flying low: grad opportunities working lates

Philip Stott continues our series on casual work with an essay on his experience as an airport baggage-handler and aircraft cleaner

After graduating from university, I immediately started working for an agency who specialise in providing workers for the aviation industry. I thought I would write about two of my ‘assignments’.

Servisair are imposing redundancies on Liverpool baggage handlers, as the job becomes increasingly casualised

The first of these was as an aircraft cleaner for Derichebourg Multiservices at Liverpool Airport. I was part of a group of people in our twenties, some of whom travelled from as far away as Bury, who were taken on in order to work through the busy summer period. We worked a shift pattern, 10pm-6am; four days on, two days off and were paid an agency rate of £6.68 an hour (pretty bad for night work). Refuelling operators were the best paid and worked shifts, 8pm–8am, four days on, four off. There had been no pay rise at all for five years.

bar humbug: the new shape of work

Pete Wright went through the mill of precarious bar work

How does one go about describing the experience working at the Clapham Grand? Well I suppose it depends on who you ask. If you asked management they would tell it’s like being part of a giant family or a rainbow or something; which is somewhat disturbing when you consider that the floor manager changed a total of four times in the three months I worked there. A model family for the broken society I suppose.

Management would probably cite how everyone knows each other’s names (they don’t) and how they enjoy each other’s company so much they spend a certain premeasured but non-compulsory segment of their free time outside of work together as well. If however you were to ask a worker I’m sure their answer would be pretty short and along the lines of ‘it’s like working at most bars in London’.

the “workers’ enquiry” and call centre communism

Jack Staunton reviews Hotlines: Call centre – Inquiry – Communism

When we pick up a left wing paper or magazine and scan its contents we can be fairly sure that its editors will not have failed to offer a piece on shifts in the world’s stock markets, analysis of the businesses felled by the recession, and a take on the latest wheeling and dealing by the world’s statesmen. Whether dry, rational and down-to-earth commentary, or grandiose predictions of the final crisis of capitalism and vast forces of chaos sweeping across the globe, we can be sure enough that developments in the activities of the ruling class will be recounted in some detail.

But ours is not a movement which limits itself to attacking the dominant system: it is a movement for the self-emancipation of the working class. To put that in the language of the current crisis: no-one simply wants capitalism to ‘collapse’ chaotically in a heap of bankruptcies and mass redundancies. Quite obviously, the unravelling of the irrationalities of capitalism will not in itself create a better society. Rather, we have a better, alternative vision for humanity: we want the working class to organise to displace those who control the levers of political and economic power and re-organise society from below on an egalitarian, collectivist and democratic basis.

So surely it should follow that the left ought to privilege understanding the state of the working class – the people and the movement who are actually going to revolutionise society.  This is all the more the case since although no-one would deny the existence of capitalism, for the last two decades it has been a commonplace assertion of much of academia and the media that the working class no longer exists.  For such ‘commentators’, the term ‘working class’ is itself merely a label for a narrow cultural stereotype: for example, in March 2008 the BBC’s White  season featured a documentary ‘Last Orders’, detailing the lives of white working-class pensioners in northern working men’s clubs, proclaiming that a few of this “endangered species”, the working class, do in fact still exist.

precarious work and the struggle for migrant workers’ rights

Public Meeting:

Sunday November 16, 5.30pm at the Pullens Centre, 184 Crampton Street, Elephant and Castle London SE17 3AE, with:

Julio Mayor, Prospect – Amey @ National Physical Laboratory

Robinson Baldeon, Unison – Ocean/ISS @ University of London (SOAS)

Alberto Durango, Unite-T&G – Lancaster @ Schroders Bank

Rodrigo Nunes – Campaign Against Immigration Controls