Talk about an honest day's work

APART from sleep, most of us spend more time at work than in any other single activity. It takes up more time than raising our families, far more than ours favourite pursuits, unless the job itself takes on that role. But few of us talk much about our work, except perhaps to immediate colleagues, our boss or our union. Much less do most of us want to read a book about it.

Which is a pity, because Talking Work, like most oral histories, is very readable. For the most part it lets the subjects speak for themselves. Only at the end do the authors indulge their academic predilections in a debate on the nature of work, of class and the disappearance of the working class from Britain and other developed economies. They also ask if the working class ever existed in the first place.

So, after several generations of academics building their careers on discovering and analysing the working class, their successors are now questioning its very existence. This is the sort of thing that gets intellectuals a bad name.

The title is a bit of a misnomer. This oral "history" only covers the period from the early 1900s to the present day and the 36 interviewees hardly constitute a broad enough cross sect ion of the workforce to be regarded as definitive. The subjects are also almost entirely drawn from manual and low paid white collar occupations, the groups which have fared worst in Thatcher's Britain.

However, it can't just be dismissed as a Book of the Damned. One thing that it reveals is the very different attitudes to work that people have. Basically, people seem to divide into two groups, those who believe in the old motto of many a British city, Laborum est Orare (to work is to pray), and those for whom work is a form of economic servitude.

For many of the older interviewees, especially skilled workers, the job was their life. Len Greenham, an 82 year old morocco grainer in the leather industry, sums up the attitude of these men (for they were all male) towards the passing of the old trades: "It's gone now, and it only returns in highly specialised work such as my directors sitting on their morocco chairs, putting their papers on the tables ... But at least there's something still there after you . . .

Katrina is one of a new generation of workers. She rents space in Ia hairdressing salon and splits her takings fifty fifty with the owner. She likes the freedom it gives her. "Of course, the other side of it is you get no benefits from being self employed. You've no protection, you've no unemployment benefit, anything like that ... My skill is my security." Her father, a redundant council worker, thinks "hairdressing isn't a proper job, like emptying bins was. Well, I'm still working and he isn't."

Fear is another theme that runs through the interviews. Bob Clarke, a 52 year old engineer who still has a job, says conditions in his firm have been maintained because of strong union organisation. "But now, with a greatly reduced workforce, these conditions will be eroded. And there's nothing we can do about it ... I've had some great experiences on the shop floor but I doubt if I will in the future."

For a number of miners interviewed, their most enduring memories are not of the job, but their efforts to hang on to it. "The greatest 12 months of my life", was how one of them summed up the 1984 strike. It is clear that many of them are still suffering from the shock of first being beaten on the picket line and then being driven out of a lifestyle.

One of the saddest stories in the book is that of a group of ex-miners ambushed by social welfare officials in a field where they were picking potatoes for £8 a day. "Poor buggers, trying to get a few extras for the kiddies," one of the luckier ones who escaped said. "Is that England? We used to think we lived in a decent society."

The book also poses important social and political questions about the future of work that tend to be forgotten by the prophets of the information society and the global economy. Perhaps most ominously, it asks what are we to do about ecological issues in a world where the assimilation of billions of working people to capitalist society has been based on the principle of unlimited growth.