What a laugh we had when I was made redundant… me and the missus… July 15, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Reading Sarah Carey today at lunch my jaw sort of dropped because here was an article discussing unemployment and redundancy as if they somehow crept in under the banner of ‘lifestyle’. Surprising that? Well, perhaps not for the Irish Times in the contemporary period, but nonetheless…
I know a few high-powered female executives but the definite trend was that as women aged, they opted out of high-risk, high-pressure jobs.
Sometimes the corporate flight was the natural consequence of allowing a career to take second place to child rearing. Mostly, having gotten a taste of freedom from job pressures during maternity leave, the arguments for resuming full-time corporate slavery seemed weaker the longer one stayed outside the mainstream system. Children were a reason, but sometimes an excuse to get off the treadmill.
Non-mothers too, tired of the macho world of pointless testosterone-fuelled boardroom squabbles, left to pursue other paths that earned less money and less stress. Of course, the option of marrying a man with a good job helped broaden the options for women. But that’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to say out loud.
Anyway, here’s our dirty little secret – whether down-shifting or opting out – life is great. We are masters of our universe. Whether working from home or in the home, women have discovered the joys of autonomy. Not completely of course – bills still have to be paid, deadlines obeyed and the insatiable needs of children to be met. But there are no tortuous Monday morning management meetings, no hellish commutes, no power point presentations and no angry clients.
And the problem being?
Now it’s all been ruined with these husbands hanging around at home.
And, with but a bare nod towards what I tentatively call reality… she goes…
Leaving aside the financial strain, an alien creature has invaded the house. It reminds one of the soaring divorce rate among older couples in Japan where a retired husband shows up and a 30-year marriage ends. Ireland’s unemployed husbands may not be facing abandonment but are finding their wives aren’t exactly thrilled about unlimited quality time.
Leaving aside the financial strain..? How and for who is that possible? Who can seriously ‘leave aside the financial strain’, and even strain seems too petty a word. I still have work but I’m seriously worried about the future and at a time in life when outgoings have suddenly shot up for one reason and another. I know from talking to friends and acquaintances that I’m far from alone in that worry. And for those who don’t have work, who have lost it… well, the situation is much much worse.
Anyhow, cue x number of words on the thigh slapping subject of a man and a woman, for it is in this article a world exclusively made up of couples who are men and women, pushed together by economic circumstance.
The last thing an efficient housewife needs is the presence of a man who is irritated by cleaning or worse, offers helpful suggestions as to the better improvement of household management. You can see how otherwise stable relationships based on spouses spending most of their time apart are going to have trouble adjusting to daily companionship.
So what are wives supposed to do? Tread carefully. Producing lists of DIY projects and gardening jobs is tempting but we are dealing with sensitive souls. Of the men and women I know who have been made redundant, men take it much harder. Women see it as an escape; an opportunity to start something new whether it is minding their own children or retraining for a long abandoned dream.
Three women I know have been made redundant in the last month and each is delighted. They got good packages and see themselves as being set free rather than rejected. The men are not so sure.
Now, I’m perhaps not quite in the exalted bracket that she is in terms of knowing people, particularly women, who can blithely slip from work to home with little more concern than the fact that there happens to be an extra body around the house. But I do happen to know women who have been made redundant in the past year. And from talking with them it is very clear that far from this being an happy event it was a profoundly difficult time which for those unable to find new work has continued. Perhaps the women I know who work are different to those she does. And that’s fair enough. It takes all sorts.
Then there is the implicit message, which strikes me as pretty reactionary, that women working in or from the home are engaged in a humour-ish conspiracy to hide their indolence. And that’s an annoying trope in its own way.
But… this article drips complacency, a complacency very different to what I’m hearing from couples who find the hours each day ‘rattling around the house’, as its been put to me, and wondering how they will manage to pay the mortgage and bills and look after families as the recession lengthens.
And while I don’t doubt there’s a kernel of truth in the observation that different social roles generate different responses I can’t help but feel, again from knowing people going through this process that when she argues that…
Women resigned themselves a long time ago to being judged on non-revenue generation issues like the shine on their hair or granite worktop, so unemployment doesn’t affect their self-esteem as badly as it does men’s. Accustomed to being judged, by society and themselves, on their ability to provide, men have a harder time adjusting to a day without formal socialisation, structure or status. For those who defined themselves by their jobs, life with nothing to do seems bleak. The men who will cope best are those who realise that a valuable life can be lived without a monetary value being placed on it.
