Unread Books (2018)

Recurring Dreams

Pauline Murray on The Invisible Girls


[Unedited version of article published in The Quietus, January 2015]  

Formed in the north-eastern town of Ferryhill in 1976 in the wake of the Sex Pistols, Penetration were an enthralling burst of punk energy. Led by singer and lyricist Pauline Murray, their songs of military conflict and domestic servitude attacked the dictators and firing squads of polite society, and as they gained momentum they threatened to invade the mainstream.

By their time of their second album Coming Up for Air, however, Murray was finding the rock format intolerable. “I felt I was drowning in some ways, hence the title.” She ended Penetration and began writing new material with bassist Robert Blamire. “The dynamics of the songs had changed since we weren’t writing around guitar riffs.” A new, more abstract studio palette was provided by the decidedly un-macho sounding Invisible Girls, consisting of Murray and Blamire, keyboardist Steve Hopkins and Factory producer Martin Hannett (who had previously played under that name with John Cooper Clarke), with contributions from Vini Reilly and others. The result was a futuristic but highly accessible record which didn’t adhere to the industry conventions of group or solo artist, major or indie, pop or post-punk. It was sublime.

Originally released in September 1980, Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls is an extraordinary work of art, a treasure not just of its own time but of any era. Yet soon after completing it the singer followed her own backing band and disappeared. Long unavailable, the album has now been reissued and hopefully will be discovered by a new audience. Interviewing Pauline Murray by email, I encountered a unique performer still striking a vital oppositional note in today’s no-alternative culture of commodified rebellion, digital passivity and talent show banality.

What does punk mean to you? Does it mean the same thing now that it did in 1976? Is punk still possible today?

At the time it meant opening your eyes and seeing things as they are. It was about questioning tried and tested methods and doing things in a different way. It was about not caring whether you could do something but more about having a go. It was about contributing rather than passively consuming. It was about having the courage to break away from the stifling confines of a society that bowed down to “superiors”. It was about the youth of the late seventies turning their backs on the middle class hippy generation. It was about thinking for yourself and expressing your individuality. It was outside the system for a very short time and showed what people could achieve with focus and direction of energy. The raw music, anti-fashion, photography, art and design, writing, fanzines, the 7” single and animated audiences. Exciting stuff! It was as if a window had opened and real primal expression could emerge. It felt that you could collectively change the world and it certainly changed the lives of those involved.

Punk now means a certain category where products of a certain type can be marketed. It has turned into a stereotype and has no power to change.

I don’t think it’s possible today to have the black swan that was punk as young people have lived in a different world. They have been distracted and pacified from an early age by video games, mobile phones, computers, the internet, fast food and the American hard sell.  They are surrounded by unmotivated people, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that brings them together.  The culture of music and art has been hijacked by the clean people and karaoke singing appears on prime time TV.

Despite your achievements you rarely feature in the endless BBC4 documentaries on punk and post-punk, which are usually quite Londoncentric (or at best Manchester). It seems that if you lived outside these places and there’s no stock footage easily available you risk being edited out of history. Have you noticed this, and if so does it surprise or annoy you, because your work might not be getting the recognition it deserves?

Journalism and the media have become very lazy and would rather print a press release than analyse something themselves. The same old story and names have been repeated again and again without any depth of research and it has become stock footage. We weren’t part of the high profile London crowd and didn’t have hit records so it’s easy to get overlooked. We are sometimes more noticeable by our absence. It’s just one of those things - the powers that be, write and re-write history.

How do you view the second Penetration album now? The year after it came out you said it left a lot to be desired but ever since I first heard it in the ‘90s I’ve loved it.

Obviously I was too close in the making of it at the time. I felt that we were rushed into it and could have come up with better songs with more preparation. We worked with the fledgling producer Steve Lillywhite who had a different approach to the producers of the first album. I know we gave it our best shot as we always do. I was becoming uncertain about where the music was going and things were pulling in different directions. Listening to it now brings a tear to my eye, to hear such young kids taking on and generally succeeding in a monumental task. There are some great tracks on there. Come Into the Open, Shout Above the Noise.

From Penetration to the Invisible Girls, from Shout Above the Noise to Screaming in the Darkness - was there a deliberate connection between these two opening tracks?

There’s no conscious connection at all between these two tracks. I had put Penetration behind me and was writing new songs. Shout above the Noise is very external whilst Screaming in the Darkness is internal.

Over what period were the Invisible Girls songs written? Did any ideas date from while Penetration were still going, or was the split the starting point for them? Were some written in the studio?

Penetration finished their tour at the end of 1979. I had nothing planned after the split but somehow Rob and I gravitated towards each other. We bought a Teac four track and set up a recording studio in his parents’ house. By March 1980 we had recorded a John Peel session (with a temporary band) and soon after that teamed up with Martin and Steve to record Dream Sequence as a single. None of the ideas were left over from Penetration.  We came up with them all as new. I had also written some on my own - Sympathy, Dream Sequence, Drummer Boy, which I had never done with the band. Most of the album was written before going into the studio. Only Time Slipping was worked on at the time. It was a backing track idea of the Invisible Girls. I took it away and wrote the tune and lyrics and we re-recorded the backing track though none of us can remember doing that!

How would you describe the experience of recording the album?

We were living in Martin Hannett’s house for the duration in Manchester recording at Strawberry studios. I remember Martin playing Atmosphere by Joy Division, which was very poignant at the time. The first week was backing tracks with bass drums and piano moving through the process in the conventional way. As it progressed we were working late into the night then starting later each day. I began to become more withdrawn and couldn’t speak to anyone and had to go home after the second week. When I returned, I felt disconnected from the album and did vocal tracks again and again without guidance. I think Martin did an amazing job with the production but the content and playing by all of the individuals involved should never be overlooked. There’s something magical, deep and intense.

