Working Matters!

Redundancy Is Looming…

2010-09-17T17:16:00.003+01:00

Is this liberation or a cause for angst?

As the coalition cuts bite into the public sector, many workers are having to face stark choices – the devil you know or the deep blue sea. Should I take the voluntary redundancy package offered or competitively interview for a job on a lower grade with the possibility of further restructures in March and a compulsory redundancy further down the line?

It is a rather lonely decision these days because there is no collective response. The union is absent. Management ignores them. Threatened employees are invited to individual meetings where management can manipulate insecurities to their advantage. Everyone I know has not bothered to ask the lone union rep to accompany them believing her to be more of a liability than an aid in striking a desperate deal. One or two have asked trusted work colleagues to attend as observers but most have attended these meetings alone and endeavoured to make the best deal possible. However, despite management’s desire to isolate and bully individuals into accepting what they want, we have begun to speak to each other, to share information and to help or advise one another where we can. This is not the same as the old days of group meetings and collective workplace action but it helps to stave off that feeling of persecution and vulnerability.

The climate of deepening recession is not the most opportune moment to apply for a new job or to consider a risky career change, yet one can’t help feeling liberated by the decision to take voluntary redundancy. One reason for this is that the public sector I joined in the early nineties does not feel the same as the one I am now considering leaving. There is no longer an ethos of public service that once provided a measure of job satisfaction despite the lower wages and crappy workplaces we endured in comparison to our private sector counterparts.

These days aloof management is prized over sincerity and passion. Our chief executive invites staff to shadow her for a day in an attempt to show how ‘open’ her style of management is but her ‘openness’ only reveals the lack of values that drive the organisation. She is open about the fact that she doesn’t need to know the issues of every department or the details of every complaint. That’s what her managers are for. Pass it on. This leaves her free to network, to procure funding, to spout the right sound-bites and assuage important groups of irate clients. This can be seen as efficient delegation of responsibilities but it also feels remote.

Her managers do not appear to be driven by values of customer care or public service. They are driven by the requirement to tick boxes: to achieve endless targets, or the obligatory Investors In People certificate, or the two stars to procure government funding and a higher listing in the local government quarterly league tables. The provision of a service to the ordinary individual customer at the front desk or at the end of a phone line comes low down the list of priorities. Of course every poster, leaflet and newsletter says the exact opposite. The customer comes first. Right first time. You matter to us. Our Values are posted up everywhere. The shrill need to assert our values belies the lack of belief in anything. What’s more important is that you answer the phone in three rings. That’s easily measured.

I am reminded of the labour leadership Question Time last night. The repetitive candidate assertions about morals and values punctuating vacuous contributions left me cold. Ironically, Dianne Abbott, who happens to be my local MP and who normally sounds somewhat wooden, appeared the most human of the lot but that’s because she’s really there to keep on board those who Vote Labour With No Illusions rather than win the leadership contest.

The public sector today reflects the lack of belief in our wider society and in western democracies around the world. It would seem that even our Universe lacks a centre; to the glee of a growing band of atheists and pope-haters, Stephen Hawkings recently pronounced that with the development of science there is no longer any need for the existence God. What is there to believe in today? A growing number may no longer believe in God but everyone believes in the doomed message of climate change or the universal prevalence of child abuse and terrorism. But like the father and son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, human beings need something to inspire them, something to hope for in order to survive.

Certainly, walking away from a job without meaning feels less scary and more liberating. Perhaps as Bingham in the film Up in the Air says to every worker facing the sack ‘anyone who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you’re sitting’. That gives me some hope. So if you’re at a loose end this October, you can join me at The Battle of Ideas where changing the world is definitely on the agenda.

Making Cuts: Are We In Danger of Self-Harming

2010-08-11T12:27:00.003+01:00

On Monday this week Newsnight ran a report on 'Where does the public think the axe should fall?'. I watched in horror as desperate members of the public volunteered to wield the axe. It was like watching a group of self-harmers up close and live.

This citizen's jury was rounded up by the renowned consultancy firm, Price Waterhouse Coopers to find out, ahead of the coalition government's Spending Review in October, where the public think the cuts should be made.

