Multimillion-Pound Sandwich Chain Needs Your Help!
This from Hettie O’Brien today is excellent. Absolutely first-rate. She rightly draws the connection between a right-wing message that we “get back to work” in city centre office blocks and the money that can be extracted from commuters and businesses alike:
The service economy in financialised city centres depends on the consumption patterns of office workers: commuting every day involves not just buying a sandwich or a coffee from Pret, but helping to prop up an entire system.
and
The people who seem most concerned about going back to work aren’t workers, or managers, but rentiers – a category that applies to many retiree readers of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, a demographic that is likely to have paid off mortgages, receives generous pensions and contains a higher proportion of private landlords, and to the rentiers.
The quotes she pulls from those right-wing media outlets are quick shocking too. Read it up.
When newspapers shriek that workers must return to the office, despite the reality that many don’t want to, they’re voicing what the sociologist Luc Boltanski called a “system of confirmation” – an utterance that is neither truth nor fact, but rather a way of reinforcing the status quo. But nobody can think that risking their health to save a multimillion pound sandwich chain is a sensible endeavour.
About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk
I work for a small Engineering firm, they let two people go last year somehow i’m still here -bored. I wish it was me they had let go! I don’t mind the work, when there is work (which isn’t often at all) – but five days a week?!
This year I thought about quitting, even wrote out my resignation letter, but I thought before I go through with it I would ask for reduced hours -what could they say ‘no’?!
I asked and they begrudgingly agreed, now I’m working four days and much happier -it just seems so much more civil. An extra day to work in the garden, house admin, see grandparents, volunteer, learn piano, read, cook, DIY, look out the window etc.
Some of the dinosaurs in the office are’nt sure whats going on!
Haha, nice work John. Writing a resignation letter is amazing, isn’t it? Wonderful and terrifying. Walking around with it in your phone or folder feels like carrying a bomb in a briefcase or something.
It is certainly liberating to write a resignation letter, and reassuring to have -the ultimate ejection seat!
I acknowledge that I am in the fortunate enough position to have the option to resign, for those who don’t, who are stuck in jobs they despise I truly feel sorry -and why your writing is so important. Thanks.