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.

The Islanders (1939) dir Maurice Harvey. Permission of Royal Mail Film Archive.

In Exploring the Tomato: transformations of nature, economy and society (Mark Harvey, Steve Quilley and Huw Beynon, 2002), there is a chapter called ‘Broken Glass’, describing the extraordinary economic and social organisation of small growers (including part-time postmen), the Guernsey Tomato Marketing Board, and glasshouses made from the skeleton-frames of up-turned boats. It told of the system of English wholesale markets, and how the Guernsey ‘Potentate’ tomato (a powerful hybrid) had to endure a clunky two-week journey from grower to consumer, and of the standardisation and ‘process of qualification’ of tomatoes for mass consumer markets. This transitory world was shattered by the twin forces of competition from Dutch, North Sea Gas-warmed tomatoes and the growth of supermarket chains in the UK. The book was written nearly five years before I discovered the film – but could there have been some subliminal connection? A transmission of a kind of interest in the world?

The film transports us into a world as seen 65 years ago. One of many in a revolutionary genre of documentary films — Night Mail being the most famous —  The Islanders shows how the world was made rather than consumed. Social realist vision uncovers the work of world-making. So we see mostly men, mostly smoking, engaged in manual labour of producing, lifting and transporting tomatoes; the work of picking and grading; the work of making sales, of intermediating, and regulating. We are told only that restaurants demand regular, middle-sized, good-coloured tomatoes. The consumer as such is an absent figure. Further, this and many of the films from the GPO stable, unsurprisingly present a communications revolution, economies now made possible by radio and telephone, worlds connected, ships at sea rescued, letters delivered, telegrams sent, undersea cables laid. As today, the sense of a world being transformed by then revolutionary technologies of communication, wired social and economic organisation, is tangibly and visually exciting. The work of communication, of creating the infrastructures, occasionally at risk to working lives, is explored through stark and resolutely modernist imagery. The island dissolves into the planet, the planet into the universe, the film ends.

Orbiting the tomato: A door to a hidden-to-me dimension of my father. A refracting prism of past and present worlds. A society of proud production, now disappeared from visual representation (a genre documentary now dead) and buried by new forms of supermarket-dominated, consumer-oriented social and economic organisation. Work losing its core sociological reputation, and attempts to recover and re-visualise the tomato in the round, through its multiple presences. Such a simple fruit.

References

1. Harvey, M., Quilley, S. and Beynon, H. (2002) Exploring the Tomato: Transformations of Nature, Economy and Society Edward Elgar.

Arriving at the Port of Felixstowe

A few weeks ago, I went in search of fish at Felixstowe (on the Suffolk coast, UK), took a wrong turn and found myself trying to drive into the Port. In the few minutes it took to ask for directions at the security gate (where the men were very friendly and helpful), several lorries came and went, apparently disappearing into the unending stretch of the Port ahead of me. What goes on in all that space? I wondered, so a couple of weeks later, my friend and I joined the ‘ship-spotters’ at the Landguard Terminal viewing area. I had no idea what a pleasure that could be! You can watch the ships arrive into port (with the help of a marine pilot and tugs), ‘park’ (a process which looks especially tricky), and after a few hours, leave again with a different cargo (or with empty boxes given the discrepancy between imports and exports in the UK). It’s hard to grasp the sheer expanse of the site from any vantage point on the ground – at close to 200 hectares, it’s the size of about 185 football pitches. Still, after driving along the perimeter fence for about 10 minutes and seeing little other than containers (and not a single person!), I did get a sense of this space of the physical redistribution of goods in ‘a flow of dispersion-concentration-dispersion’ (Mark Harvey et al, 2002: 202–5).

It’s worth giving some details about the Port itself to begin to understand its significance, locally and globally. Privately owned by the Hutchison Port Holdings Group, according to the Port of Felixstowe website, Felixstowe is the largest and busiest container port in the UK, amongst the largest in Europe, and ranked 33 by container traffic in the World Port Ranking (2008). In one year, it handles over 3 million TEUs (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units – containers are either 20 or 40 feet long), 4000 ships, and over 40% of the UK’s import and export trade. It’s hard to overstate the impact of containerisation which transformed cargo shipping in the second half of the 20th Century (Levinson, 2006). Felixstowe, with its offer of deep water next to the quay (up to 15m maintained by dredging) and its location close to the open sea, was just right for a container terminal (built in 1966). It usurped Liverpool, London and other urban ports in the UK, as those sites were less convenient and couldn’t handle the size of these new ships. (See Ports of Call for memories of the communities surrounding the Royal Docks in London.)

