No Way To Make a Living Just another WordPress site

“The busi­ness of earn­ing your daily bread is really sad and weari­some. Peo­ple come up with the most pious lies about work. It’s just another abom­inable form of idol­a­try, a dog lick­ing the rod that beats it: work.” (Luther Blis­sett, 2004 [2000]: Q. Arrow Books: 28).

Recent sto­ries about work have got me think­ing about the pious lies we tell each other. The eth­i­cal conun­drum in these three cases is the way appar­ently solid and valid oppor­tu­ni­ties to work dis­guise the pro­duc­tion and repro­duc­tion of inequal­i­ties of income and oppor­tu­nity.  Moral argu­ments about the rights and wrongs of ways of arrang­ing work should not rely solely on the cal­cu­la­tions of worth mea­sured by $£€.

Neigh­bours help­ing neighbours

If there’s some­thing that can be val­ued then there’s some­one who will assign it a value. Whilst the Time­banks use non-monetary value (an hour of iron­ing is worth an hour of gar­den­ing), taskrab­bits are there to make money – by under­bid­ding their taskrab­bit neigh­bours for the right to do your chores. And indeed, they will – if one of them is to be believed – find it pleasurable:

“I try to approach many tasks you may find tedious as med­i­ta­tive so will attempt to make data entry and dishes a zen like expe­ri­ence. I feel good about the fact that this job affords me oppor­tu­ni­ties to per­haps lessen the daily stresses that may be attack­ing your psy­che or at least make them less over­whelm­ing” (Eliz­a­beth, task rab­bit from San Francisco).

Task rab­biters will also set up your wire­less net­work, pick up your dry clean­ing, and orga­nize a party for you – using their design skills on that party invi­ta­tion. As an old boss of mine would say dur­ing busy times ‘and stick a broom up my arse and I’ll sweep the floor as I go’. Task rab­bit­ing sounds full of pious lies that claim there’s virtue in subservience.

Lol­cats

A few weeks ago, ‘Bob’, a com­puter pro­gram­mer for Ver­i­zon caused some amuse­ment in the media for out­sourc­ing his job to a Chi­nese pro­gram­mer in order to free him­self some time to be on social media, watch­ing videos of cute cats. That’s an idea, you might think. Bob was no-one’s idea of an imag­i­na­tive entre­pre­neur, or cun­ning anti-hero (the inves­ti­ga­tor described him as a “fam­ily man, inof­fen­sive and quiet. Some­one you wouldn’t look twice at in an ele­va­tor.”) One fifth of Bob’s income went on pay­ing some­one else to do his job for him.

For as long as there’s some­one with the money to pay and some­one with the need to be paid, these things seem like an inevitable appli­ca­tion of mar­ket prin­ci­ples. As Sandel (2012) gets part way to argu­ing, just because some­thing can be mar­ke­tised, doesn’t mean it should be: there are moral prin­ci­ples at stake. Here, that prin­ci­ple is one of recog­ni­tion for the work, the skill and the exper­tise that a per­son has.

Mod­ern slavery

A sim­i­lar eth­i­cal prin­ci­ple of effort lead­ing to reward is vis­i­ble in the recent dis­cus­sions of work­fare, and com­pa­ra­ble eth­i­cal ques­tions about recog­ni­tion and redis­tri­b­u­tion arise. The court case taken out by Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wil­son against the UK gov­ern­ment scheme of forc­ing the unem­ployed to work for no pay was – in part– suc­cess­ful. ‘Vol­un­tary’ work­fare schemes are unlaw­ful. But the shame­ful attempt to avoid return­ing ‘sanc­tioned’ ben­e­fits taken from the 231,000 forced onto the work­fare schemes is a reminder of how deeply felt is the pious belief that such cit­i­zens were get­ting ‘some­thing for noth­ing’, and how pow­er­ful is the dis­course of the infer­nal alter­na­tive (the nation’s finances are at stake, after all, there is no alternative).

Have you ever been attacked by some­one whose life you were try­ing to save? Have you ever been asked by the police to iden­tify human remains? Taken a phone call from some­one try­ing to save their dying child? Prob­a­bly not, but this is all part of pro­fes­sional life for many peo­ple work­ing in Britain’s National Health Ser­vice. For some, such ‘extreme work’ is part of their daily reality.