…she is ignoring the basic fact that it’s not the ‘monetary value’ of life that is central, although for some that’s hugely important, but the fear that one will be unable to financially make it into the future.
I don’t know. This all seems to me to be missing the point. Just getting by is such a trial. Redundancy is a terribly scarring process for everyone involved. You don’t have to come close to ‘defining yourself by your job’ to recognise that losing the central focus of a working life is something a bit beyond ‘monetary’ value. Friendships, social networks, the very structure of life is irrevocably fractured. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive to this issue having been though the experience five years ago. But, surely events of such seriousness deserve something a bit more than this?
It’s just Ye Olde Chestnutte columns about how tough it is to have the kids at home for the school holidays or the in laws around for the Christmas with the details, slightly, changed.
You’d wonder sometimes does Geraldine Kennedy who, whatever about her politics was a journalist who in her day was serious minded, hard working and wrote well, read the Times at all. I’m trying to picture her smacking her lips at the sheer flair and intellectual brilliance of a column like this.
And you are being too serious WBS. Here’s a simple guide to modern Ireland. Women, AKA girly girls, like chocolate, shoes and pink stuff. Men, AKA blokes, like football, man gadgets and football. I mean, all this like politics, economics and history is, y’know, boring.
By the way, wasn’t there a similarly humorous treatment of male redundancy in Boys From The Blackstuff, in the episode with Michael Angelis and Julie Walters where the ducks end up getting the tar.
I used to really like her old blog but each of her columns these days seems to be trying to outdo itself for glib, short-sighted, narrow-minded cliche.
Sigh. I wonder how much of the world constructed in these columns is her actual experience. A world where women aren’t forced out, they ‘opt’ out. A world where bills are minor inconveniences. A world where wives can’t bear more than a few hours a day in their husbands’ company, ho ho ho.
Maybe if I were her friend, I’d pretend all was utterly rosy and my middle class status not in the slightest jeopardy. On the other hand, maybe I’m an utter cynic to think that Carey is deliberately trying out a mild form of the Myers school of opinion writing – write something quite ridiculous, rile everyone up, get lots of letters in and the editor starts to value your anti-popularity. Or maybe she is genuinely this self-absorbed. Sigh again. She did use to be a feminist, I’m almost sure of it.
I don’t want to be too harsh, and she can write as you say Betty, but I think you’re onto something there. There is a certain degree of let’s see how far this can be pushed… I think the throw away line about ‘not supposed to say out loud’ is central to that…
I am too serious EC, at least on this issue! It’s not a gift…
There seems to be a natural cycle in the development of a columnist where they start off offering being insightful before falling into a routine, then become a parody of themselves before finally they reject their old viewpoint, reinvent themselves and start the cycle again. Repeat till death or retirement.
That’s a fair point Niall too. In fairness it is probably difficult to come up with new stuff, and I think the real danger is the urge to be funny and/or relevant at all costs. I’d also very tentatively hazard a guess that if one doesn’t have a particular ideology, or rather a reasonably defined ideology it’s more difficult to sustain a reasonably clear viewpoint. And in also in fairness with people prodding and poking at texts like never before writing a column in a national newspaper is probably more high-risk (if one cares about such matters as consistency etc) than ever before.
Betty, your second paragraph has really resonated with me for the last hour or so. I think that’s a precise summing up of it.
You’re having us on WbS, aren’t you. This isn’t today’s Carey column at all, is it? You lifted it from an old 1950s book you discovered called something like ‘How to Treat Your Man – secrets to a happy marriage’ with some Mad Men like folk on the cover, didn’t you
Please tell me that’s the case, because surely that bastion of liberalism, that old lady of d’Olier Street, couldn’t be recommending old fashioned gender roles with Him doing the DIY, and Her polishing the kitchen worktops?
Even leaving aside the ridiculous central point, has anyone noticed that, in the broadsheets – the Guardian as much as the IT – ‘work’ is invariably something you do in an office, involving meetings and powerpoint?
Manual work just doesn’t exist for in any ‘lifestyle’ – only in boring old life.
I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret. Sarah Carey’s column is actually ghost written by Candace Bushnell.
Only noticed SoS’s comment after I posted the one above. I thought that was a given, that all broadsheets see everything from an urban middle-class lifestyle perspective.
I wish I was Damian. I wish was.
That’s a great point sonofstan. It’s like only the ‘high-powered’ ‘high-risk’ ‘high-pressure’ etc really ‘work’. Everyone else… pah!
