It takes 32 weeks of your life to
buy a car.
3 days, 4 hours.
Get a job, get a car.
It takes 1 week of your life to
buy a mattress.
3 days, 4 hours.
Get a job, get a car, get a bed.
It takes 2 hours of your life to
buy whiskey.
45 minutes.
Get a job, get a car, get a bed,
get drunk.
It takes 6 minutes of your life
to buy a loaf.
Get a job, get a car, get a bed,
get drunk and eat cake.
The weekly £50,000 Premium Bond
announced on Saturday
Was won by number 588755478.
The winner lives in Hull,
(The Mekons,
1977)
Clearly,
I’ve no idea how much longer I have left on this planet. Whatever my allotted
time may be, I know for certain I will never regret the decision I made to take
voluntary redundancy from Further Education. The escape tunnel I dug in
December 2017 and emerged from on Easter Sunday 2018, has literally kept me
alive, as I’d undoubtedly have exploded or imploded if I’d been forced to keep
frantically pawing the fraudulent hamster wheel of College politics, like a
lobotomised, verminous Sisyphus. Of course, alongside the joyous sense of
celebration I always feel when I remember I’ll never teach another lesson or
give a lecture, I do recognise that some of the times I had post education were
a wee bit tough.
For
instance, those emotionally febrile weeks when I was literally destitute last
October, trapped in the iniquitous Universal Credit labyrinth and reliant on
handouts from Newcastle East End Foodbank. My descent into Benefit Hades was
magically arrested by the simple stroke of fortune provided by starting paid
employment in the middle of that month. Obviously, the very act of setting the
alarm and putting your bait up after a significant period of quiet isolation
and semi-creative idleness is an enormous jolt to the system and it took me a
while to get used to the noise and stress occasioned by being in close
proximity to a large number of other human beings, where exposure to the toad
work is the only common factor or reason for interaction.
While obviously
recognising that the main purpose of work under capitalism, whether it be
backbreaking physical labour or mindlessly repetitive administration, is to
engage in a process that ultimately exists to make bosses richer and workers
ever more alienated, the degree of ordinary human interaction inherent in the
workplace can’t help but take any unwilling cog in the machine of private
enterprise, rapidly through all 5 stages of culture shock: confusion, despair,
elation, boredom and acceptance. I’d say I’ve been comfortably on cruise
control in stage 5 since the turn of the year, with no real desire to shift
lanes, go through the gears or change horses midstream. You see, scarcely
credibly, I have now completed 32 weeks of continuous labour, without any
recourse to my cherished, pressure release valve of the sick day.
This is a
significant point; while the difference between the compassionate incompetence
of the public sector and the flinty avarice of private enterprise is perfectly
illustrated by the punitive use of miserly statutory sick pay (SSP) in the
latter, meaning any absence leaves the ordinary worker seriously out of pocket,
the fact I’ve not had a day off, despite wanting to quit the place after each
of my first 9 days in post, shows there is some merit to be found in the social
aspect of work. That said, it is nothing short of a scandal to see colleagues
wracked by debilitating illnesses and conditions, dragging themselves through
the door each morning, simply because a day’s rest and recuperation would have
severe implications regarding the quality and amount of food on their table or
stability of the roof over their head. Incidentally, please do not mistake my
nose’s regular proximity to the grindstone for loyalty, subservience, or
gratitude that my pay has risen from £8.30 per hour when I started to £9.50 now
I’ve passed my probation, 3 weeks after I should have done because HR forgot
about it. The reader is invited to answer for themselves the question as to
whether I have been paid in arrears for this period. Still, what’s £135 in the
wider context of the class struggle?
Currently,
there are 13 of us in our particular section, including a team leader so
laidback he’s almost horizontal and a low-rent Hedda Gabler, responsible for “managing
quality,” which means she fills her week by sending snide, judgemental general
emails, full of invective and personal digs, then sobbing unconvincingly into
her cardigan sleeve because nobody with an ounce of self-respect likes her,
other than the obsequious fellow-travellers who crave preferment.
