Employment Precarity beyond Temporality and the Wage
by James Pattison
I have spent my entire life residing in the coalfields along the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire border. To anyone who has spent any time there, or in any other coalfield in Britain, it quickly becomes apparent that many institutions associated with the coal industry remain, and often thrive, long after the end of deep coal mining. My doctoral research is an ethnographic study of Shirebrook, a deindustrialised pit village in Derbyshire. Here, you could include the presence of the houses, shops and hotel in the model village, the colliery cricket and football clubs, the brass band, and the miners’ welfare institute, as a few such examples of the infrastructure provided by the colliery which still remain today. I want to suggest that a consideration of these foundations of industrial community can further problematize the precarity stemming from contemporary employment. This is compounded when you consider that the largest employer in Shirebrook today is Sports Direct whose employment practices have become emblematic of contemporary precarious work (see the Guardian 2015).
Contemporary debates on precarity have mainly focussed directly on the temporality and the low-wages associated with the employment experiences of the precariat. For instance, Standing (2011) lists seven forms of labour security, relating directly to income, employment, skills and representation, won by the post-World War II labour movement to fulfil an industrial citizenship objective, which are absent for the precariat. Shildrick et al (2012) highlight the insecurity that stems from the constant flux between low-waged work and unemployment for an increasing number of people. Whilst Hanson (2014) builds on this by illustrating how some of his research participants in Todmorden were forced to move between the official and unofficial economies in order to ‘get by’.
Work in the coal industry not only provided relatively secure and well-paid employment, particularly after nationalisation in 1946, but it also provided many further incentives. The colliery provided good quality housing with relatively low rent, gardens and allotments, provided subsidised coal to its workers through a fuel allowance, and a multitude of subsidised leisure activities. Dennis’ et al (1969) seminal study, Coal is Our Life, provides a good account of the leisure activities provided by colliery welfare institutes. These provisions were required by law under the Mining Industry Act of 1920 ‘for purposes connected with the social well-being, recreation and conditions of living of workers in and about coalmines’ (in Dennis et al 1969: 122). They were paid for through a levy taken per ton of extracted saleable coal, and a contribution from the mineworkers’ wage. In addition to the brass bands, cricket and football clubs already mentioned, you can also add to the list dramatic and musical societies, dances, youth clubs, boxing clubs, libraries or reading rooms, and the welfare institute itself.
Emerging from his research on a West London Guinness brewery, Tim Strangleman argues that a consideration on such provisions provides a wider understanding of industrial citizenship than those concerned only with trade union representation: ‘management felt it had a real responsibility to create a model workforce, not in a direct structuring sense but rather organically through creating an environment in which its employees could flourish’ (2015: 682). This illustrates the way in which employers considered their own role beyond providing a wage, and presents a different understanding of capitalism than we are perhaps used to encountering today.
It is important that this is not accepted uncritically, however. Many of these provisions came during the golden age of the welfare state in the 30 or so immediate post-war years. They have their roots in industrial paternalism and were developed as a solution to anxieties that the welfare state would deter effort (Strangleman 2015). This was a very different era to the age of austerity we are now experiencing. There was also unhappiness from some mineworkers over the compulsory contribution made towards welfare from their wages, and a focus on the benefits of welfare provisions should not overlook the physical danger involved in mining, and that the industry was frequently marred by bitter disputes.
It requires caution not to provide an un-nuanced and idyllic representation of all work in the post-war period, which is simplistically juxtaposed against a negative representation of all work in the present day. Nevertheless, these comparisons do help illustrate the way employment has changed that go beyond its temporality and wage. This is particularly salient when we look at Shirebrook’s largest post-war employer: the colliery; and its largest employer today: Sports Direct. The colliery provided homes, and various leisure and welfare provisions with the aim of improving the wellbeing of its workforce. Compare this with the estimated 80% of Sports Direct staff on zero-hour contracts which do not extend beyond the obligatory body search at the end of each shift, with none of the wider welfare institutions of the past being reimagined today (the Guardian 2015).
James Pattison is an ESRC Postgraduate Research Student at the University of Nottingham. You can find him on Twitter here.
