Tag Archives: Work

Working to Live or Living to Work

“Life isn’t nice, it’s contingent.” Kendal Roy

I was set an article to study for my French class that detailed the generational struggles with work and life. It was also accompanied by a short cartoon video exhorting the benefits of building mixed teams of energetic Gen Zers, professionally focused millennials and seasoned grizzly boomers. The cartoon boomer was me with less hair and more tummy. French businesses were being encouraged to put me on teams with the young ones to share my history of the company and my deep knowledge of the market. Meanwhile, I would be benefiting from the energy and new ideas from the newbies while we worked in shiny new ‘collaborative spaces’. The interesting thing was that in the more detailed article the new ideas the ‘petit jeunes’ are bringing seem to best summarized as “work sucks, there is more to life than a job and I get paid to do the job, I turn up on time and leave on time and do what I was asked to do so don’t talk to me about my commitment?”

It’s actually hard to argue with any of that. It’s not as if many of us are in our dream jobs, I have been in container logistics for 40 years, I never got the job doing A&R for Virgin Records or writing album reviews for NME, I’m not running my own winery, I don’t have my own restaurant. The social contract with work is and has been for however many years that one does one’s best and gets paid more or less accordingly to that effort. If your face fits you get paid more, if you are a handsome tall white guy you get paid more, if you kiss a little ass you get paid more. If you don’t kiss enough ass or even worse, are a woman or a minority, or if you demonstrate that you can actually see behind the curtain and see there is someone frantically pulling levers, you will get paid less or shit-canned. Yet ironically for most of my early working life, and more generally in the USA, there has been the ongoing pretense that companies are like some giant family, looking after you and in return for your slavish devotion, working long hours, traveling Sundays to be at work on the other side of the Atlantic first thing on Monday morning is just the baseline of personal commitment in return. The protective cloak of health care for you and your loved ones, that only comes with a job, reinforces the need to play the corporate game, the added cosseting of 401k contributions or stock options tie the restraints tighter. The bondage analogies pile up as most contracts of employment are metaphorical ballgags. In California they have the marvelous oxymoron of the ‘At Will Contract’, the device that flies in the face of any sense of mutual commitment. ‘At Will’ meaning I can fire you if I feel like it.  You can then go off and rely upon whatever weak regulatory protection you can find after the event to come and complain, of course the employee is ‘at will’ to leave, as long as they work their notice, don’t go and work in the same industry for 2 years and don’t mind not having any healthcare.

One thing that does make me smile is the dance over remote working. The guy in the corner office who worked his way there by the old route of golf, kissing much butt, being a good company man and absently striving long hours while his kids were growing up is now unsettled to find that in his moment in the sun there is no-one in the office to appreciate how cool that corner spot really is. If the millennials and gen Z were already not buying into the corporate dance from a lack of credibility perspective, after all thanks to streaming they have watched every episode of The Office, the pandemic didn’t just stop the dance it blew up the dance hall.

So for 2 years everyone in office work worked from home, the world not only didn’t fall apart, but life improved on most measures. If you were fortunate to not be in healthcare or one of the working poor you worked remotely, doing the normal stuff, at times that suited you, wearing what the hell you felt like wearing, at least below the waist if you had to Zoom, not commuting. For women, not spending an hour and a half longer than most men to get hair washed, dried, make up applied, outfit put together was life changing. For those with small kids, the ability to actually achieve something like a work-life balance arrived. For everyone other than commercial real estate investors, the new way of working was so self-evidently better it continued, even when the pandemic reasons to work remotely melted away. Then we had the steady drip drip of articles, opinion pieces, straightforward shill pieces, news items and large announcements by the likes of Google that remote work would stop. That would be the same Google that fired 12,000 jobs, ‘pour encourager des autres”? 

