How appropriate that on the day the Chancellor celebrated the UK’s 0.6% economic growth figures with a hi-vis tour of factories and warehouses, I was reacquainted with one of the traditions of the low-paid insecure work lurking behind such statistics and within such workplaces: the enforced day off.

Where I work, all the temporary staff received a text message from the recruitment agency on Wednesday afternoon, informing us that the company “are not going to need you tomorrow but would like you back on Friday.” The message ended with the words: “Is that ok with you?” The façade of choice must be upheld and the corporate power routinely exerted over casualised labourers cannot be called what it is, namely exploitation on an industrial scale.

Our immediate supervisors made no comment on this remote announcement, or none that I could overhear, anyway. Maybe they weren’t aware of it, even as they monitored us, ensuring that we did not shirk our duties. The business does not seem to be faltering; on the contrary, it is a struggle to keep up with the expanding workload. Perhaps, just as we are expected to fit an increasing volume of products into a small space, the bosses are trying to squash more of our labour into less time, to maximise their return.

In the absence of any focus for our resentment we kept calm and carried on, as the posters say, completing the monotonous tasks required of us, as if no arbitrary chasm had suddenly opened up in our weekly incomes.

Luckily while I’ve been employed there I’ve accrued a couple of days’ paid leave, and the following morning I phoned the agency and arranged to take that day as one of them. As ever, the recruitment operative conveyed an impression of cheerful powerlessness about the whole thing. The agency’s motto could be: Don’t Shoot the Messenger [smiley face]. I had hoped to take some paid time off next month, but this was a sharp reminder of one of the first lessons the precarious worker must learn about life under the regime of flexible conformity. Thinking of accumulating your leave for a week’s holiday? Think again.

Including the disintegration of my previous job, of my 6 and a half days of paid leave so far this year, not counting bank holidays, 5 have been decided by my employers. And even this is a luxury compared to the self-employed, intermittently employed or unemployed who don’t get any paid leave at all. Just as the ‘job for life’ is now a historical cliché, no doubt soon all time off, whether paid or unpaid, will happen not when it suits you but when it suits your boss. The voice of business will sweep aside any alternative as laughably unrealistic.  “We’re all 24/7 entrepreneurs now, that’s just how it is. I’m always on duty whether I’m by the pool or in the car or in the office. I’ve never taken a day off in my life so why should my employees dictate when they work? The country would grind to a halt! My God it would be practically communism! Next they won’t want to work at all!”

The great push for growth is a convenient excuse to make ever more pressing demands upon capitalism’s conscripts, who must be constantly available and looking for work, any work, and are expected to compete with colleagues to produce more and make do with less. This is the real outcome of an economy shaped by the discourse of crisis-as-normality and the charade of unity against a backdrop of skyscraping inequality: go wherever the agency or Jobcentre sends you, regardless of pay, conditions or matters of principle, do what you’re told and more, and look happy about it.

So I’ll obey these orders-framed-as-invitations and take my time off when it’s given to me. After all, the time might not be of my own choosing but it’s up to me what I choose to do with it. It’s a free country. I might decide to go shopping, if my wages stretch beyond or even as far as the basic essentials which enable me to reproduce my labour (there’s the credit card, of course, but debt is a matter of individual responsibility...). I might even fritter away my spare time writing inane accounts of my experiences of work – but if I choose to do this rather than using that time to search for the next job and fill in application forms, well... the only person I’m punishing is myself. Nevertheless, there’s no harm in pursuing this eccentric hobby if it makes me feel better. That is, as long as I don’t jeopardise my future employability by putting my name to negative, anti-work polemics (in which case I would only have myself to blame for my lack of prospects), and as long as I don’t publicly identify my workplace and thereby endanger my current position, even if aside from its brutal employment practices and quasi-Victorian working conditions its business model is also grotesquely unethical, and even if I have already asked the agency to move me somewhere else but apparently there is nowhere else.

A so-called recovery engineered on these terms will only further aid the rich at the expense of the rest of us, being driven by unspeakable greed and implemented through the treatment of people both in and out of work as so many disposable units of short-term labour. The expansion of my current workplace on the foundation of such institutionalised insecurity and dubious morality is a symptom of this malignant growth, achieved by those at the top crushing those at the bottom, breaking their backs and their spirits so as to make them even more ‘flexible’ in the future.

Evan Davis was shocked to hear, during a Today feature on the perils of the current heatwave, that care homes for the elderly don’t have air conditioning. He must have led a sheltered life. Or rather, an air-conditioned life, a life programmed and mediated by career journalism, acted out in conference rooms, studios, airport lounges and hospitality suites, the frictionless non-places of global capitalism. Obviously this sticky issue never came up in those Oxford PPE seminars (although hothousing humans for profit must have been on the curriculum in some form, surely). But he didn’t let the revelation put him off his stride, and anyway the schedule had already moved on to some other pressing topic, such as the royal carcass or the Olympic legacy.