Of my 11
co-workers, I have significant problems with two of them; a loathsome grass who
looks like Alan Barnes and a four-eyed, gormless Born-Again Christian bore and
probable Operation Yewtree suspect who never shuts his mouth for more than 10
seconds and spouts an unending stream of shite from the minute he walks through
the door. The rest are good company. There used to be 16 of us in total, but 3
have left in the last few months; one because he was hopeless, one because he’s
got a job selling guitars, which is his real passion in life and one because he
couldn’t stand the quality analyst’s relentless efforts to undermine him.
Obviously, the net effect of 3 less people employed to do the same volume of
work is that the remaining staff have to do more. In the unforgiving private sector, we are not
privy to the employment matrices that triangulate amount of work with number of
employees and the skill set available.
Without any
thanks for our labours, now that the sole sign of gratitude, our weekly free
piece of fruit from a trolley pushed by the head of HR, has been discontinued,
management have gone for the jugular in terms of demanding twice as many bricks
with no straw. Peremptorily, we were informed we were required to work at a
quicker rate than previously, with our assumed compliance regulated by the
introduction of a series of ludicrously unattainable time scales for particular
tasks. At the same time, the unforgiving and judgemental culture of the office
means that all the inevitable mistakes, caused by the imposition of this
speed-dating approach to electronic communication, are seized upon and the
perpetrator held up for public ridicule. When the person pouring scorn is in a
managerial position, it is to be expected, as the willing camp guards of the
bourgeois elite have sacrificed their principles for a heady cocktail of money
and power. However, when the running dog lackeys of capitalist oppression are
fellow workers, honoured to embrace the role of the quisling Judas sheep, not
for material gain, but simply to be seen as useful idiots, the sense of
contempt rises even more bitterly in the gorge.
The bosses
seek to maximise profit by ruthlessly imposing further and more exacting
constraints on workers, which they are able to do with impunity as, surprise
surprise, this place is non-unionised. This is not to say there is not a
significant level of class consciousness and a desire to fight for workers’
rights evident; about 10 of us across the whole business of approximately 60
employees, are members of CWU, as well as a couple of long term Unite members. Let’s
not overstate things though; there is a moribund seam of apolitical anomie that
remains irritatingly and smugly indifferent to all imprecations of solidarity.
I actually find that approach considerably more irritating than the
brown-nosing Vichy style collaborators, who spend all their working and
probably waking hours acting as narks and grasses for the management, in the
hope of some kind of tangible or even intangible advancement in the politics of
the office. As regards the erosion of our conditions of service, the latter
scion doesn’t complain as they love their bosses, the former section seeks to
foment dissent and action, while the middle grouping gripe and impotently moan,
though have no desire to stand up for themselves. Well, let’s hope future
conditions determine their consciousness, because we’re a long way from
achieving a total of 50% plus 1 union membership, which would lead to full
recognition.
The greatest
indignity visited upon us has seen the cancellation of all paid overtime. Previously, simply to make a few extra quid,
people turned up about half an hour early for their shift, didn’t take one of
their (unpaid) breaks, or hung about at the end of the day to sort everything
out before going home. In total, we were probably doing about 2 or 3 hours a
week on top of the required 37.5 at the absolute maximum each. Now, all
overtime is unpaid and our clocking in and out stamps are ignored, providing
we’re in credit, with the standard 7 hours and 30-minute day being seen as the
only possible shift pattern. There is still the expectation you finish all work
before leaving, which can be really galling if you’re supposed to clock out at
22.30 and have a train or bus to catch. If you do any extra, time you can come
in late the next day but not leave early, which just stinks.
And yet,
despite the whispered threat of redundancies if we can’t cut the mustard, I’m
glad I’m here. The work is generally quite interesting and there’s some decent
conservation around, especially when Silent Bob the Boring Baptist isn’t there.
Thankfully, there are no Newcastle United fans to get on my nerves by droning
on about Ashley, but plenty of people who know music and films. Looking at it
selfishly, there are worse things I could do with my time for £300 a week take
home. Yet again, Larkin called it right -:
Give me your
arm, old toad;
Help me down
Cemetery Road.
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