All the bullshit about the loss of culture, the loss of the networking at the water cooler, the lack of mentoring opportunities was written by people who had obviously not stepped in an office in the last 5 years. Rows of mindless cubes with no defensible space – except the BSDs in the four corners – the constant distractions of other people’s voices while you are trying to get some mundane task done. They have also not understood what headphones have done to the great office experience, go into any office and there is no smart banter, no chit-chat and certainly no informal mentoring. Everyone is working away in headphones in their own island.

The other sand in the Vaseline is the lack of people wanting to do terrible jobs. Due to largely demographic reasons reducing the intake of raw meat into the work machine and the uncomfortable fact that the boomers have lots of money in their houses and 401ks and decided en masse to stop while they could and leave the workforce, we have a situation in the US that for every 100 jobs there are only 70 jobseekers. So if you want to hire someone good, talented, experienced, do you think forcing them to come to an office under the old rules is going to help you recruit?

We also hardly need to remind ourselves how Corporate America rewards businesses who look after their employees vs those who evidently do not give a shit, of course they run screaming from the beneficent. They instead lavish high praise in terms of stock prices and glowing reviews on the studs who announce 125,000 layoffs at the FAANGs that already earned billions from the pandemic. The destructive and long term impact on complete communities when companies decided over the last half century to please the market by moving manufacturing production somewhere else is never accounted for, but it has been responsible for swathes of the North East and Mid West being reduced to random pools of despair and opioids. It should come as no surprise that the very pols whining about China having the temerity to want to look after their own people and take their turn at wielding some commercial and financial heft in their backyard are the same people who benefitted directly from the wholesale export of jobs to China to line their own pockets and allow them to endow yet another overly shiny building on an Ivy League campus in a town surrounded by rows of empty former factories.

So against this cheery backdrop of what actually defines corporate responsibility, together with the emetic greenwashing of large companies, is it any wonder that people who have come into the labor pool in the last 10 years think my generation and our rules about work are, unsurprsingly, full of shit. Especially if they were raised by parents like me, who had enough success under the rules to give them the kind of upbringing where they were encouraged to follow their dreams. I studiously advised my kids not to do a degree to get a job but study what you find interesting. I studied the most beige of subjects possible by doing “Business Studies” and then off I went to work without really using much, if anything, of what I studied for 3 years. So it is not surprising that the current 20 somethings with a degree in esoteria and pocketful of student debt find much of mainstream business behavior an unpleasant experience, even tech or especially tech. Tech had the hoodie-wearing hacker for freedom aura, breaking stuff and building a brighter new future was the promise. What they delivered was ubiquitous free porn, screen addiction, the total destruction of female self-esteem for anyone under 16 and the concentration of wealth in a few hands not seen since the days of the Robber Barons. The new genie to be let out of the bottle AI is not really going to improve life much, there will be no ‘AI Spring’ like there was not really an Arab Spring and many young people probably get that more than Wall Street does. Tech is not breaching the barriers to a better world, its not solving the climate problems. In fact, it’s making the whole thing worse, as the damn servers need juice. And for what? Some more ads for some more stuff. The world has not been left by us Boomers in a great state for the succeeding generations, a world, as I read earlier today: “in which a tiny sliver of the world’s population is growing richer and richer while everyone else lives in millennial poverty or circumstances of heightened economic insecurity”.

I went to San Francisco a couple of times earlier this year and the Financial District looked like it had been cleared to film a post apocalyptic horror movie, trash everywhere, homeless like extras in costume as zombies, no cars, no-one in the offices, few places to eat and mostly grab and run back to the secure space of whatever office you are hiding out in. People used to put up with the sub-optimal BART transit system to brave the crush from the suburbs into the city. But post-pandemic it’s become the preserve of the homeless and the many sadly crazy folks who sit and ride it, in comfort, from one end of the system to the other, all day long. It is shunned now by working people and ridership has fallen off a cliff. It’s not helped by the fact it’s less of a pain to drive now as if people do go in, start times are flexible, parking is easier to find and has taken a bit of a market adjustment in price. 

