In the Workers’ Museum, this is described as an octopus woman. I was able to find out that this provocative image was used by the Kvindeligt Arbejderforbund (Female Workers Confederation) as part of their fight for equal pay in Denmark in the early 1970s, but it speaks to me today on many levels. Of course there is the important level of the continuing need to fully respect work done in the home as just that—work. Unpaid care work is work that can be hard, but also rewarding; work that contributes to our families, communities, and economies, and that should be valued because of these contributions, rather than devalued because it does not directly earn a paycheck.

On another level, this image can also be a metaphor for work more generally. What is work? Too often work is looked at as only one thing, specifically as just a way to earn a living. This is not only unduly narrow, it is destructive. Seeing work only in this way means that job quality is reduced to the dollars and cents on a paycheck, and the bidding down of wages and benefits in a global economy is seen as a natural course of events than cannot be checked. When work is thought of as only about money, it creates a culture where it is necessary and acceptable to closely monitor, supervise, and incentivize employees. This is captured by another object in the Workers’ Museum—a clipboard with a built-in stopwatch used by managers to break work down into simple, repetitive, mindless tasks.

In my recent book, “The Thought of Work” (Cornell University Press, 2011), I try to fight the “one best way” approach to thinking about work that frequently dominates not only public and private policies on work, but also scholarly research. While we need to guard against work becoming all-consuming—the octopus woman image also demonstrates how easy it is to become overburdened by work—I try to embrace the metaphor of the octopus woman by recognizing and valuing work as many things. When we work, we do more than earn a living, we also create, care for, and serve others. We hopefully derive some satisfaction, but also a deeper understanding of our own identities. It is time for researchers to do a better job talking with each other across disciplinary lines, and more importantly, it is time for social norms as well as private and public policies on work to truly embrace work’s fundamental importance.

References

1. Budd, John W. (2011) The Thought of Work. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

It used to be that the newspaper report would say “The police were tipped off about the whereabouts of the gold bullion”. And in Evelyn Waugh’s, Scoop, that sort-of journalist William Boot, who hoped to go to Ishmaelia as a spy but ended up being sent as a journalist, finds that “Now he had something under his hat; a tip-off straight from headquarters, news of high international importance” (Waugh, 2003: 101), Boot might have found a red under the bed.

Tip-offs make the world go round; they are a flow of secret knowledge. Imagine this as a tip-off story: the police tip-off a bunch of journalists about the coming arrest of an ex-journalist for possibly having hacked a phone to get a tip-off to write a scoop. The police employ an ex-journalist who hacked a phone for a tip-off in order to better manage their public presence and this ex-journalist is mates with another ex-journalist who has the ear of the PM. The police know the journalists who know the politicians who know the police. They’re tipping-off to their hearts content, from behind the smokescreens of public relations who keep on saying no-one knows about this tip-off circle.

2. Strategic Ignorance

Murdoch, R., Murdoch J. and Brooks, R. appear before a Select Committee of elected MPs to explain phone hacking. The Chairman and CEO of NewsCorp, the Chief Executive of Newscorp and the Chief Executive of News International and former newspaper editor know nothing now and knew less then. They’re shocked and horrified, but they deny. They employing “strategic ignorance”, Linsey McGoey’s compelling phrase to describe the

“feigning of ignorance — whether deliberately or unconsciously, collectively or individually [which] answers the twin demands of appearing transparent while wielding control over the very information one has an interest in concealing.” (McGoey, 2007: 216–7)

There’s no unequivocal bliss to be had in ignorance though: responses on twitter either mock or are horrified by the vacuum of control implied by the NewsCorp/NewsInternational ignorance position.

3. The Art of Asking Questions

We’re used to interviews now. We’ve all been interviewed: by our future bosses, by our GPs, some of us by the police, and some of us by social scientists (see Mike Savage (2010) for a discussion of how respondents of early interview-based research projects seemed flattered to be asked to give their views). We’re used now to having our views and experience sought out, and there’s no doubt that Yates, Stephenson, Murdoch, Murdoch and Brooks interviewed in Select Committees yesterday have been questioned before.
Fewer of us have experience of asking questions, and not all question-askers are skilled – however many episodes of tv shows about sharp lawyers we might watch. Tom Watson MP and his short, sharp questions based on detailed preparation gave a masterclass in expert interviewing, of pushing the respondent towards revelation. Louise Mensch MP (for example) gave us words, lots of words, assertion and opinion: a grandstanding questioner doesn’t produce excitement .