The first blow was foreign aid. We should not be ring-fencing foreign aid, said this jury. We need to look after our own at a time like this. Nothing was sacred - certainly not the holy cow of universal welfare benefits and that fatted calf of job seekers allowance meant to feed those workless scroungers must be put on half rations.

Should we be surprised by this response? Not really. When David Cameron and Nick Clegg insist that reducing the deficit 'is the most important issue facing Britain' and no-one disagrees then our citizen's jury are rather like hapless survivors on a sinking ship with a pessimistic captain at the helm, desperately deciding who should be saved and who should be allowed to go under.

All over the country, people are making special cases for their service to be saved. Of course we agree that cuts should be made, they say, but not our hospital – it’s essential. Not our pensioners’ community centre – where would they go? Not this facility for our youth – do you want them hanging about on your street with no future? The louder they shout, the more likely they are to be heard; and certainly, the government have caved in to strong local protest groups. Better fight than not, then; but this approach can’t save us all and tends to be divisive – pitting one beleaguered community against another and allowing the government to lower our horizons and buckle under the weight of the budget deficit.

I think this focus must be reversed if we are to save ourselves and stop self-harming. If our only view of the British economy is one of a sinking ship then we are all losers.

We need to focus on economic growth, not the budget deficit. How can we grow the British economy? What ideas do the coalition government have about that? What new sectors have they targeted for investment and development that will create the jobs we all need? They need to think big not small, local and limited.

Big Potatoes is the manifesto of a group who do believe in innovation and growth and thinking big. Be bold. Pick up a copy and chuck the axe away.

Working For Profit? You’re Having A Laugh!

2010-03-31T15:24:00.006+01:00

This was the response of a group of eco-businessmen in St David’s, Wales when interviewed by Paul Mason from BBC’s Newsnight for his report on What’s wrong with Britain.

All five businessmen thought the idea of maximising profit was old hat. They tell Paul that they have learnt their lesson from Nature.

"Nothing in nature maximises," said Andy Middleton, adventure company boss and deep green business guru. "Trees don't ask 'how high can I grow?'"

The buzzword today is optimization not maximization. It allows one to manoeuvre and be more flexible. I presume that - rather like in Nature - if you find yourself in a desert, it’s better to be a dwarf shrub rather than a giant redwood. How different from our Victorian predecessors who sought to tame nature to our needs.

The talk is all about decent margins, low margins, tight overheads and labour intensive rather than machine production. A woman who owned a pottery design business boasted about employing lots of local labour in routine, repetitive jobs that would be better done by machines or cheap labour abroad.

Philip Blond from ResPublica argues for devolving power to the users and re-localising the economy.

All of this smacks of less growth or no growth and low horizons.

‘It’s not capitalism’ says Paul Mason.

True enough. It isn’t capitalism and I ought to be happy about that; after all I’ve argued against capitalism since my University days. But I’m not. The alternative suggested here is even less progressive. At least social progress was driven by the self interest of individual capitalist entrepreneurs. These businessmen are eschewing progress in favour of limiting growth, of allowing nature to determine our boundaries.

Britain’s lifestyle businessmen may feel good about shedding the image of ruthless profiteers but their debts are bankrolled by profit-making countries like India and China and our unprofitable industries are being bought up by those self-same countries.

If British bosses are fighting shy of bigger and better then it’s no surprise that many workers in Britain are being told to make do with less. The vitriol spewed over the BA strikers recently, is an illustration of this trend.

We shouldn’t accept this. We need more than a living wage. It’s only by being dissatisfied with our lot and aspiring for more that human progress evolves at all.

Who’s Afraid of Politics?

2010-03-17T12:57:00.016Z

Everyone it seems. ‘It’s not political, it’s industrial’ protested Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of Unite. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made the same point with the added epithet that the proposed strike was deplorable.

Who are they kidding? Arguing for or against strike action means taking a political stance and making a political argument for support. In fact, despite their protestations, everyone is taking a political stance.

For the first time in a long while, politics has been pushed onto the agenda by the intrepid stance of BA cabin crew who refuse to accept that they must pay for the recession. Even the hyped-up forthcoming general election hasn’t been able to stir up such a catfight.

