-Americans who had been born into slavery, thus offering an important window into the experiences of enforced labour.

The Farm Security Administration ran a number of camps for migrant workers, many of whom were attracted to California in the hope of obtaining seasonal work in agriculture. There is an online collection of various sources describing the daily experience of residents of these camps.

The set of photos by Suzanne Lee/Panos London, of women taxi drivers in Delhi gives lie to the hypertheorising of supermodernity. Here, an older story of gender, family and work is on display. Diya Chaudhri’s text describes women’s discovery of freedom and subject status through their entry into taxi driving. For Meenu Vadera, director of the Azad Foundation which trains women to become taxi drivers, this is a way of giving women citizenship: the driving license is a document which proves existence.

Photo by Suzanne Lee for Panos London

One of the women interviewed, Ekta , says “I feel empowered, as if I have my own identity other than a wife and mother.” There is extensive research to show how paid work provides empowerment and connection and freedom, but taxi driving differs from other work. For Sheller and Urry (2006), mobility is a way of gaining subjectivity, of becoming a person; though they don’t give that much of a sense of whether it matters what the mobility is for, is it just to be prized for its own sake?

It seems here that it is work as much as mobility, that offers this subject status, and mobilities research should take work seriously. The female taxi driver challenges the norms of the city as a gendered space because she works and well as because she moves. Running a taxi, of course, is not merely a process of learning how to negotiate those city streets with that machine, but of negotiating the internal space of the car. Chaudhri notes the challenge the women taxi drivers provide to other drivers on Delhi’s streets, but the only customers she considers are other women, who will feel safer if driven by a woman. I wonder and worry about the dangerous customers. However empowering it is to learn to drive, being at the vanguard of gender equality and working as a driver is a risky place.

References

1. Augé, M. (2009) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso.
   Hodges, G. R G. (2007) Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘The new mobilities paradigm’. Environment and Planning A 2006, volume 38, pp 207–226.

Martin Argles/Guardian: Downing St political staff

In the first photograph, there are three members of staff huddled round one phone. Argles tells us they are listening in as Brown speaks to Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems. “Nick, Nick, I can’t hold on any longer. Nick, I’ve got to go to the palace”, Argles reports hearing (Guardian, 13th May 2010: 21). I’m fascinated by that huddle, it speaks of the hunger, urge and delight to be in on the moment that characterises the political aides and correspondents I’ve met. They are seduced by an everyday proximity to power to imagine that nothing else matters as much, and that hearing things second hand is almost worse than not hearing them at all. Look at the woman hovering behind, one ear turned inwards and her own mobile in hand: it matters so much to be there, to be listening in on an event that matters for just this moment.

I like the ordinariness of the rest of the scene: the big metal cupboard with its fire safety certificate, the Downing Street screensaver on the right of the shot, and at the back, the colleague involved in a very different sort of phone call.

Martin Argles/Guardian: The war room in Downing Street

In the second shot, we see a wider perspective, a layered modernity. Chandeliers, wood panelling and a fireplace point to a Victorian refurbishment of the original Downing Street building, although the lights are now electric and the fireplace is surrounded by desks. Confronting this past is the detritus of the modern office: screens, wires and swivel chairs; coffee cups, iphones, and men in ties. The carousel of MDF desks are paper-free, though an enormous briefcase in the centre of the shot has a wadge of documents shoved in it: this is the last day of work, and this room will soon come to be taken for granted by a different sort of political animal.

A number of the images are portraits, including of people who are in the public realm, such as Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London (who I happened to see going into City Hall just as I was leaving this afternoon!). In other portraits we can understand work by the context within the image, for instance the policeman standing outside Number 10 Downing Street, or workers posed amongst theatre props. In these types of photograph, the worker and the job are one (for now at least) and the portrait of the person in their working environment carries the idea of what it is they do in their working lives.

The composition of some of the photographs is stimulating for thinking about work sociologically. In one image, a Neon Light engineer, suspended alongside a building, is pictured from below, the sky becoming the backdrop to his working world. He looks alone up there, only tenuously connected to the world as he holds onto the light he is working on, although in another image, someone else appears to be keeping an eye on him from the ground. We can’t see exactly what the light engineer is doing so we don’t get an insight into the activity of work per se but we do get some sense of what his working life is like from seeing him in the sky like that. The stunning picture of the rope access abseiler cleaning the No 1 London Bright Building is equally evocative.

Although the image of statue cleaners is taken peering into a vehicle, what looks like a harness on one of the workers suggests that his work also takes him off the ground. His co-worker, seen snoozing in the background, is taking a moment out, and this draws our attention to the ways in which working routines include pauses, and are shot through with other activities and meanings.

The materiality of work is very present in the photographs too. The cinema projectionist at the Barbican is seen surrounded by and connected to his equipment, as is the fire-fighter, whereas the organ tuner at the Royal Albert Hall must quite literally get inside the object of his labour.

