Work Archives
October 05, 2007
Union trouble
What’s with the unions? Can’t they see that working people in a globalised economy need smart, strategic representation, not belligerence?
Strikes are uncool. Strikers are uncool. They're aggressive, negative, out-of-date. Strikers are defensive, anti-change, stuck in the 1970s. Everyone knows that. Strikes only happen in the backward industries: the dirty, blue collar industries. They're counter-productive, anti-social, self-destructive. Even the left don't like strikes any more: they're an inconvenient reminder of where we come from: they're the dirty-fingernailed id to our lighter-than-air post-industrial ego.
Wired metropolitan information workers like you and me just can't identify with the strikers and their combative, one-dimensional, 20th Century model of work and life. Even progressives secretly suspect that strikers are just a bit slow. Why don't they just get with the programme? Re-skill, learn to promote themselves, stop whinging and escape from the miserable zero-sum game of wage discipline, downsizing and workplace reform? Come on guys. Get a blog!
Of course, the unions don’t help. They’ve shown no readiness to update the class warrior image: they’ve made nothing of their extraordinary resources: twelve million members, vast assets and a guaranteed income to die for. The unions could, by now, have morphed into a powerful modernising institution, defending not doomed jobs in doomed industries but the future welfare of their members and their families. Why aren’t unions helping to prepare working people for change?
Why aren’t they building capacity, training and enabling? If the unions had ‘brand values’ they’d be all about defence, resistance, retreat. But the unions are really the natural owners of aspiration, improvement, progress. Generations of short-sighted leaders have allowed the unions to be pushed into this negative, bottom-rung position where it’s hard for them even to deliver their basic functions: defending the exploited and representing the voiceless.
Unions, in the space of one generation, have gone from glorious emblem of solidarity, organisation and resistance to shoddy irrelevance. The communications union, authors of the current mess at the Royal Mail, could have been leading change in their industry: they could have been in the driving seat, taking proposals to management, pushing reform of the business as a means to improve the odds for their members.
But what they’re doing is what they’ve always done: it’s a kind of industrial era Tourette’s. They know that a strike can only damage their interests but they just can’t help it. They’ve allowed themselves to be so thoroughly painted into a corner by decades of intransigence and avoidance of change that this kind of beat-yourself-up behaviour really is their only option. It’s heartbreaking and disappointing and it serves working people very poorly indeed.
(Picture by yousoundhollow)
April 27, 2007
Shaving for a living
A couple of months ago I blogged a company called King of Shaves, one whose product I had always admired and whose brand I thought was interesting – unconventional, quite funny, a bit knowing. I sort of thought it was American: a bit too much chutzpah for a UK company, I thought.
Anyway, it turns out I was wrong – they're from Chesham in Bucks – and now, dear reader, I work there! I've taken a job as interim head of digital, working with the company's founder Will King (the King himself), his MD Andy Hill and the rest of his small but perfectly formed team to – among other things – bring the firm's already quite successful web presence up to date and to come up with interesting new digital stuff.
I'm going to be thinking about ecommerce sales, site traffic and opt-in data. If you have expertise or an interesting product in any of those areas I would, of course, be happy to hear from you.
March 05, 2006
Commuting again
As some of you know, I've been at home for a while now, developing a detailed understanding of my children's appalling table manners (and helping my wife start a business, of which you will soon, I'm sure, be made aware). I'm not doing that any more, though. I'm working – in a glittering tower in the quite amazing Mediaeval walled city they call Canary Wharf.
I wear a swipe card on a ribbon, eat stone-baked pizza in a gorgeous cafeteria and shop in a supermarket that has its own sushi bar. It's disorienting and quite exotic and I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm working with some clever young people (who humour me when I tell them stories about the old days) and after work we go to a bar where a girl dispenses Tequila from a sort of gun-belt.
Back in the office, we're covering the walls in colourful plans and flow charts and filling the empty desks with more clever people as fast as we can. What we're up to, though, is a secret...
June 15, 2005
More about work
Bill Morris' series about work, Workaday World, is really good. Very nicely put together, sort of contemplative, focused on the voices of working people (and I'm pretty sure that's Brian Eno on the soundtrack). It ought to be a set text for business and sociology students. Part two (MP3). This is a programme that really, really ought to be properly archived...