Green Shoots

by Dave Sewell on 1.09.09

This weekend I quit my job, perhaps never to pull another pint. It was a date I’d been counting down to for some time and, when it finally came along, it was hard to shake the inane grin from my face – to the extent that I wonder if customers didn’t start to worry that I was indulging in hilarious hi-jinks at their expense. Bodily fluids in the beer and that.

With my last ever staff discount I ordered a lunch so epic that for the last half of my shift it was impossible to bend down. When I left to go home I was too tired to make particularly speedy or spritely progress, but my spirit ran, skipped and jumped along ahead of my tired body and even what I fear might be the start of flu-like symptoms can’t drip snot on my parade.

And this job was by no means the worst I’ve ever done. Not even sure it makes the bottom five; it was definitely a major step up from the last one. Call centres – enough said. The same low wages and inconsistent, antisocial hours as bar work, but with the added bonus of getting to spend hours reliving the same contrived conversation again and again, with customers who hate you for sticking to the script and supes who hate you for the slightest hint of a deviation from it.

There’s physical labour, there’s intellectual labour, and there’s this special kind labour which doesn’t require much activity from your mind or body but leaves you dead inside. I think I cried tears of joy when I quit that one.

Before that – before my mature (ha!) student days – it was a Proper Job. On the face of it a better prospect, with much better pay, conditions and that to make up for staring out the office window at your life as it slips away. Good times. And before that… well, the point is, I’ve got about as diverse and action-packed a CV as you could ask for at my age, and pretty much everything on it I’ve fucking hated. The general rule is, no sooner do I get a job than I’m constructing elaborate fantasies about how I’m gonna lose it – even though, for obvious financial reasons, as soon as I quit I have to start looking for the next one. I don’t think this is so unusual.

The bosses and their pet politicians certainly don’t seem to think so. Their answer to unemployment – even mid-recession – is to bully the unemployed into taking something even more soul-destroying than they knew was possible.

This is partly because mainstream economics has little explanation for a recession more convincing than a sudden surge in laziness levels and partly, I suspect, because of many a politician’s Mr. Burns-like glee at the idea of taking child benefits from a single mother’s baby. But it’s also a reflection of the inescapable reality that no-one really likes to spend their day being exploited for someone else’s profits.

At the same time, I know that many thousands of people around the UK and far more across the world will be losing sleep over the very real possibility of being thrown out of work and onto the scrapheap. A single redundancy can ruin lives, break up families and in extreme cases lead to suicide and mass unemployment can throw whole communities into long-term despair.

That inescapable reality has to kick my office-getting-struck-by-a-meteorite daydreams into touch – especially when the only “job” that will really be open to many of those slapped in the face with a P45 will be to get themselves blown up for no good reason in Afghanistan.

So it is that the fight to save jobs over the last few months has been so inspiring. As I write, workers at the Vestas Blades wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight are entering the third week of their sit-in against mass redundancies – because for all the hype of the green shoots of recovery, “there isn’t a market” for saving the world with wind power – which has already forced several humiliating concessions upon management and, it isn’t crazy to speculate, might even end in victory.

And it’s spreading, too: this weekend alone the Vestas workers have inspired occupations from workers facing the sack in London and Dublin. This could have done with starting a year ago, but hey. We are starting to fight for the right to work in a very real way.

But of course, it’s more than that. I’ve not had the privilege of supporting the Vestas struggle in person, but from our university occupation I have an idea what they’re going through. What the workers there are doing now is much more demanding than any day at work, and in its own way more stressful.

But it’s also something they’re doing for themselves and for each other, not for the sake of the bosses’ bonuses. It’s something no-one can tell them how to do, or why to do it; something they have to think through for themselves at every practical and philosophical level. It is so much harder than a day at the production line, but so much more human too.

When we occupied a lecture theatre, we began to organise our own lectures, debates and film showings. When the Ford-Visteon factories were occupied by their workers, they began to investigate the possibilities of manufacturing green infrastructure instead of cars.

If another world is ever to be possible, it is in struggles like this that we start to see it. In the foreground of the fight to save jobs, we have a fight for the right not to live in constant fear of redundancy. But it’s not hard to see, in the background, how it can also become a fight for the right not to devote 8 hours a day to boring yourself out of your mind and letting the world go to shit in the process.

Dave is looking forward to shutting down Nick Griffin’s gang of Nazis at the protest on the 15th of August – see Unite Against Fascism for details.