Willie Walsh, the British Airway’s chief executive and former trade unionist for the moderate airline pilot’s union at Aer Lingus blames the union’s cynical action for the disruption of his customers travel plans and claims that most of the cabin crew have offered to carry on working. To avoid chaos BA are e-mailing passengers about flight information. They have trained 400 pilots and 600 ground staff to work as temporary cabin crew and have also chartered 22 aircraft and crew to keep some flights running. Mr Walsh warned that he will be forced to implement deeper cuts from the cabin crew budget if the strike goes ahead.

Shareholders have welcomed Mr Walsh’s management style and support his determination to make savings. Share prices in BA have gone up.

The government have rallied around the defiant British Airways management.

Lord Adonis said the strike was ‘totally unjustified’ and argued that the BA strike would destroy the company.

Gordon Brown intoned “It is not in the company’s interest, it is not in the workers’ interest and it is certainly not in the national interest” and branded the strike action as deplorable.

The Tories say they would have deplored the strike action even earlier than Gordon Brown and accused the Labour Party of being in the pockets of Unite; the latter having donated £11m to party funds over a period of three years and whose members have often been putforward to become successful Party candidates.

The media have joined forces in their condemnation of the strike. The Times leader argues ‘Mr Walsh is entirely right to stand his ground. The position of Unite is not just unreasonable, it is self-destructive. It poisons BA’s position with its customers. It harms the union’s own political allies. And it endangers both the future of the airline industry and a flag-carrying British company. In this dispute, Mr Walsh is being reasonable, and greatly to his credit, equally strong-willed.’

On the opposing side, the union appears to be trying hard to defend its position but one gets the feeling that it’s been pushed into a more radical stance by the militant cabin crew and that they are desperate for a deal. Instead of raising the political game and making a strong case for solidarity they continue to plead for talks.

Tony Woodley of Unite claims Mr Walsh is ‘looking for war. He doesn’t want a negotiated settlement.’

Steve Turner, Unite’s national officer for aviation, will meet officials from the Teamsters, a powerful US trade union, to discuss an offer of support. No one knows whether this support will involve solidarity action to frustrate BA flights or simply a gesture of sympathy and possible financial aid.

To be fair, Tony Woodley did make the point on Newsnight on Monday this week that he was proud of the better pay and conditions of BA staff. That shows they are doing a good job as a union, he added. However, it is no surprise that BA cabin crew are looking to replace both general secretaries with one of their own preferred candidates, Len McCluskey who they feel would better represent their interests.

The lesson from all of this is clear. When push comes to shove, you have to take sides and that means being political. In this case, I support the BA cabin crew.

In general these days, political self-interest is rarely expressed and as in the forthcoming general election one is left wondering whether we should bother with politics at all or if there is any side to choose.

If you're wondering whether politics is still worthwhile then, in the spirit of the BA cabin crew, be daring and check out the Institute of Ideas who are getting stuck in at The Battle for Politics this Saturday. I know for a fact that Claire Fox, the director and stalwart of BBC4's The Moral Maze, is not afraid of anything.

BA strikers asking for more? What the Dickens!

2009-12-17T19:11:00.010Z

Dickens is our man at Christmas; the season of goodwill to all men. We all remember the young orphan Oliver asking for more. Asking for more is what downtrodden workers have always had to do to defend their livelihoods. But it seems that in today's Britain, asking for more is seen as a crime.

12000 BA cabin crew who recently voted to strike against cutbacks in staffing and changes to working practices were villified by the media and the public. How dare they ask for more! They get paid more than the Virgin cabin crew and above the London average of £24,000 for what many consider to be a cushy number with plenty of perks.

In fact in todays age of mass travel being an air steward is probably less glamorous than a waitress in a good restaurant whose working conditions are probably more comfortable and less stressful. A BA steward who voted for strike action says their wages after 23 years of service are between £29,000 - £35,000 and believes management get their money's worth.

The majority of comments from the public seem to be that if they don't like the job they should resign. 'You're lucky to even have a job' says one resentful commentator. Workers who have accepted pay cuts or been made redundant or young people who are finding it difficult to even get a job in today's recession believe that BA workers who ask for more are just being greedy and that they too should accept cutbacks to save the economy.