These expe­ri­ences emerged as we (with col­leagues Paula Hyde and John Has­sard) spent time with Nurses, Man­agers, Para­medics, Emer­gency Call Han­dlers and Dis­patch­ers and oth­ers as part of an immer­sive three year study of work­ing life in the NHS. Some of these expe­ri­ences were recounted in inter­views, or as we accom­pa­nied peo­ple through­out their work­ing day. We spent a day with call han­dlers at an Emer­gency Con­trol Cen­tre who took 999 calls from peo­ple at the worst moments of their lives – but also, occa­sion­ally, the best; more than one had talked some­one through deliv­er­ing a baby. Good or bad, what struck us as researchers was that many of these were mat­ters, quite lit­er­ally, of life and death. In light of this, we were sur­prised by how young many of the call han­dlers were; peo­ple in their early to mid twen­ties, some hav­ing just swapped the lec­ture the­atre of a uni­ver­sity for a busy inner city emer­gency call centre.

While the theme of ‘life and death’ ran through the research (maybe not sur­pris­ing given the con­text), not all of the work we saw involved hor­ror and high drama. Often, it was more a mat­ter of pace of work, as well as the stakes involved. Man­age­r­ial meet­ings are per­haps not the most obvi­ous set­ting for fast paced, high inten­sity work, but in an organ­i­sa­tion under as much pres­sure as the NHS, they were often con­ducted at a tempo quite in con­trast with that we our­selves were used to. Once again, what is at stake is key – the impor­tance of var­i­ous per­for­mance tar­gets, for exam­ple on wait­ing times or infec­tion rates, meant that sta­tis­tics flew back and forth with dizzy­ing rapid­ity. While hard tar­gets for exam­ple are impor­tant to the orga­ni­za­tion, they also had a more overt, and imme­di­ate human ele­ment. With allow­ing a patient to breach a wait­ing tar­get, or the hos­pi­tal run­ning out of beds very much not the ‘done thing’ for the NHS man­ager on the spot and want­ing to stay in their job, things can get rather fre­netic as the pos­si­bil­ity draws near – phones are ham­mered, favours are called in, patient moves are co-ordinated with some haste, wards are opened, oxy­gen tanks checked… and dis­as­ter is (usu­ally) averted.

Spend­ing time with an ambu­lance con­trol cen­tre man­ager, we asked him at inter­vals through­out his 12 hour shift to rate the level of inten­sity of work. At 10am things were pretty calm at ‘level six’, but as the day drew on and the weather wors­ened, road traf­fic inci­dents began to mount up and demand for ambu­lances rose. By 4pm the man­ager was deal­ing with cars — which might or might not con­tain decap­i­tated teenagers — stuck under bridges, ambu­lances break­ing down, and bor­row­ing a heli­copter from another ambu­lance ser­vice in order to fly some­one hun­dreds of miles for a life­sav­ing oper­a­tion. While his team of 15 junior col­leagues were almost as busy, it was the man­ager to whom the most crit­i­cal inci­dents were handed. At the same time, he had to deal with per­son­nel issues such as pro­ba­tion and sick leave. We had never, until observ­ing this man­ager, seen a phone ring as soon as it is put down – over and over again. The inten­sity level by 4:30pm?-‘ten, but here it can go up to eleven’….

The ‘rapid fire’ prob­lem solv­ing we saw in this and count­less other instances gave us the sense of ‘man­ager as fighter pilot’, crit­i­cal deci­sions made rapidly in an envi­ron­ment of pres­sure and inten­sity. Other researchers had noted sim­i­lar lev­els of inten­sity, with David Buchanan’s research team, for instance won­der­ing if health­care jobs were becom­ing ‘extreme jobs’ (Buchanan 2011). While the NHS col­leagues we spoke to all accepted their lot as part of their job as pro­fes­sion­als, high lev­els of stress lurked, unspo­ken, in the back­ground, and lev­els of stress in the NHS are for­mally reported as being very high. Aside from the inten­sity of work, many peo­ple we spoke to, par­tic­u­larly man­agers, found that the amount of work they were expected to get through seemed to be increas­ing. Very often, work was taken home to be com­pleted in evenings and week­ends, because the large vol­ume of paper­work or data entry sim­ply could not be dealt with in the hospital/ emer­gency con­trol centre/ ambu­lance sta­tion because of ‘con­stant interruptions’

Widen­ing the soci­o­log­i­cal dis­cus­sion fur­ther, we have become inter­ested in how intense work and long-hours cul­tures are increas­ingly under­stood as ‘the norm’ in con­tem­po­rary work­places. Increas­ingly, many peo­ple take long hours and very intense work for granted, believ­ing it to be inevitable; an unspo­ken part of the employ­ment con­tract. In an attempt to char­ac­terise this sit­u­a­tion, com­men­ta­tors have used seem­ingly para­dox­i­cal or tau­to­log­i­cal phrases such as ‘nor­mal­ized inten­sity’ (McCann et al 2008). For many in the twenty– first cen­tury work­force, extreme has become nor­mal, nor­mal has become extreme.

