In 2007, just before the financial crash, I spent a week or two in Nottingham asking men what they did for money. The occasion for the question was the 50th anniversary of the archetypal postwar English working man’s novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning . The Raleigh bicycle factory where Alan Sillitoe’s hero Arthur Seaton worked had long since closed down, frame-making had been outsourced to Vietnam, and all the job-for-life certainties that came with it had been outsourced too. The men I spoke to mostly did piecemeal bits of things: former miners were making sandwiches for supermarkets; precision toolmakers were running tanning salons. Several of the men at the Radford working men’s club, where Seaton sank pints, had never worked a day in their life.
Since then, since the banks trousered our GDP, since high streets filled up with charity shops, since robots worked uncomplaining 24-hour shifts in car factories, the question of what we as a nation work at to make a living has felt like an ever-more insistent one. The government mantra, repeated until you start to believe it, says more people in Britain are working than ever before, that unemployment is down to 6%, that apprenticeships are up to record levels. That assertion seems always to beg a supplementary, though: but what is it exactly that everyone does?
Related: The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010 – review
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