But is sharing the misery going to make things better for us? Why would BA workers accepting less improve our prospects? Surely, if workers in one sector succeed in defending their conditions it would mean other employers would be more hesitant about driving down conditions elsewhere. Instead of resenting other workers asking for more, we should be cheering them on because asking for more may get you into trouble but you don't get if you don't ask and it's the only way to improve our lives.

Isn't accepting less better than losing your job if your company goes bust? Not necessarily. We have to weigh up our options and take our chances. BA is not some small business outfit. It may suffer some temporary competitive setbacks but it won't go bust just yet.

Today the threatened 12 day strike by British Airways cabin crew has been blocked by a High Court injunction that deemed the action illegal because the vote included members who had already accepted voluntary redundancy. The union may re-ballot on strike action. I hope BA cabin crew will still show some fighting spirit.

The Lost Ethos of Public Service

2009-11-13T15:10:00.014Z

Ethos. What is it? One only realises it's missing when it's not there.

I remember it was there when I joined the Local Government Benefits Service in 1988. I was inducted into the ethos of public service by my colleagues. The guiding principle of the Benefits Service was to serve our tenants by getting the benefit due to them paid out as quickly as possible so that they would not be evicted for rent arrears and be made homeless. That was our public duty. It was based on trust and confidentiality and professionalism.

Many of my colleagues at the time were graduates. They joined the public sector as a vocation - a calling to a higher moral purpose than those who went to work in the City or the private sector for the money or the prospect of a more glittery career. Other colleagues had worked their way up from sixteen-year-old filing clerks or similar lower level jobs. They expected to be there till they retired. We all expected to be there for the long term. Most of us lived locally. We felt a sense of pride and importance working for our local council.

The more people we helped the more satisfied we felt. Our efficiency flowed from this ethos.

In those days we had personal caseloads. We got to know the people we were paying benefits to: whether they were vulnerable and needed a visit, whether they needed a quick reminder to inform us of changes in their circumstances or whether they were having trouble getting their student grant. This guaranteed an important element of accountability. We even went to the inconvenience of making emergency cash payments to private tenants if they showed up with a notice to quit to make sure they did not lose the rooves over their heads. As recent graduates we could empathise with their experience of grim flats and dodgy landlords. All private landlords were seen as possible Rachmans.

When we went on strike for better pay and conditions we had one leaflet for our fellow workers and one leaflet for the public to explain why we were striking; more often than not they supported us.

In general we were a close-knit, happy group of employees with a common vision of the service we worked for, good relations with our tenants and a fairly good sense of our value and worth if our employers tried to erode our pay and conditions.

Of course, we could have worked better. There were the usual slackers and idlers and cheats who abused the trust of colleagues. There was undeniably the smug confidence of job security. Performance management could have been tighter but to a large extent as we began gearing up for privatisation in the mid-90's we had pretty much got to where we wanted to be. So we were all the more horrified to be chucked out like carefully farmed fish to the swarming sharks of the private contracting companies.

When did this 'ethos' begin to disappear and how did it start to change the service we offered?

To be continued...

Personal Fulfilment: In the Workplace?

2009-11-10T16:47:00.004Z

At the recent Battle of Ideas conference work strand ‘The changing meaning of work – from work-life balance to unemployment’, Stephen Overell from the Work Foundation suggested that meaningful work had shifted from the purely economic sense of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ or the broader vocational sense of public service to something more subjective - a quest for personal fulfilment that is not necessarily progressive.

He sees this new inwardness in how we see work as a reflection of the gradual evolution of social values: greater affluence, education, rapid rise in professional and managerial work in the 20th century and a dominant culture of expressive individualism.

Finding satisfaction in one’s work is not new. A job well done, whether it’s stacking shelves, maintaining a well kept filing system or producing a well crafted report can give one immense satisfaction. Having a good employer, likeable colleagues and a nice working environment make work a pleasanter place to be but none of these things provide that sense of fulfilment we seem to crave today.

Craftsmen or artists may come closer to a sense of personal self-expression and fulfilment in what they do. Not long ago, a sense of vocation – a calling to public service – provided an adequate sense of fulfilment for many nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers or civil servants.