The lyrics on the Invisible Girls album are so strong but rarely appreciated. The album is lyrically very intense - I’d say it’s as poetic as, for example, Joy Division’s Closer - but the depth is deceptive, because rather than announcing their profundity in a rock type way, the words are encased in this kind of blissful pop exterior… What were the chief influences and experiences which inspired them?

I have never made a big deal of my lyrics though I do spend a lot of time working on them! I have to be happy with what I am singing and they have to fit the feel of the music. The lyrics are usually inspired by the structure of the music. An idea has to inspire me in the first place. I can’t really say where they come from as each song is quite different from another. I spend time in quiet contemplation and concentration until I settle upon a subject that can unfold into a song. Something like Thundertunes reflects upon the village where I was born and grew up - a place that no longer exists. I try to look at things from all angles but ultimately the subject matter has to fit the framework of a song and flow with the vocal melody. I think my lyrics are quite deep but the tunes and singing are accessible but perhaps unsettling to the casual listener! Many of the lyrics were written through the night when everyone is asleep and there are no distractions.

The mixing up of dreams and reality is a recurring theme; not just in Dream Sequence, but in Sympathy, “imagination seems to be real, reality is just a dream”, and elsewhere. Was this a ‘conscious’ decision or did it just emerge? Was it a case of real life seeming unreal and the creative rush of the imagination?

This theme of dreams and reality was something that just emerged. Dream Sequence and Sympathy were written before the album. The line “somebody wake me before I go to sleep” just popped up of its own accord but the song was inspired by recurring dreams.  Sometimes dreams and reality can come together. Creativity is opening yourself up to bring dreams to reality. Pulling ideas out of the air and arranging them into solid matter for a while.

Another theme is suspicion of fame and celebrity, in Shoot You Down and most obviously in Mr X. Does this reflect a pressure for punk or alternative culture to become part of the showbiz machinery? Was it something you feared happening to you or saw happening to other people? What are your views on fame, then and now?

Punks generally steered away from the showbiz machinery. I’m quite a private person and would struggle with the pressures of fame. We are in a society where people will do anything to be famous. This celebrity culture is driven by the media and to stay famous you have to be in the public eye on a regular basis. Everybody watches everybody else, passes judgement and projects their thoughts onto who they think someone is. I’ve always preferred to be myself than be famous. Fame means everybody looking up to you until you fall from grace and are fed to the lions!

When Will We Learn is interesting: “This restless feeling falls upon the humble/stupid people”, “Mother Nature’s face is scarred to death...” Is this about a general frustration with humanity, or is there a sense of some wider threat - environmental disaster, war, even nuclear annihilation (the track ends with a sound like missiles falling...)?

When Will We Learn is a comment on the ignorance of the human race and how people never take responsibility for their own actions. It has gone on for forever where the majority don’t question anything and are led into the next drama. People will only notice that something is wrong when it is all too late and wonder how this has happened. We have used and abused nature and it will always have the last say. I see the breakdown of structures that hold everything together.

The album seems to move from a mood of personal or existential anxiety towards a feeling of impending doom, through the warnings and wilderness of Thundertunes, and When Will We Learn where “the end is coming”, to the ominous bassline of Mr X, and finally Judgement Day. It is as if the people making it thought it might be the last record ever made (and what a record!). Is that theme and direction something you were aware of during writing/recording, or am I imagining it?

There was no conscious theme to the album. The songs were written separately and put together at the end. It was a very organic process. Maybe subconsciously I felt all of those things you mentioned, as my life was about to change and we were about to enter Thatcher’s Britain which can never be underestimated. I could maybe sense that I wouldn’t get a chance to make another album. The songs and production came together at a point in time, never to be repeated. There’s lots of intensity in all the records I’ve been involved in. I’ve always felt that every album could be the last.

Listening again to Judgement Day; “You have no possessions, you have no illusions, no arrangements and no future plans…There’s no breathing space inside this place, there’s no escaping…” It is an extraordinary set of images and an astonishing cliffhanger on which to end an album. Can you say anything about where that song came from and what it was pointing towards?

My grandmother had died while I was still with Penetration and Judgement Day was my observations of the final scenario. She was in hospital, had given up her home and had nothing other than the fact that she was leaving this world. It’s very close up. We will all be in this position one day and I have seen the same with parents and friends. It came last on the album as it’s really intense and definitely a final song.

Was there much encouragement from other people in the indie sphere after the album and follow-up single, when RSO went out of business? After such an innovative but still commercial-sounding album, you’d think that some of the established labels would have been keen to get involved. Or did you decide, after this phase of intense activity, to take a step back for a while?

None of the singles were hits, which makes a big difference. There were companies interested but at that time I was going through a massive personal crisis. Everything around me had changed and I couldn’t focus on anything. I was perhaps mentally and physically burned out as I hadn’t had a break for five years. I got half way through a vocal take and just gave up, walked out and turned my back on everything and everyone connected to music.

Later with Robert you set up Polestar Studios, which is still going strong, and the Storm Clouds album came out in 1989. Did you get involved in the technical side of production, and have you been pursuing other interests and doing other things alongside music?

Polestar was originally set up as a record label to release our own material in the early ‘80s. In 1990 I took on the lease of a building and set up music rehearsal studios and a recording studio. Robert is the technical maestro in the recording studio as I have never had any interest or ability in the production side of things. We bought a derelict building almost four years ago, undertook a massive building project and relocated the studios. I have managed bands, promoted gigs, studied reflexology, formed a community choir and brought up two very fine children! I am always busy with one thing or another.

In recent years you have reformed Penetration and also played some solo shows. What has that been like?

I think the band has been better since it reformed as the songs and playing have matured in a good way. It was perhaps unfinished business as we split up very abruptly but people have had the chance to see us over the past few years. We have always been a good live band and have done some great shows. We manage ourselves, operate independently and still play for the enjoyment and connecting with people. We’ve put out a couple of singles but are reaching a point where we need to make an album to challenge ourselves!

