Thursday is bin morning on my street. The rules are: bins out before 7; bins must be at the edge of the property, handles must point the prescribed way to help the loaders grab the bins and manoeuvre them quickly. I obey these rules to the letter, terrified that my bin will be deemed incorrectly placed and publicly rejected. I also sneakily watch the refuse workers on my street whenever I can. This is because their job demands that they run. Run really, really fast.

The bin loaders run down the street, collecting groups of bins together, loading the bins onto the bin wagon, putting bins back onto the road (in a lovely neat row. See image, plus weeds!), and running off – really fast — to the next group of bins. Their pace is set by the driver of the wagon who keeps his (it’s always been a he so far) vehicle moving all the time. This morning I passed as the loaders were heading to the next road. I think sprinting is the best description of their speed between streets.

Sociology has had a great deal to say about time and the control of work, drawing on other disciplines like history and economics too. We can look to EP Thompson’s (1967) seminal work on the introduction of ‘clock time’ into the workplace, with hours and minutes taking over the organization of work tasks rather than the task itself. Sociologists have explored the impact of ‘Taylorism’ and its time and motion studies on how work was organized and experienced in factories, including when the quest for time efficiencies was picked up by Henry Ford and introduced into his car plants via the moving assembly line. Sociologists have carried out some great research into how workers’ experience their work time (such as Miriam Glucksmann’s account of working on an assembly line in her book Women on the Line –first published under her pseudonym at the factory of Ruth Cavendish (1982)). Sociology has been fascinated with the speeding up of our working lives, and it has long asked crucial questions over whether our lives more generally are becoming more rushed or more leisurely (e.g. Veblen, 1963). And, of course, what role does profit accumulation play in any speed up?

Back to bins. My parents have lived in the same house for about 40 years now. They can’t get the wheelie bins out themselves anymore, so they have help from the local Council. So do many of those living along their street. Now, one of ‘the bin lads’ rushes ahead of the bin wagon to open the gates of those properties that are allowed help, to go and get the bins and place them out on the road. He puts the bins back after they are emptied, and closes the gates. Even with this weekly help, my mam and dad don’t know the names of any of the ‘lads’ anymore, not like they used to. ‘They are like whirlwinds these days’, my dad reports ‘in and out’. My parents still leave a tip each Christmas: a couple of pounds on top of the wheelie bin.

This all reminds me of a lovely study by Ian McIntosh and John Broderick. In a 1996 article they discussed what happened at work when Southburgh Borough Council contracted out its cleansing and refuse collections (in 1988). In particular, they detail the increased workload experienced by refuse collection workers and street cleaners. The refuse collection workers saw huge increases in the number of properties that they had to cover each day. McIntosh and Broderick note that the bin wagon now moved constantly in order to complete the routes in time. There was no time anymore for cups of tea from and with householders; no more biscuits, Christmas tips, chats and helping with odd jobs. Currently, Brendan Burchell is carrying out some great analysis of survey data to explore work intensification over the years and also in diverse societies. At the Work, Employment and Society conference in 2010, he reported that one of the questions he is most interested in is how much time we report having to work ‘at high speed’ in our jobs. I wonder what the bin loaders would report.

References

1. Burchell, B.J. (2006) Work Intensification in the UK. In D. Perrons, C Fagan, L McDowell K Ray and K Ward (Eds) Gender divisions and working time in the new economy. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
2. Cavendish, R. (1982) Women on the Line, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
3. McIntosh, I and Broderick, J. (1996) ‘Neither one thing nor the other’: compulsory competitive tendering and Southburgh Cleansing Services, Work, Employment and Society, 10, 3, 413–430.
4. Thompson, E.P. (1967) ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’ Past and Present: a Journal of Scientific History, 38, pp.56–176.
5. Veblen, T. (1963) The Theory of the Leisure Class, London: New English Library Limited (published originally in 1899).

Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content, that anyone can step up and do it for a thank-you and a cup of tea? Does he think that all a librarian does is to tidy the shelves? And who are these volunteers? Who are these people whose lives are so empty, whose time spreads out in front of them like the limitless steppes of central Asia, who have no families to look after, no jobs to do, no responsibilities of any sort, and yet are so wealthy that they can commit hours of their time every week to working for nothing? Who are these volunteers? Do you know anyone who could volunteer their time in this way? If there’s anyone who has the time and the energy to work for nothing in a good cause, they are probably already working for one of the voluntary sector day centres or running a local football team or helping out with the league of friends in a hospital. What’s going to make them stop doing that and start working in a library instead?