Transport connections

The minimal cost of transporting goods in containers means that it’s not only cheaper to produce a flat-screen TV in China, it’s cheaper to move it half way around the world to the UK coast than to deliver it from South to North within Britain for example (BBC4, 2010). The spatial arrangements of these complex global distribution networks reflect the current logic of commodity production and consumption where distance is no obstacle since space is overcome by time (David Harvey, 1992). The success of keeping things moving also relies on a broader infrastructure of rail and road and at Felixstowe, some rail lines are owned by the Port connecting with those of other Train Operating Companies in order that boxes can be directly loaded onto trucks or trains. So in addition to shipping lines, the whole process requires rails companies, forwarding and line agents, and logistics and distribution companies.

The history of containerisation is however also a history of the demise of the dockworker, a painful transition whereby metal boxes and software replaced the dockers’ hook and their physical labour. As Marc Levinson puts it,

‘The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy. The armies of will-paid, ill-treated workers who once made their livings loading and unloading ships in every port are no more, their tight-knit waterfront communities now just memories.’ (2006: 2)

In BBC4’s ‘The Box that Changed Britain’ which aired earlier this month, we see a single person overseeing a computer-allocated process of unloading and reloading by crane, doing what tens of thousands of men (and it is all men in these stories) previously did. This dramatic reduction of labour is also mirrored by the handful of men who now work on the massive container ships themselves.

Another representation of contemporary dock work can be seen in The Wire. Moving freight in containers that generally don’t get opened is a widely recognised opportunity for the informal economy – both in The Wire and in the real life presence of the UK Border Agency at Felixstowe with its designated spaces to examine the contents of the containers. The boxes are all uniquely coded, but at the same time, anonymised and opaque. In the police investigation into irregular practices in Baltimore in the second series of The Wire, it is the computer representation of their movement in space that finally reveals the ‘disappearance’ of boxes and their goods. Albeit a fictionalised depiction, it presents the understanding and practice of the work of managing the physical distribution of goods to the viewer as mediated by how it’s depicted on the computer screen.

Waiting containers

The current Port of Felixstowe is quite a setup, with around 40 shipping lines operating from the site. Open for business 24 hours a day, (almost) every day (see the sailing schedule here), there is a workforce of close to 3000. The range of what they do is striking: there’s lots of engineering of course, plus systems development and planning, rail operations, yard control and stevedoring. And the Port has its own dedicated police, fire and ambulance services. On the Port website (from which this information is taken), the list of ‘ancillary services’ also indicates the variety of associated work activities which wouldn’t happen without it – chauffeurs, marine surveyors and ship repairs, financial services, IT, and many more, plus of course all the domestic labour that must remain flexible to support a 24 hour operation. And the primary activity they are all there to carry out or support is to move things around. That’s really the thing that struck me most; the enormous amount of stuff there is in this ‘holding space’ — and one that many commercial organisations effectively use as a de facto mobile storage facility — that marks the landscape with its presence.

References
1. BBC4 ‘The Box that Changed Britain’, 9 May 2010: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00scpzn.
2. Harvey, D. (1992) The Limits to Capital, Basil Blackwell (Oxford) and University of Chicago.
3. Harvey, M., S. Quilley and H. Beynon (2002) Exploring the Tomato, Transformations of Nature, Society and Economy, Edward Elgar.
4. Levinson, M. (2006) The Box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger, Princeton University Press.

What’s notable about the reporting of the dispute is who is imagined to be damaged by strike action: it is you, my reader and telly watcher, you the imagined, eternal and all-important consumer. You are no longer a shadowy presence; you have had your honeymoon plans destroyed. Whilst the workforce are specified by the fact of their employment for BA, you the consumer are everyman, and you the consumer ought not be disadvantaged by those pesky strikers. There is no hint that you are also a worker.

Casablanca Airport by John Spooner

The BA dispute — and the political interventions provoked by it — has broader implications for discussions of pay and working conditions than just this case. It influences the landscape in which further discussions and decisions about labour law and labour rights are made, and relates to political sensitivity to the consumer the worker, to the power of management and the privileged status afforded to protecting the brand. The consumer is not the only universal figure in our social life. We are workers, too.