I have been doing solo acoustic shows with new material. It’s a whole new thing for me. The songs are written on acoustic guitar and cover topics such as family history, depression, people going missing and being plugged in to technology. This is work in progress as I plan to write more songs, record them acoustically and then experiment with the music. At the moment I am concentrating on Penetration, writing and recording a new album.

What do you think of music today? Are there any performers who still inspire you and are there any current artists who get the Pauline Murray seal of approval?

Music today is very fragmented. There are so many different genres, labels and specific interests and the mainstream is unintelligible. There’s nothing that brings people together in an emotional way. The digital format means that we can access music very easily but it’s more disposable and doesn’t hold your attention.  I have to say that there is nothing in particular that excites and inspires me at the moment but there are many creative individuals swimming against the tide. I am lucky to have heard, first hand, the great music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which was the soundtrack to my youth. Most things have been done before but genuine passion and energy will always have an impact.

 

Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls (2CD with extra live tracks) is released by Les Disques du Crepuscule

Great new article by Nina Power: From The One to The Many

Rather than identifying what it is that makes us ‘special,’ we would do well to remember what it is we have in common, including all the time and resources that have been stolen from all of us, and given back piecemeal to some. How to divide and conquer those who seek to divide and conquer us? Only a strategic mass identity can save us now.


Coincidentally, in the final section of my forthcoming essay on the naturalised subjugation of 'employability’ I argue similarly that resisting this pernicious and divisive discourse means positioning collective desire against individual 'aspiration'. It also involves discovering a new unemployability, and attacking fake positivity with a radical negativity (aiming for a real social happiness by destroying the coerced, isolated, miserable simulation).


If a genuinely rebellious cultural movement/moment/whatever is to emerge from this era of digital precarity and competitive compliance, it could usefully coalesce around these elements: it would be anti-individual, anti-positive thinking, anti-aspiration, anti-employability. Such a position would also shun self-promotion and maintain a sceptical distance from online hype and revolutionary posturing. This attitude would primarily circulate in places and conversations rather than in tweets and opinion columns. Rather than preaching to the converted, it would directly (or obliquely) confront its targets - the bosses, team leaders and entrepreneurs, the executive guardians who deny responsibility for the misery they inflict - and seek tactical alliances not with verified career lefties but with fellow inmates sentenced to debt in warehouses and call centres, hotels and restaurants, agencies and job centres. Such communication would be concerned not so much with activism as inactivism, actively not doing; refusing, rejecting, withholding, demurring, declining, ignoring. We would prefer not to.


Of course the individual yoked to the mechanisms of i-capital cannot afford to refuse work and the performative labour involved in getting and keeping it, so unless one is in a position of privilege one cannot make oneself literally unemployable, much as one might fantasise about doing so. Rather it is the latent negative energy behind the job interview smiles and the upbeat social media profiles, the shared ecstatic destructive desire to sweep away this vile charade, which is unemployable and irrecuperable, and which, if unrepressed, could overflow into those everyday spaces and interactions of discipline and control*, irritating/irrigating and gradually eroding them, cultivating conflict and channelling dissent through instances of micro-resistance and, to borrow a term of Foucault's, counter-conduct.


Obviously anti-aspiration here does not mean the inane Hollywood slacker stereotype (this would be to perpetuate the post-political entrepreneurial subject position by way of its supposed opposite, in fact its apathetic twin). Anti-aspiration means intense desire, concentrated and collective (in)action which transcends those imposed models of self-help and happification and rejects the bombardments of inspirational gurus, lifestyle pedlars and lying politicians.

 
*I also agree with NP’s point here on societies of discipline and control existing concurrently or within each other, rather than, as is sometimes said, the latter being the sequel to the former. I have in the past noticed this dual effect in the mutually supportive hard and soft discourses of employability, the quasi-police state  of welfare ‘conditionality’, sanctions and workfare, and the language of CV-building, corporate networking and self-presentation which has become a supposedly essential field of scholarly knowledge in university curricula. 

Reply to Bluebird Tea Co. Re: ‘Packing Apprenticeship’

In a recent blog post addressed to your customers you attempted to defend your vacancy for a one year 'Packing Apprenticeship' (later re-advertised as a 'Warehouse Apprentice') paid at £3.30 an hour (rising to £3.75 an hour after 3 months) in your Brighton warehouse, against criticisms made by myself and others that you are using the Apprenticeship scheme to undercut the minimum wage.
 

You announced that in order for your customers to reach an informed decision about this issue, "you must ensure that you are able to get all the facts"; yet it is these very facts which are missing from your blog. In this response I am being careful not to be sidetracked by the various personal insults scattered throughout your blog and tweets ("some thoughtless individual", "little Twitter troll", customers being "disturbed" etc.), and to concentrate instead on these facts, or rather omissions, which are highlighted below. I also ask a series of questions about your use of apprenticeships, which your blog has conspicuously failed to answer.

1. Government funding

The first fact which is missing, and of which your customers might be unaware, is that businesses participating in the apprenticeship scheme routinely receive government grants. The question of how much state money you receive was explicitly asked on Twitter and not replied to. The issue of government funding was also raised in the leaflet handed out outside your shop, and the assertion has not been challenged in your blog, so although you have not acknowledged this fact, it is reasonable to believe that it is correct and that you do receive government money. It seems that the amount awarded is typically £1500 per apprentice.

Of course, mentioning this funding in your blog would significantly weaken your claim that an apprentice costs three times more to employ than a fully paid worker, but we’ll come back to that.

In the meantime, can you confirm that you receive government funding for apprenticeships? And if so, how much is that funding?

(Incidentally, your comment that if Bluebird was intent on abusing the scheme "we could very easily have 100 apprentices now ... but we have only one" is rather disingenuous, as the rules stipulate that small businesses can only claim government funding for up to five apprenticeships. And soon you will have at least two.)