My own business has gone to hybrid with Tuesday and Thursday being preferred days for the office with core hours of 10-2, but its not enforced, at least not by me. As time has gone by it’s less rigidly observed, and it will remain more informal than formal. We have reduced our footprint from 2 offices to one, extended our lease for a 25% reduction in rent. On balance the office is a bust, there are millions of square feet of commercial real estate that is, or is about to be, without any future income. Its a shoe waiting to drop in every large city and ultimately in everyone’s pension funds.

If you cannot provide more than a general sense of camaraderie accruing from a sense of common purpose, in so far as what your business does is not fundamentally a ‘good thing’, then our expectations must change as to what the work compact is between the company and its people. Let’s not kid ourselves, most enterprises are not helping the environment, they do not improve people’s lives other than the shareholders. They are usually some smaller part of a larger business network, a link in a value chain. People like to do good work. I have never believed there is a need to second guess every employee, that unless I am on them they will naturally slack off. People like to complete the tasks assigned to them, to get a sense of self satisfaction from doing the task well. Confinement proved that in spades. We no longer make many widgets as a society, so paying someone for the number of widgets made, like paying for the number of hours worked making widgets, is arcane. Remote work allowed people to get their tasks done when it best suited the completion of the tasks, which is when the person responsible for the tasks most feels energized to do it, rather than an arbitrary allocation of 9am until 5pm.

I think the classic work pattern, again for the fortunate white collar legions, is now disintermediated, stuff gets done when you feel it best gets done.

Many people are just getting by, going to crappy jobs, getting paid less than they need. Poverty is easy to define, its when you have too much month at the end of your money. That is the situation that over the last few years more and more people have found themselves in. Meanwhile the data shows that since 2020, the richest 1% have hoovered up around two-thirds of the new wealth (about $42tn); which is almost twice as much as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. That is part of the reason the ‘craquers’ can smash stuff up in our ongoing protests here in France. People do not stop them because everyone is feeling we, they, everyone, is being taken advantage of by the faceless system. Macron to many people is just the same as Trump, Putin or Bezos.

In that atmosphere it is hardly surprising that the bright young things entering the work force do not care about the game that everyone has obediently played for over 100 years. They will pick jobs that allow them to work wherever they want to be. They will not spend 3 hours of every day commuting. And you can forget ‘live to work’ as a mantra, they work to live and all work is suspect.

It’s another long weekend in May and I have been listening to these lovely people: check it out here.

It’s You – LA Priest

Pul – Ya Tosiba

Lose You – Bully

Silver Velvet – The Courtneys

This is What I’m Here For – Ian Hunter ( yes Ian fucking Hunter still going)

Superficial Conversation – Madeline Kenney

Wild Geese – Amy May Ellis

Fits – Do Nothing

Its Just a Bit Of Blood – bdrmm

Doritos & Fritos – 100 gecs

Ava Adore – Smashing Pumpkins ( Rachel is filling in gaps in my musical knowledge)

Victoria – Brutus

Modern Business Hymns – Protomartyr ( Thanks Rut for encouraging me to persevere)

Bleach – Coach Party

Wet Tennis – Sofi Tukker

Don’t Be Another – Skinny Pelembe

Hot Penny Days (Charlotte Adigéry- Bolis Pupul remix) – Dry Cleaning

Je bosse

I think being the eldest child teaches you to be bossy. My brother Bob arrived home from the hospital with my mother when I was 3 and a half, already precocious I immediately enquired when he would be able to play cars with me. He duly became the dastardly Jerries to my plucky Tommy hero, the noble Indian to my brave cowboy, the dastardly Japanese to my Chindit. He was my goalkeeper when I later decided to be a footballer, so I could fire my dream shots into the top corner, or at least into the garage door and annoy my long suffering grandfather whose workshop was behind the goal. As our games outgrew just the two of us I recruited the Twohig brothers from across the road to our gang, then the Cornish brothers moved in around the corner and we had two opposing armies to work through our wars, raiding parties and bloodthirsty campaigns which were played out through the wooded world that was Tardis-like enfolded into our back garden.

