Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (66 page)

In 1952 Zweig also published
The British Worker
, pulling together the fruits of his hundreds of interviews in the late 1940s with male manual workers. In the book he drew similarly positive conclusions about the human effects of industrial work. A worker who complained about a monotonous job was usually unhappy in his home life; most male jobs were not monotonous; and even if up to a third of the male working-class population did ‘dull, repetitive, and uninteresting jobs’, that did not mean that they were all bored stiff with them, given the twin observed facts of the sociability of the workplace and that ‘machines are often very interesting and many people like handling them.’

Yet as Zweig fully conceded, the question of job satisfaction depended on a range of variables, even within the same grade of the same industry in the same region:

Cleanliness, the right temperature, good air, light, private lockers, good washing facilities, good canteens, the good repute of a firm, a genial atmosphere, friendly relations on the floor, fairness in dealing with the worker, a good foreman, and a good boss, may turn even a distasteful job into an attractive one. No one of these factors can be singled out as more important than the others. Men react to the general conditions of the work, not to any individual factor in it.

There were two even more important variables – the size of the wage packet and the extent of job security – with Zweig in both cases emphasising the social as much as the economic aspect. All in all, he concluded, ‘there is an element of hate in the most valued jobs, and an element of love in the most hated’:

The factor of habit clearly comes into men’s feelings towards a job, and makes them like even a job they originally disliked. But the hateful thought that they are bound to a job for life is an unpleasant feature of even the most interesting jobs . . .

The vast majority of men if asked whether they like their job will answer thoughtfully ‘I suppose I do’; but their further comments are often revealing.

Some men will tell you: ‘I should think so. Think about the people who have no job at all’, or ‘It gives me my bread and butter’, or ‘I am used to it now’, or ‘I mustn’t grumble’.

Strong feelings for or against the job are less common than the combination of liking and disliking at the same time.

‘I like the job but you get fed up with it at times.’

In short, ‘the ambivalence of love and hate is nowhere more strongly expressed than it is in the attitude to work’.
¹⁴
Zweig’s portrayal, here and in his other studies, of a fatalistic, suspicious, deeply conservative working class, finding a degree of satisfaction in its labours while overall stoically and unenthusiastically accepting its lot, is broadly convincing – not least because no other sociologist or commentator of the era came so intimately and extensively into contact with that class as he did.

Certainly there were some workers intensely proud of what they did. Take the Sheffield steel industry, where for so many years the crucible had nurtured what the industry’s historian justifiably calls ‘virtuoso skill in hand and eye’. That skill may have been under threat by the 1950s, but it still remained important. ‘It was all rule of thumb,’ recalled one operative. ‘We did play around with devices such as thermocouples, but they were so unreliable, we tended not to use them.’ Sheffield, remembers Stewart Dalton about growing up there, ‘was a proud City, and its workers proud of their skills’. Not only the workers: ‘Children on the housing estates could be heard arguing, “My dad works at ESC [English Steel Corporation]. It’s better than Firth Browns.” Pity the child whose father’s occupation was so humble as to be ignored in the daily round of squabbles. The melter, the roller, the forgeman . . . these were the “worthy” occupations, not comparable in any way with the “wimpish” occupations found outside the factories.’

In general, such pride was unsurprising. Whatever the long-term trend towards deskilling that was undeniably taking place in British industry, the fact was that by mid-century less than 5 per cent of the overall workforce was engaged in mass-production processes, increasingly typified by the assembly line of the car plant. Nor does Zweig’s emphasis on the positive social function of the workplace seem misplaced. As often as not there was humour and camaraderie, as well as a strict hierarchy within many of the workforces – a hierarchy which, by informally imposing its code of proper conduct, in turn contributed to the strength of civil society. ‘If you didn’t behave at the works,’ the Labour politician Frank Field has recalled, ‘you were taken behind the shed and dealt with, because you couldn’t have people risking other people’s limbs and lives.’ That necessity, as well as the sense of solidarity in factory culture, comes through in Colin Ferguson’s diary entry for the last Monday in August 1950:

Worked only half a day in the Pattern Shop today. Just before dinner time a Shop Meeting was hurriedly called & within 2 minutes a vote was taken whether we would stop at the whistle & go home till tomorrow morning. This was agreed to on a show of hands without a count. The reason for this was a request, that our shop fall in line with the Dressing Shop & the Iron & Steel Foundries, which (as a mark of respect to a dresser who’d just been killed by a 3½ ton casting falling on him) had decided to stop work for the day. The man killed came from Paisley. His name was Patterson.

It was a discipline good at creating a sense of duty, even loyalty – primarily towards fellow-workers, but sometimes to employers. Field’s father spent 48 years building carbon blocks for Morgan Crucible in Battersea. ‘He got up every day, coughing his lungs out, hating his job, but he never went sick, never let them down.’ His reward on retirement was £1 for every year of employment.
¹⁵

In the end – whether or not the job was satisfying (and here Zweig may have been somewhat rose-tinted, ignoring for example the sheer numbing, alienating tedium of the vast majority of clerical work), whether or not there was solidarity within the workforce (at Lax &Shaw the sorters were the sworn enemies of the operators, the latter paid by the accepted bottle and often provoked to violence when ‘idle sorters on a slow-moving lehr raked away perfectly good bottles simply to get away for their break more quickly’), and whether or not there was a good atmosphere in the workplace – every worker knew full well, like generations of workers before him, that he was not there for the fun of it.

