Andy Hedgecock tries to make sense of a thirty-three year odyssey into insecure employment and unstable freelancing.
At the end of my first session as a part-time psychology lecturer, in September 1991, I put a question to my class of FE students: “Is there anything you’d like to ask me? Go on, anything at all?”
The young woman at the back, who had spent half the period looking out of the window, said: “Yes, if you ever went bald would you wear a wig?”
At the time, Nottinghamshire FE Colleges paid sessional lecturers with a decent head of curly hair – and little understanding of the phrase ‘hostage to fortune’ – £25 an hour to deal with off-piste questions about androgenic alopecia.
Twenty one years later the curls are gone: I haven’t opted for a wig but I have drifted out of the FE sector. It’s December 2012, Lincoln College is looking for a temporary Psychology Lecturer. Experience and a teaching qualification are ‘must haves’ and the successful candidate will teach for 14.25 hours per week at £16.32 per hour – that’s £232.56 per week. Pay is for contact time only, with the hours spread across four days. In my experience the preparation time and other commitments mean the real hourly rate would be much lower than first appears. And the working pattern and time hungry nature of the work means the person appointed will have little or no time, or energy, for a second job.
In reality a sessional FE lecturer earns about the same as a teenage Barista at one of the corporate coffee house chains. I’m not out to ‘name and shame’ Lincoln College. The rate of pay and fragmented nature of the hours are considered typical and fair for the sector.
I have the kind of experience they are looking for and I have a PGCE, but I can’t afford to apply. I have two children in education and a mortgage and however much I enjoy teaching – and I do enjoy it – I can’t afford to bring in less per hour than I’m earning through freelance minute-taking and knocking out the occasional press release.
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Let’s consider the case of Rushcliffe School in Nottingham which, in September 2012, asked for a full-time Cover Supervisor at a starting salary of £14,994.76. For this post, described as a potential ‘springboard into education and possibly teaching’, the school was looking for a ‘dynamic, creative and tenacious graduate’ with proven behaviour management skills, experience of working with large groups of 11 – 18 year olds, some specialism in a core or none-core curriculum area and a willingness to support the Duke of Edinburgh Programme, including two weekend camping expeditions. Not so much as a springboard than an opportunity to plunge from the diving tower into the deep end of secondary education for around half the salary of a teacher. The advert stated: “If you are someone who has always wondered whether you would be suited to a career in education this is a fantastic opportunity for you.”
There’s an obvious paradox in the advert: was this an opportunity for a new teacher or someone hoping to find an alternative way into teaching; or did they want someone with the skill set and experience of a teacher? If I didn’t have the utmost respect for the integrity of Nottinghamshire schools I might suspect them of trying to trawl for talent on the cheap.
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In the autumn of 1979, the first year of the Thatcher Revolution, I left my job as a building society clerk-cashier to take a degree in psychology. A few years later, armed with a BA in Psychology and an MSc in Intelligent Systems, I got a job as a Research Assistant at Nottingham University. I met some interesting people, did some engaging work, contributed to a few publications and spent 13 years bouncing from one fixed-term university-sector research post to another.
By 1999 I was earning a very decent salary as a project evaluator in an FE college, and my employer was treating me very well in other respects. But by then I had two children and was weary – and wary – of the precarious nature of the sectors in which I worked. My longest contract had been three years and the shortest nine months. I was never out of work but I had no accrued employment rights, fragmented pension contributions and little of the continuity of focus that enables an employee to claim membership of a recognised profession.
I decided to embrace risk on my own terms and set up a freelance business using the skills I’d picked up over the years.
A couple of years after launching a freelance editorial and research business I had a full order book and was working with more than 10 regular clients, mainly in the public sector. Some organisations employed me as a freelance because of a genuine need for independent support and advice, but others used me because they could no longer afford to pay the wages, national insurance and pensions of the full-time ‘permanent’ staff who used to do the work. They wanted me on the cheap and I worked a 50-60 hour week to make the business model work.
Unsurprisingly, since the advent of the ConDem Coalition Government my rates of pay have been reduced and my earnings have fallen by around 80%. I have less financial security than ever before, in spite of the fact that I’m still working hours equating to a full-time job.