Work is not presented in these photos in the restricted ways we sometimes see it celebrated, mostly of men doing dangerous things, however fascinating images of these worlds are. Bell-ringers – presumably an unpaid commitment – are shown in perfect coordination in a space lit by what looks like early morning sunshine. The hairdresser in a centre for homeless people might be there on a voluntary basis or as an employee. Overall, the collection transcends rigid categories of work, including artisans, gardeners and protestors alongside teachers and engineers. These photographs encourage us to ask questions about the basis on which work is undertaken, and to recognise the enormous range of work that goes on in London.

Overall, this series is a refreshing look at what we do from a young woman photographer. Thank you, Harriet Armstrong.

I was staying in a B&B last night and found myself having breakfast this morning with a Hotel Inspector. He didn’t quite have the style of Alex Polizzi, pictured above (of the current Channel Five Hotel Inspector series) but it was still the most interesting early morning conversation I’ve had this week. I’m not sure which of the various organisations that bestow stars he works for but it probably doesn’t make much difference. So, during an especially well-presented breakfast, I asked: What exactly does a real life hotel inspector do?

To start with, he explained that he spends most of the week away from home. The glamour of his working life is already diminished in my mind. Some establishments, those with lower ratings, can be checked out in the space of a day-visit, he tells me, whereas others, hotels or B&Bs with high ratings, require an overnight stay. ‘There are a lot of services to sample in some places’, he comments — and lots of hidden spaces to investigate, it turns out. One visit last week led to the deregistering of an establishment after he moved the bed away from the wall and exposed ‘an inch of dust’. The appeal of his work has now completely gone for me. So I’m surprised to learn from the How to become a AAA hotel inspector webpage , that it ‘is a much sought-after job, with a limited number of openings’.

Maybe it’s to do with all the free dinners. I wonder though how it feels to eat in order to evaluate. Do you have to choose things you might not otherwise want? He is obliged to order room service, try out restaurants, and sit in bars. Not for the leisure we would normally associate with consumption in these places but to scrutinize the menu, and the manner and mood of waiting staff. His own experience in catering, from waiter to chef, goes a long way in helping him to judge what’s on his plate, and how it’s brought to him. Yet his current job has taken him to the other side of the bar or table. This places him in the curious position of knowing the trades he is assessing whilst having to act like a consumer in doing so.

Even when he retires to his room, puts on his pyjamas, and gets into bed after what might have been a long, hard day, his work is far from over. Is the mattress firm? Is it even across the bed? Do the springs squeak if he moves around a lot? Can you hear the people in the room next door? Restful, it isn’t.

As I finish my coffee, I ask him what he does for a holiday. I don’t suppose you want to stay in a fancy hotel? I say. ‘Not really’, he replies ‘I quite like self-catering.’

‘Christy, Southwest Airlines’ — Brian Finke

References
Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory, London: Sage.
Witz, A, C Warhurst, D Nickson (2003) ‘The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization’ Organization, 10(1): 33–54.
Wolkowitz, C. (2002) ‘The social relations of body work’, Work, Employment and Society 16(3): 497–510.

Women on the Line is often described as a seminal ethnography of 1980s British sociology of work. Its republication in 2009 has attracted considerable interest, especially in the US. How would you describe the reception of the original publication of the book?

The enforced pseudonym and anonymity the first time round meant that I got very little sense of its reception. I couldn’t give any talks or publicise it at all. People wrote to Routledge asking to be put in contact with Ruth Cavendish, and they forwarded everything to me but of course I wasn’t able to reply to anything! Yet for many years afterwards I often met people who knew me, and were familiar with Women on the Line, but were unaware of the connection between us. It kept on happening right up to the appearance of the new edition published under my own name. My sense is that the book was quite widely read both in the UK and abroad, and by feminist and other activists as well as academics over the next few years, especially given the greater interest in studying and campaigning around work during the 1980s.

In terms of ‘method’, although your working at the factory was not intended as research, what do you think about the approach of ‘knowing by doing’ as a way of understanding work, in your case, quite literally working on the line – especially in a context in which the interview has come to dominate qualitative research?

Knowing by doing was certainly crucial, in the sense that my understanding of what was going on in the factory and how it affected the women would have been impossible without experiencing it myself. The ‘doing’ included not only the work itself, but also the numerous interactions with the women around me. The chatting that this involved ranged far wider than what would normally be covered in an interview, and of course I wasn’t determining the course of the conversation either. However, the interpretive ‘knowing’ part of it relied also on my pre-existing knowledge and analytical frames, and all the ‘doing’ was necessarily filtered through and mediated by what was already in my head, and my political preoccupations and questions in doing the job in the first place.