References

1. McGoey, Linsey(2007)‘On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy’, Economy and Society,36:2,212 — 235.
2. Mike Savage (2010) Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method Oxford, Clarendon.
3. Waugh, Evelyn (2003 [1938]) Scoop</> Penguin.

The guard’s function was mainly to open and close the doors at stations and give the signal to the driver (known as a Motorman) to proceed. I worked on the Northern line between 1977 and 1981, starting as a guard and qualifying as a Guard Motorman in 1980 (a Guard Motorman being the in-between stage on one’s way to becoming a full-time driver).

At that time the Northern line was known as the ‘misery line’, quite rightly so, as the service was plagued by staff absenteeism and frequent equipment failure. Problems were often compounded by the complicated nature of the line’s layout, especially at Camden Town where the two branches from Edgeware and High Barnet converge and then diverge to either the Charing Cross or City Branches. No modern tube line would be designed like this — have a look at the Victoria Line (opened in 1968) which has no branches or junctions and was One Man Operated (known as O.M.O in the trade) from its inception. The absence of passenger toilets on the system meant that late night boozers coming home from the pubs often used the platform ends or cross passages to relieve themselves so this added to the general fug which was counteracted (and compounded) by an evil-looking green powder which was sprinkled liberally in problem areas. Train crews also urinated in the tunnels or underground sidings and there were even a few instances of persons unknown defecating in the Tooting Broadway siding. As if that wasn’t bad enough there was found to be a section of tunnel between Golders Green and Hampstead which was lined with blue asbestos.

Camden Town was also one of the locations on the line where train crews would break for meals (or a P.N.R. — Physical Needs Relief) and once the service started to get out of sync the situation often arose where a crew due to come off for a meal break would find no relief crew waiting for them (either because they hadn‘t finished their meal break or because they were delayed on another train). Most of the staff had a pretty bloody-minded attitude to the job and we worked to rule all the time secure in the knowledge that the unions would protect us if the need arose. Given the above, the word ‘misery’ seems a fair adjective to use.

New recruits to London Transport (as it was known then) had to undergo a period of training at the White City School. There we sat in classrooms, kitted out in brand new uniforms that felt like they were manufactured from cardboard for East German border guards and learned about train equipment, signalling and emergency procedures (smoking was allowed in class!). First though, we had to watch an old black and white film called Rail Crash, presumably to give us the idea of what shouldn’t happen on a railway. In fact London Transport had one of the best safety records of any railway in the world up until the Moorgate crash in 1975. In the twenty-five years prior to that there had been one serious collision in Stratford (1953) where a train had run into the back of another in a tunnel resulting in the deaths of twelve people.

Once through the classroom stage, I (and my fellow newbies) were itching to get out and participate in what we had been lead to believe was a glorious undertaking with strict adherence to all aspects of rules, regs and time-keeping. (In fact, just about the only place on the whole LT network that had strict time-keeping enforced was the School). So with a head full of ominous and highly technical sounding jargon like Dead Man’s Handle, Tripcock Isolating Cock (TIC) and Drivers Brake Valve Isolating Cock (DBVIC) I reported for duty at some ungodly hour of the morning at a depot on the Central line where I was to finally get my hands on a train.

A guard’s job included taking over the controls of a train in an emergency and believe it or not the practice at the time was to learn to drive on a train in passenger service, despite the existence of simulators (you can try one in the London Transport Museum). On entering the cab of my appointed train the driver stepped away from the controls and told me to take over, he then gave me verbal instructions as to what to do. The chief skill involved in driving a train is in judging the braking and given that there is a trip system that prevents trains passing red signals this system of learning to drive is not as dodgy as it sounds. The passengers did get a rough ride though as a common mistake made by learners is ‘dropping the dead-man’ i.e. letting go of the Dead Man’s Handle which results in instant emergency braking and a loud noise of compressed air escaping. Some Dead Man’s Handles (I never heard the expression in the plural using Men’s) had a particularly fierce spring so were quite hard to hold down.