2. ‘Study hours’

It is also unfair to compare an apprenticeship year to other jobs, it is more accurate to compare it to university or college – where in fact, you have to pay to gain similar skills and qualifications.

The wage is lower than ‘regular’ national minimum wage as it takes into consideration study hours that are on paid working time, that go towards an NVQ qualification on completion of the scheme.

The apprenticeship lists an employer, a 'wage' (£132 per week), working hours (40 per week), and duties including the following: 

• pack tea and fulfil customer orders.
• prepare products to be sent to our store and events.
• Dispatch all orders through various computer systems.
• Accept, check and store deliveries arriving to our warehouse.
• Assist in blending tea.
• Assist in managing stock and ensuring the warehouse can run efficiently.

Despite this, you claim that this apprenticeship isn't a job, and you compare it instead with a university course. To resolve this confusion, therefore, let us consider what these ‘study hours’ involve.  

We learn that the apprentice receives "workplace training sessions" from the boss (does this count as 'studying'?) and "further development support and training" from an NVQ trainer, again in the workplace. We know from the vacancy that the resulting qualification is a "level 2 Warehousing and Storage NVQ"; but it is not clear how this differs from a certificate to say that someone has worked in a warehouse for a year and picked up certain skills in the process.

You do not specify in the blog how many of the 40 hours a week of the apprenticeship are spent 'studying', and you refused to answer a question about this on Twitter, directing the person instead to your email address.

Another detail curiously absent from the blog is that while the job and the employer are based in Brighton, the training provider – Vision West Nottinghamshire College – is located in Mansfield. One would think this worthy of at least a passing mention in an article expounding the scholarly virtues of an apprenticeship. What exactly does this arrangement entail, in the context of a 'packing apprenticeship'? Is it distance learning? Warehousing seminars? Or is it, in fact, a checklist of competencies and assessments indistinguishable from in-work training?  

We can also compare this emphasis on the importance of skills and qualifications for warehouse packing with your current vacancy for a 'Packing Area Manager'. This offers a "competitive salary" and states: "Don’t be put off - No previous warehouse or logistics experience is necessary as full training is provided."

So much for a 'packing apprenticeship' being equivalent to a year’s undergraduate study. At management level it turns out that none of these skills or qualifications are prerequisites, as they can be taught on the job.

3. Characterisation and eligibility of potential applicants

to give people, who are otherwise struggling, a chance to learn key workplace skills and experience.

Upon starting the placement, an apprentices skill and experience levels can be very low or they may have personal or medical issues that make it difficult to find employment through the usual, unsupported route.

We are more relaxed to start with with things like timekeeping, presentation and communication as we understand they are all new skills to be learnt.

the candidates may have little or no workplace experience at all which can be a huge drain on a businesses resources. 

The portrayal of young people entering the labour market as uncommunicative, poorly presented, incapable of punctuality and "a huge drain on a business’s resources" is now a well established justification for paying these people below the minimum wage or nothing at all. Of course, this argument goes, school-leavers, even those who have been through a rigorous application and interview process, can't be expected to just turn up at work on time and perform the tasks assigned to them. Therefore they can't expect to be paid a proper wage until a further period of 'training' or 'work experience' has been completed.

This stigmatising narrative has been cooked up by government and business in order to re-brand low-paid work as a form of education, and to present it as a gift offered by the employer rather than an economic exchange, born not out of commercial necessity but social beneficence. Because so many people are chasing so few jobs, employers can get away with saying this with a straight face. Applicants can't go elsewhere and have no option but to accept it.

No amount of PR waffle can disguise the fact that this is exploitation. People of any age or level of experience travelling to a warehouse to pack and dispatch goods from 9am to 5pm deserve to be fully paid for their work from day one.

If there are applicants with genuine "personal or medical issues", since when did employers have the right to accommodate them not by meeting their equal opportunities obligations but by lowering wages?

Another thing your blog fails to mention (although it is stated in the vacancy for the position on a jobs website) is that apprenticeships are not open to applicants who hold a degree qualification. This means that graduates are excluded from this vacancy and therefore from the chance of a fully paid job. Is this not also a form of discrimination?

With its emphasis on people who are supposedly "struggling" and not work-ready, the apprenticeship also excludes those who have the relevant experience, but just need a job. Are these experienced workers also excluded from the prospect of a warehouse job at Bluebird, or are they expected to simply exclude themselves by not applying for the apprenticeship?

Regarding this, you will remember that on Twitter you stated that if a person doesn’t want to work for half the minimum wage for a year towards a certificate in something they’ve already done, then "you don’t have to apply [smiley face]".

4. Cost to the business

Again, in terms of the supposed costs of training and the value of the skills developed on this apprenticeship scheme, it must be emphasised that the occupation we are discussing here is not nursing or plumbing, it is warehouse packing.

To come to the boldest claim in your blog (and I admire its audacity, if nothing else about it):

the costs to a business training and supporting an inexperienced and under qualified team member in the workplace are very high.

To a small business like ours that cost is even higher, around triple that of employing an experienced and fully trained team member.

I can see why on first glance it appear that we make money out of paying someone £3.30 an hour – but it just isn’t the case.

Profit making is 100% not on the agenda as quite simply it doesn’t make us any money.

You cannot even admit that the work of a warehouse packing 'apprentice' makes money for your company. Bluebird is not an educational establishment or a charity, it is a business. There is no shame in admitting this. There is however, a great deal of shame involved in claiming the role of a college campus or social service to avoid acknowledging the real reason you employ workers and deny the real value of their work.

Are you perhaps confusing a passionate commitment to improving lives above and beyond commercial interests with the routine business practice of investing in new staff who inevitably become more productive over time?

Are you seriously saying that the duties set out above are not profitable for the company unless they are performed by "an experienced and fully trained team member"? (It is revealing to note that even for a warehouse packing job an employer expects to pay the adult minimum wage only to an already 'experienced' worker.)