References

1. Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press.
2. Taylor, S. And Tyler, M. (2000) ‘Emotional labour and sexual difference in the airline industry’. Work, Employment and Society. 14:77–95.
3. Williams C. (2003) ‘Sky service: the demands of emotional labour in the airline industry’. Gender, Work and Organization. 10 (5) 513–550.

John Spooner photographs used under creative commons license

‘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.

Walking matters to get to work and leave again; look at Alan Bates as Vic Brown in A Kind of Loving, trying to track Ingrid when the buzzer goes and all the staff of Dawson Whittaker walk out of the gates; walking here is flirting (from c 4 minutes into this clip).

But we don’t often think about walking as a way of doing work. It is one of many dimensions of working lives that is taken for granted: the sales assistant rushes from fitting room to clothes rail and back again in response to a customer request, or the administrator wanders down the corridor to ask a favour, workers in Durand’s Peugeot factory must walk sideways, as they work up the line, and they walk to the store area to get more equipment, carrying double the amount they’re supposed to, to save needing to take another trip.

Walking is often a taken for granted bodily movement, an action most of us do often and unthinkingly, the leg swing, foot levering and the many tiny but essential adjustments the body makes at each step. It is integral to many forms of work as skill, training and knowledge are, though we might only notice it when we or someone else can’t manage it.

References

1. Durand, J. P. and Hatzfeld, N. (2003) Living Labour: Life on the Line at Peugeot France. Palgrave Macmillan.
2. A Kind of Loving (1962) dir John Schlesinger.

photograph: PA/The Guardian

Sweeping the M1, 1959

I find this photo compelling. The M1, highpoint of Modern Britain, and the roadsweeper, with brush in hand. We have never been modern.

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.

It came from a friend of mine who used to work as a navvy.[1] One of the most demanding things they had to do was to stretch the rail. It’s important to make sure there’s no give left in the rail to prevent it from expanding then buckling in the summer heat. You get less than 10 inches from a quarter of a mile of track, but still, that’s enough to realise the malleability of it. At the same time, the stubbornness of the piece that was left over, cut off, and is now in my house, makes it hard to believe it could be anything other than rock-solid.

Sitting here now, what it reminds me of is the sheer physicality of the work that goes into maintaining the track; and the sheer materiality of the track. Of just how much work continues to be done in the world through the strength of bodies and hands. And how much stuff there is around us that’s discarded material itself produced through work.

photography by Lynne Pettinger

The idea of post — something that comes directly to your doormat for 39p that someone else pays — is pretty amazing. We used to get milk and eggs on the doorstep, maybe dusters and cleaning equipment courtesy of the travelling salesman. Now though, its only the post that arrives like this. It is a daily triumph that the post comes to me direct (even as I get mostly bills, marketing and letters to families who have long since moved out of my house).

The postman’s job is unreplaceable, but it is affected by technologies. The bicycle and the delivery van; the rubber band, the sack and the street storage boxes; the uniform and the letter box in my front door are all parts of this. And that is without thinking about the technologies of collection, sorting and movement. The fundamental job of the postman, though, is to move from door to door, up my street and down yours. It requires body work and an engagement with the material cultures of people’s homes and their private and public messages. There is no way of not having a postman if the post is to be delivered. So thank you postman. I think you have a romantic job.

Though booming internet shopping might keep some postmen in work, even as Royal Mail loses the contract to deliver Amazon parcels, his job isn’t quite as romantic as once it was. Gone are the days of daily letters or postcards, and even bills are now delivered online. That seems like a loss to me, I like getting and sending postcards. So please send me a letter. Send me the pillow you dream on. Send in the clowns. Send me birthday cards, sympathy cars, a postcard from your holiday and a thank you for dinner. Let the postman make me happy.

References

1. Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital; the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York, Monthly Review Press.
2. Kobayashi, Y., Kuno, Y., Niwa, H., Akiya, N., Okada, M. Yamazaki, K. and Yamazaki, A. (2009) ‘Assisted-Care Robot Initiation of Communication in Multiparty Settings’. Chi 2009 conference, Boston MA.
3. Schwartz Cowan, R. (1989) More Work for Mother: the Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. London: Free Association.
4. Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. London : Allen Lane.