My trade union CV

In the past few months I have written out my CV  dozens of times - so many times in fact  that I'm even starting to bore myself.  So just  for a change - I thought I'd set it out in terms of the chronology of my trade union membership. 

I  have to say it's not an inspiring story:

• TGWU - in between school and uni I worked as a lathe operator in a factory making photocopiers. It was an old-fashioned shitty  assembly line and played no small part in getting me politicised. The factory was run on the lines of a caste system; the T&G was the union for the 'un-skilled and semi-skilled' - we wore grey overalls; there were engineers (AUEW) who wore blue lab-coats; and technicians (ASTMS) who wore white lab-coats. Paranoia about demarcation and a kind of apartheid system prevailed.  I wasn't there long enough to form a proper view of it all but it did seem like  something out of disutopian sci-fi movie.

• NUS (students not seamen that is) - I couldn't really take this seriously as a proper trade union. Certainly at that time (the 1980s) and place (Oxbridge) it was a drinking club with overtones of political correctness. The high-point of this was an occupation against the proposal of fees (sounds familiar) - but being a respectable bunch the union actually  booked the venue they were occupying in advance.

• SOGAT - joined by mistake whilst I was a student at the London College of Printing. We used to go down to Wapping on a Friday night - which is where I was first  at the receiving end of  police thuggery . Once I started work - in the pre press sector - I found that I was in the wrong union. It then took about six months of arguing and pleading before I was allowed to transfer to the right one.

• NGA - I came in at a time which might considered the swan song of ascendant craft unionism. The chapel had a degree of control over recruitment and working practices which seems almost impossible in these post-Thatcher days. I thought it was great and in retrospect was a bit seduced by it all. It was corrupt and riddled with nepotism, racism and sexism.  And whilst new technology was about to bury us - the union was burying its head in the past. In my section many of the members identified more with the pre-merger( even more arcane) craft unions- like SLADE and the ASLP. The  leadership was more concerned with defining who could and couldn't join - certainly not the new generation of mac heads who did 'desk top publishing'.  The trouble was this was the next generation who were poised to replace many of our jobs.

• GPMU - at last a single union for the print. Trouble was the stable door was bolted  after the horse had run away. The union at my place - and many other smaller companies - had already been de-recognised and members were largely an aging minority.

• AMICUS and  then UNITE - successive swallowing-ups and the union became increasingly remote and irrelevant. Out of 80 odd people in our place there were three members and one of them was me - supposedly a senior manager. 

Which brings me to the latest installment: When I phoned the union offices a few week ago - the first time I had spoken to anyone there for years - to tell them that I had been made redundant, they could tell me only  that as I'd been in for 25 years  I was eligible for a free 'retired members' level of membership. They didn't even ask me if I was happy that I'd received my statutory rights or offer me any support or advice.  I was seriously tempted to tell them to poke my union card - although I have kept it as an 'unemployed member' out of some sort of misplaced sentimentality.

Here's hoping that wherever I end up next has something resembling a healthy union ...

Clerkenwell crafts - nostalgia and melancholy

A really nice glimpse into a world of craftsmanship in Clerkenwell  today over at one of my favourite blogs.

My first job 'in the print' was in Clerkenwell. When I describe it to people now I am conscious that it sounds like something from the 1500's - in fact it was only the late '80s. I was  a production junior in pre press - having done a short course at the then London College of Printing - it was a backdoor route into the trade and the possession of that precious union card at a time when four year appenticeships were the norm and graduates virtually unheard of.

The first couple of years I spent in a small trade house was a fantastic education. My duties were general dogs-bodying around the studio and no small part of this was being a runner dropping off and collecting work around the small concentrated area of tenement-style buildings behind the Clerkenwell Road . These buildings were a warren of small businesses often with only half a dozen guys occupying  a single room and  engaged in  some very specific operation in the spectrum of arcane crafts that made up the 'print'. We were a lithographic planning/plate-making house - and that was all we did - so  a typical project would require me to scuttle back and forth from  the scanning house around the corner, the cromalin company next door, the wet proofers in the basement and the typesetters at the end of the street.

Thinking about it now I have no idea of how costs were recorded or even who was working for who - the client / supplier relationship would oscillate between different projects - often several times a day. It wasn't really clear either who was the management - most of the businesses were owned by one or two working managers who themselves were hands-on or 'on the bench'. Everybody seemed to have worked with - or for - everyone else at some point. And everyone of course was in 'the union'. In fact the union acted as part HR department and part recruitment agency - the officials were usually of the same generation as the working owners and they colluded in  placing their old mates in the best jobs. This was the age of the 'green list' and 'white card' when vacancies in other houses were only advertised by the union, from which you had to get a permission slip in order to go for an interview - to be presented to the Father Of Chapel before you spoke to  a prospective employer.

I'm almost getting dewy-eyed as I type all this - but of course the reality was a far cry from some sort of workers-controlled halcyon age. The system was rife was nepotism and corruption and a self-perpetuated  clique that kept out outsiders - particularly women and minorities - and a culture of bullying apprentices / juniors was almost institutionalised. But for centuries it created a layer of affluent skilled workers who took immense pride in what they did and didn't take too much shit from anyone. I feel privileged to have been a small part of that world for the last decade of its existence. By the mid '90s Thatcher, Murdoch and the Apple Mac had effectively killed it off. Some of us are still going having reinvented ourselves several times over in a digital age and shrouded ourselves in the bullshit of the 'creative industries'.

I suppose we are still a privileged little world - as working environments go it is probably better than most and a damn site better than the service industries and soulless white-collar jobs that nowadays  are the norm. But I can't helping thinking that nearly all those things that first drew me to it are now a part of history. And whilst there might be a whole lot of  renewal currently going on in  Clerkenwell, I did notice the other week  that the workshop where my first company was is now a gastro-bar packed with media-lovies...

The apprentice

In my other life - the day job - I was invited to the government's apprenticeship roadshow. A seminar at Excel with a panel of Alan Sugar, Ed Balls and John Denham, an audience of captains of industry, assorted hangers on ... and myself.

I was one of the few not in a suit, definitely the only one who checked in a crash helmet at the cloak-room, and probably the only member of a Far Left Organisation there.

I don't have a major problem with the apprenticeship drive in itself - it was me who introduced the Modern Apprenticeship scheme at my work - hence the invitation I suppose. Despite its imperfections its not a bad scheme - almost as good as the union-run apprenticeships, and City & Guilds qualifications back in the supposed 'dark ages' of the print industry.

The crowd was a collection of familiar stereotypes - apparachiks from public sector quangos who are serial conference attenders, slimy big business types doing a PR job to show that offering training in shelf stacking is really making a contribution to society, and chippy small businessmen who complain the government should ' do something' to help them but in the same breath moan about being burdened with too much tax, red tape and political correctness.

Ed Balls and John Denham span the government-line with consummate polish whilst giving the impression that they have no idea about manufacturing industry at all. Alan Sugar (can't bring myself to call him 'Sir Alan' ) was greeted like a celebrity - the people's entrepreneur. In comparison to the oily politicians his bluntness was refreshing although he did lose a bit of credibility when in the Q&A session having berated business for not getting involved with the scheme, he also made it clear he has no idea how it actually operates.

In a similar vein at one of the interminable 'networking' breaks I got talking to some worthy from a housing trust - who had a go at me when I voiced my skepticism about how many apprenticeships and vocational courses actually led to proper skilled jobs - I asked him how many apprentices he had taken on in his organisation - the answer was none.

This is not surprising - the government is some 10,000 places behind its own targets for apprenticeships - and the poorest uptake is in the public sector.