There are more photographs in the republished version of the book than in the original. Can you comment on the place of images in representations of work, and on the relationship between the written and the visual in this book.

I would have liked to include far more photos than the publishers would allow, and in colour. The black and white ones don’t really do justice to the situation and don’t come over nearly as well as the colour ones on the cover. I hope it makes a difference to readers being able to see what some of my work-mates looked like, especially those whose life stories are recounted. Similarly the spatial and physical layout of the shopfloor, and some examples of machinery should help to bring the narrative to life. There are so very few images available of the faces of women doing this kind of work (like the one of Alice who is looking straight at me taking her photo) so the more we can collect the better, especially when the women are engaged in the process rather than being objectified as ‘women workers’. However, these photos were taken during the strike/lockout, so everyone is looking more relaxed and happier than they would have done if they had actually been working!

The covers of the two editions are different. What is the story of them?

Cover of original publication, 1982

I have always disliked the cover of the first edition because it is so misleading. So many of the women came from the Caribbean or Indian subcontinent, yet the picture suggests white women only. The first version was even worse as they were all given long blonde hair. I objected and asked for black or Asian women to be represented. The concession was to give one of them curly hair, but I think she still looks white. Routledge wouldn’t budge further. The portrayal of the line was also misleading showing the women facing it rather than at right angles to it, so contradicting my description of how the spatial layout affected social and physical interaction.

Cover of republication, 2009

So of course I am much happier with the cover of the new edition, which I chose and which uses two of my own photos taken in the factory back in 1977. I was surprised how well the original negatives scanned in especially as it was only a little instamatic camera. In fact these are much better quality than the original prints. So that’s a lesson to keep old negs in a safe place! Now we have older black women on the cover, as well as a very young Irish worker, suggesting the age and ethnic composition, and you can see the line, and all the clutter. The ‘product’ is also clearly visible, and of course this would not have been possible in the 1982 edition.

In tune

I recently went to the workshop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was taking his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and otherwise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attending to the finish rather than the sound. Apparently there is value in layers of varnish and Roger is cautious. It seems to me that he’s sort of ‘reading the wood’ as he looks at the instrument, and he knows not to touch where he can’t be sure of the impact of changing something. ‘No, you wouldn’t want to do that…’ he concludes.

Waiting

The workshop is an extraordinary place for an outsider. There are pieces of instruments all around the single room, sections and strings and bridges and necks, and a pan of glue on the boil on an old camping stove. I can’t take it all in, and I can’t see how Roger manoeuvres his way through the arrangement of objects. As well as making new instruments, what he does here is to work on things produced through the craftsmanship of others, undoing and remaking them. It takes a careful eye and a trained ear, an understanding of the whole process of creating a double bass, a lot of patience and dexterity, and a kind of respect it seems to me. He’s not an old man but he’s been doing this for a long time already. Several years ago, he decided to take a break. ‘I tried being a driving instructor,’ he said. ‘I lasted a year.’ When he was doing his apprenticeship, the man who taught him had already told him his future: ‘You’ll never do anything else.’ And here he is, in his own workshop, in tune with his instruments.

I started taking photos without much of a project in mind at first but soon thought it would be interesting to keep a record of the whole period of the construction. I convinced Colin Samson of the idea and we got into a routine, taking pictures almost every week until Easter, always from the office window and sometimes through the blind. By that point, the structure was starting to emerge. Then we both went on holiday and missed the second floor go on. After that I carried on (Colin had become bored!), taking pictures every couple of weeks or so until I left the University in September 2006. This was before the outside was finished, but fortunately, Lucinda’s Platt’s office was directly above mine at the time and some of the final photos were taken from there by her or by me, the last in February 2007.

I wanted to do something with this but wasn’t sure what. Then when I saw David Hockney’s photo-collages in his exhibition of portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in Autumn 2006, I knew I wanted to make a picture story like them. I love the simultaneity of time and place, for instance, in the moods of competition of The Scrabble Game, and in the gestures of Billy Wilder lighting his cigar.[2]

With some help thinking it all through from Rowena Macaulay, I started putting the pictures together, selecting, cutting, sticking and fiddling about with them. In the end, I made a single large collage composed of several lines of images representing the formation of the building and how it took shape over the time of its construction. The bottom line shows the ground being moved, the next one up is of the laying of the foundations, and above that, the floors gradually appear. As the space gets enclosed, fewer of the building workers are visible in the photos. The building emerges as the product of their work, and at the same time conceals the work which made it.

The original collage can now be seen on the ground floor of the Social Science Building at the University of Essex. The picture of it here in situ has some reflections of the room and the building itself back into it – this wasn’t intentional but I like the sense it creates of the collage as part of the building.