 

Later, reflecting on this exchange in the seething oven of a warehouse where we, the elderly-in-waiting, carried on our monotonous manual work while upstairs the air-con irrigated the cool and spacious offices of the mouse-clicking bosses (not so much a Dragon’s Den as a Vampire’s Attic), I realised this summed up my impression of the interchangeable cast of politicians, media professionals and business leaders who preside over our overheated lives: an air-conditioned existence. They are cushioned by a mental, physical and financial zephyr which is taken for granted even as it is denied both to those who most need it, and those whose labour funds the refined atmosphere to which they have become accustomed.

The heat at the core of the economic meltdown is purely symbolic; unlike the markets, the actual temperature is carefully regulated. I couldn’t imagine the CEO of RBS sweltering and glugging warm tap water as he fixed the figures for his company’s privatisation dossier, any more than I could picture the Today team propping open a fire exit as they got to grips with the latest episode in the Euro debt saga. The so-called crisis has now reached such a plateau of air-conditioned normality that every default or bailout seems only to constitute an administrative adjustment which ensures that the presenters, politicians and business leaders can carry on living in high-level comfort, while those below them search ever more desperately for rest and shade. Unless those media professionals work for a Greek state broadcaster, that is, in which case the ideological air-conditioning unit is broken beyond repair.

 

                          But such tensions seem far away from the smoothly ventilated discourse of the BBC media-industrial complex, even when it touches on those locations where its correspondents might conceivably feel the heat. I recently watched an edition of Davis's business show The Bottom Line on the BBC News channel [radio version available here], in which he hosted a breezy round table discussion with a group of travel and tourism executives. The recorded show was overlaid with a live news ticker at the foot of the screen which looped updates from sites of geopolitical upheaval - Syria, Turkey, Egypt - while above the scrollbar these people traded club-class corporate clichés, as if their entire shared worldview was air-conditioned, mediated to the point of virtual reality.

                           The participants in these shows, however,  are aware that in order to justify their indulgences they must as least appear to take account of those economic factors which affect the rest of us. Whether dehydrating in a residential home or taking on fluids in Costa Coffee, the ‘bottom line’ is no longer just a matter for entrepreneurs but the Plimsoll line of the cruise liner Big Society on which we are all supposedly sailing together. “People are re-prioritising their discretionary spend”, one of the show’s guests euphemistically observed; but the annual package holiday was not deemed to be under threat. On the contrary, the consensus in the studio was that even for those facing insecurity or redundancy, it was as inevitable and affordable as television or toothpaste. Another guest was a director of a Greek holiday resort, and while he admitted that his domestic business had taken a hit, his sales pitch betrayed not the slightest ripple of anxiety. Indeed, he painted Greece as a popular destination offering exceptional value for money due to the very crisis from which, he insisted, it was now recovering.

                          The real and virtual occasionally overlapped: the execs acknowledged that travel operators had to watch out for episodes of national unrest, as if protests or coups were unexpected weather events, matters for insurance and contingency planning. Whether it’s the Arab Spring or the ash cloud, the panel agreed, people want peace of mind. They weren’t alluding to the minds of those occupying Tahrir Square, although no doubt this has already been written into the brochures as a tourist spectacle. The same cities whose mass protests and violent suppressions  bruised the news feeds were viewed here purely as products to be sold. An easyJet executive reported, “We were barely affected by what’s going on.” UK travellers apparently keep on flying regardless of political turbulence, protected by the sunscreen of capital.

These passing references between the lines of upbeat PR were uncanny, as if some background disturbance had become momentarily audible before the mechanism corrected itself and the glitch was forgotten again. As the credits rolled, guests and host stood up and left the air-conditioned studio together, no doubt adjourning to an air-conditioned bar where they would congratulate each other on their performances, before each returned to their air-conditioned apartments for a night of guilt-free, air-conditioned dreams.

Humiliation sessions and intensive surveillance will ‘empower’ jobseekers to find work, says DWP

The latest phase of the government’s tough-but-fair approach to welfare reform has been unveiled, with two new schemes encouraging jobseekers to get off benefits and into work.

 

As part of a pilot project, unemployed people in Brougham are being handed over to private consultants Head First for ‘Empowerment Training’. The 1:1 courses, which are compulsory for all claimants referred by a Jobcentre advisor, consist of the jobseeker enduring 20 minutes of derisory laughter from an ‘Empowerment Coach’, then being made to literally grovel to qualify for their next benefit payment. 