So what’s changed?

Stephen Overell sees the loss of meaning increasing since the 1970’s with the decline in the concept of vocation, the ethos of public service and self-sacrifice. Without this meaning can seem ‘self-interested and solipsistic’ and the search for meaning in work today is therefore not necessarily progressive.

I agree with Stephen about the loss of the ethos of public service but I also believe that this is linked to a bigger picture: the narrowing of the public space in which people were able to find fulfilment and meaning beyond the limitations of the workplace.

During the 1980’s and early 1990’s, I and my colleagues were involved in political campaigns: in support of the miners and Irish Freedom, against racism and imperialist wars, for womens rights and abortion on demand. At work we organised around the trade unions in town halls and on picket lines.
Our identities were defined by our political ideals. Personal fulfilment was a collective endeavour.

One may have shuffled papers or stacked shelves at work but outside of work, one could be addressing a rally, organising a march or protest or being interviewed on the television or radio.

Work was a material means to a more fulfilling end. Perhaps we need to recreate our public space with new visions of the society we want and forget about trying to seek personal fulfilment at work.

Women Working the System by Necessity not Choice

2009-10-07T14:50:00.013+01:00

A new opinion poll specially commissioned by the Centre for Policy Studies from YouGov found that only 12% of mothers wanted to work full time and 31% did not want to work at all. Only 1% of mothers with children under five thought that the mother, in a family where the father worked and there were two children under five, should work full time; 49% thought she shouldn’t work at all. Fathers asked the same question offered an almost identical response: only 2% thought mum should work when her husband worked and the children were under five; and 48% thought she shouldn’t work at all.

Christina Odone from the Centre for Policy Studies hails this poll as groundbreaking and draws the conclusion that women prefer to be at home looking after house, husband and children rather than in the workplace.

In her new book 'What Women Really Want' Odone lambasts what she sees as the vocal minority of careerist women who seek self-realisation in the workplace and impose their values on the majority of those desiring fulfilment in the home.

I disagree with Ms Odone's conclusions. The glaringly obvious detail amongst the percentages is the word 'children' and particularly 'young children under the age of five'. Women with children have always had to consider working around childcare so when asked about working hours it is no surprise that they have taken that into consideration when contemplating working hours. This is not choice; it's necessity. It's not what women really want; it's about woman working an indequate system.

Recently, two single mums from Aylesbury came to an informal arrangement over childcare to allow them to jobshare as policewomen. They were found guilty of criminal offence under Ofsted's bureaucratic childcare registration rules but a huge public outcry showed that many mothers identified with their plight having had to juggle similar arrangements because of the lack of good, affordable social childcare.

The persistence of women's inequality in the workplace today is largely due to the burden of personal responsibility for childcare.

Ms Odone states that her findings call into question government initiatives such as wrap-around schools and day care centres that have cost £21 billion since Labour came to power. This seems a convenient justification for cutting costs at a time when all political parties are proposing slashing public spending. Women will be forced back into the home by necessity - not choice. Is this really what women want?

Another interesting statistic from the report highlighted by Ms Odone states the following:

While 19% of women
working full-time wouldn’t work if they didn’t have to, a
whopping 28% of men working full-time don’t want to.

The fact that more men than women expressed a desire to give up full-time work seems to reveal rather more about the general 'anti-work' climate that prevails today. The workplace is portrayed as a site of stress and interpersonal strife rather than as an arena for the self-realisation of one's potential within society. This is a relatively new phenomenon and is being dicussed in the Work Strand at the Battle of Ideas weekend conference at the end of this month.

The Good Life - or is it?

2009-08-04T12:34:00.008+01:00

In a recent Times interview, Richard Briers, the actor famed for his role as Tom in The Good Life, confessed that maybe retiring from work is not all it's cracked up to be.

Many people do look forward to the day when they can retire from work to spend time on more pleasurable pursuits. It seems the earlier one can retire the better. People boast about being able to retire at 40 or earlier. These tend to be the ones who've made mega-bucks as e-millionaires or off-shore investment bankers or some such job mysterious to the rest of us mortals. They have enough dosh to go cruising or jet-setting round the world to interesting places and events and have the sort of luxurious holiday homes that everyone else wants to go to.