As part of our devel­op­ing inter­est in extreme work in all its forms, we are run­ning a stream at the 2013 Crit­i­cal Man­age­ment Stud­ies con­fer­ence here in Man­ches­ter, and there will also be a spe­cial issue of the jour­nal Orga­ni­za­tion on this theme; please look out for fur­ther details and calls for papers, or con­tact us at edward.granter@mbs.ac.uk.

Ref­er­ences

1. Buchanan, D. (2011) Are health­care man­age­ment jobs becom­ing extreme jobs? , Cran­field Health­care Man­age­ment Group Research Brief­ing 7. Cran­field Uni­ver­sity, UK.
2. McCann, L., Has­sard, J. and Mor­ris, J.L. (2008) ‘Nor­mal­ized Inten­sity: The New Labour Process of Mid­dle Man­age­ment’, Jour­nal of Man­age­ment Stud­ies , 45, 2: 343–71.

Acknowl­edge­ment and Disclaimer

Our project was funded by the National Insti­tute for Health Research Health Ser­vices and Deliv­ery Research (project num­ber 08/1808/241). Visit the HS&DR Pro­gramme web­site for more infor­ma­tion. The views and opin­ions expressed therein are those of the authors and do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect those of the HS&DR Pro­gramme, NIHR, NHS or the Depart­ment of Health.

Billings­gate fish mar­ket is London’s old­est whole­sale mar­ket. It offi­cially opens at four o’clock in the morn­ing when a bell sig­nals the start of trade and it closes at half past nine. But the day’s work starts well before trade begins and con­tin­ues through the morn­ing on and off the mar­ket floor. The archi­tec­ture of Billings­gate offers a par­tic­u­lar oppor­tu­nity for see­ing the ‘tem­po­ral unfold­ing’ (Simp­son, 2012: 431) of the mar­ket space and the work which hap­pens there at dif­fer­ent times. There is a gallery at either end of the first floor over­look­ing the mar­ket hall where the sound is muted and the view inter­rupted by fire glass. On 11 Decem­ber 2012, just after mid­night, together with film-maker Kevin Reynolds, of very­Mov­ing­Pic­tures, we set up cam­eras in this first floor gallery loca­tion look­ing down the length of the mar­ket hall above the begin­ning of the cen­tral isle. We took a pho­to­graph every 10 sec­onds from one o’clock in the morn­ing until mid­day. Every hour or so, I walked around the mar­ket floor mak­ing short sound record­ings of what­ever was hap­pen­ing at the time. The film we made is a com­bi­na­tion of the sequence of images speeded up (so one hour is pre­sented in 30 sec­onds) with snip­pets of sound cor­re­spond­ing to the same time period in which the pho­tographs were taken. It shows phys­i­cal activ­ity, move­ment, inter­ac­tions, pat­terns, rhythms and flows which can’t be per­ceived in real time. And it shows how the mar­ket comes to life through work.

Note
This film was made as part of my British Academy-funded project, ‘Work­ing with Fish from Sea to Table’ (ref: SG100889).

Ref­er­ence
Simp­son, Paul (2012) ‘Appre­hend­ing every­day rhythms: rhyth­m­analy­sis, time-lapse pho­tog­ra­phy, and the space-time of every­day street per­for­mance’ cul­tural geo­gra­phies 19(4): 423–445.

Two pre­vi­ous posts by Lynne Pet­tinger — Moments of Domes­tic­ity and Hand­writ­ten- got me think­ing more about my obses­sion with those notes that pop up in var­i­ous work­places that remind peo­ple to clean up after them­selves. I won­der who pro­duced them, how often they update them, and what drove them to it. How bad had the toi­let or kitchen been! Was some­one ‘tasked’ with the job, or did they take it on them­selves to pro­duce the notice and main­tain it over time?

Ann Oakley’s ‘House­wife’ (1974) was the first Soci­ol­ogy book that I read, and I am still hooked on the study of who does what domes­tic work within the home, for whom and why. Is this work paid or unpaid? Is it ‘recog­nised’ (Elson 2008) and wel­comed by other grate­ful house­hold mem­bers? Or is it just taken for granted, per­haps unseen even? But these lit­tle ‘moments of domes­tic­ity’ in the paid work­place are fas­ci­nat­ing me.

In Moments of Domes­tic­ity, there are great images of the office where taxi dri­vers came for their breaks. In one image, there is a note above the sink that reminds the dri­vers to ‘Please’ wash the cups. Here are 3 images from notices that I have seen around var­i­ous work­places. None are hand-written. Two were found in women’s toi­lets (do men do this too?), and one was in a shared kitchen/communal space. The ‘Toi­let Eti­quette’ notice is focused on hygiene. It is neatly word-processed, cen­trally aligned. Lynne Pet­tinger reminded me here of soci­ol­o­gist Nor­bert Elias on eti­quette. In The Civ­i­liz­ing Process, Elias cites a 15th cen­tury guide to eti­quette and table man­ners that states: ‘It is unseemly to blow your nose into the table­cloth’ (Elias 1995: 108).

