Steinbeck in Wetherspoons

Like most people in the UK, I am in a job which I am paid too much to leave, but not enough to care. The life of a contractor is one of the subtly oppressed, none of this ‘squeezed middle’ rhetoric. As more and more large companies try and reduce their headcounts by hiring contractors rather than permanent staff, they’re actually spending more money to be seen to have a reduced workforce. In today’s ‘economic climate’ (is this the same as this ‘climate change’ I’ve been hearing a lot about?) sick-pay and severance pay have become the holy grails of modern employment. A higher hourly rate has replaced the benefits and pleasantries of being part of a workplace and alas, the level of camaraderie once demonstrated in British offices has diminished rapidly. Why should you be asked in an interview about your ability to be a ‘team-player’ when you’re working for yourself, charge by the hour, and can leave with a week’s notice?

Employment agencies provide a great service to graduates and school leavers alike in helping them find their feet on the proverbial career ladder (my ladder feels like one protruding from a Royal Navy search & rescue helicopter, and I’m the poor Scottish trawlerman being thrown about in a force eight gale). But agencies’ prerogative is to put pieces in the jigsaw for commission and bonuses; not to care about such trivialities as your ethical values, employee happiness, or your career progression.

The more I think about employment history, the more I believe that history is inevitably repeating itself. John Steinbeck famously documented the lives of drifters, casual labourers and who I would call the contractors of their day. The 500,000 Americans that lived in the covers of The Grapes of Wrath, as proclaimed President Truman, worked their hands to the bone for $50 a week, to eek out a hedonistic pleasure and upturn Maslow’s hierarchy.

“You give me a good whore house every time...A guy can go in an’ get drunk and get ever’thing outa his system all at once, an’ no messes. And he knows who much it’s gonna set him back.”

This quote from Of Mice and Men sounds like any pub or club on a Friday or Saturday night right? Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Quaker or Methodist Superintendent of the Fun Police; but working for five days to blam it all on overpriced sugar and fermented-potato based beverages and then purge them out of your body the following morning isn’t exactly clever or sustainable is it? Week after week after week, on holidays, birthdays and Christmas, blue-collared folk turn blue with hangovers then have the audacity to claim they don’t get paid enough. If I’ve seen you order four pitchers of ‘Woo-Woo’ at ‘Spoons then you’ve clearly got more money than sense....or taste for that matter.

The workforce I feel will always remain in this state of ‘get-cash-and-get-smashed’ whether on Steinbeckian whore houses or bottles of Hooch in Wetherspoons. Long may it continue as the poor’s alcohol duty is currently the main provider to the NHS of both revenue and in-patients. By God, I love Britain.