At the other end of the train the guard’s position was inside the last carriage (on some lines in the cab) and consisted of two panels, one either side of the car. Learning the guard’s job was also done on a train in passenger service and consisted of opening and closing the passenger doors, giving the signal to the driver to proceed and watching the train out of the station. Once the guard’s key had been inserted in the panel the controls would become live and enable the guard’s door to be operated independently of the rest of the train doors. The guard would open his or her door first when the last car entered the station and after checking that the train was fully in the station would then open the passenger doors by depressing two buttons simultaneously. After passengers had detrained and entrained the doors would be closed and the signal given to the driver to proceed (one ring on a bell operated by a button on the panel). As the train left the station the guard would keep an eye out for any untoward activity on the platform and close the guard’s door making sure that his or head was in the carriage before the train reached the end of the platform.

Tea can

Eventually a guard would be teamed up with a regular driver in one of the depots serving the line that he or she was working on. It was advisable to live near one’s depot as the first shift started at 05:19, the latest morning start time being 07:43. There were also shifts that started throughout the afternoon, a few night shifts and some ‘split’ shifts. Split shifts involved coming to work twice in one day to work in peak hours. Night shift crews ran the last trains at night, late staff trains, early staff trains and the first trains in the mornings. We also had ‘spare’ crews whose function was to be there in case of staff absenteeism. Night spare was a good shift — come to work, book on, if everybody shows up for work either bed down for the night in the mess-room or go home and come back in the morning to book off. I was lucky enough to end up crewed with a driver with whom I shared some interests and we spent many hours at night listening to jazz, reading and drinking Darjeeling tea. We were probably the only crew who had string on our tea-bags and as far as I know there was only one bloke on the whole of the Northern Line who drank coffee made in a cafetiere. Every mess-room had a hot water urn and most guards and drivers owned a white enamel tea can, the lid of which served as a cup. Other mess-room activities included playing cards, snooker at a couple of the depots, and I once saw a driver making a clock-surround from clothes-pegs.

There was also a lot of time to kill whilst running the service given that most of the guard’s time was spent not opening and closing doors. I read newspapers and did crosswords, eventually graduating to the Times via the Sun, Evening News or Standard, Telegraph and Guardian. I also played chess with one driver and games would start at the beginning of the shift with moves being made when we saw each other — either at the end of the line, in which case one had plenty of time for deliberation during the journey there — or at meal breaks. I am convinced that I learned more in four years of reading newspapers and doing crosswords than I had in the whole of my school career. Other times I just sat and stared at and re-read endlessly the adverts above me and even perfected the art of dozing off between stations to catch up on missed sleep. To this day I cannot sleep on a tube train without waking up every time it stops.

Guard’s panel

There were quite a few ‘characters’ at my depot (East Finchley), including a guard whose nickname was ‘Killer’, so-called because he had been involved in a passenger fatality in the Kennington Loop. The Kennington Loop was a section of track south of Kennington on the Charing Cross branch where trains would run empty southbound into the loop after detraining and emerge on the northbound platform. Killer was a diminutive Asian man who spoke unintelligible English and apparently a lack of communication between him and the driver over the train intercom had had something to do with the accident. This wasn’t surprising as the intercoms on the 1938 trains were almost useless. The guard’s panel had a small speaker and microphone with button next to it, the technique for using the apparatus being to press the button and shout into the microphone. At the other end of the train the driver would hear a strangled squawk from his speaker if he was lucky and using the same procedure as the guard, would shout back. The guard meanwhile in anticipation of a reply would have his ear pressed hard against the speaker grill — the whole procedure being akin to communicating with deaf relatives at Christmas. Killer was crewed with a huge taciturn West-Indian driver, who was mainly interested in playing cards, or sometimes with a very overweight moustachioed racist who drove like a maniac and arrived at junctions minutes early. This meant that the train would be held to time by the signalman. Passengers on his trains had all the fun of the demented fairground followed by seemingly interminable tedium.

Only two of the train staff at my depot wore full uniform, i.e. including hat, tie and matching jacket and trousers and most didn’t bother to carry all the equipment that was required i.e. timetables, traffic circular, note-book, lost property labels etc. Nearly everyone carried a hand-lamp though, although I don’t remember ever using mine or being aware of anyone else using theirs. Drivers carried a phone which could be connected to wires in the tunnel to speak to the line controller in an emergency. On finding lost property the guard was required to attach a label to it with details of where and when found, and hand it in at a terminal station at the next convenient opportunity. I never found anything of interest except an empty suitcase (quite a big deal at the time because of the IRA activity in London), and of course umbrellas. Quite a few of the train crews had snazzy umbrellas which they had found and kept. The rest ended up at the Lost Property Office in Baker Street which was run by a man rejoicing in the nickname of ‘Mr Brolly’. When he retired he walked out of the building under an umbrella guard of honour.

