Emma Jacobs: Dad’s yellowing reports on work could apply today

I hadn’t dared look at it. Almost 13 years after my father had died, there was a box of his papers I could not touch. I feared digging around in case the dormant grief snapped like a bear trap. Yet this year, as Christmas drew near, his absence from family gatherings sharper, I willed myself to peer inside. In it was an autobiographical account of his working life. He summed up work’s all-consuming Sisyphean nature: “I sometimes wonder if I ever do any work. Then again, I wonder if I do anything else.”

In this unpublished book, he chronicled his career from the 1960s to the 1990s, for a long stretch employed by national newspapers to report on unions, strikes motivated by industrial change, job losses and technology. The changes in work were all too personal when he was made redundant and became freelance.

Reading Dad’s draft was a striking reminder of how central work was to his identity. I knew work had been important to him, of course. As a teenager I would roll my eyes at his stories of meeting this trade union leader or that politician. It seemed as boring to me then as I’m sure my own job will be to my son. Yet his enthusiasm somehow penetrated my adolescent world-weariness and I followed him into the trade.

He was far from alone in being consumed by work. Yet its true significance was brought home to him by stints of unemployment, as is the case for others. Having written about cuts and “industry’s onward march” as a correspondent, my father was assailed by their realities when he became a casualty: “No man is a statistic to himself,” he wrote. Being out of work cast him adrift; enforced idleness triggered anxiety. It was partly about money; he took to turning off the lights to save on electricity, tripping over stray shoes.

But it also brought up existential questions: who was he when he was not working? He confessed – in writing – to extremes of mood that he had previously never experienced. The slightest bit of good news made him elated beyond reason; the sniff of bad would depress him hugely.

Work’s significance

It seems that work's significance – as an expression of creativity and self-fulfilment – has become even more important since my father's day. David Frayne described in his book, the Refusal of Work, a modern ethos which emphasises the importance of personality in the workplace. "Being yourself" and "having fun" are the orders of today.

After reading Dad's autobiography I asked Sherry Lee Linkon, professor of English at Georgetown University, why she studies fictional accounts and memoirs of US workers. There is a richness, she observes, in these accounts. While social scientists and economists analyse how work is changing, it is only through the voices of workers themselves we can fully understand how those changes feel.

As well as chronicling change, such accounts of work give perspective on our own professional worries and workplace upheavals. What strikes me reading Dad’s account is how contemporary some issues appear. We are told we are living through an age of disruption, yet our predecessors felt techno-charged turmoil too. Dad’s description of the print production changes could apply to most workplaces today.

More ruthless

“The new computer-driven technologies were more ruthless than any innovations before them. They churned through the traditional production system and smashed all the working relationships . . . Everywhere the computers won.”

The madness of job advertisements and their demands read as if they were written today. Dad was flummoxed by their jargon. “Why all jobs ‘unique opportunities’, requiring ‘high-calibre professionals’ with ‘proven track records’, to work for outfits that are ‘leaders’ in their field – often in whole world? Why are they all ‘enjoying record growth’, even ‘exponential growth’?” He was quite taken by a shared office for freelances in central London. Claims that the “sharing economy” and co-working offices – such as WeWork – are new seem hyperbolic from this perspective. So too with the gig economy and the march of the freelances: my father was fretting about piecing together contracts and hustling for work, long before Gen Y.

One enduring feature of work is the grumbling over daily frustrations. Dad reflected that even during his “golden age” – when he was in a job he loved and that appeared permanent –– he still found “dozens of grouses and complaints to moan about”. It was more than likely, he noted, that he would in time be looking back on the 1990s as his new golden age.

Perhaps that is the problem with golden ages? They are only apparent when they are gone. – Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2015 Lucy Kellaway is away