And are you really claiming that someone doing this work for £3.30 per hour costs you more than a worker paid £6.70 an hour, even with the government subsidy you receive for each apprentice?

The individual journey of your ex-business administration apprentice - who apparently, unlike most other people, managed to live on an apprentice wage and didn’t mind being paid far less than her work was worth - is heart-warming. However, gushing testimonies from current employees, like your personal jibes towards me, are hardly objective, and distract attention from the facts of the matter.

This so-called 'packing apprenticeship' is an entry-level warehouse job, which until a few years ago would have been fully paid. Now the cost of gaining on-the-job experience has been transferred from the employer to the employee, and this has been passed off as an apprenticeship "qualification".

As for the experience of an apprenticeship providing a substitute currency which is supposedly "just as valuable (if not more) to a team member as money", this can be easily disproved. Experience, no matter how fulfilling or enjoyable, is not accepted in lieu of cash by any landlord or supermarket, nor as far as I know by any of your own shops. This economy of experience is therefore somewhat one-way, as the parents and partners of 'apprentices' working full-time for £150 a week will no doubt attest.

Your indignation at criticisms of your involvement in this scheme is sharpened by your image of Bluebird as an ethical company; but being ethical is not just about being friendly or donating to charities, it is also about the terms under which you employ people. If Bluebird wishes to set a positive example to other employers and to its staff and customers, you will have the decency to pay your 'apprentice' workers a full wage and withdraw from this exploitative scheme, rather than be its "success story".

The Trial (3)

(1) (2)

There are interesting parallels to be drawn between the DWP's ongoing administration of benefit sanctions and the disciplinary action taken against the Foreign Office cleaners who dared to ask the Minister for a pay rise.

As noted here, the so-called 'warning' being introduced by the DWP as part of its sanctions regime is really just an extension of the existing ‘mandatory reconsideration’ period. In Duncan Smith's words, "During this time, claimants will have another opportunity to provide further evidence to explain their non-compliance." This has been reported as a softening of the DWP line, but if anything it will further strengthen it, normalising sanctions while giving outsiders the impression that they are now 'fair' i.e. that some people deserve to be sanctioned. Spinning an overdue appeals mechanism (58% of sanction decisions are already overturned) as a 'yellow card' is a PR conjuring trick. The intimidation of claimants, expected to produce this 'evidence' on top of all the other absurd 'jobseeking' duties, will continue; only now, if the sanction is finally imposed a claimant can be blamed for not working hard enough to prove their innocence or justify their 'non-compliance'.

Similarly, after sending their collective letter to the Foreign Secretary asking to be paid the London Living Wage, each of the outsourced cleaners at the FCO received a generic reply from the Operations Manager of contractor Interserve, requesting their attendance at an "Investigation Meeting". The investigation regarded "allegations that have been made referring to your conduct in the workplace", specifically "bringing the contract into disrepute".

The meeting, the letter explains, would be "your opportunity to voice your version of events" prior to a formal disciplinary hearing, if the company decided to call one, at a later date. Again the quasi-legal language is designed to intimidate while being vague about any specific offence (the manager's mistake was of course to enclose a copy of the workers' letter, making the connection too clear).

From the institutional point of view, the fear that such ominous correspondence raises in the precarious claimant or worker is punishment and deterrent enough - for organising against low pay or communicating beyond the outsourced ghetto, for declining an ostensibly optional 'work-related activity'. These institutions (government, private contractor, welfare-to-work provider, welfare department), which distribute huge, disproportionate powers among themselves in an inversion of the collectivity they stamp on, can dance across the arbitrary line between formal and informal discipline as it suits them, especially in response to negative publicity, but the language and the potential outcome remain the same.

For these distant authorities there was obviously something about the workers' jointly written letter which had called their conduct (and the contract) into question, but exactly what, or how, could not be admitted or spelt out. Speaking interchangeably, practically as one entity, Hammond and Interserve both later announced that the "matter" had been "investigated" and no disciplinary action had been taken. Their statements blithely carried on the suggestion that the matter under investigation was the conduct of the cleaners rather than the employer.

These investigatory, evidence-giving periods are ways for the state and its corporate allies to eliminate dissent by creating vast Kafkaesque paradisciplinary grey areas which can later be said by officials not to have existed. Asking for a pay rise triggers an "opportunity" to explain your "conduct"; a sanction threat brings an "opportunity" to explain your "non-compliance".

It turns out then that these pronouncements from on high are indeed warnings, but their true meaning cannot be acknowledged by the organisations that issue them, respectful as they supposedly are of welfare and employment law. These paradisciplinary processes are interpellative admonitions from the corporate state to its subjects (not just those directly addressed, but all of us) about compliance and correct conduct. While 'opportunities' to prepare one's defence are built into such trials, innocence can never be proven, as it rests on a form of compliance which is ultimately not legal but ideological. The obedient claimant/employee is required to act out the myth that unemployment is an individual, not a structural matter, and that poverty is similarly a matter of individual choices, not collective repression. These must be portrayed as crimes or tragedies of personal conduct, not of class or economics.

Some of my earliest memories of my dad involve watching him mowing the garden, seeing him up a ladder banging nails into the side of the house, or hearing him clanging and swearing underneath a car long into the night. Somewhat ambivalently, and, as it turns out, naively, I imagined that if I ever became a responsible adult similar duties awaited me.

How wrong could I be? In today’s UK Plc, where gardening, driving and DIY are largely bourgeois pursuits, I’ve calculated that I spend about the same amount of time on the internet that my dad used to spend on all these domestic chores. My partner probably clocks up as many hours travelling to and from work as my mum did at work. And as for cooking, well, put it this way, there’s more Bake-Off than actual baking going on.

Yes, our parents' generation may have owned their homes or lived in long-term council houses, had recognisable jobs and made proper food; but did they have the opportunity to develop their own personal brands or experience the rollercoaster of privatised train travel? And were their lives emptier or fuller as a result?

