All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain At Work,
By Joanna Biggs, Serpent’s Tail, 320 pages, $22
Which would you rather: wipe bottoms all day, be shot at in Iraq, or allow your body to be penetrated by strange men?
If this is a question you have ever pondered, Joanna Biggs has some surprising answers for you. For the past few years she has been going round Britain with a tape recorder interviewing 32 people in 32 jobs, including a fishmonger, a ballerina, a lawyer — as well as a care worker, an army officer and a prostitute — in order to understand what it feels like to do different sorts of work.
Biggs warns at the start of “All Day Long” that there will be no heavy theorising — she is not an anthropologist or sociologist or statistician. Instead, she is an editor on the London Review of Books and what she promises is a picture (the subtitle is “A Portrait of Britain at Work”) that will be “fragmentary, personal, fleeting”. The result is detailed, quirky and faithful in its likeness, yet underneath simmers with the artist’s rage at the unfairness of it all.
“You do make your own luck”, says one of Biggs’ interviewees. She is Anne-Marie Imafidon, a child prodigy who did GCSE exams at primary school, got into Oxford at 17 and now manages both to have a job at Deutsche Bank and be an entrepreneur and all-round free spirit. “I’m constantly aware that I might not be fulfilled ... So I kind of pre-empt that by just doing other stuff,” she boasts.
Many of the other interviewees have had bad luck whether they deserved it or not. There is the graduate with a first-class degree, but without a job. The cleaner who fights in vain for a living wage. The legal aid lawyer who is struggling against budget cuts and impossible workloads. And the sex worker at the mercy of a police force keen to conduct raids whenever it feels like it.
Yet this isn’t a book full of whinges and left wing anguish. The most remarkable thing about these stories is how much satisfaction people seem to find in their work. The nurse in the abortion clinic (whose uniform bears the message “don’t lose it until you’re ready) is so kind to her clients (they don’t call them patients) she makes them cry. Her main pleasure is in ensuring they never come back. One potter in Stoke-on-Trent who works with a sponge all day putting designs on Emma Bridgewater mugs talks of how he has trained his mind to go elsewhere; a colleague, however, talks of a “sense of pride and of wanting to make it work”.
Jobs that ruin the body turn out not to do the same to the soul. “Hand in hand with how much you love it is how much it hurts,” says Nathalie Harrison, a ballet dancer at Covent Garden. She has no autonomy and has given herself to a career that will spit her out in a few years time and pays little for a 14-hour day. A break is having a nap on a fold-out mattress kept under the dressing-room sinks.
While work has spoilt Harrison’s feet, it has spoilt Taksim’s hands. He is employed by Freed in east London, where he makes ballet shoes for dancers such as her, each pair marked with his own sign — an anchor. He has never seen a ballet, and expresses no desire to, but he goes home every night with hands red and swollen, feeling satisfied at a job well done.
Every interviewee manages to say something interesting about their work — with one exception. Ashley Westwood, a midfielder for Aston Villa Football Club, limits his pronouncements to the pedestrian “it’s well worth it in the end” and “It’s all about playing well and pleasing people on a Saturday.”
There are only two people in “All Day Long” who do jobs they find entirely hateful. The first works in a call centre and spends a lot of time at home swearing because he is forbidden from doing so at work. “I do feel I’ve lost a large part of myself working here,” he says. Even more wretched is the job described by a former sandwich-maker at Pret a Manger, where workers are made to feign “passion” every day, and if they are caught being unpassionate by a mystery shopper, the entire shop has its pay docked.
Biggs seems to disapprove of “emotional labour” — being made to speak in a voice other than your own — per se. She may be right in the case of Pret but surely there is nothing wrong with telling staff to be nice to customers. Most of us put on different faces at work; we understand the deal.
There are two general lessons that emerge from the interviews. The first underlines what we know already: that money doesn’t matter very much, except to people who hate their jobs. (The footballer wasn’t allowed to talk to Biggs about money — his press person intervened, declaring on his behalf that it wasn’t his main motivation.) Otherwise, money only seems to upset people when they think what they are paid is unfair. “I could probably earn more in Morrisons sweeping the floor. That’s wrong!” says the care worker. “But I couldn’t leave. No.”
The other, more surprising, lesson is that hardly anyone wants their children to do what they have done, even — or especially — when they love it as much as the soldier and dancer. Biggs herself, when she asks seven-year-olds at her old primary school what they want to do when they grow up, says of the two who want to be authors: “Poor souls”.
So, in the end, having read the accounts of the various professionals, which would we rather be: care worker, army officer or prostitute? It turns out that all three are nicer than you would think: each interviewee talked of a purpose that I might struggle to find in my own — thoroughly pleasant — job.
The army officer describes a paternalism so powerful that it defines who he is: “I exist for the benefit of 123 men who rely on me for their welfare.” As for the care worker, no matter how hard the conditions and how low the pay, her voice softens when she says: “I like me old ladies.” And the prostitute says of her work, “It’s a lovely job”.
Yet more than any of these occupations, the one I really envy is that of the apprentice goldsmith. At 17, Candice Devine signed herself over for four years to the care of a master craftsman, for a stint in which he nurtures her, teaches her to do something truly beautiful — and instead of saddling herself with a student loan, she gets paid to learn.
The trouble with this example is that it is almost a one-off, a throwback to a distant past. The present version of apprenticeship is more likely to be a dull job in a supermarket with an hour or two’s training a week thrown in. And this leads to the only real weakness of this intelligent, surprising and elegantly written book. It isn’t really about how people in Britain now work at all. If it is a portrait, it is a lopsided one, focused on a few interesting features that are either throwbacks to the past or — like the children’s hospital “giggle doctor” — a colourful eccentricity of the present.
What most of us actually do all day is toil away in colourless offices, but such work is almost entirely absent here. It is easy to see why, as describing people sitting at computers sending emails doesn’t make for a readable book. Yet by omitting the tedium (and occasional satisfactions) of office labour, the result is not representative of very much at all.
–Financial Times
