Nerve 14 - Letters Page

Nerve 14 Letters Page

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Dear Nerve,
Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed a number of the articles in Nerve 13: 'The Wonderful World of Work' (in particular the 'Work/Lessness' piece by Val Walsh) it didn't really seem to me to explain what work actually is.
Work is looking after your immediate surroundings, like cooking and cleaning. Work is looking after your home for you and your family to live in. Work is raising your children. Work is painting on a canvas to create a masterpiece. Work is the hours spent painstakingly tending an allotment bed in order to ensure a good crop. Work is chasing a ball around a football pitch on a Saturday afternoon. Work is flying a fighter aircraft and firing missiles in to civilian areas. Work is trying to save peoples lives. Work is any activity where energy is expended.
Work is effectively enslavement of the masses - the common people who survive by selling their muscle or brainpower. How can people be free if work for most people means getting up at an unsuitable hour, putting on your work clothing, uniform etc., rushing to leave so you're not late, sitting in traffic worrying if you'll make it in time to the place you hate most, putting up with the same back-stabbing two-faced gang of poor sods who share your lot, wondering who to trust and who'll run off screaming to the boss?
Work means following rules, procedures and laws with the threat of discipline and unemployment ever looming to keep you in fear so you stay in line whilst enduring minimal terms and conditions, if any, in order to bring home enough money to keep the family and pay off the ever-mounting debt. Work is the place you go where employers routinely breach rules, procedures and laws resulting in injury and death, while they hungrily cream off the profits. The same profits with which the bankers and the money men hedge their bets on markets to ensure their own over-inflated wages, bonuses and pensions are paid while the majority of the workforce do not even have a pension and for those that do it is a pittance. People who have dedicated their entire lives to work are left to rot in appalling conditions.
Work for most people means doing it all over again tomorrow whilst having little time to actually live, and it only serves to stifle real human activity, creativity, communal activity and the forming of common bonds of respect and kinship.
Work can have the effect of making life a chore to be endured rather than a joy to be experienced.
Work is really not that good for you.
In fact, work sucks!
Tony Whitehead

Hi Folks,
Enjoyed NERVE issue 13. Sat here now at my paid work in the middle of my paid night shift on a paid break. I will finish at 07:00 and head home to the unpaid work of looking after my eighteen month old son; while my wife who was doing her unpaid work of looking after him, goes out to do some paid work until 12:00. I will then go to bed while my wife will do the unpaid work of cleaning, cooking, baby-feeding, nappy changing, washing etc. I will get out of bed at 18:00 and head back to my paid work again which will start at 19:00. My wife will continue to do the unpaid work at home and then do the unpaid babysitting with her younger sister. She will pay her sister with a pizza as she does not like sitting in on her own while I do my paid night work.
I remember the time between 1984 and 1994 in Liverpool when there was very little paid work. I left school without any formal qualifications so there was definitely no paid work for me. I did all I could to occupy myself both mentally and physically. All the unpaid work around the home, garden etc. But like the paid work this unpaid work also ran out as I had so much time on my hands. I then sat around with no paid or unpaid work.
I went away to find the paid work, and to be honest I travelled well and enjoyed every minute of it. Down South from one holiday camp to another as well as hotels working as a waiter or a barman. Then feeling a little braver chanced my arm and went around the world doing much of the same. I eventually came back to Liverpool in 1994. The work situation was still not great so with spare time on my hands caught up on my passion in life: 'writing'. I started a band called ONTICK and did the unpaid circuit eking out an existence of bit part jobs here and there. Eventually I found paid work installing cable and then was fortunate enough to find work on the railway.
The point of this is that at this time in my life I am happy that I have paid and unpaid work to do. But looking at the doom and gloom of the economy I am half expecting anything to happen; and just like clothing styles come in and out of fashion, so do economic cycles. I really did not like Thatcher or Tebbit but with Brown at the helm, I may have no option but to get on my bike again.
Cheers,
Barry Cooper-Finch
Network Rail Duty Station Manager, Liverpool Lime Street

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