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But there is a feeling of English culture being overwhelmed by capitalism, too. The forces that have ruthlessly turned almost every British high street into a cultural wasteland of dull and identikit chain stores offering the same sensory experience are now so vast and incomprehensible that it is the single Polski sklep that is singled out. If English culture is being trampled on then Ronald McDonald should take more of the blame than Eastern European fruit pickers.
On one occasion22 I witnessed a particularly disgusting scene. Wheeling a trolley down a deserted corner of the warehouse one dull afternoon, I saw a supervisor – a dead-eyed young middle manager who was puffed up from the gym and pungent with aftershave – set upon an older man. Shaking his finger at him, the young man called the older worker every name he could think of. The words came out of his mouth like sour milk poured from a jug. He might as well have knocked the old man over with scorn. The man on the receiving end, who must have been at least sixty, grew pale and tense as he cowered
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The security guards at Amazon were endowed with a great deal of power, which included the right to search your car if they suspected you of stealing something.
From the perspective of a middle-class professional cocooned in a London office, the belief that workers gorge themselves on stodge, grease and sugar because they are feckless and irresolute makes sense. After all, a middle-class person only indulges like this in a moment of weakness or as part of a rational cost/benefit calculation.
A working-class person, on the other hand, will buy a greasy packet of chips as an emotional escape from the present. As Nirmal put it to me one afternoon, ‘This work makes you want to drink.’
‘There are no jobs. Or they’re minimum-wage jobs and they’re jobs based on short-term contracts and fear.’
The fact that a growing number of British people are unwilling to be treated like animals by unscrupulous employers is often viewed as shameful, when it really ought to be considered a sign of progress. British workers have minimum standards with respect to what they will put up with – standards that many of the precarious and poorly paid jobs our economy now relies upon fail to satisfy.
Together with the closure of the collieries, manufacturing jobs have disappeared right across the Midlands over the last thirty years, as firms have relocated their production lines to countries with fewer scruples about workers’ rights. One in five working people had a job in manufacturing in Britain in the mid-1980s. By 2013 that figure had fallen to just one in twelve.
‘They have replaced jobs in declining industries with lower-skilled, more routinised jobs, swapping cotton mills for call centres and dock yards for distribution sheds.’
The in-work training and the value afforded to the learning of skills vanished too. The academically gifted were encouraged to move away to university, while those without qualifications could do little more than stay put and take whatever was on offer locally.
And so you’re living with your parents because you can’t get a house. There’s no social housing.
This time I received just £150: almost £100 short. It turned out that I had again been taxed at a higher rate; however, Transline had also underpaid me along with every other picker, including the migrant workers.
I am reminded of an article in the Daily Mail about a woman who survived on £1 a day. ‘Frugal Kath Kelly, 51, ate at free buffets, shopped at church jumble sales and scrounged leftovers from grocery stores and restaurants,’ ran the story.38 This woman reportedly amassed a further £117 by rooting among the cigarette butts and dog mess, picking up loose change dropped in the street. This sort of thriftiness is typically jumped on by people who have always wanted to ration the poor. It is held up as the final ‘proof’ that poverty is really not as bad as all that: as long as you have a bit of
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The speedy efficiency which characterises middle-class life is non-existent in many working-class homes. Poverty is the thief of time.
You hang around for an eternity waiting for the person who has told you they will sort out the administrative error in your payslip. You go searching for a shop to print the wad of documents you need to start work. You must traipse around the supermarket looking for special offers with the diligence of a librarian searching for that rare first edition. You have to walk home afterwards.
Whereas a middle class person will spend their Sunday afternoons eating a roast dinner before cooking another huge meal and putting it into little containers for the week ahead, a worker at the bottom of the economy will either be winding down or chasing down one of the company bureaucrats who seem to exist in order to thwart the smooth running of their life.
When you bring home just £150 because of an administrative error (and such errors were common) you were left, after my budgeting, with £2.23 at the end of the week.
Whereas in the past the men of the Lea Hall working men’s club worked so the middle classes could enjoy more prosperous lives, today it is people like Norbert who sweat and starve to fill the pockets of some and deliver consumer goods to the rest of us on the cheap.
It plasters a layer of kitsch over the reality of life lived on the coast, which is often a struggle in the winter months when work becomes scarce.
At the time of writing, the number of people in Britain on zero-hours contracts sits at almost one million (903,000) – up 21 per cent in the year to June 2016. Almost a quarter of the jobs in the adult social care sector are offered on zero-hours contracts.
Nostalgia is hardly a feeling confined to working-class towns, but its pull is invariably stronger in places like Blackpool, which feel somehow as if they are in precipitous decline.
the economic transformation of the previous half-century has taken away one source of income (in this case tourist revenue) without satisfactorily replacing it with anything else.
With their supposedly innate xenophobia and stubborn inability to grasp the infallible theories of the salaried professor, it is as if they exist in order to perpetually disappoint the modern liberal.
