Non-Stop Inertia Quotes

“Rather than accepting that negativity about job searching may be a rational response to social circumstances, the message of the self-help paradigm is that your circumstances are the result of your own negativity.

To challenge the ideological basis of this paradigm therefore involves a high risk of humiliation, as focusing on external obstacles leaves the individual open to accusations of being personally flawed and having a "negative attitude".”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Feelings of sudden existential vulnerability now come upon the individual as if from nowhere, in the midst of indifference, in the banal space of work; at the customer service counter, in a warehouse or call centre, as s/he services the remote needs of the globalised professional class in an almost colonial fashion. And this fear also follows the unanchored worker out of the nominal workplace and into the home: it fills gaps in conversations, is readable between the lines of emails, seeps into relationships and crevices of the mind. The precarious worker is then saddled with an additional duty: to hide these feelings.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non Stop Inertia

“Like the weary workforce of a company undergoing a change of ownership, we all gather around our TV sets (or handheld digital devices) to hear the inaugural speech by the new Chief Executive of Team UK, who lectures us on our responsibilities and says that everyone should work together for a better, fairer society, before going off to celebrate and leaving us to wonder whether we'll still have jobs next week.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“As noted earlier with regard to job interviews, employers have at their disposal a whole range of convenient terms - confidence, presentation, commitment, personality - upon which to hang any ideological conflict. Indeed, such judgements are often more crucial than any real ability. Having got this far, the precarious jobseeker clearly cannot afford to step outside the spirit of the discourse.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Beyond the gloom of the Jobcentre, in the spotlight of the competitive jobseeking talent show, the illusion of immersive identification is vital, and scepticism must be not only unspoken but heavily disguised (unless all hope is lost, of course, in which case the pompous interviewer/manager is an open target for sarcasm).”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“A continual restless movement towards the next job, commodity or identity means that this reality never really comes into focus: our vision is always too blurred to orientate ourselves or see how things might be changed. Whether literally or figuratively, by way of temporary work and perpetual jobseeking or mobile media and aspirational consumption, this superficial movement conceals a deep paralysis of thought and action.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“The rootless worker cannot be uprooted.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“I often arrived at the warehouse in the mornings with a mixture of relief that I still had a job and disappointment that the place had not been somehow swept away during the night, or hoping that the managers, knowing that their time was up, had deserted their posts like guards leaving a camp, so at last we could roam the aisles and offices freely without fear of reprimand until an executive somewhere remembered to phone a temp and order her to press a button and delete us all.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“It is perhaps not too outlandish to suggest that those of us for whom market penetration and thrusting self-promotional contests do not "come naturally" are seen by today's cultural authorities as the new misfits, needing to be put right by a regime of remedial schemes, self-help manuals and, if necessary, medication.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“If I follow the script and play the role assigned to me I'll be a model citizen, with a seamless CV and immaculate presentational skills, exceeding expectations and going the extra mile. I'll show how in this society of endless mobility and boundless opportunity anyone can get to "the top" with a flexible approach, a winning smile and a ruthless eye for profit.

And if I ever falter or fluff my lines my Team Leader will be there to remind me: don't worry about other people or look for any big social picture. Forget all that stuff, just look after yourself. Put those books and ideas away now, their time has gone.

Just look straight ahead, keep moving, and think positive. Or else.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“If only I could embrace the prospect of a career in sales or marketing (and there are so many to choose from!), I would be free once more to enjoy life. Things would be so much easier if only I could, in the words of Team UK's new CEO, "do the right thing": give up those pointless scholarly principles and just go with the corporate flow, erasing myself in the process.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Work is no longer a secure base, but rather a source of anxiety and indignity, both a matter of life and death and utterly meaningless, overwhelming and yet so insubstantial it could run through our fingers.

It is normal to feel under threat and undervalued, to feel snivellingly grateful to have a job, any job. We must be sure not to take work for granted and yet be willing to be taken for granted ourselves.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Ten minutes is a luxury the day-labourer cannot afford: I should be waiting outside the metaphorical factory gates with my boots on, every morning. If I hadn't been playing truant in Tesco I could have been on my way to a remote industrial estate by now.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Employers are unhappy if their worker takes unscheduled time off or vanishes suddenly, conveniently forgetting that their own demands for short-term flexibility encourage exactly this sort of pattern. The applicant must often be available to attend interviews and start work immediately, regardless of whether he happens to be working elsewhere at the time. Such instances of unauthorised absence or sudden disappearance then become part of an ongoing and convenient grumbling about temps' leisurely unreliability, as if it were they who had somehow exploited the good will of the poor capitalist.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Where I work, doing what and for whom, for how long and how much; all these co-ordinates are arbitrary to the point of absurdity. In this non-place and this non-job, I feel detached from any meaningful social identity. The distance from my "colleagues" is as vast as is the space between myself and the members of the public who will soon be standing outside their offices, tossing their cigarettes into the gutter.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“As we stood in a corner of the warehouse unpacking and re-packing boxes at top speed in a postmodernised pastiche of actual production, I put on a tone of mock motivational vigor and exhorted my fellow temp to "think of the managing director's Mercedes parked outside and remember the real reason why we're doing this".”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“What are we not thinking about during all those hours of jobseeking, networking and CV-building? What interests, worries and fantasies might we otherwise have? What books might we read (other than self-help manuals), what conversations might we have with colleagues and friends about topics other than work? How differently might we perceive our current jobs without this constant needling insecurity? What kind of dangerous spaces might open up, in what kind of jeopardy might we put ourselves and this dynamic system, if we resigned from our jobs as jobseekers?”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Now, rather than proclaiming his jobless status the career jobseeker hides it, like something obscene, behind a screen of training courses and voluntary work and expressions of rictus positivity, and he becomes ever more complicit with this concealment in proportion to his desperation.