(read more from Pullman)

The second piece is a diagram and it reminds me that unpaid work is not only done by people for ‘good causes’, (and I have argued that even those working unpaid for ‘good causes’ were not simple altruists giving free time Taylor 2005). Unpaid work is done by anyone involved in a creative occupation or industry — musicians, artists, webdesigners, actors, writers — their work is their life, it is who they are, and who they are is defined by their work (Taylor and Littleton 2008 ). They continually cross the boundaries between paid and unpaid work, navigating between the need to earn a living and pay the rent, and the need to do what they do, and be recognised for what they do by their peers. They serve symbolic unpaid apprenticeships ‘working for free’, getting themselves known so they can eventually make money doing what they love, or they do something they don’t love so they can support the unpaid creative work they do. And here is Jessica Hische at http://shouldiworkforfree.com helping them (with tongue firmly in cheek) through the minefield of decisions about which unpaid jobs to do…and which to avoid:

Thanks Jessica.

References

1. Taylor, R. F. (2005) Rethinking Voluntary Work in Pettinger, L., Parry, J., Taylor, R. F. and Glucksmann, M. (eds.) (2005) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford: Blackwell.
2. Taylor, S. and Littleton, K. (2008), Art work or money: Conflicts in the construction of a creative identity. The Sociological Review, 56: 275–292.

When you become a carer (and if you haven’t already, the chances are you will for a time at least – there are 2.3 million new carers each year), you’ll work hard. You’ll strain your back lifting; you’ll be tired from waking at night to give medicine. You’ll learn how to manage complex treatment schedules. You’ll try not to scream at the individuals representing the institutions of the state who are supposed to help, but who ask you to fill in another form; who cancel your appointment at the last minute so you didn’t need to have a morning off work. Caring will make you cry. It will give you ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai, 2009), make you resent (once, sometimes, often) the person you care for and will cause your other relationships to suffer. You will gain new capacities, but at some cost. You will need praise, but you won’t get it from your boss. Life will be something to be coped with as well as something to enjoy.

Carer, by Kai Hendry

And yes, as a form of work it is complicated. It is unpaid, occurring in the private sphere, dominated by discourses of love and duty (Lyon, 2010), and carers are casually treated by welfare policy as being neither working nor unemployed. For example, carers allowance is awarded to those caring for 35+ hours per week. Once a carer starts claiming their pension, the allowance is removed even as the care duties remain, and so it isn’t a substitute for earned income. At best, it seems to be a symbolic payment, a rather miserly donation for being nice. Many carers combine care with paid work (60% of women, 74% of men of working age who care do this, according to Yeandle, 2008), and part of their care tasks may be to manage paid caregivers and service providers. Caring is not simple.

Glucksmann (2005) argues it’s not the location of an activity in the public sphere that means it should be called work, but the social relations that make it up. This means different configurations between state, market, family and voluntary sector give rise to different modes of organising care, and different interactions between paid and unpaid care (Lyon, 2010). Unpaid care work is not separate from market or state provision, rather the need for it is contingent on what sorts of other provision is possible or available in a country.

However, the formal organisation of care work is buttressed by discourses around who should care. Love and duty are in complement (and may be in tension) within a socio-cultural context that says that to be a good parent/wife/son/whatever is to take on the responsibility and activity of care; in the UK this impulse is enhanced by how alternative forms of caregiving are limited. And perhaps this is right: the quality of life of the person being cared for may be greater like this (although Nelson and England (2002) raise the question of whether paid-for care might well be morally right). It worth noting that this is not an inevitable, uncontestable moral position, but one that is regularly reproduced in media, government policy, by carers and those cared for as something which ought to be. The naturalisation of unpaid care as the way of showing love tends to override the difficulties of being a carer, and may be used to produce ‘fictive’ family ties when paid care is brought into the home.

Recognising care as work helps to understand the complexity of what care is, even though some carers would resist the label work, seeing caring as a gift of love. Thinking about care as work may help sort out the mess over benefits: it’s work, it needs support, and respite. And it may offer status to carers by acknowledging that there’s more to caring than loving. And that might offer carers a recognition that what they do has status; it’s not a natural gift and it doesn’t come for free.

References

1. Carers UK (2009) Facts About Carers.
2. Glucksmann, M. (2005) ‘Shifting Boundaries and Interconnections: Extending the ‘Total Social Organisation of Labour’’. In Pettinger, L., Parry, J. Taylor, R. F. and Glucksmann, M. (eds) (2005) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review.
3. Lyon, Dawn (forthcoming, 2010) ‘Intersections and Boundaries of Work and Non-work: The Case of Elder Care in Comparative European Perspective’ European Societies 12(1): 1–23.
4. Nelson, J. A. and England, P. (2002) ‘Feminist Philosophies of Love and Work’. Hypatia. Vol. 17, no 2 (spring) 1–18.
5. Ngai, S. (2005) Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Mass. and London.
6. Yeandle, S. (2008) Transforming Lives: Time for a New Social Contract for Care. Paper presented at Carers UK conference on Carers in Communities: The local transformation agenda.