The next note, the passive-aggressive ‘Polite Notice’, is amaz­ing. It is more detailed, and moves us beyond hygiene. We are also asked to ‘Refrain’ from using mobile phones. Who would want to use a mobile while some­one else was ‘using the facil­i­ties’? Some­one has gone to some trou­ble over it. It must have taken a lit­tle thought to pro­duce, and it had been placed on the wall quite recently. It uses dif­fer­ent colours, types and sizes of fonts; is printed using a good printer; employs bullet-points.

The last notice, ‘Clean­ing Fairy’, was stuck neatly to a fridge door, and pro­tected by a plas­tic cover. Again, some care has been taken over its pro­duc­tion, includ­ing adding in the image of a pink-faced, blonde fairy. Its mean­ing is to the point: if you make a mess, clean it up. But it is also inac­cu­rate. Any quick inter­net search will reveal fairies (of the clean­ing type) DO exist*. Fairy­land must be quiet these days because fairies are being employed in their thou­sands by com­pa­nies to come and clean your home or office for you. The ‘Fairy Dust’ clean­ing com­pany is local to me.

*You can buy stick­ers, mouse mats etc that pro­claim ‘the dust bun­nies killed my clean­ing fairy’.

Ref­er­ences

1. Elias, N. (1995) The Civ­i­liz­ing Process, Oxford: Black­well (first pub­lished in 1939).
2. Elson, D. (2008) Recog­ni­tion, Redis­tri­b­u­tion and Reduc­tion, Pre­sen­ta­tion at launch of UNDP Expert Group on Unpaid Work, Gen­der and the Care Econ­omy, Novem­ber, New York: UNDP.
3. Oak­ley, A. (1974) House­wife, Lon­don: Lane.

My Dad loved his job. Even when he was ter­mi­nally ill with can­cer and on sick leave he would get my mother to drive him around to see the progress of con­struc­tion sites that he felt he should have been work­ing on. He started in the build­ing trade as an appren­tice car­pen­ter and joiner in 1961 at the age of 16. He remained com­mit­ted to his trade for almost half a cen­tury, that is to say, all his work­ing life. He worked his way up through ranks of fore­man car­pen­ter and gen­eral fore­man, and moved into site and project man­age­ment long before he died in 2008. Despite his rel­a­tively quick tran­si­tion into man­age­ment, “com­ing off the tools” as he put it, he was always par­tic­u­larly proud that he had served a four year inden­tured appren­tice­ship where he, his father, the firm who took him on, and the indus­try body designed to over­see appren­tice­ship train­ing entered into an agreement.

The legal doc­u­ment bind­ing them all together bears tes­ti­mony to the nature of the com­pact they had made. Phrases such as ‘the Appren­tice should learn the craft of car­pen­ter and joiner in the ser­vice of the Mas­ter’ and the appren­tice will ‘faith­fully and hon­estly serve the Master….be dili­gent to learn….willingly obey and per­form law­ful and rea­son­able com­mands… and keep the secrets of his trade’ con­jure notions of fidelity, loy­alty and ser­vice rather absent in 21^st cen­tury employee/employer rela­tions. Fur­ther­more, in order to become a skilled worker the Appren­tice must apply them­selves to their train­ing in pre­scribed ways. Dili­gence, obe­di­ence and hon­esty are all seen as inte­gral to mas­ter­ing the spe­cific com­pe­ten­cies asso­ci­ated with crafts­man­ship. That is to say, skill acqui­si­tion requires a dis­ci­plined mind and body. What the pic­tures here do not ade­quately con­vey is the phys­i­cal feel of the thick legal parch­ment; it vir­tu­ally oozes grav­i­tas and sub­stance. One could argue that this doc­u­ment is rather anachro­nis­tic and a hang­over from the medieval ori­gins of trade appren­tice­ships, but for Dad, this rooted him in a long tra­di­tion of well-respected crafts­men.  Indeed he could be rather dis­mis­sive of those in the trade who hadn’t spent years in train­ing; hon­ing and refin­ing their skills. He could saw a piece of wood in two per­fectly straight and true with­out any guid­ance mark­ings. I once asked him how on earth he could do that. He laugh­ingly replied, “Because I spent a whole year’s col­lege course doing noth­ing but saw­ing lumps of 4” x 2” apart, free­hand, until I could do it prop­erly! Not every­body has done that and that’s why I can and they can’t”.