We have gone from maintaining the world to maintaining ourselves, with the world as a sort of dimly acknowledged desktop background. My dad had a workshop where he kept all manner of implements, pieces of wood and nails and screws of various sizes in drawers. I have a laptop with folders full of random files, half-written drafts and obsolete CVs, as well as a sporadic blog and years of tweets and emails stored in a virtual cloud which could burst at any moment.

This is not to say that the virtual and the physical can’t co-exist, and indeed my dad was dialling up to the internet in 1991 - although I was never quite sure why - and if he was still around he’d doubtless be a keen browser of today’s online universe. But when a whiff of Swarfega is enough to trigger a Proustian rush of nostalgia, it’s perhaps a sign that somewhere along the way the balance has been lost.

There is a fault in our flat whereby switching off the oven cuts off the electricity. Something to do with the element, apparently - I Googled it. That’s something I can do. I am a skilled Googler. I can diagnose the problem. I can’t fix it, however, even if I find a how-to guide on a website, because as tenants any faults must be reported to the letting agents and repaired by their maintenance team.

It’s probably a simple enough task, I imagine my dad would have sorted it in a few minutes. But if I attempted some homemade solution and it caused complications further down the line... well it doesn’t bear thinking about. The engineers, when they visit, unsurprisingly advise against such experiments.

We’ve been trying to get this looked at for over two months now while these various agencies continue to ignore us, because until the flat catches fire it’s our problem, not theirs. And of course when this and other similarly mundane matters are eventually put right, it’s us who will pay, indirectly through our rent or, if we’re deemed to be the perpetrators, through our deposit when we ‘vacate the property’.

As serial renters we’ve been systematically deskilled: our homes, like our appliances, are factory-sealed so we can’t get into them. As involuntary consumers of landlords, electricians and plumbers, our talents are concentrated in some areas (administration, composing delicately phrased emails, arranging time off for technicians to call, tolerating faults for long periods) and lacking in others (knowledge, tools, time, money).

What brings on this reflective Sunday-supplement-lifestyle-column tone, I hear you ask witheringly as you hover over the ‘close tab’ button? Well, dear reader, I can’t help wondering about our own new life which is on its way, a tiny human apocalypse soon to land amid the stuff and precarity of our flat with a mind already attuned to the wi-fi frequency and a body acclimatised to daily four-hour commutes. How can we hope to give our child those same taken-for-granted memories which formed part of the wallpaper of our own childhoods? Fast-forward a few years to a typical conversation as I sit glumy at some glowing device, scrolling through my social media timeline and fulfilling my jobsearch obligations while the little one watches, brow furrowed:

'Daddy,’

‘Hmmm?’

‘Why can't I put any posters up?’

‘Well my darling, if you read section 2.14 of the tenancy agreement you’ll see that posters, pictures, photographs or ornaments cannot be attached to the walls with sticky tape, blu-tac or similar adhesives.’

'And why are there no shelves for me to put my toys and things on?'

‘I refer my cherub once more to the tenancy agreement...’

Manual Labours at Movement Gallery, Platform 2, Foregate Street Railway Station, Worcester, 21-25 April. Includes new writing in the form of a free newspaper.

Material

Another job interview. The same recycled material, the same territory trodden so many times before. And as if by some far-fetched parodic device, this was literally the same job I had been interviewed for three years previously, and at the same place: assistant at an industrial laundry plant. Not an especially sought-after position - quite the opposite.

As I approached the site, driven by the compulsion of the involuntary ‘jobseeker’, I recognised once again that same knotted feeling, not of expectation but of dread and resentment, and brought on by the prospect not of rejection, but of acceptance.

I lurked outside just as before, in the same suit, then went into the same unstaffed reception and dialled the same number to announce my arrival. Everything was exactly as it had been last time, except for some notices on the wall about the company’s ethical obligations, which dated from this year.

It was unclear whether my interlocutors would remember me, or whether in fact they would turn out to be the different people. As last time, the vacancy was advertised in the local paper and the application form was sent by post and filled in by hand – a ritual rare enough to pass as some sort of period reconstruction. It was likely that the job was aimed at people who, for whatever reason, did not have regular internet access. I made a mental note not to let on about my extravagant broadband lifestyle. The fact that I’d been invited back suggested there was no record of my previous failure; or maybe I’d just missed out to a more suitable candidate and was being given a second chance. How generous. 

I hadn’t recognised her name but Jane, the woman who collected me, looked distinctly familiar. She gave no indication of us having met before as we entered the main building and she explained the signing-in process, but then there was no reason why she should remember every visitor, or share that knowledge even if she did, so I supposed it was up to me to decide whether or not to own up. We began the tour of the plant and the moment had passed; already she was describing the layout and I had slipped into the performance of looking interested as the machinery scrolled past, as if I were seeing it all for the first time, nodding and asking questions.

I knew from my previous visit that the tour would be followed by a short formal interview, and pinned my hopes on the probability that the manager had changed. Given the pressurised atmosphere and conditions I figured the place must have a high staff turnover. I remembered that last time I was seen by a middle-aged Scot with tattoos and a hi-viz vest who greeted me from behind his desk and then went through the motions of telling me about the job, while clearly having no intention of hiring me.

After the tour I was shown into the office of the current manager, Ian; a middle-aged Scot with tattoos and a hi-viz vest. He greeted me from behind his desk and then went through the motions of telling me about the job, while clearly having no intention of hiring me.

All three of us sat in the same seats in the same office: Ian at his desk, me on a slightly too high chair in front of him and Jane behind me near the door. None of us acknowledged that this whole scene had been acted out before. Even with such an industrial approach to recruitment it would be surprising if nothing had stirred in Ian’s mind, perhaps emerging like a pair of logoed overalls dragged from behind an industrial washing unit, pertaining to this candidate in front of him or the application form spread on his desk. But then, like Jane, he must have seen countless unhopefuls in his time, and no doubt assessed each one instantly as a bundle of human material which either could be ironed into productive shape or should be thrown out. Maybe he was playing a clever game, waiting for me to make the first move. Maybe he detected something uncanny in our encounter but dismissed it as déjà vu; maybe he was oblivious, or simply didn’t care. In that couple of seconds, I couldn’t tell.