Then there were the suicides, sometimes referred to as ‘a person under a train’ in official passenger announcements or ‘one under’ by the staff. Deep tunnel stations have a trench in the centre of the track known as the ‘Suicide Pit’ and if you fall into the pit you will survive a train passing over you (these were installed during the depression in the 1930s). Apart from the risk of being mangled by a train there is a hefty current of 640 Volts D.C running through the positive rail which in stations is always furthest from the platform. I once saw a woman who had crossed the track at East Finchley, lie down across the running rail and positive rail and electrocute herself. My chief memory of that incident is of the smell of burnt hair. We often stepped on the rails whilst walking to the depot to prepare a train for service, not that we were supposed to of course. Some drivers at my depot had had as many as three suicides and I was lucky to avoid a suicide myself when driving, as the train behind me was chosen instead. This was at Waterloo going north, where trains enter the platform at about 30 mph. It doesn’t sound fast but even with full braking it would take more than half a platform length to stop. Jumping in front of a tube train is not a guaranteed way of killing yourself, surprisingly it is only about 50% effective and often results in horrific injuries instead. There are up to 100 such incidents every year on the network — many drivers have been severely traumatised by them and unable to drive again.

So how does a guard on a train in service happen to have a hot cup of tea? At East Finchley going south, the driver’s cab is right next to the stairs to the mess room so after stopping and securing the train, the driver runs up the stairs with a tea can, fills it and runs back down. This takes less than a minute. The driver pours a cup of tea and stops short at the next station (Highgate), leaving the tea can at the guard’s end of the platform before pulling fully into the station. After opening the doors the guard alights and picks up the can from the platform. A cup of tea and a newspaper help to pass the time, the only other entertainment being trying to trap double-bassists and their instruments in the doors.

Follow this link for an account of the last 1959 Tube Stock Train to run on the Northern Line: http://www.squarewheels.org.uk/rly/1959final/. District Dave’s website is very good too: http://www.trainweb.org/districtdave/index.html.

Bell is often quoted as describing the service work that characterises post-industrial society as ‘a game between persons’, unlike industrial society which he characterises as ‘a game against fabricated nature’, centred on the relationship between man and machine (1999 [1973]: 17). Interactive service work can readily be imagined as a game between persons: between customer and waiter, there is hierarchy, deference and a complex negotiation over power (see Paules (1996) for interesting discussion of how waiters resist customers’ attempts to denigrate them).

“Michel Roux’s Service” is currently showing on BBC. Here we see another instance of reality TV showing us how to be better workers by training us in the ludic art of personality (I’d rather we learned how to be better customers). Eight unemployed young people are being trained to control body and feeling; to perform authentically;  and to empathise with the demanding customer by denying their own distance from how the customers live. They are to treat customers as their friends, though they are not the customer’s friends. Much is made of how bad the British are at giving service; we’re too uppity and resistant to subservience. So these workers learn how not to notice that they have feelings.

Fred Sirieix trains the recruits in the raw art of talking to customers, carrying plates and so on. (And you shouldn’t laugh at this unless you know how to carry three hot plates across a crowded room without disturbing the arrangement of the food: denying that service work requires skill is a form of symbolic violence). He doesn’t seem to offer much guidance in the many tiny decisions about organising your work that any waiter needs to constantly do in order to keep on top of service (see Gatta, (2002) for a nice description of the complexity of waitressing). He’s keen to point out that the challenge and pleasure of interactive service work makes it noble.

But the interpretation of Bell’s game between persons made by Sirieix is disturbing. In episode 1 he defines the good waiter as a ghost. This ghost is always looking at you — the customer — just in case you need something. It’s sensing you, anticipating you. It’s not a person (anymore), just “a felt presence – an anima, geist, or genius – that possesses and gives a sense of social aliveness to a place” (Michael Bell, emphasis in original, cited in Wynn, 2007). The ghost has no personhood, really; it places plates FROM THE RIGHT and clears plates FROM THE LEFT as though any deviation will materialise evil. All the attention the waiter must pay to his smile, his clothes, his body odour, work to produce him as an absent presence. Having good character here means not really existing. The game is not between persons. It’s between a person and a ghost. Bell’s characterisation of industrial society has more purchase here: the game is to fabricate a human as nature, which means turning person into a machine.