Man, Donagh, you might be right. Re #11! Bloody hell. That’s a scary thought.
it’s been bothering me for a while…… I lead curious double (at least) life; half among academics and students, and half doing – or supervising- what is essentially hard graft: and, the thing is, young middle-class people don’t even seem to understand that it takes hard, tiring often dangerous physical effort to make a lot of things, that a lot of things that you do with your hands and get dirty in the process involve skill and intelligence……a sort of magical thinking takes over: the world of stuff is just ‘there’ ready to be consumed. Roads and houses and cars and shopping centres just happen because clever people with money want it to be so (The working classes, of course, are just scrounging – they don’t actually, like, work.)
No sonsofstan, real work at the cutting edge involves condensing your latest thoughts into 140 characters and posting them on twitter – now that’s the hard graft, high pressure stuff. Just ask the guardian, or should I say twitter.com/guardian
On mature reflection I think I’m too hard on Sarah Carey. There are far worse columnists and we don’t know what constraints she’s under as to what she can write about.
Re people knowing about what real work is right. Perhaps one difference between right and left in this country is the lack of respect the former have for manual work. Most mainstream media commentators lionise the developers without whom apparently nothing would be built in this country. However we could, theoretically, do without developers. Everything that gets built could be built by the state. (I’m not saying this is a desirable situation, just that it’s physically possible.)
However we couldn’t do without building workers. Wonderful and all as the Sean Dunnes and Liam Carrolls of this world are, none of them would be able to single-handedly build a housing estate or office block. Yet looking at all the belly-aching about the electricians strike and trade union bashing, and the complete lack of outcry at the 10% cut sought in builders wages, you get the impression that there is an almost total lack of respect for people who do actual work.
So, for example, you get Gareth O’Callaghan fulminating against the treachery of the electricians. It shows an almost complete lack of self awareness on the part of someone like that who is paid far more than any electrician. An electrician is someone with a useful skill which helps people. The use of Gareth O’Callaghan, on the other hand, is somewhat more mysterious.
Sonofstan is dead right about the lack of respect for any work outside the office. How often did we hear that Poles were here to do the jobs which were too crappy for the Irish to do themselves? What way is that to talk about anyone’s work? What’s rarely mentioned is that in the aforementioned jobs the Poles generally worked side by side with the kind of Irish people who are usually left out of any discussion about the effects of the recession though they have been the first to be put out of work. Apparently the term working class is passe these days but it’s hard to know how else you’d describe them. There might be very few dockers these days and we might only have ever had a couple of coal mines but there’s still an awful lot of manual labour going in this country. I also balk at this persistent description of trade unions as being somehow undemocratic because the leaders are not elected in Dail elections. The likes of David Begg and Jack O’Connor surely represent more people than the man who got the last seat in a five seater.
On one news bulletin last week on RTE, I heard the interviewer say to the rep. from the TEEU that €23 pw (what they were looking for) was almost 3 times the minimum wage – the assumption being that ‘mere’ electricians, people without degrees, couldn’t possibly be worth that -indeed that their worth should be somehow indexed to that. I somehow would think that RTE news reporters are on a significantly greater multiple of the min. wage.
Incidentally a recent book that explores some of this disconnect between workers of the hand and brain (or at least, those who sit in front of a computer all day) is Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Work. He’s a philosopher turned Motorcycle mechanic, and he argues that ‘fixing things’ is a) much more intellectually challenging than merely moving information around, b) that it’s the latter – the movers of info – who are the real proles these days, and the ones most vulnerable in a global economy: the important jobs are those that can’t be delivered online: someone in Bangalore can sort out your internet connection problems, but s/he can’t fix your washing machine. (a point familiar from much of Conor’s stuff on class) – he is scathing about the unreality of transferable skills and the university system that supposedly produces it.
He’s not a leftie – if anything, he comes from that kind of sturdy peoman tradition of Jefferson and so on, and he’s too fond of pot shots at PC-ness. It’s too polemical for its own good, but its a really interesting argument nonetheless.
That’s ’sturdy yeoman’
On the subjective of relative wages/salaries touched on above…
I was briefly watching BBC24, the 24 hours news channel, one night when they were discussing the UK MP “expenses” scandal. The parliamentarian interviewed claimed the problem was that MPs weren’t paid enough (about £64,000 pa I think) so they make it up with “expenses”, then he asked the interviewer, someone I had never seen before, so no TV personality, how much she earns. Astonishlingly she answered (normally they get huffy and don’t): £92,000 pa. Wha…….!
So that’s where my licence fee goes!
‘Apparently the term working class is passe these days but it’s hard to know how else you’d describe them.’
