in praise of shirking

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

Shirking nine to five

Julie Burchill
Saturday May 11, 2002
The Guardian

I have written before about what life was like growing up in an English
working-class family headed by a union man at the height of organised
labour's power; the way I thought "Capitalist!" was a swearword until I
was 10, because of the way my dad always yelled it at the TV during the
news and my mother always tutted. The never-to-be-forgotten time when the
self-righteous old sod made us put our Christmas dinner in Tupperware
boxes and take it to the striking bakers on the picket line. I remember
thinking bitterly "They're bloody bakers: why don't they bake something
and leave me to enjoy my chicken and Paxo in peace!" More than anything,
I remember the ease, confidence and if-you-don't-ask-you-don't-get
straightforwardness of the working man and woman at that time. Think of
May Hobbs, the brilliantly articulate leader of the cleaners; in the
1970s, even cleaners went on strike! (My mum was one of them, briefly.)
Imagine that now. You just can't. Or the glorious Asian ladies who led
the strike at Grunwick. To quote an old Broadway term of approval and
largesse, "Everybody worked!" Or not, as the case may be.

What the working class learnt to do in the 1970s, finally, was to take
their ease. For a class defined by the fact of selling their labour in
order to live, this hadn't come easy. But in the 1970s, the working class
finally learnt to lay down their shovels and take the piss - just as
every other class had always done. Be it the millionaire evading tax, the
MP working two days a month for a six-figure salary as a company
director, the farmer growing fat on subsidies or the journalist fiddling
his expenses, doing minimum work for maximum return has always been what
people aspire to. In the 1970s, the working class finally caught on;
every time a printer, say, signed himself in for nonexistent overtime as
M Mouse or I Amnot, he was merely doing what the rulers, movers and
shakers of our society do every day of the working week.

No matter how much the old Tory press and the New Labour government have
tried to paint the 1970s as a grim, grey era for these poor beleaguered
isles, largely due to the unions' nasty habit of "holding the country to
ransom" (who is the country, if not its workers?), I remember it as a
time of unparalleled fun, affluence and confidence for the working class,
who finally realised, with childlike delight, that you had no
responsibility whatsoever to play straight with a system that had never
played straight with you. In those days, manual work was the nearest it
could be to fun, because you were halfway to being decently paid, giving
the finger to those who had always short-changed you, and secure, with
the strength of your union behind you. You'd finally joined the cool
kids!

But, of course, the working class - being newly clued-up to the slippery
ways of their "betters" - never talked about work and fun in the same
breath. No, to all intents and purposes, work was still grim and
soul-destroying, and that was all the more reason why you had to be
rewarded properly. Else you might get really depressed and go on strike!
If a boss had walked on to my dad's factory floor and told the workers
they had to have fun at work, as well as giving up their time and
hearing, the old geezer would have had them out the gates before you
could say Jack Jones. Union strength saw to it that management finally
treated workers with a combination of fear and fascination that was the
nearest they could come to respect, and a mutual, good-humoured distaste
came to exist between the two sides once the bosses grudgingly accepted
that the hirelings had got wise to their game - the less you do, the more
you earn.

It should have been plain sailing. However, with the divide and rule
tactics that so fatally weakened the labour movement over the past two
decades, and that have seen the surrender of the workers rewarded not
with a bigger share of the pie but with - quelle surprise! - the grubby
crumbs of casualisation, privatisation and an endless supply of McJobs,
we now finally see the day when bosses literally order British workers to
"have fun". The workers in question toil in a call centre, of course, and
the parent company is American. Not only that, but workplaces that in the
past have failed to respond to the decree to lively up themselves have
received a visit from a corporate clown in full slap.

But even this grisly attempt at enforcing joy through work pales in
comparison with an ad for a "massage parlour" that appears in my local
paper every day. R U UP FOR IT? it yells, and it's the language of
mad-fer-it Madchester hedonism superimposed on the reality of the
soul-destroying drudgery of sex work that jars. You can just imagine the
exhausted jade, layering on the lipgloss and meeting her own weary eyes
in the mirror as these words come into her head, mocking her youthful
dreams of fun and freedom.

But to some extent, if not so blatantly, we are all but a few of us
mocked when the words "fun" and "work" collide. And if the bosses really
so badly want their workers to be happy, they could always try doubling
their wages instead of siphoning off the profits to idle investors, fat
cat directors, useless ad agencies and superfluous management. I
guarantee that this will have the workforce laughing and grinning like
crazy.