‘When a man receives his wages every seven days, and these on the whole not a great deal more than enough for comfortable survival, he is
bound
to his work,’ noted the authors of a study of a Yorkshire mining community in the early to mid-1950s. ‘By Sunday night the collier who starts work at 6 a.m. on Monday is not enjoying himself with the same abandon as he did the night before. By Wednesday, three hard days may have made him tired and dispirited and he consoles himself only with the remark that at least the back of the week has been broken.’ While on the vexed question of the voluntary Saturday morning shift, that subject of much well-meaning exhortation and propaganda from above, the authors quoted a typical snatch of miners’ dialogue:

Coming in on Saturday?

No. Five days is enough for anybody.

Oh, so you’re not bothered about getting some extra coal out for the country?

I suppose that’s why you come in on Saturdays.

Is it . . .! We come in for some extra brass and that’s that.

It is a trend impossible to date precisely, but it seems plausible that it was during these relatively early post-war years that the shift began – at least on the part of a significant proportion of the working class – from ‘living to work’ (as the phrase went) to ‘working to live’. Work, in other words, was starting to lose
some
of its traditional centrality in terms of defining a working man’s life and purpose. ‘If extra hours have to be worked at pressure periods, it is almost impossible to persuade workers to do them on Saturday mornings’ was the 1949 finding of the Chief Inspector of Factories about the coming of the five-day week, not only in relation to coal miners. An important shift, it can only be understood against the background of full employment and rising real wages.

Even so, for the workforce as a whole, it did not alter the dominant priorities identified by Zweig. Early in 1953, Research Services Ltd, the organisation run by Mark Abrams, interviewed 1,079 people who worked for a living across the country. They were shown a list of ten possible job satisfactions – nearness to your home; friendly people to work with; good wages or earnings; security of employment; opportunity to use your own ideas; good holidays; opportunities to get on; adequate pension; good training facilities; reasonably short hours – and asked to name which three they considered most important. Good earnings (placed in 58 per cent of people’s top three) and security of employment (55 per cent) were easily the most popular, followed by friendly people to work with (39 per cent), while reasonably short hours and good training finished equal bottom at 8 per cent each. Predictably, middle-class workers attached greater importance to opportunities to get on and use one’s own ideas; equally predictably, older people (who had lived through the inter-war slump) put job security above good earnings, while younger workers were the other way round. There was indeed a distinct generational gap emerging in attitudes to work. ‘A middle-aged craftsman will say sometimes: “My work is my hobby”, but a young man will very rarely say this’ was Zweig’s observation. ‘He finds his hobbies somewhere else, and lacks the same firmly-established working habits.’
¹⁶

Fortunately, it is possible to get a bit closer up. In 1946 a University of London psychologist, Norah M. Davis, conducted individual interviews across the country with 400 building workers, a mixture of skilled tradesmen (bricklayers, joiners, plasterers, etc) and labourers (mainly unskilled but including some semi-skilled like scaffolders). She found that 82.1 per cent of tradesmen expressed ‘definite liking’ for their jobs, compared with 69.6 per cent of labourers. ‘Open-air life; healthy; sense of freedom’ was the most popular explanation given (34.5 per cent) for liking the job, with – despite the acute national housing shortage – ‘Job is of social importance’ put forward by only 2.9 per cent. Whether liking or disliking the job, there were plenty of patently sincere views expressed:

Mine is a job on its own. Not everyone can get an eighth of an inch off 57 feet long of glass.

I feel that men’s lives depend on my work [scaffolding]. The more ticklish a job the better I like it.

I dislike being a labourer and looked down on as an imbecile. It gives me an inferiority complex. Girls draw away from you in buses and say, ‘He’s only a labourer’.

I like being a labourer as we have less responsibility than trades-men.

The wages aren’t enough to live on. I have slaved for fifty years and now have only one suit. Is that enough out of life?

It frightens me to think I’ll do nothing but lay bricks all my life.

I like making a place look decent. I want a house of my own so I am interested.

I like the open air. I like laying bricks and the harmony among your mates.

Asked about their ambitions, more than 40 per cent of the tradesmen and over 52 per cent of the labourers replied – in what tone of voice is not recorded – that they had ‘No ambition’, with many men adding, ‘It’s no good having ambition.’

The interviews also revealed that a high degree of group solidarity, with overwhelmingly favourable attitudes being expressed about fellow-workers (‘They’re a good, sociable crowd of lads’ was a typical assertion), co-existed with widespread grumbling about management:

There are too many walking about in hats. Why?

You can get no satisfaction out of the Head Office. They pass the buck and you get nowhere.

I wish they had a suggestion scheme. Of course I expect only one in a hundred suggestions would be any good and be accepted, but that wouldn’t matter because it would be an encouragement to everyone.

I’m sure our squad is laying an average of about 800 bricks whatever the Corporation says. They never give us the facts or tell us how they get their figures.

It would be more interesting if they’d only tell us how the job is progressing.

‘On most of the sites,’ summarised Davis, ‘the relationship of the operatives to the management was characterised by lack of contact and ignorance.’ Significantly, private contractors were less the target of criticism than public contractors, in effect the local authorities – a discouraging finding in the light of Aneurin Bevan’s systematic privileging of public above private house-building.