It’s work, not love, that makes the world go round
SOCIETY ALL DAY LONG By Joanna Biggs (Serpent’s Tail £14.99)
FAMOUSLY and memorably, the poet Philip Larkin asked: ‘Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?’ He longed to be ‘…courageous enough / To shout Stuff
your pension! — but knew he never would. The tyranny of the nine-to-five is about money (of course), but also about moral worth: we work because we know we should ‘pull our weight’ in society’s tug-of-war.
on any morning, in any town or city all over the world, people stream into their places of work, some driven by a sense of vocation, some by resigned boredom, some by greed, some by need. Surely it is work, not love, which makes the world go round?
Joanna Biggs offers an excellent contribution to our knowledge of the world of work in all its variety — not through tedious sociological analysis (thank goodness), but through the stories of real people she has interviewed all over the country.
Reading this book reminds me how times have changed dramatically since my generation left school or college in the Sixties with no worries about finding a job. We were lucky.
Joanna Biggs makes it bleakly clear that for many people today, ‘the idea that good work brings a good life no longer holds’. Biggs divides her workers in interesting categories, yoking disparate occupations in terms of their overall function. So the ‘Making’ chapter gives us a potter, a shoemaker and (yes) a robot, which introduces us to its maintenance engineers.
‘ Serving’ includes a sex worker, two baristas, a call centre adviser and a political special adviser. Those ‘Repairing’ are a rabbi, an Army major and a nurse, while those ‘ Leading’ are a company director, a stay-at-home mum (inspired, that one) and a hereditary lord.
The scope of the book is broad. We meet those who are selling, entertaining, thinking, caring — as well as a curious clutch of people Biggs lumps together under ‘Starting’: a goldsmith’s apprentice (one of my favourites), a rebellious intern, an entrepreneur specialising in ‘start-up’ technologies, an unemployed graduate.
There’s also a 56-year-old man on Mandatory Work Activity, usually known as ‘workfare’ — the Government initiative designed for those on Jobseeker’s Allowance, to help them ‘gain a better understanding of the discipline and focus required for work… while at the same time making a contribution to the community’.
Joanna Biggs clearly does not think very much of ‘workfare’: in fact, it’s clear she despises the scheme. Here, although of course anyone can see that the system is not perfect, I wish she hadn’t editorialised so overtly. I really wanted to hear more about what John thought of his life.
A book which aims to give the reader much-needed insight into other people’s lives (and it certainly does that) seems to me to be spoilt by degenerating into a student newspaper leader: ‘A citizen’s income set at the right level — £320 a week is the current estimate — would kill off the sort of unproductive and low-paid jobs
that have proliferated since 2008 in the UK.’
At that point the author does not speculate what disastrous effects such indiscriminate largesse could have on the economy, with inevitable repercussions for the very men and women she has met.
In the Seventies I was a huge admirer of the work of America’s Studs Terkel and England’s Tony Parker, both oral historians who aimed to give insight into the lives of those with no voice, by using recorded interviews, carefully transcribed, with no questions included and no comment or judgment.
It was a magnificent technique which catapulted the reader movingly (and sometimes shockingly) into the hearts and minds of prisoners, drifters, miners, people on a housing estate, and so on.
You felt you got to know them without the author-interviewer standing in the way — although, of course, all interviews have to be edited.
Joanna Biggs invokes Terkel: ‘ I’ve often wondered what ( he) would think of how we think about work now.’
Well, I reckon the great man would continue to record what he heard, without surprise, and without trying to fit life stories into a preconceived mould.
In contrast, Biggs writes: ‘I continuously heard that people loved their jobs, and sometimes this worried me: it felt as if work was becoming more insecure on one hand, and the work ethic increasingly revered on the other.’
At the end, she lays her cards on the table, confessing that as she listened to people’s stories, ‘I most often wished for the way we work as a society to be organised more fairly and hoped for more resistance to the way it’s organised now.’
That’s the trouble with the workers, you see. They’ve always been unpredictable individuals who may like or dislike their jobs but just get on with life, turning their backs on revolution.