References

1. Bell, D. (1999 [1973]) The coming of post-industrial society: a venture in social forecasting. New York, Basic Books.
2. Gatta, M. (2002) Juggling Food and Feelings: Emotional Balance in the Workplace. Lanham MD: Lexington Books.
3. Paules, G. (1996). Resisting the symbolism of service. In C. Macdonald & C. Sirianni (Eds.), Working in the service society (pp. 264–290). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
4. Wynn, J. R. (2007) ‘Haunting Orpheus: problems of space and time in the desert.’ In Clough, P. T (ed.) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Duke University Press.

[1] A pleasurably cautious subtitle; academic training discourages futurology. Those who took up Bell’s work were not so restrained – see Alvin Toffler (1981) The Third Wave . New York: Bantam Books.

At work

Forty years on, Davide is running the place. He’s the third generation of his family to do so. The Old Coffee, in the Castello area of Cagliari, Sardinia, was originally set up by his great uncle more than 100 years ago. In due course, Davide’s father took over, and then after the death of his mother, Davide gave up his studies to work alongside his father. He remarks on how it was one of those decisions that you make at the time and don’t see the way it’s shaping your life.

‘So what’s it like to work here?’ I ask him repeatedly on my visits to the caffè, trying to fathom the combination of constraint and autonomy that mark his life. ‘L’amo e l’odio. I love it and hate it.’ It’s a line he uses often. It’s demanding, first, in terms of presence. Someone has to be there. It’s almost always him although occasionally he is helped by a nephew. ‘If I want to go somewhere, I can just close up,’ he says. Of course it’s true in principle but it’s difficult to follow through in practice. He always needs to be ahead of himself too, managing stock for what’s happening next week and into the future. But he also has to think of today, to be ready for the rhythms of coffee consumption, panini at lunchtime, apertivi and so on. He’s open from 9am to 9pm in the week, closing for a few hours on Saturday afternoon, then all day on Sunday. Plus he needs to be present in a different kind of way, available to listen to customers who come in for a moment of contact and perhaps some understanding. Even if he doesn’t always feel like it, he sees this as part of his role.

It’s very visible to the stranger’s eye how well he takes care of the place. Some of the original furnishings are in tact and the built-in display cabinets are especially unusual. Not only are they beautiful in themselves but Davide has filled them with an extraordinary collection of objects. ‘Will you tell me something about what’s here?’ I ask, pointing to a wall of cabinets, dark wooden doors at the bottom, and glass-panelled ones at the top. ‘They are things I like,’ he explains. ‘Look, here are some sweet jars like the ones we used to have. And this, well this was my grandmother’s.’ He opens a door and takes out a cup and saucer from a coffee service. It’s complete, he points out, including small plates, a jug and sugar bowl, and is around 130 years old. I hold a cup – carefully. It’s quirky and beautiful with an uneven decorated rim that would make it impossible to drink from!

If some of the objects in the caffè are living connections to the past, a past which is both Davide’s personal history, memories and relationships, and the history of the caffè itself, others have come to be there more directly from the former life of the caffè: old drinks signs and trays, as well as some pictures and photographs. There is a third kind of object there too: things that Davide has ‘lived’ that he likes to see in the present. There is a set of old records (vinyl), and various collections from hobbies and interests, for instance radios and cameras. This all adds up to the caffè being a repository of other lives and other dimensions of life as well as an everyday workplace and a space of consumption.

‘What of the future then?’ I ask at some point. Davide’s sons are established in their own fields of study and work and there is, at the moment at least, no one in line to take the place on when the time is right. He does not know what will happen. In the meantime though, Davide has made this place his own, whilst maintaining this family tradition through his work.