The jobseeker must have an alibi ready to explain away every gap in his employment history, while the most mundane experience becomes the occasion of a personal epiphany: "working in a busy café really taught me something about the importance of customer service."

Skills are valued over knowledge. Non-vocational qualifications are almost a liability, unless they are emptied of content; a degree in literature is valued not for its evidence of critical thought but because it shows that the applicant has word processing experience.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“The old skills of craftsmanship or technical proficiency are now secondary, even in manual occupations, to the new skill of linguistic and semiotic virtuosity, a kind of stagecraft: being able to adapt to whatever environment and identity one is thrown into and improvise a role around its unwritten rules of costume, gesture and language.

A sort of verbal dexterity, the "gift of the gab", which in the Fordist era would have been associated with sales work or with working one's way deliberately up the career ladder, is now generalised and compulsory in interviews and trial periods and then in the job itself.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“The CV is a particular sub-genre of post-Fordist autobiography, a copy-and-paste cosmetic narrative which accentuates the positives and papers over any cracks; ironically, at a time when continuity in work is at its weakest, one's life history must be made to seem as smooth and characterless as a shampoo advertisement.

This again is a form of emotional labour, a micromanagement of feeling. Can I force myself into a state of enthusiasm as I string together various unwanted and unfulfilling jobs and inflate their personal significance, while reducing my identity to a series of bullet points? If I can, then once again, this is a triumph of style over substance.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Meanwhile the aspirational language of self-help continues to be pushed onto the jobseeker by the bonus-driven welfare-to-work tutor, and any objections to this self-selling orientation - either on ethical grounds, or because the individual just can't bring himself to "do it" - sound like excuses for idleness or signs of deviance.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“The Minister will probably be pleased to know that many of us are ahead of the game here; regardless of our circumstances we already expect nothing in the way of actual support from these new state-sponsored agencies, and have long since realised that under cover of its quasi-therapeutic consumer-friendly language the welfare system is being turned into a glorified workhouse.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“The Jobcentre "customer" who is indifferent to the institutional charade of choice and positivity similarly tends to be viewed as having brought his situation upon himself. Rather than this indifference being interpreted as a justifiable response to a useless regime of compulsory advice sessions and pointless homework tasks, it is taken as a reason to intensify them: it's no wonder you haven't got a job with that attitude.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“As well as its obvious economic aspects, this process of privatisation also involves the transformation of social causes of unemployment (and the social worthlessness of much actual work) into perceived individual inadequacies, which must be addressed as such in terms of discipline and rehabilitation.

Unemployment is turned into a pastiche of a job, complete with mock workplace, clocking in and out times, and managers to report to; and the jobseeking subject, having been brought under the punitive authority of a private agency, is correspondingly privatised, both threatened with withdrawal of welfare and force-fed the aspirational discourse.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“As I have found on several occasions over the past few years whilst having to justify to the Jobcentre my surplus existence as if defending my own case in some interminable trial, the stigmatising effect of its thinly veiled interrogatory discourse is felt personally as an irrational sense of guilt.

The ideological apparatus of the Jobcentre routinely interpellates the claimant as lazy or wilfully inadequate if not downright fraudulent, and under such pressure even the most conscientious or self-assured person would struggle not to internalise this image.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Similarly, despite the regime of appointments, there is no real discussion of anything at the Jobcentre; any apparent discussion turns out to be an illusion, and an opportunity for the network of bureaucratic power to extend itself.

The slightest forced expression of interest in, say, IT training, is immediately formalised into a two hour appointment with some psuedo-educational provider, from which one can then only extricate oneself at risk of being accused of shirking one's jobseeking duties.

The advisors are not really there to dispense advice but rather to enforce authority.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“To refuse to go along with this performance and its mutual suspension of disbelief risks bringing the full weight of the institution down on the "customer"; he is reminded of his legal obligations and low status.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“The only labour now exchanged at the Jobcentre is the performative sort: empty gestures, feigned enthusiasm, containment of hostility, suppression of resentment.

The "customer" and "advisor" are required between them to conjure an interaction which is entirely fake, a form of surface acting stretched over the underlying reality of compulsion and surveillance.

Posters and leaflets in the Jobcentre depict smiling figures in work-like scenarios, proffering handshakes or clutching official-looking folders.

The discourse of customer service adopted by the staff presents an illusion of empowerment, as if the claimant were choosing to buy a product, and deflects any real criticisms of the system onto psuedo-issues of standards or quality.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“Now, of course, after a generation of New Times and the unstitching of the social fabric by privatisation and debt, the welfare state has itself been deemed an unnecessary drag on the new corporate agenda, like a veteran factory worker for whom the managers affect a superficial public respect while secretly despising what he stands for and quietly pushing him out of the back door.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work

“As this model of work gains ever more prominence, as fixed premises and traditional jobs are subsumed into the space of flows and flexible contracts, there is the prospect of this sort of remote-controlled labour spreading out from the entrepreneurial sphere to become the norm.

The supposedly classless society of the future might well arrange itself around an elite of WiFi managers serviced by a mass of virtual assistants who are kept occupied well beyond their nominal work duties.

This will be a society where self-marketing is just another administrative task, employment involves fitting multiple differently shaped assignments into every available gap, and there is no real beginning or end to the working day; a world in which we are all either willing or reluctant jugglers.”
― Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work