The View from 5A

To finish off the project, I decided (with permission from the UK Data Archive) to photograph the move of the Data Archive into the new building. I spent two days with the removal men, following them around and photographing their trips back and forth across the campus. In the end, they got me to help out. From this I made a series of collages showing the labour of removal, two of which are posted here.

The Move 1

The Move 2

[2] These images can be found online or in various of Hockey’s publications.

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 day. People submitted photographs, poems, videos and sculptures produced alone or with their colleagues. They are funny, revealing and surprising.

image by Idlan Zakaria

So many occupations are represented at a University; its staff have skills as mechanics, researchers, negotiators, managers, chefs, librarians, administrators. work : place explored how these occupations intersect and co-depend. It made visible the complexity of work in a vast organisation by making visible the employees and how they communicate.

criticising compulsory creativity

One reason for this project was to consider scope for creativity in the contemporary workplace. Whilst universities might well be described as part of the ‘creative industries’, by and large the dominance of a romanticised concept of ‘creativity’ as the act of a free individual (see Toynbee, 2000, ch 2 for a critique), renders creativity as something outside of market or employment relations.

Yet management discourses celebrate and push towards creativity as the hallmark of the successful employee, the value added by the reflexive, self-monitoring worker of the 21st Century: see Bilton (2007) or http://www.creativitycentre.com/.

This sort of thing leads Thomas Osborne to describe creativity as a moral imperative: ‘for who could imaginably be against creativity?’ (2003: 508). He describes a doctrinal ‘compulsory creativity’ as something to stand against, for its promotion of compulsory individualism, innovation, self-performativity and the quest for the new.

Orvar Löfgren offers an alternative critique of the unthinking use of creativity as a new means of production as ‘the striking paradox of trying to domesticate the imagination while at the same time trying to preserve its magic aura of unbridled energy’ (Löfgren, 2003: 246). Here the suggestion is that the institutionalisation of creativity risks making it disappear. So, here are Toynbee, Osborne and Löfgren criticising simplistic accounts of the creative soul; they almost convince me that creativity is overrated; just a step away from exploitation.

‘Leaf Cells’, by Mike Fryer

But on the other hand, I’m a hippy and I think people have great capacity to be creative if they feel like this is within the possible for them. And this was borne out by some of my experience on the work : place project. What surprised me was precisely what Toynbee’s critique of creativity as hyper-individualised might have lead me to expect, had I thought it through: that some people felt they could not participate alone. It was not for them, they didn’t have an artistic bone in their bodies. But let them be in a group, let the group not the individual be described as creative, then all sorts of things became possible.

collaborations

We did not suggest that respondents might submit collectively, but 17 were collaborations from those already working together. Some of the productions were a result of the competition being used as an excuse for management to work on ‘team building’, but there are two I’d like to talk about which came from the work groups themselves, as a form of play interrupting the working day.

The first, To Boldly Go came from a team of cleaning staff in one of the university residences. Here, the youngest of the workers is dressed with the accoutrements of her job, and the poem sits alongside, reflecting the engagement of this group of staff with students and the mess that student’s produce.

ready for work

I’m standing here outside the door and offering up a prayer,
That when I walk inside the flat its not messy everywhere.
Have they had a party with food and lots of drink?
Will the washing up be sky high and blocking up the sinks?
Or could there be a budding cook who made a spag bowl for all,
Then dished it out for all his mates and left mine up the wall.
So now I’ll open up the door, I’ll tell you what I find.
Oh the little darlings have been very, very kind…

The second A Crystal Ball Moment is a photograph of a sculpture made by the course records team. Each worker made a model of themselves out of found office supplies, plastic water cups were chairs and the figures were made from blue-tack. Faces and clothes differ, and one of them is glued to the phone. The piece refers to a (creative) problem-solving discussion about procedure.

A Crystal Ball Moment, by Course Records Team

What both of these, and many others, suggested to me is how the possibility for creativity exists because of the existence of the group; it is not embodied in the individual. Toynbee would probably agree with this, but Löfgren would not approve of the project, precisely because it is the work group who in this instance provides the group identity. Osborne, though somewhat curmudgeonly, might see that creativity is far more appealing — “post heroic” and non-romanticised – when it is not seen as an attribute of the individual.

More on work : place in the future. Thanks to the rest of the project team: Karen Bush, Veerle van den Eynden, Gavin Sandercock, Matt Softly, Richard Stock and Dave Suggett.

references

1. Bilton, C. (2007) Management and creativity: from creative industries to creative management. Oxford, Blackwell Pub.
2. Löfgren, O. (2003) ‘The New Economy: A Cultural History’. Global Networks. A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 3: 239–254.
3. Osborne, T. (2003) ‘Against Creativity: a philistine rant’, Economy and Society 32(4): 507–525 .
4. Toynbee, J. (2000) Making popular music: musicians, creativity and institutions. London: Arnold.