For the rest of us retirement comes as a bit of an anti-climax. We have all the time in the world to do all the things we dreamt of doing while we were beavering away in the office but no longer the wherewithal to do it all. Of course there are many inexpensive and/or free activities that we can busy ourselves with - gardening, pottery, matinees at the theatre, free bus-pass tourism and concessions at many other venues. In my neck of the woods they even have something called the University of the Third Age (U3A) that hosts talks and art or writing classes and opera evenings. But it takes a certain self-dicipline to organise oneself to get up and go out and be socially interactive when there is no compulsion to do so and many of the retired end up stuck at home, slumped in an armchair in front of the box or staring into space waiting for the end or perhaps these days dreaming of a one-way ticket to Geneva.

In his interview, Richard Briers talks about when he first decided to give up the day job.

“You need your own bloody bed. When Gerald du Maurier faced his next production after 50 years of acting, he famously said, ‘I’d rather go round the shops.’ I got that feeling about five years ago; I thought if I’m not careful, I’ll forget to live.” That rueful smile again: “But then when I’m not working I don’t feel I’m living.” We contemplate this irony for a moment: “Life is duller but more pleasant, I suppose.” He brightens: “The thing is to have a few little jobs, just to keep one interested: the rest is chores and charity. I do a bit of gardening, but it’s terribly boring.”

He admits he's become another 'grumpy old man'.

'One gets so angry — all those poor people in West London suffering under 22,000 flights a year already — why on earth would we want more of them? Bloody planes: the Wright brothers should have been locked up.” He gives me one of his rueful little smiles: “Sorry if I sound crotchety, but I don’t like progress.”

Funny that! I thought he was acting when he played Tom, the sustainable guru in The Good Life. In fact he was being himself.

PS I added my own highlights

Tipping the Balance

2009-08-01T09:56:00.005+01:00

The recent suicide of of a top woman City lawyer, Catherine Bailey, has once again brought forth a flurry of articles and comments about the problem with our work life balance.

The discussions around work life balance tend to present work as a problem from which we should escape. This is a new and worrying trend in modern society.

Growing up as a young woman in the seventies and eighties, I was actively involved in debates where the right for equal access to the workplace was seen as essential to the liberation of women. Escaping from the isolation of the private sphere in the home and the unfulfilling tasks of endless housework and childcare to participate in the public sphere of work and interact socially with other adults as equals was something we aspired to and for many still remains a goal.

Today, the private sphere is upheld as a haven of self-fulfilment which is being denied us by the demands of work. See Jon Burke on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square.

What's going on? There is a limit to engaging in a fulfilling way with babies and young children. A stint as an au-pair during a gap year abroad as well as meeting up on the rare occasion with parents, made me realise this.

One reason may be our changed perception of work and the workplace. Has our attitude to work changed because what we do seems to lack any connection to a positive and improving vision of society? As a public sector worker myself, I know that today my work seems to be just an endless achievement of targets. Unlike in the past there seems to be no ethos that what we do is for the good of society and so it feels less fulfilling.

Another reason may be the constantly increasing regulation of relationships in the workplace. Over a period of time, issues such as stress, bullying, and harassment have led to what some describe as 'toxic' relations between people at work presided over by the HR police. Is this what we are escaping from?

Whatever the reasons are it is worth exploring because without work society cannot go forward and we will be the poorer without it.

The Knox Man-Work and Identity

2009-06-18T11:42:00.005+01:00

"All I want is to get enough dough coming in to keep us solvent for the next year or so , till I can figure things out; meanwhile I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I'm most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered 'interesting' in it's own right. I want something that can't possibly touch me."

"I mean the great advantage of a place like Knox is that you can sort of turn off your mind every morning at nine and leave it off all day, and nobody knows the difference."

So boasts Frank Wheeler in 'Revolutionary Road', the novel by Richard Yates recently made into a critically acclaimed film.

It's the sort of sentiment those who work in large corporate structures whether private or public may empathize with. Many may boast about it's easy, stress-free flexibility and yet as time passes and they find themselves still there, they, like Frank Wheeler, become slightly more embarrassed about telling people what they do for a living because it sounds rather dull and uninteresting.

