The Great Resignation

I love the various screengrabs that go around Twitter of an American working in the service industry being treated like crap by their manager who just doesn’t get that labour shortages mean power has shifted, and end with the worker quitting. They’re so popular I can only guess some are fake to hoover up extra likes, but the sentiment is real and the data seems to back it up. The Great Resignation is real, probably driven by deaths from covid, caring responsibilities and, it seems, older people leaving the workforce. In the UK, about a million Europeans have left the country, 700,000 of them from London by the first covid summer. Not that you’d know it from most newspapers. You have to infer it from the calls by government ministers for students to pick rotting vegetables and mothers to put in a shift in an abattoir after they drop the kids to school.

I used to always think having suddenly fewer of a certain essential group gave that group more power. Then I read sometime in the late nineties about China’s ‘one child’ policy, how it drove termination of pregnancies with girls, and how scarcity drove kidnapping and general mistreatment of the surviving girls and women as they grew up. Employers and governments have two choices; adapt the labour market to accommodate workers’ greater choices in the new reality, or punitively try and force them to continue behaving as in the old one. Or in the UK, complain about ungrateful (insert minority category)s, do corruption to personally buy yourself out of the broken system, and rail against reality while throwing dead cat after dead cat on the table. In this way, the ‘great resignation’ can mean both people resigning from shitty jobs and conditions, but also becoming fatally resigned to them.

So, yes, I get it. Everything you think will help a disadvantaged group has to be turned and worked extremely hard to its advantage, and you may still lose and end up in worse conditions, but the collective is the only way we’ve ever done useful things. (Albeit James C. Scott’s ‘Two Cheers for Anarchism’ is pithily excellent on how the entrenched left-leaning institutions for absorbing disorder and barely, incrementally bring about just enough change to see off revolutions, reflexively condemn wildcat strikes, incivility, radicalism and so forth. Then they try and absorb it. Sometimes that works, to both good and bad effect.)

ANYWAY, all to say, many years ago I worked in the film industry in Ireland. It was incredibly hard to get a union card unless you came from a family that already worked in the industry. There was a Catch 22 – you couldn’t work on a film unless you had a union card, but you couldn’t get one without showing you’d already worked on a film and got two union members to sign for you. Anyway, I did. (Thank you, wonderful continuity people – at that time generally the only women on closed or small sets – who were willing to sign the card of a stranger.) I worked freelance for a couple of years, temping in offices around north Dublin in the winter and working production in the summer.

The first summer, I worked on a BBC period drama series based on a book by Deirdre Purcell, ‘Falling for a Dancer’. We spent five months on location in Castletownbere, on the Beara Peninsula of west Cork. So many stories about that summer. But the one our current conditions bring to mind is the time the production schedule called for a week of night-shoots. Normally you should have been paid more for them – at least time and a half – but the producer was dragging his feet. We in the production office were cut off from set and generally – correctly – seen as on the side of the producer in most things. Like, if he said that accommodation and per diems were only going to be x, we just implemented it. But for the night-shoots, which were at least half-way through the production and everyone was already running on fumes, we, too, wanted to get paid more. There just wasn’t a way to say it.

Did I mention we were mostly women? In fact, all women, with a male boss who I’d known in college and delighted in telling me that any of us could be sacked at any moment. We weren’t allowed to leave the office, no matter how late it was or that everyone on set had gone home hours before, until the fax with that day’s figures and the next day’s schedule was successfully received by a machine in London. And let’s just say faxes were not the most reliable technology back then. One time, I made a mistake – don’t remember what it was, but I think we can all agree that nobody died – and my old buddy the production manager decided that to punish me I would be required to drive the day’s rushes to Cork, within a time limit that was impossible without going over the speed limit for most of it, and on dangerous, twisty roads. I did. The next day the woman who usually had to do that resumed. How she wasn’t killed or didn’t kill someone, I’ll never know. So yes, the night-shoots.

Word on-set was that the SIPTU union members weren’t happy with the risible extra pay offered. They might even get a rep down from Dublin. (SIPTU was my union, but they had a strong reputation of not giving a toss about production staff, and indeed white collar women in general.) There was lots of gossip and complaining, most of which we only heard in the pub, and largely quelled by budgetary hand-wringing from the producer, a tall, polite Englishman with a handlebar moustache and the faint whiff of pained colonialism in many of his dealings. But probably we were all just going to knuckle under, grumbling, and do the bloody night-shoots for whatever we got, and we in production knew we wouldn’t get anything other than by smiling gratefully.

In marched the sparks. Or I should say, out marched the sparks. The set electricians, without whom you couldn’t plug in a light or set up a camera, announced that they were stepping down, immediately. They belonged to a completely different union, BECTU, if I recall, which was focused on electricians generally and had no particular interest in the film industry, so just let them get on with it. Now, the sparks were their own thing entirely. If I mention the last battle in Narnia and the phrase ‘the dwarves are for the dwarves’ comes to mind, then you know exactly what I mean. They were tradesmen who’d come up through apprenticeships in a completely different industry before moving sideways into film, and they really had no fucks to give when it came to overtime, breaks, or the privilege of Olympic-level eye-rolling at creative lovey-ness. (Given they managed to keep electricity consistently coming for shooting outside in gales and horizontal rain, or indoors in cottages hundreds of yards from any supply, and managed never to electrocute anyone or burn anything down, I think they earned this privilege.) So the sparks, who also drank in a different, arguably grittier pub to everyone else, waited until the first day of night-shoots, when the producer must have thought he was in the clear, and informed the production that they would not be coming to work until they were paid double. And cash in advance.

Out the window flew the comforting fiction that it might be shit but we were all in it together.

Off the producer went to the bank – maybe all the way to Cork? – to return, hours later, with literally bags of money. All in twenties, fresh and newly printed notes which the sparks received gruffly and walked around set fanning out rather cruelly at everyone else.

So, end of the day, the rest of us got paid a bit more, both thanks to and in spite of the sparks – the producer’s claim of a poor mouth both supported and undercut by the handfuls of bank-notes. But we didn’t get nearly as much as they did.

All of which brings me back to yesterday’s condemnation by London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, of the RMT union members’ announced strike as Tube drivers. Strange/not strange to see a Labour mayor condemn the right to withdraw labour. Of course the RMT guys are out for themselves. Just the demonstration effect of their threatened strike, and the very good wages and conditions they generally have because of it, show the efficacy of collective action, and how no one’s going to love you for it. Just like the sparks, they don’t have to be nice to be right. Bosses can easily use the selfishness of the squeaky wheel to divide and conquer, but they can’t stop us all noticing where the oil is administered. More often than not, the arsehole insisting on his rights and fanning his bank notes at those who would never go that far manages to provoke them into going just a bit further, even as he rolls his eyes at their silly qualms.

I don’t remember if this happened before or after the week of night-shoots, but one day I’d managed to wangle an errand to set and was sitting chatting with the sparks who were, of course, on their tea break. Someone asked what we’d all do if we won the lottery, which had recently been introduced into Ireland. I said something or other about giving up this work to, probably, make my own films, then someone else said something about perpetual holidays. I asked the most senior spark if he’d give up work if he won. He laughed and shook his head. “I wouldn’t give up work,” he said, “But I’d be very fucking cheeky.”