He asked me what I knew about the company. I should have seized this opportunity to come clean: ‘Well, Ian, I know about the same amount as I did three years ago when I last saw you...’ But as tempting as this was, I thought if there really was no mental or digital imprint of my previous application, a reminder could only damage my chances. Being all too aware of my fear of getting the job - the seasoned drudge must always be on the lookout for such traps laid by one’s own unconscious, desperate for escape - such an approach might even constitute an act of self-sabotage. What was the strategy here? I wondered whether any of the employability manuals covered this scenario.

I blurted some basic facts. After a perfunctory nod he embarked on the formality of explaining the corporate structure, and again the moment had passed.

As the process went on I sensed that I had been pretty much eliminated (again), with my bookish body stuck awkwardly inside a suit recently dry cleaned by the retail arm of this very company (I had an echoing sense of thinking, I should have dressed down). Ian’s reiterations of the demands of the role suggested that he thought I wouldn’t cope with dull repetitive physical work, even though I emphasised that I would positively embrace such work and pointed to my successful history in other such jobs. 

Still the interview ticked on towards its inevitable conclusion, the only new information being that although they have bank holidays off the manager doesn't let staff take any other leave during the weeks of bank holidays, including Christmas. I didn't recall that from last time. He explained the sound business reasons for this and I nodded in acceptance, obviously, as I did at the policy that any lateness or sickness in the first three months would result in instant dismissal. During the tour, as we had watched workers put wet garments on hangers or fold dry ones into plastic bags, tasks which would be repeated for weeks at a time, Jane had mentioned the need to meet deadlines in order to return the items promptly to their owners (hotels, airports, garages). If the workload increased, the staff had to work harder and for longer hours to keep up. Apparently all the staff were working 7-5 this week rather than the standard 8-5 hours. Everyone worked together to get the work done, she said. I got the impression that this overtime wasn't necessarily voluntary. 

Last time when it came to the ‘any questions’ stage at the end of the interview, I couldn’t be bothered asking anything because I knew it was hopeless and I just wanted to get out. I knew it was hopeless this time too, and I still wanted to get out, but nevertheless my self-sabotage radar warned me against worthless silence or belatedly mentioning my past failure. In an effort to pull the experience out of the amnesic void of the here and now, I wondered aloud how long the plant had been here. A laundry has been on the site since the 1880s, Ian told me, and it used to cover the whole area of the industrial estate. It had operated under different names and owners before its various specialist departments had been re-located and it had finally been rebuilt in its current form as part of a national chain. 

All three of us, Jane, Ian and myself, momentarily bonded over our shared fascination with this historic fact; we stepped outside of the script and the characters we inhabited. We had all been here before, certainly, but in a way which transcended our individual identities, just as the soiled uniforms delivered here and passed through the machines over and over again were elements in a larger fabric, the impervious material of time.

Appropriately enough, as he sat in his office in his hi-viz vest, denying his staff holidays and ordering them to fold clothes for the minimum wage for nearly fifty hours a week, the manager struck me as being a 21st century version of a Victorian factory boss, so absorbed in the duty of maintaining his human machinery as to be utterly unaware of his own cruelty. As he led me out of the plant, twenty minutes after I’d arrived, he told me he’d been the manager here for eight years, having worked his way up through the ranks at another branch.

Outside I noticed a gleaming black Mercedes in the otherwise desolate car park. I presumed it was his, and wondered if I remembered it from last time or if it was a newer model. I imagined all the luxury vehicles which had occupied that same spot over the years, paid for by the labour of those toiling inside: another kind of laundering, another motif in the same endless story.

Labour MP David Lammy and right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange have both expressed deep concerns that Jobcentres are failing to help people find work. Policy Exchange have produced a report called “Joined Up Welfare: The next steps for personalisation”[1], which proposes that the service provided by Jobcentres should be opened up to market competition, and that claimants should be allocated “caseholders” to “coordinate specialist support suited to that person’s unique needs.” Lammy, meanwhile, writes that Jobcentres are no longer "fit for purpose"[2]. The “one-size-fit-all national system doesn’t reflect the varying and specific needs of individuals,” he argues; “the unique nature of each case of unemployment means services must be personalised and responsive to individual needs.” He too favours “a network of regulated charities and private sector organisations” to administer this model of personalised welfare provision.

The similarity of these pronouncements, coming from supposedly different political perspectives, demonstrates how one-dimensional ‘debates’ about welfare have become (Lammy even cites the Policy Exchange report approvingly). In their enthusiasm to propose dynamic new forms of support for ‘jobseekers’, both overlook a fact which is obvious to anyone who has actually had to sign on in recent years: people don’t go to Jobcentres to look for work. Jobs, or rather fragments or episodes of work, are found elsewhere, usually online or through agencies after days or weeks or months of copying and pasting and clicking and scrolling and phoning. People go to Jobcentres to get the welfare benefits they're entitled to, and which they need to live on.

Immense ideological resources have been invested in obscuring this fact, through the invention of a range of contrived interactions, most of which are thinly disguised surveillance exercises. Once inside the Jobcentre, recipients of ‘Jobseeker’s Allowance’ are required to prove their eligibility by producing evidence of job searches (often involving the spam-filled Universal Jobmatch website), made to undergo “work-focused interviews” and attend compulsory workshops on CV-writing, motivation or self-esteem. None of these contribute anything in practical terms, but all serve to wrap the basic transaction between claimant and state authority in an imaginary relationship of rehabilitation or moral instruction, as if to administer financial support without these strings attached would be somehow flagrantly irresponsible.