When I was at college (history) my lecturer, a very highly regarded writer on Ireland 1900-1939, who has been referenced on a discussion elsewhere on this site asked in all seriousness if such a thing as ‘labourers’ existed anymore. This was 1996. I told him that yes, I was under the impression that they did. He seemed surprised. While as an example it may not mean much, it is surely significant that people who earn quite a lot and who move in circles where they often do not meet electricians, brickies or god forbid labourers, can conclude that the working class does not exist. They then pass this attitude to many of their students, who quite often come from backgrounds where manual labour is either a memory or was never done by anyone in the immediate family. Some of these people get their degrees, do a couple of years in journalism school and end up writing columns for the national press.
My own, entirely unscientific, theory is that the profile of people in journalism has changed. Hence the fact that, for example, if you look at the coverage of trade union disputes by RTE and the Irish Times in the seventies, it was broadly sympathetic to the unions whereas nowadays the first reaction when there’s a strike is to place a mike in front of some bystander who will express his outrage at how he’s going to be affected. “I know there’s 200 jobs at stake but I’m going to be half an hour late for work.”
Journalists in the seventies had generally gone in straight from school to local papers or been copy boys in the nationals. The job was pretty low down the social scale for a long time and many of its best known practicioners were bright people who hadn’t been to college but who read a lot, and kept reading. It was very strongly unionised and the NUJ generally made common cause with the other unions. My uncle worked in the trade and would have fitted into this category, so would most of his workmates. Their bias was instinctively towards the working class because that’s where they came from themselves.
With the introduction of academic journalism courses, and the modern phenomenon whereby a job in “the media,” is seen as a great prize. (Don’t know why, but it seems to be), you got a different kind of person coming in, the kind of person who once would have gone on for medicine or law. The idea that journalism was a profession rather than a trade took hold. And a lot of the newcomers tended to be from a background where their class allegiances were different. The boys from the old school saw management as the kind of people who kept wages in local papers low (and they were low). The new breed saw unions as the kind of people who’d persecuted their father when he tried to keep costs down in his business. Like any broad analysis, this is full of generalisations but I think there’s truth in it.
The interesting thing is that with casualisation increasing at a ferocious rate journalism isn’t seen as that much of a prestige gig any more (it’s striking how many journos have gone into the law). Whether this leads to a further change is something we’ll have to wait to see.
The job was pretty low down the social scale for a long time and many of its best known practicioners were bright people who hadn’t been to college but who read a lot, and kept reading.
I think there was a discussion here a while back about post-punk and how the likes of Curtis and MES were those sort of guys, and how the problem is now that bright working class kids do go to college, but, like everyone else there, they don’t read anymore than they have to.
The snobbery in Ireland around work intensified in the Tiger years. Bertie was heard to say in one interview that we needed “good” jobs in IT and the like, that the day of the “ordinary” worker was over. Our masters– those who govern us, tell us what to think via “opinion pieces”, compile Snip Nua reports etc.–know little of the lives of ordinary workers. Yet they tell minimum wage workers that they’re “paying themselves too much”, that they should not strike but think of the economy, be patriotic, be glad to have a job etc. (And best of all, not accept “compulsory” retirement at 65. Great idea if you’re a celebrity journo, less so if if you’ve been a manual worker since your teens.)
Remember the late Studs Terkel’s wonderful book entitled “Working” which celebrated ordinary workers across America by interviewing them about their lives. Waitresses, janitors, cleaners, factory workers spoke eloquently about the beauty , satisfaction, boredom and exhaustion of their jobs and of the sorrow and dignity of their hidden, anonymous lives. James Taylor wrote the lovely “Millworker” after reading the book. Recorded by Emmylou Harris (Youtube).
Terkel’s book should be required reading for the preening masters of the universe and their political groupies.
Is it my imagination but wasn’t there a follow up book to Working where the only guy who was happy was the stonemason, all the office clerks, etc because they didn’t work with real tangible stuff were filled with anomie, or was that Working itself?
Tortoise is right, snobbery is exactly the word to describe this. One drawback of the emigration boom will be having to read more articles about how the old style Irish emigrant was a navvy with dirty boots whereas today’s emigrant is running a gallery in Tribeca or working on the London Stock Exchange.
Yeah…. although one thing I remember from the 80s is how it was quite OK for middle- class kids to be carpenters or plumbers in the Bronx or whatever; you could do jobs ‘out there’ that would bring shame on the family if done here. Getting away from the Irish class system, as well as the ‘moral’ atmosphere was one plus of emigrating.