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These days, among other things, I’m picking up outsourced administrative work in a social services department. It’s fairly demanding work in terms of writing skills, discretion and dealing with upsetting information. People are committed to the work, but the fact that more than half of us – administrators, social workers and social work managers – are freelance and/or agency workers, has a destabilising impact. The council is looking for permanent staff to fill the posts we’re covering but some workers, particularly those in managerial roles, are financially better off outside the organisation. Or I should say better off in the short term?
This is a recipe for instability in service delivery as well as long-term insecurity in the workforce. I sometimes wonder if I’ve accidentally clambered into a Trojan horse in a concealed campaign for sneaky privatisation. At the very least my kind of working arrangements might help diminish public sector organisations to the status of mere commissioning ‘hubs’ for privately managed services. If so there will be the usual appalling standards of service delivery, corner-cutting, corporate greed, poor pay and worsening working conditions.
And don’t get me started on the role of voracious, shabby and self-serving employment agencies in all this outsourcing and faux freelancing.
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As Stephen Stills said, so many years ago: “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear…”
What is clear is that finding worthwhile and decently paid work is getting tougher – but I don’t mean to sound bitter and twisted. To pinch a phrase from Joe Walsh, life’s been good to me so far. People who know me will associate the phrase ‘Andy’s career’ with reckless and uncontrolled movement rather than a progression of professional achievements. I have my passions, obsessions and ambitions, but they aren’t things that tend to lead to financial reward. So, when I left the building society all those years ago I wasn’t expecting wealth, power or effortless security, but I did hope for greater degree of economic freedom than if I’d stuck to stamping savings account passbooks in my hometown. What went wrong?
There may be a clue in my battered old copy of The Floodgates of Anarchy (1970), in which Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer expose the ‘archetypical myth’ of the small business person as a smokescreen for capitalism’s relentless drive to cut wages:
“It conceals the reality that capitalism has reduced him (sic) to the status of an outworking contractor in those trades where there is insufficient incentive for employees.”
There is a prophetic element to Christie and Meltzer’s analysis: forty years after I first borrowed their book from Doncaster Central Library, their analysis applies to teachers, researchers, social workers, community and housing workers and people in a host of other ‘professional’ roles.
For many people this shift in status and security will be a massive problem. In The Corrosion of Character (1998) Richard Sennett says:
“The system radiates indifference … in the organization of the absence of trust, where there is no reason to be needed. And it does so through reengineering of institutions in which people are treated as disposable. Such practices obviously and brutally diminish the sense of mattering as a person, of being necessary to others.”
The stakes are massive, but the situation may not be hopeless. In The Employment Question (1986) Denis Pym sees the possibility of salvation in genuine freelance work driven by community rather than consumption. If there’s hope it lies in a network of ‘bricoleurs’ – people who own their own skills, products, time and space. This is a very different proposition to ersatz self-employment driven by the desire of employers to cut costs.
In How to be Free (2006) Tom Hodgkinson characterises employment in terms of William Blake’s “mind forg’d manacles.” For Hodgkinson freedom and autonomy can be achieved by minimising your needs: this, in turn, allows you to reduce the time you need to spend in formal employment and maximises the time available for creative work, community activities and leisure that need not be justified in terms of its positive impact on your CV. And there are other benefits to escaping the vassalage of formal employment:
“Gone are the commuting costs, gone are the endless giant coffees – slave no more to Starbucks! Free at last!”
If Pym’s community economy with its nexus of self-employed ‘bricoleurs’ and Hodgkinson’s notion of active joblessness sound a bit too utopian, consider the way we live and work now and the gradual erosion of the status of working people. Maybe, to steal an idea from Buckiminster Fuller, the corrosive impact of corporate employment is becoming so dangerous nothing less than utopian thinking can save us.
References:
Christie, Stuart and Meltzer, Albert, The Floodgates of Anarchy (London: Kahn and Averill, 1970).
Hodgkinson, Tom, How to be Free (London: Penguin, 2006).
Pym, Denis, The Employment Question and Other Essays (London: Freedom Press, 1986).
Sennett, Richard, The Corrosion of Character: the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998).