 

A spokesman for Brougham Jobcentre explained: “This is a service run by skilled professionals and is designed to empower customers and motivate them to step up their efforts to find work.”

 

The DWP also confirmed that claimants who refuse to attend the sessions or walk out would risk having their benefits stopped.

 

The spokesman added that the “innovative” and “personalised” scheme was already showing positive results, as the number of claims in Brougham had dropped by 10% since it was introduced.

 

However the scheme is not so popular with claimants, who have dubbed it “humiliation therapy”. One person, who did not want to be named, said: “I lost my job and I was already in debt, and then I was referred here, they said for ‘advice’. I was called into a room and I asked: ‘How am I going to pay my gas bill?’ The guy just pointed to his shoes and said: ‘You can start by licking these.’”

 

When challenged on the controversial methods of the programme, government minister Liam Hoban said, “We are facing an epidemic of worklessness which demands bold new solutions. Rather than complaining, jobseekers should be grateful that we’re giving them an opportunity to boost their employability skills. If they can’t find work on their own and are taking money from hard-working taxpayers, then they obviously need help to change their attitudes and be more resilient if they’re going to be of value to employers again in the future. If they won’t do the right thing and accept that help then I think it’s perfectly reasonable to show them that a life on benefits won't be worth living.”

 

Alongside this new approach, the DWP is trialling a new nationwide online scheme, run in partnership with private firm Virtua, which it says has been set up in response to concerns from taxpayers about how benefit money is being spent. 200 people claiming Universal Credit are being identified and tracked on a database which can be viewed by the public at the website www.benefittracker.gov.uk. Subscribers can also follow the movements of particular jobseekers via Twitter. It is expected that within a year registration on the site will be mandatory for anyone claiming out of work benefits.

The site, which is automatically updated in response to community interactions or when jobseekers make purchases with Universal Credit funds, is now active and is being updated daily. Tweets which have appeared so far include the following: 

 

#UC1295383 9.03am: Neighbour reports curtains drawn, music heard last night, no answer to mobile - To monitor further

#UC0539355 11.35am: Jobseeker spent £1.50 on takeaway coffee - Adviser to give counselling re:  savings of home consumption

 

#UC0839258 15.47pm: Feedback from agency: jobseeker declined offer of 4 hours work 5-9pm Reason: “not enough notice” - Sanction applied

 

#UC0459382 10.30am: Jobseeker failed to attend Positive Thinking session, no reason given - Sanction applied

 

#UC0922521 9.45pm: Message received from Police Community Liaison Unit - This claim is no longer active

Defending the scheme against accusations of intrusiveness and bullying, a government spokesman said it was “in the public’s interest to see how their money was being spent,” and “those who were making genuine efforts to find work and not hiding a luxury lifestyle should have no reason to object.”

Heresy

 

If only, rather than wasting my time thinking about work-power relations and questioning the discourse of 'jobseeking', I would apply "smart effort with impact" and display "positive and balanced intent", and above all if I cultivated a proper work ethic, I could now be making a living writing stuff like this:



The Only Way is Ethics

 

(this and countless other righteous tracts discovered via the 'Employability Hub' @EmployHub - a "social learning community", apparently*)

 

The words would pour out of me, as if I were possessed by some inspiring inner voice. From my pulpit-blog I would preach the gospel of employability, giving new virtual form to the familiar motivational narrative: the sanctimonious opening anecdote... the history bit... the bit where I mention "the capitalist economic model" as if I stand outside of it... the vaguely threatening, Torchwood-like The 21st Century is when everything changes and you've got to be ready bit...

 

In contrast to the old-fashioned 20th Century workplace, the author tells us, "The 21st Century perspective favours values like..."

 

...fear, insecurity, competition, selfishness, 24/7 availability, emotional labour? No? Oh hang on...

 

"...independence, individuality, influencing without authority, insistence, initiative, innovation, risk, diversity and entrepreneurialism."

 

Ah, of course. Hallelujah.

 

 

* More on Hubs here

Notes on walk, Bury St.Edmunds 28 December 2012: Symonds Road, Shakers Lane, Hollow Road, Compiegne Way

Moreton Hall: once a stately home owned by a Cambridge history professor, now a private school. Day and boarding, ‘preparatory and pre-preparatory’. Pre-preparatory?

According To Locals (1) From 1940s to 1960s the whole area around Moreton Hall, previously farmland, was a military airfield abandoned after the war. Children played unsupervised among the munitions.

According To Locals (2) In the 1950s Ford wanted to build a car plant on the site. The council refused, said high wages would damage other local industries. Moreton Hall, almost-Dagenham, then became a residential development.