I was the major general in charge of the maneuvers, the head coach making the tough calls and the CEO responsible for the division of labour. I was the oldest by one year from Kim Twohig and Neil Cornish but it was less a function of the height giving authority rather than desire for taking the authority, giving direction and leading the group off on our adventures. Whether foraging a path through the jungle of the bamboo thicket in our garden or trekking down the back lane of Webbs Hill to Vallis Vale and the overgrown former quarries that regularly became more strange lands to be explored and conquered.

My first formal interaction with a superior, other than dealing with my teachers, parents, grandparents and a much older sister, was Mr Wells of Wells Coaches. He ran the school bus services in the mornings and afternoons and day trips to Weston-Super-Mare, Bournemouth, Weymouth and Longleat. Children, sweet eating old ladies, smoking pub groups, travel sick as often as not, all his regular clients kept his coaches filthy. Myself and an everchanging cast of characters emptied the ashtrays on the back of every seat, swept and mopped the floors. We also got to clean the outside of the coach with a brush and a hose, I got to clean the outside until Mr Wells caught me cleaning my colleague with the hose and was told to clear off and never come back.

My next boss was a little more understanding but in her own way a little more intimidating. Barb Roberts was a bespectacled Yorkshirewoman adrift with her portly little husband in our little Somerset market town. She and George were friends of my parents and drank together at the Royal Oak, next door, every Friday evening. My mother and Barb did most of the talking, working through their packs of Silk Cut while my Dad and George punctuated with nods, chortles and knowing looks. My Dad’s pipe fulls of Condor tobacco completing the recreation of the great smogs of the 19th century while George, the non-smoker of the group, sipped his half of bitter. Barb was the manager of the Spar supermarket on the corner of Gore Hedge and Keyford. I worked for the going rate of 3 shillings an hour Friday after school and Saturdays stacking shelves and packing groceries. I moved on to other jobs that paid more or fitted around my school and, latterly, my sporting commitments better but I would see Barb and George with Mum and Dad on their Friday evening socials as they came back to our place for a night cap. This was the era of dressing up for an evening out so both the men wore suits, and the women in full make up, jewelry and dresses. George developed an increasingly large swelling in his groin that was never discussed, even as it became the size of a small football, more and more visible in his suit pants. He died suddenly of testicular cancer and it was still never disucssed. Barb went grey completely over the next few months and then died herself of a broken heart within a year. I looked to see on Google StreetView if the Spar was still there in some form but it has also disappeared under what is now a small housing development.

Bill Lewis was another outsider in Frome. He had been in the army but was a cockney who married a local woman. He had started a small cleaning business from scratch. He drove around town in his little van with ladders on the roof, hustling window cleaning when larger jobs were scarce. He managed to get a couple of contract cleaning jobs and then needed help and with my coach cleaning experience I was a shoe in to help him sustain his growing enterprise. I cleaned the floors of the large supermarket in the new West Way Centre every morning at 7.00am using a new fangled wet-vac. I balanced atop his highest ladders cleaning office windows. We cleaned  windows of the houses on the new estates. We cleaned PVC storage silos during the factory shutdown at Wallington Weston, where my sister and her husband had worked before setting off to darkest Essex for him to be a programmer. We also cleaned the canteen at the Express Dairy in Oldford, I did the cleaning and then Bill would help himself to chocolate bars and sweets which he smuggled out in the wet vac. Oldford is full of odd memories, the Vaughn family farm at Park Farm, home of first serious girlfriend Jude, The Ship pub where I ended up working as bar man and outside of which myself and a friend spent an afternoon mooning cars as they drove by. The Express Dairy is now owned by Bonne Maman for some reason and in the early 2000’s my brother Bob ended up in charge of HR for whoever was the owner at the time.