Homelessness had increased almost every year since 2009/2010.11
1979, 64 per cent of residential and nursing-home beds were provided by the NHS and local authorities. By 2012 that figure had plummeted to just 6 per cent.
The company she works for will usually be the one that can do all of this for the local authority at the lowest price. Therefore the most cost-effective company invariably empties the most catheters and changes the most medical pads.
‘whilst local authorities might pay private providers £13 an hour, the worker only earns the minimum wage of around £6 per hour [now £7.20]’.
Yet so-called ‘clock-watch care’ was arguably the logical conclusion of both the privatisation of social care and the swingeing cuts to council budgets which the 2010–15 coalition government (of which Norman Lamb was an integral part) implemented with gusto.
However, some visits lasted for as little as five or ten minutes. This was due to the fact that appointments were packed into a carer’s schedule like sardines crammed into a tin. So if one appointment took longer for whatever reason – say, a customer was feeling unwell – it would invariably spill over into your other scheduled appointments,
Legally you’re supposed to have twelve hours’ [rest] ... I wish someone would tell our firm that. We don’t get that, we get seven or eight.’
If you were late – and sometimes you were through no fault of your own – a customer could be left sitting in a urine-soaked pad for hours at a time, causing nasty sores.
Often that was all people wanted once we’d taken them to the toilet or made them a cup of tea: a bit of company. I would see the disappointment etched on their faces as we dashed out of their front door: the realisation that even a brief chat was too much to ask. We were racing against the clock and it was the customer who lost out. That, after all, was what they were – a customer, engaged in a frigid transaction with you, a representative of the business.
She attributed this partly to the poor English-language skills of some care workers: ‘Because a lot of the carers, their English wasn’t good enough to read what she should be having, and when.’
the care companies knew they could extract a level of fearful compliance out of Eastern European workers that they would not necessarily expect from their indigenous equivalents.
They could also cut your hours down to nothing, which was one of the benefits for the company of employing staff on zero-hours contracts.
the only way you could ever make up would be to cut call times, and that’s just stealing time off vulnerable people. And that’s what those organisations encouraged you to do. “Oh, you can just get that done a little bit quicker.”’
‘All she could find was part time. They won’t give out full-time contracts ... very, very difficult to get a full-time job with a contract as well. Everyone seems to be a number now. It’s not like a workforce any more or a family. I mean, she worked at Marks and Spencers [and] they used to do their hair for them and everything. You know, look after their staff. But [with other firms], you’re a number now ... [The zero-hours’ contracts they use] are just to cover their arse, aren’t they? And when you’ve finished they’ll sack you off and bring new ones in ... It’s wicked what they’re doing.
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Yet much of that wealth depends on a permanent class of people who live a fearful and tumultuous existence characterised by an almost total subservience to the whims of their employers.
It’s no longer so easy to be the ‘self-made man’ who works his or her way up from the shop floor to the boardroom.
‘You shouldn’t enjoy yourself going to work, you know, you’re there for nine, ten hours a day; but you shouldn’t have to work in fear. You shouldn’t have to start a shift at six o’clock in the morning and think, you know, am I getting sent home at quarter past six? You know, am I gonna make one box wrong out of 2,000 and get sacked for it?’
Even when I was a manager, I was still fearful of my job and whether, you know, the company was going to relocate to Liverpool ... There’d be a big pile [of application forms] in my inbox tray in HR, and then they’d go, “Right, get the next lot.”
“Get the next twenty in, get the next twenty in.” That’s what the main bosses would say. Just turning [staff] over constantly, constantly.’
It struck me talking to Steven that there would be far fewer workplaces like the one he described if the left was a bit less fixated on the romantic penumbra surrounding the word ‘socialism’ – the slogans, the thundering speeches and the whiff of ‘revolution’ – and a little more interested in the boring stuff.
I was part of the 47.8 per cent of care workers who would typically leave their posts within a year.
Britain was several countries melded uncomfortably into one like different types of clay. Not so much in the geographic sense, but more in the way that people rubbed along side by side yet inhabited vastly different universes.
The name of this growing domain summons up images of fame and insouciant swagger – like a guitar-wielding megastar bestriding the stage, you could roll lazily out of bed and turn up to a ‘gig’ whenever it suited you.
they were better at persuading you that the whole thing was for your own good. You were ‘your own boss’, as the PR departments of the ‘gig’ economy firms never tired of telling you. And who could argue with that?
targeting techniques that keep a person playing a videogame: a feeling of incremental progression towards a set goal.
As much as Uber liked to say that the passenger was your customer, it felt much more like they were Uber’s.
The company looked at your last fifty ratings, meaning that a few difficult customers who brought down your average could see you summarily hauled into one of Uber’s central London offices for ‘training’. If you continued to score below 4.5, you could be blocked from using the Uber app altogether.