According To Statisticians A few years ago a study found the Moreton Hall estate to have the longest average life-expectancy of any area in the UK. “Girls born on Moreton Hall could live to 119”

Leave Symonds Road at right angle bend – past the layby where 6 years ago I parked every morning for a 3 week temporary agency admin job at a bank in the town centre - into Shakers Lane (no vehicular access)

No evidence of Shaker worship, architecture or furniture in Shakers Lane; only the background drumming of traffic on the concrete runway of the bypass gouged into the landscape 100 metres away.

Continue straight ahead, past left turn leading to footbridge over dual carriageway towards the Abbey Gardens / town centre. Ignore the call of the A14 container lorry-retail park continuum, in many ways the successor to the Abbey itself; a once all-powerful institution ransacked by rioting townspeople and dismantled for scrap.

Further down Shakers Lane: sequestered elderly care home; SCOPE ‘Inclusion’ Unit; one or two houses; B&B.

“not considered to be of special interest”

End of Shakers Lane, reformatted junction with Hollow Road and Barton Road. A mini-roundabout is overlooked by a distinctive relic of a 14th century window, moved from a hospital in another part of the town to its current location in the late 1700s, forming part of another hospital building which later became a private house. For some time, seemingly since at least 1900, it has stood alone, its second home also a ruin.

North up Hollow Road, towards the sugar factory. By bridge over railway line: ‘Adult Learning Centre’ recently renamed ‘Community Hub’. Outline of old lettering still visible on brickwork behind new sign. Biopolitical palimpsest.

The metallic mass of the sugar factory, its silos sighing, chimneys puffing out white smoke. An actual real-life factory, not a CGI heritage simulation. Have to resist the urge to walk up to the barrier and ask the security guard if I might wander in and have a look around.

Occasional lumps of sugar beet, thrown off by over-enthusiastic delivery lorries, lie like dead seed pods on the pavement outside the houses opposite the factory. Having started their lives in a remote field somewhere on the planet’s surface, at every moment being guided by nature and human intervention toward their final transcendent crystallisation, these poor specimens got to within a calorie of fulfilment only to end up, by the whim of the sucrose Gods, stranded here on the hard shoulder outside the gates of Silver Spoon. Imagine residents tired of tripping over these unwanted gifts every day upon their arrival home, picking up the dirty beets and hurling the damned things back at the trucks as they rumble past.

1936: “The British Sugar Corporation was created by the Sugar Industry (Reorganisation) Act to manage the entire UK sugar beet crop”

1977: “a rights issue decreased the government holding from 36% to 24%”

1982: The British Sugar Corporation was taken over by Berisford International and became British Sugar plc.

1991: British Sugar sold to Associated British Foods (ABF)

2011: ABF and its parent company Wittington Investments targeted by UK Uncut for tax avoidance. “The tax avoidance scheme involved moving capital between ABF/Primark and the affiliated Luxembourg entity ABF European Holdings & Co SNC by means of interest-free loans, avoiding tax of about £9.7 million per year.”

“£650,000 fines following sugar factory death” (2005)

“The tall British Sugar silos dominate the town's skyline, whilst the busy A14 passes above the roofs on a high-level flyover.” (2007)

Just past the factory, the pavement dissolves into generic automotive (de)territory. All that is solid melts into non-place signage. Peripheral zone of industrial units and DIY outlets. Hot tubs, ‘Mole Country Stores’.

A143 roundabout at optimistically named ‘Compiegne Way’ - concealed service road, electricity substation, fenced-off factory land, discarded bottles

As glimpsed from a car window: pedestrian standing on grass verge, folding a 1980s map of Bury St.Edmunds, in fading light.

Mr Duncan Smith, in the spirit of accountable and transparent government I believe the public has a right to know the contents of the £39 breakfast which you consumed at our expense.

 

Did you plump for the smoked salmon option? Or was it a full English? If so were the eggs scrambled, fried or poached? How many sausages? Are you a black pudding man?

Was the service satisfactory? What thoughts passed through your mind as you devoured the warm chunks of flesh?

Note to Potential Employers

Congratulations! Using your expert Googling skills and social media knowledge, you have reached the blog of one of the candidates for your latest vacancy. Think of this as a hidden CV extra, offering a wealth of behind-the-scenes material. Please do read through the various entries and leave a comment - your feedback is important.

 

I should take this opportunity to mention, in case I somehow omitted the fact in my covering letter, that there is also a whole book which deals with similar topics: scroll down for details. If you are thinking of advancing my application to the interview stage I would suggest buying and reading this text (it is very short, and cheap). You may find the contents informative and a useful point for discussion.  

 

I look forward to hearing from you.

"I had the perfect elevator speech memorised and I carried it around everywhere for months in my head, but when I finally found myself in a real elevator with a real potential boss and I opened my mouth to speak, all that came out was 'FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU' for the entire journey."

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