JACKIE CULWORTH

DOWN & OUT IN THE FLEXIBLE ECONOMY

I

The ordinary working people of England are treated like shit. Anyone who doesn’t know this is either an idiot or they’re choosing not to look. Anyone who thinks it’s not true is profiting from their oppression and should go and boil their head in hot oil forever.

I was offered work by an agency the other week. Let’s call them ARS. The Job Centre makes me volunteer in a charity shop once a week but the offer of work came on the same day. On the morning of the shift, at half-past nine in the rain when I was just about to walk into the charity shop.

Three hours induction at a warehouse, 2 until 5. And then an 8-hour-a-day shift packing, five days a week, starting the next day. But before I went for the induction I had to go and register at ARS. I was told I could get there ‘any time between 11.30 and 12’.

The deputy manager in the charity shop had just worked ten days straight because her boss was off sick and her boss’ boss had no one she could offer as support. She’d been relying on me because there were no other volunteers that morning. But what could I do? I had holes in my trainers letting in the fucking rain.

ii.

In the ARS outer office all the seats were occupied by men and women filling in paperwork. Those who talked were all from other countries. Everybody was here for the same reason, though: they were registering for work.

I filled in my paperwork when I could find a seat and took it to the kind-looking young woman behind the big reception desk. She took it through a door and I reclaimed my seat.

I hadn’t been sitting in it long when a woman with expensive hair and nails, not to mention disturbingly orange skin, came out through the same door and asked me to follow her.

We went into the main office, which was comparatively large, a bit like a call centre, with at least ten identical people sitting at computer screens pecking away at keyboards.

The woman, who said her name was Alice, took me into a side room and asked me to sit down. Then she restated the details of the job I was going to do, rattling the words out like rounds from a Gatling gun, barely taking time to breathe, giving me no chance at all to ask a question.

Does that sound good to you? she asked at the end of her verbal onslaught. No, it sounded like a very slow and a very shit way to die. But so was being humiliated at the Job Centre every fortnight and walking around with rainwater swilling in your trainers.

iii

At the warehouse that afternoon I sat in a small room with five people from Romania, one from Russia and two other English people. A woman who didn’t introduce herself read through the rules and regulations of the company in a very bored, droney voice, emphasising the number of ways in which we could get fired.

Three sick days in one month will result in instant dismissal, she droned. Your mum must be so proud, I thought. But of course I said nothing. Our job was to shut the hell up, be good and take our medicine.

The next stage for us was watching the health and safety videos every company makes you watch. While they were on the little Nazi in charge of the group left the room.

When she returned, we had to register on the company database using laptops they provided. This, I suppose, was to check out how good we were with computers. I’m good but my keyboard was knackered; the @ didn’t work, which is a bit of a drawback these days. One of the English blokes was still doing his after everybody else had finished.

A walkaround followed, Adolf moving so quickly no one could keep up with her. The warehouse was exactly like the three other warehouses I’d been in, only smaller.  Cold, noisey, full of people in different-coloured hi-viz jackets and with really crap music pouring out of speakers all over the place.


Finally we had to work for an hour at the packing desks stuffing envelopes with calendars. As we worked the little Nazi watched. Then another one turned up. He began talking to some of my group like they were shit under his foot. If he addressed them that way in a pub he’d be glassed.


It’s like one of my friends once said. The problem with these cunts is they think they’re managers because they’re powerful, not that they’re powerful because they’re managers.

iv.

But this country has been the same since all you bastards elected Margaret Thatcher three times in a row and kissed away your rights in exchange for – whatever it was you thought you were getting. I never did understand what that was.

Anyway I had a job, at least for a while. My problems were over, temporarily. Except I didn’t have a job.

The next morning I got up expecting to have a 2 o’clock start at the warehouse. When I checked my phone I saw I had a text from ARS: You won’t be needed at ******* today. You did not pass the training. I will call you about other work later.

I texted them not to bother. I would look somewhere else.

At the Job Centre all they wanted to know was how much I was going to be paid for the three hours I’d worked, because that would have to be deducted from the whopping benefits I partied on from week to week.

Since nothing had gone into my bank, I emailed the agency and asked them when they would be paying me. Alice texted the next morning just after 7am saying they would not be paying me because I had only received training; I’d done no work.

What the fuck?!

I texted that we’d all worked for an hour packing, even if she didn't define the other two hours as work (I did). We deserved to be paid for the packing at least.

Her reply came half an hour later. it was like she'd had to think about it. I’ll have to look into that, she wrote. I didn’t know about the packing.

But I’d already changed my mind about the money. If £8 was all I was going to get out of the tight bastards – they owed me £24 – it wasn’t worth all the hassle I would get from the Job Centre.

v.

Get a job if life’s so hard on the dole, I hear you say. Thanks, I didn’t think of that. Wankers.

I had a job. I did night shifts for four years at a warehouse ten miles away. It took me hours of standing around in all weathers at bus stops and hours on unreliable buses to get there.

But the company went bust and everybody got laid off. Agency workers went first, no notice, no compensation. They don’t have to treat agency like anything other than deadwood floating downriver. They’re an endlessly renewable resource with no rights and only two-thirds of a human soul.

That’s the flexible fucking economy for you.

The owner of the company did all right, of course. I saw him on Match of the Day the other day, grinning smugly in his outsize suit in the director’s box of his premier league football club.

I hope he loses a bundle and his team goes down, although he’s only a symptom of the disease that’s killing us and not the cause