First, there are the nets. The tuna are effectively trapped in an elaborate series of nets, known as a tonnara, anchored at sea. Taken out of their winter storage, the nets must be repaired and arranged ready to be put in position. If the whole process of tuna-fishing is a very male dominated one, women are nevertheless involved in the making and mending of the nets (van Ginkel, 2005). Although the details of the sizes of the sections are tightly guarded secrets, the pieces are numerous: 1,812 in Favignana, calculates Theresa Maggio (1990: 112). Getting this ‘unseen architecture’ (Maggio, 1990: 129) in place at sea is not at all straightforward. Each section of the nets must be secured, which means using anchors that are themselves as heavy as the tuna.

In the model of the tonnara at the Museo Civico di Carolforte in the images above, the nets form a T-shape (seen here on its side). The length of the T (in the large photo on the left) is the section the tuna first encounter which impedes their forward movement. As a result they are channelled towards a series of ‘rooms’ (along the top of the T) until they reach the camera delle morte, the death chamber (shown photographed from above in the bottom right image). The ‘rooms’ that the nets create need to be large (up to 100meters long) so the tuna can move easily, which they must do to be able to breathe and continue to reproduce. Work on the nets doesn’t end when they are in place; they have to be maintained. The adult tuna that are coming up against them are large (more than 100kilos), strong and fast. And there’s the work of counting the number of tuna trapped too — through glass-bottomed buckets, or by the feel of vibrations on a line dropped into the different rooms (Longo, 2009: 143) — until the rais, the head fisherman, decides the time is right…

It’s hard to overstate the significance and status of the rais in this world. He has near-total authority, retains his title and is given ongoing respect into retirement (and beyond the grave, with headstones marked, ‘rais’). He has a profound understanding of the sea and of the tonnara. Indeed, all the tonarotti (the tuna fishers) are highly skilled mariners, learning what to do through a kind of apprenticeship system, and although there is a strong formal hierarchy and division of labour, in practice, the men turn their hands to many aspects of the work (Longo, 2009: 127). It is a highly labour-intensive process, a total bodily and sensory experience of work, and one they talk about in terms of dignity and gratification, as well as hard work (Longo, 2009: 148).

When the rais gives the signal, the tonnarotti gather in specially designed boats around the edge of the camera delle morte. This final chamber differs from the others as it also has ‘floor’. This means that the net can be raised, bringing the tuna closer to the surface. That is when the slaughter of the increasingly tired tuna takes place. It relies on the close cooperation of the tonarotti who kill the fish in a ritualised way (van Ginkel, 2005: 73), accompanied by traditional songs and prayers, and using hooks, gaffs and knives, as in the images here, one old (taken from the website of Isola di Piana), one more recent (taken from Italia a Tavola).

Although it has been criticised by environmental movements, and in spite of the fact that the blue-fin tuna is an endangered species, killing tuna in this way has not been widely contested, in comparison with the whale drive for instance, with which it has a lot in common. In the latter, animal rights have come to trump traditional practices associated with ‘cultural rights’ in public debate (van Ginkel, 2005). Trapping tuna is thought to be one of the oldest forms of industrial fishing still in existence, originally an Arab practice, and at least 1200 years old. Once found all across the Mediterranean, there are now just a few tonnare still in operation. In these cases, people still work and live from the catch. When it is good, as it was last year on the Isola di San Pietro we were told, life improves for everyone. As one of the tonarotti in Theresa Maggio’s study of Favignana explains:

‘You do it because it’s survival. You do it to live. Or you don’t choose this life. You become a banker. It’s not for the violence. It’s not something I do for pleasure, or to please others. It’s survival’ (Maggio, 1990: 127).

Whether or not it’s cruel, the quantity of tuna caught in this way is tiny compared to the industrial scale and methods of fishing: long lines of up to 50 miles, and purse-seines that can catch thousands, even tens of thousands of fish at once. In contrast to the traditional practices, this is highly capital intensive, and the catch needs to be enormous for profits to be maintained (Longo, 2009: 169). However, these methods also catch younger tuna, including those of pre-spawning age, with the effect of hugely depleting stocks into the future. It is the apparent insatiability of the Japanese market that makes fishing them in this way so profitable, at least in the short-term, albeit with the risk of total collapse in the Mediterranean (Longo, 2009). If a fish of less than 30 kilos is amongst those in the traps off the coast of the Isola di San Pietro, it is freed. Most of those killed are mature adult fish in excess of 100 kilos.