So, the personalisation of welfare is already well under way. Under its oppressive regime unemployment is presented as an internal fault in the individual, either a deception - you’re not really unemployed, you’re not really looking for work - or a negative attitude or deficit in employability, rather than an external economic fact. In his article, Labour MP Lammy lists examples of reasons for becoming unemployed as “health issues”, “confidence problems” and “a lack of training and skills.” But not a lack of jobs.

This is the context in which reports of politicians and think-tanks about “specialist support” and “specific needs of individuals” must be interpreted. They are falling over each other to express their concerns that Jobcentres aren't helping people  - especially young people - not out of any bid to rebuild the true social purpose of welfare or revive the spirit of the Labour Exchange but because, having systematically stigmatised the unemployed and whipped up public resentment and ignorance through the language of ‘welfare dependence’ and ‘something for nothing’, the Labour and Conservative parties are now racing to be the first to push the detonator in front of the cameras. These statements are the latest mystifications of the reality of work and non-work, providing a convenient opening for further outsourcing to the private welfare-to-work industry with its humiliation programmes and obstacle courses of appointments and activities, where the economic causes of unemployment and necessity of benefits are forgotten amid the scramble to offer lucrative guidance to 'customers' in return for public funds.

There is another glaring gap in this official talk of personalised welfare support: while claimants have to attend Jobcentres to claim benefit, the duty of Jobcentre advisers is now to do everything in their power to stop people getting that benefit. Advisors are no longer able to offer worthwhile work opportunities, as the few such opportunities that exist rarely reach the doors of the Jobcentre and are hugely over-applied for. It is not a coincidence that the web of Jobcentre rules has expanded as the same time that the labour market has dissolved into low-paid temporary and zero-hours drudgery. The goal of ‘getting people off benefits’ has been detached from the goal of finding sustainable work and is now predominantly a matter of intimidation and statistical chicanery.

Conspicuously absent from the MP’s hand-wringing elegy and the Policy Exchange plan is any mention of benefit sanctions, an issue which to anyone in close proximity to the reality of ‘welfare reform’ looms far larger than any PR waffle on what sort of “support” should be offered. Benefit sanctions are at their highest rate since the introduction of JSA and still rising, even as the official unemployment figures fall. 874,850 sanctions were imposed (5.1% of claimants) from September 2012 to September 2013 (rising to 6% in the last 3 months)[3]; and this before the introduction in October 2013 of the ‘Claimant Commitment’ requiring 35 hours per week of job searching. Targets for sanctions achieved by Jobcentre staff are widely reported, although officially denied[4]. 

In July last year, eight days after his JSA was sanctioned, 59-year-old David Clapson died from complications of diabetes. Mr Clapson was found at home “a short distance from a pile of printed CVs.” He could not afford electricity and the coroner found that his stomach was empty when he died. A response to his family from a DWP official stated that “the correct procedures were followed for the administration of benefit.”[5] 

This is the kind of personalised tyranny which routinely operates in Jobcentres today: “little trip wires"[6] designed to snare claimants and exploit vulnerabilities, regardless of the consequences, and thereby to reduce the official jobless figures, if not through actual work then through workfare, sanctions, destitution and death. As long as they are processed correctly, all outcomes are statistically the same.

In perpetrating such atrocities the Jobcentre has indeed lost any social purpose it may once have had, and as such it should be abolished in its current form. This is not however the reason for the objections of the politicians and think-tanks; for all their ideas for personalised support, they will not be drawn on the details of individual cases, even though such cases are the logical conclusion of their rhetoric. The aim in re-branding Jobcentres as remedial services based on individual responsibility and employability is to eliminate all consideration of the general economic necessity of welfare, along with the structural fact of unemployment under capitalism. Just as unemployment becomes a personal rather than a social issue, deaths from sanctions or institutionalised bullying are viewed as personal tragedies for which the organisations involved cannot be held responsible, even when they have engineered them.

Jobcentres haven't 'failed' in their aim to help people find work, because that is not their real aim. Their function is to act not as a support but as a deterrent. Everything from the bureaucratic minefield of claiming to the inquisitions of advisors and the atmosphere of humiliation is designed to make you feel like a) you’ve done something wrong to get here; and b) you would rather be anywhere else. This is not an accident or a case of bad management, it’s a deliberate policy.         

These same themes are played out in party-political pseudo-debates regarding the workfare schemes ostensibly set up to help unemployed people. The Work Programme hasn't 'failed' to get people into work, because its function isn't to help people get into work. The ‘Help to Work’ scheme is not designed to help people into work. The function of these schemes is to artificially reduce the official unemployment rate, firstly by discouraging claims through stigma and fear, and then by creating pretexts for sanctions and conscripting people into workfare, erasing them from the statistics and giving corporations a supply of free labour into the bargain. On these terms, far from failing, the schemes have been extremely successful.

Of course Jobcentres will soon disappear into the morass of virtual employability hubs and remedial training providers. The relentless torrent of dole stigma emanating from both government and opposition and amplified by media have turned the Jobcentre into the post-Fordist equivalent of the asylum on the hill that prompts ordinary ‘hard-working’, Reality TV watching people to shudder as they walk past, thinking it full of Hogarthian caricatures rather than people just like themselves only even worse off.

A vision of a truly joined-up welfare state would be the complete opposite of the market- and target-driven machinery of blame proposed by the political authorities, and would aim to ease the anxiety and despair of unemployment, rather than add to it. An unemployment benefit office – freed from the misnomer ‘Jobcentre’ - would invite claimants to register, sign on without fear of sanctions or coercion, and leave, without any compulsory support or stupefying activities or jobseeker’s agreements. Better still, depersonalise the process entirely: put the whole thing online and make claiming benefit a matter of one click, whereby the money is sent straight to your account, without human contact and without conditions, until you find a job worth doing. In an era of permanent insecurity, this is the only sort of welfare system which would really help individuals and society.