So what keeps us tied to places of work like these?

I think most of us would agree with Frank when he says it's 'the people' he would miss if he had to quit.

"I mean hell, they're a pretty decent crowd; some of them anyway."

And there are other things too: the homely feeling of a familiar place and the 'ways of spacing out the hours of the day - almost time to go down for coffee; almost time to go out for lunch; almost time to go home –.'

An added interest is the odd office flirtation at the Christmas party or in the filing room.

For an in depth and entertaining look at positive aspects of work see Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

And yet there is something lacking. There doesn't seem to be any purpose in a job like this. Even when Frank Wheeler accidentally lands a project, it lacks real meaning - it's just another smooth talking sales promotion campaign.

However, the idea of escaping from this meaningless reality to the imagined artistic-intellectual milieu of Paris to write a novel while his wife gets a job to pay for their keep seems daunting and eventually even a little insane. Is it really the job preventing Frank's writing a novel or has he really got it in him to be a writer? These are the doubts that haunt those of us in dull, safe, meaningless jobs. Perhaps, as Frank decides, it's better to stay and earn a living, try to get a raise in order to afford a bigger house and holidays abroad rather than having to relocate and begin anew.

On the other hand, just working provides a sense of purpose for his neighbour – Mrs. Helen Givings. For most of her life she worked as an admin assistant in the Horst Ball Bearing Company.

' "It certainly can't be very interesting," her husband would say, "and it certainly isn't as if we needed the money. Why, then?" '

' "Because I love it," she'd said. 'Deep down what she loved and needed was work itself.'

' "Hard work," her father always said, "is the best medicine yet for all the ills of man - and of woman," and she'd always believed it. The press and bustle and glare of the office, the quick lunch sent up on a tray, the crisp handling of papers and telephones, the exhaustion of staying overtime and the final sweet relief of slipping off her shoes at night, which left her feeling drained and pure and fit for nothing but two aspirins and a hot bath and a light supper and bed - '

So, is it really the work itself that is the problem or our expectations of what work should be - or maybe the expectations others in society have of the work we do?

If work gives us an identity is it the identity we want?

Can we have a separate identity outside of the work we do?

Playing Too-Hard-To-Get

2009-06-04T13:27:00.004+01:00

French TV reality contestants on Temptation Island have won compensation for unfair dismissal and workers rights such as overtime pay and holidays. If that were to be rolled out over here it would be the death knell for 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here' or any show where contestants believe they have been kicked off unfairly and imagine the flood of grievances Gordon Ramsay would have to deal with.

The supreme-court ruling noted: "Tempting a person of the opposite sex requires concentration and attention."

I guess if one plays too hard or in this case too hard-to-get it becomes work.

Is this going too far in blurring the boundaries between work and play? The contestants are voluntary participants and surely acquiesced to the rules governing the show?

In general though, when hobbies and leisure activities are taken seriously that's the time to turn pro and then it becomes another job with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails. One gets paid of course or is entitled to competition winnings but one must also subject oneself to the discipline necessary to be successful.

Sky Arts 1 has a filler slot in between programmes called ‘working spaces’ where painters, sculptors and writers show us how they have gone to great lengths to set up offices or work spaces away from their normal living space in order to re-create the disciplined boundary required for a productive output that will eventually bring in the money.

Perhaps those of us who do the nine-to-five should be thankful that our work spaces are automatically created and we get paid for the time we spend there even if we do spend some of it playing Freecell and surfing the internet.

Co-opting the workforce

2009-06-03T13:42:00.002+01:00

In this time of credit crunch economics employers seem to need all the help they can get and they’re looking to their workforce to provide them with ideas for making profits as well as cooperating in making cutbacks.

Channel 4’s ‘I’m Running Sainsbury’s’ shows the bosses at head office looking to the shelf-stackers and till operators, the lowly shop floor staff to come up with new ideas on saving money for shoppers who are looking for value for money deals, offers and promotions that are also profitable for the stores.

Becky Craze, a young shelf-stacker cum till-operator had a great idea for enhancing the existing ‘feed your family for under a fiver’ deal suggesting they put all the items for the meal in one place so it could be easily picked up. One of 16 employees selected to present their ideas to head-office; she won over the top table with her simple idea and youthful enthusiasm.