Once the tuna is caught, there is other work to do still. Although nowadays a large share of the tuna is sent directly to Japan, some is still gutted, cooked and tinned, and the roe dried in Sardinia. The canning factory no longer exists on the island, but the museum houses a delightful model made by local school children of how the factory — and occupational community — was believed to have been organised in the late 19th century. Fish larger than the people working on them are seen to be gutted and cut into pieces (by men) and cooked (by women). And, today, as then, the roe of the tuna continues to be dried locally by traditional methods to make bottarga.

After the final mattanza of the season, the work of anchoring the nets in place has to be undone. They must be packed away for next year when the process begins all over again…

References
1. Longo, Stefano B (2009) Global Sushi, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oregon.
2. Maggio, T (2000) Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily, Perseus Publishing.
3. van Ginkel, Rob (2005) ‘Killing Giants of the Sea: Contentious Heritage and the Politics of Culture’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 15(1): 71–98.

Kerry was a careers advisor in a career she hated. She took redundancy and spent her pay-out ‘upskilling’, taking a vocational MA, which she thought would increase her chance of a job in the culture industries. She did what is supposed to be right: she aspired to higher qualifications, and she aspired to fulfilling work. She did well on the course. And she learned that what would make the difference to her chances of good, exciting work wasn’t the quality of her work, it was the quality of her network.

Unemployed since the end of the course, Kerry has just found the most temporary of jobs: as a “Peak Relief Assistant” at a local library. She provides holiday and sickness cover for full time workers. On a temporary contract, her working hours are flexible and contingent (on their being holiday and sickness) and her job content is unpredictable. Further, the continued existence of her job is dependent on structural changes to the public sector: in the aftermath of public sector spending cuts, two pincer moves might stymie Kerry’s chances of ‘good’ employment: firstly hers, the most precarious of jobs is easiest to cut, and secondly ‘efficiency savings’ will render more jobs ‘flexible’ so her chance of locating stable employment, and a stable life, will lessen. Kerry experiences of both sides of precarity: the precarity of networked life in the culture industries (Gill and Pratt, 2008), and the precarity of temporary, flexiblised service work (McDowell, et al, 2009). She scrapes an unpredictable living.

Cuts, rhetorical shifts, changing social welfare and the drive to ever more competition are producing a hyper-precarious labour market. This labour market has precarious employment relationships, precarious forms of work (what Barbier (2008) calls ‘jobs without status’), high and rising unemployment, and attacks on already undependable, and moralised, mechanisms of social support. It’s no way to make a living.

References

1. Barbier, J C (2008) ‘There is more to Job Quality that ‘Precariousness’: a Comparative Epistemological Analysis of the ‘Flexibility and Security’ Debate in Europe’. In Flexibility and Employment Security in Europe: Labour Markets in Transition. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
2. Gill, R. and Pratt, A.C. (2008). ‘In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work.’ Theory, Culture and Society Annual Review 25(7–8):1–30.
3. McDowell, L., Batnitzky, A. and Dyer, S (2009) ‘Precarious Work and Economic Migration: Emerging Immigrant Divisions of Labour in Greater London’s Service Sector’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (1) March 3–25 .

The Start of the Day

Enormous reductions in public sector spending produce unemployment. And unemployment makes for poverty, misery, hopelessness, illness and anomie. Some of the cuts to public sector spending will remove work from society: Forgemasters’ employees will join the queues outside Sheffield job centres, looking for jobs that don’t exist, living on the benefit breadline, sinking into depression, needing care.

Other public sector cuts will not remove work, but transfer it from public sphere to private sphere, from commodity form to non-commodity form. Children, the infirm elderly and the sick will carry on needing care (and social care isn’t part of the NHS ringfencing). Someone will have to step in when budget cuts mean fewer care assistants or fewer public nursery spaces. This might sound like Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ in action: neighbours helping because the fat state is ought to slim down. But care that is contingently gifted like that leaves the recipient at risk, even assuming that the needy are known and noticed (which might not be the case if layers of administration are removed). And it leaves the caregiver exhausted by the double burden of paid work and care.

It is often the case that unpaid care is done by women (see the Women’s Budget Group analysis), and, though the ideological conservatism that drives the desire for a small state is not quite the same conservatism that essentialises gender divisions and wants women to be placed in the home, married and looking after children, the coincidence might be felt to be fortuitous by some. At nowaytoamakealiving, we are always angered by the failures of imagination and empathy that generate policies intended to increase inequality and worsen lives.