Time moved on and I stacked more supermarket shelves, I was a White Hunter at the Lions of Longleat for 3 summers, worked bar, was a cook in a Good Food Guide listed restaurant, did shift work in a carpet factory running looms, was a fitter’s mate in a factory in Newport South Wales where I broke my toe, as Zappa would have been happy to see I wound up “working in a gas station” and before leaving for France after my final summer after graduation, before starting a real job, I worked in an early waste recycling project at a cement factory in Westbury, where I broke my little finger on my left hand while rebricking the immense kiln. So much for health and safety.

My first few months with Unilever were typical of the ‘graduate trainee’ scheme. Weeks of training in the SPD’s head offices in Watford interspersed with weeks in branch operations. My attempt at getting into the shipping part of Unilever failed and I ended up in their distribution business appropriately named Speedy Prompt Delivery. There were various companies all in one way or another moving raw materials into or finished goods out of Unilever businesses in the UK. Romantic intentions of being in a global world of shipping and exotic ports in foreign climes were dashed by the day to day reality of managing warehouses and delivery trucks in Warrington, Eastleigh, Doncaster and other lifeless towns in England enduring strikes and power cuts of the 3 day week and the famous ‘winter of discontent’. So when I was offered a market research project in the Potteries for a newly established international freight subsidiary I had little sense of what path I was headed down. I arrived on the train in Stoke late on a cold Monday morning in February and was picked up by the General Manager’s secretary, Carole. A woman, it saddens me to say, that having worked with her for 3 years my enduring memory is that she was prone to severe constipation and had to be reminded by her father to do something about it when she was starting to look ‘peaky’. She was engaged to a milkman, who because he got up at 3.30 every morning was not exactly the life and sole of the party, she referred to him as Bert, even though his name was David, it was if she had decided remembering boyfriend’s names was too much like hard work so for short hand they all became Bert.

I was asked to wait as my new boss, the GM, was not yet in. At about 12.05 he exploded through the office door rummaged through his in-tray and then came back out, all without taking off his mackintosh. “Lets go and grab lunch!” he said and off we went, me trailing him in an attempt to make small talk, as we jumped into his brand new gold Ford Capri 2.0 GLS and headed off to a pub. As this was late 70’s England pub lunch was a sandwich and a couple of pints of bitter consumed while my new boss, Pete Meyrick, in his broad Swansea accent, explained that there was no project but if I was interested they needed a salesman to cover Britain, the Benelux and France. If I did that for him I would get a company car and he would fight the political battles to make it a long term job. So with a very used maroon Ford Cortina complete with 8 track player and the promise of international travel I was bought. I became the Marketing Development Manager for the Powder Tank Division of Unispeed Intermodal. Meyrick was a hard driving pugilistic manager. I am not sure I learned that much from him as communications were not his forte; he was a team builder in so far as he put effort into the group socializing after long hours. He developed an esprit de corps by belittling the other two sister divisions, their efforts, their GMs especially came in for his withering disregard and the support staff who we shared the offices with in Newcastle Under Lyme. He ultimately left two years later to set up his own operation and became rich by stealing the core contracts from under the nose of the Unilever business. He took two of my colleagues with him and the fact that he didn’t invite me to join him ultimately showed how little he thought of me. I, meanwhile, was sent to another sinking ship of a division in Southampton, whose whole management team upped and set up in business to replicate what they had been doing for the by now embattled Unispeed group.

I have had 14 jobs since then, some were a lot of fun, some less so. Some I am embarrassed about in hindsight.  I did learn something from each of them, even if the lessons were simply to never do something again. Some were very financially rewarding and some I spent more money than I earned. I have managed or lead teams as large as 300 and at times as small as me on my own, some of the those colleagues have become life long friends. I have a couple of times joined a completely different industry with differing mores and ways of doing business, that is tough and ultimately not easy to do successfully. So the one conclusion is that you probably need to be thoughtful about making a commitment to a job when you are young, as it tends to direct you down a path that guides or constrains the future career options. I always wanted to work internationally and escape the rainy little island of home so on balance when I sold my soul for the used maroon Cortina that was the bargain that I made and I am happy I did.

On the 8-track this shoulda/coulda been playing.