Chuffed with her new ‘Project Manager’ badge, she liaised with the kitchen and food testing departments to design her own menus and waited nervously for the verdict. The experience seemed to transform her from a mundane shop floor worker to a budding executive, chatting away on her mobile to senior personnel about the possibilities of rolling her idea out nationwide. Although she had been happy at the Watford store where she had worked for 6 years and felt at home with the other staff this new project revealed a potential that had been suppressed by the routine tasks she normally performed.

Many of us feel similarly restricted and limited by the work we do and often look to activities outside of work to stimulate our creativity and interest. But should we expect our employers to make our work interesting and constantly provide stimulus? Their priority is making a profit not making our lives enjoyable. Can these conflicting interests be reconciled? Mundane jobs need to be done. Someone needs to do it.

The project failed to make a profit so Becky was sent back to the shop floor with a dismissive ‘I’ll be in touch, as they say’ from a real high-flyer; somewhat deflated albeit with raised aspirations.

The downside to this ‘we’re all in it together’ plea is that workers are co-opted into volunteering suggestions for cutbacks that affect their conditions and earnings. At our last team meeting we were asked to consider where the £2million savings for this year should come from as a planned restructuring consultation is about to take place. Other companies are suggesting getting rid of pension contributions, accepting fixed hours without reducing productivity and in some cases taking pay cuts – all as alternatives to redundancies and in the name of efficiency savings. Are we all in it together? What’s the alternative?

I'm Running Sainsbury's

M&S to cut its pension benefits

BAE faces strike over pension cuts

Boris V The Crow

2009-05-30T09:49:00.010+01:00

A new horror movie for commuters or fighting talk from Bob Crow's RMT?

Thousands of tube workers have voted overwhelmingly for a 48 hour strike action starting on 9 June against what they say is an unacceptable five-year pay offer and efficiency savings imposed by Transport for London across the whole network that will lead to compulsory redundancies.

It seems to throw down the gauntlet to TfL bosses to pay up or shut up but does this bravado conceal a more conciliatory approach? Is it the 'confrontational approach' of management that niggles? The strike will go ahead unless Boris meets with Bob - which leaves open the possibility of a deal being negotiated - but perhaps a better deal than one without a fight.

A cynic may say it's also good publicity for Bob Crow's No2EU - Yes to Democracy candidates in the Euro Election on 4 June. Their party political broadcast was strangely effective in it's simple presentation and direct message against the undemocratic European Union bureacracy. But some argue that the EU defends workers rights - limits to overtime, equality legislation and so forth. Is the EU good for workers or will you vote No on Jun 4?

Tube workers strike over pay

Deal or no deal

2009-05-28T11:36:00.006+01:00

Recently workers at Honda's Swindon plant voted in favour of taking a 3% pay cut for 10 months in an attempt to safeguard 490 jobs. Jim D'Avila, regional officer for Unite, said that by accepting this deal the workers at Honda were standing together in "true solidarity in difficult times to protect hundreds of jobs". [1]

But according to Bob Crow of the RMT ‘If a trade union ain’t going to fight, there is no point in joining’. [2] However, Bob Crow seems to be an exception and perhaps the RMT is in a pretty good position to negotiate a better deal as they can cause publicly visible disruption that puts pressure on their employers.

Not long ago thousands of workers disappeared silently from the finance and retail sectors. There have been sporadic outbursts of action like those at the Visteon (Car Parts) plant in Enfield where moderate concessions have been won but one could argue they had nothing to lose by taking a stand after they were sacked.[3] If their employers and unions had got together beforehand like the Honda workers above, they too may have accepted a similar deal to save their jobs.

The Public Sector hasn’t been hit hard yet but there is much discussion about the need for a shake-out. [4]

How do you think your workplace will respond when cutbacks are announced?

Should we fight or should we go?

Does work matter to you or should we see the reduction in work as an opportunity to enjoy more free time and do the things we would really like to do?
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8063719.stm

[2] http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/support_services/article6252004.ece
[3] http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6435/

[4] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6261545.ece