Conversations with a Working Man.

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.

ringway

MB Enthusiast
SUPPORTER
Joined
Nov 29, 2008
Messages
7,832
Location
In a World of My Own.
Car
2017 Audi RS6 Avant Performance Edition. Range Rover Supercharged - Lovely!
I've watched this World in Action video quite a few times over the last few weeks.

I like Jack Walker, and even though he seems to contradict himself about the middle and upper classes, I should think he's an honest, hardworking family man, and has to endure some pretty arduous conditions to collect his wage of £20.

I've not seen any other interviews or articles by John Pilger, but I can't help thinking that, at times at least (let's hope I'm wrong) he may be taking the micky out of the plight of the Jack Walkers of this era.

Either way, it's a video worth watching. :)


[YOUTUBE]zS1gdn6vAWc#t=137[/YOUTUBE]
 
In 1971, when this was filmed, the average wage was £20 per week. In 1960 the average wage was the same. Serious inflation came soon after..

Observing at my salary over the last decade, looks like we are returning to these figures!

Mind, prices haven't been holding back to quite the same extent....
 
Pilger , an Australian by birth, has been ruffling the feathers of the establishment for a long time. John Pilger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There are still Jack Walkers of the world but nowadays they are in China India Vietnam and Indonesia working for multinationals.

I wouldn't be so sure. I know people who work ten hour days for £68 (before stoppages) and there is no overtime and no bonuses, no perks and no sick pay for very hard semi-skilled manual labour. Working practices and the way the staff are treated is positively feudal at times in its mentality. The sharks always have it good when times are hard and the workplace is teeming with them IMO. The other commonality is their willingness to play fast and loose with Employment Law and soon get rid of anyone who dares to stand up for what should be inalienable rights such as toilet breaks.
 
Last edited:
John Pilger (iirc) was writing good articles for The Sun before it became a tabloid and the trash it is today.
I remember as a teenager I had a cutting on my bedroom wall where he compared the masses of young people at the first Isle of Wight festival with the masses of young men gathering to go to fight in the previous wars.
I can still remember the last sentence,
'It is better this way'

That is how powerful a writer he was (is).
 
Until relatively recently I worked for one of the largest food manufacturers in the world, we employed people on zero hours contracts, they had to attend the plant and wait to see if any work became available. No work = no pay,and had to pay transport costs to/ from the plant into the bargain.

I remember seeing news reels of things like the above happening during the 1920's depression years, so much for progress and economic morality.
 
Until relatively recently I worked for one of the largest food manufacturers in the world, we employed people on zero hours contracts, they had to attend the plant and wait to see if any work became available. No work = no pay,and had to pay transport costs to/ from the plant into the bargain.

I remember seeing news reels of things like the above happening during the 1920's depression years, so much for progress and economic morality.

Reminds me of the recent Dispatches program on Channel 4 where an undercover reporter spent some time working in the Sports Direct warehouse.

Big and shiny, it's located in a former mining area in north Notts and no doubt received government grants to do so.

The company has "created" nearly 2000 jobs there which has to be good news. Except that all but 300 are minimum wage, zero-hours agency jobs where people were given warnings if they phoned in sick, didn't work fast enough or spent too long on toilet breaks but were given no security or any incentive to work harder:

TV review: The secrets of Mike Ashley's Sports Direct | Herald Scotland
 
In 1971, when this was filmed, the average wage was £20 per week. In 1960 the average wage was the same. Serious inflation came soon after..

Observing at my salary over the last decade, looks like we are returning to these figures!

Mind, prices haven't been holding back to quite the same extent....

One of the sad things about Jack's situation is that he couldn't save fast enough to get the deposit to buy his council house.
Lending was a different game in those days and I remember the tale of Mrs Ringway's parents buying a house in 1967/68 for £3.200. They really wanted a detached house on the same row, but couldn't afford the extra £300 to buy it.
 
One of the sad things about Jack's situation is that he couldn't save fast enough to get the deposit to buy his council house.
.

Was that an option open to him in 1971?
The major issue JW appears to have had was with job insecurity and a particular disillusionment with strikebreakers. Compared to the work others did his job did not look especially arduous (merely dull with little prospect of promotion) and his housing appeared secure. By the standards of job and housing insecurity endured today, his was a relatively stable existence.
 
Was that an option open to him in 1971?
The major issue JW appears to have had was with job insecurity and a particular disillusionment with strikebreakers. Compared to the work others did his job did not look especially arduous (merely dull with little prospect of promotion) and his housing appeared secure. By the standards of job and housing insecurity endured today, his was a relatively stable existence.

Yes, at 21-40 in the video, he mentions "This House".

I'd say the conditions were arduous. The steam, heat, chemicals and drawing the heavy machines along would have been hard work.


I agree about his fears over job security.
 
Indistinct. Firstly he talks of 'the' house which he then refers to as 'this' house which can be interpreted as this house being discussed.
My understanding was it was Thatcher's government that enabled council tenants to buy 'their' homes and her election victory was not until 1979.
Arduous to a degree. But at least he was on his feet stood upright. For graft and arduous conditions see what miners or Glasgow shipbuilders endured, admittedly in earlier decades.
Job insecurity came with industrialisation - JW's 'move away from the land'. But living from the land whether in organised farming or as hunter gatherer in centuries prior is not something many of us would have the stamina for I suspect. Job insecurity remains however and will probably never be addressed. Housing insecurity is joining it and again, there is a complete failure to address it. With so many households 'one pay-cheque away from homelessness' I wonder where we are heading.
 
Indistinct. Firstly he talks of 'the' house which he then refers to as 'this' house which can be interpreted as this house being discussed.
My understanding was it was Thatcher's government that enabled council tenants to buy 'their' homes and her election victory was not until 1979.
Arduous to a degree. But at least he was on his feet stood upright. For graft and arduous conditions see what miners or Glasgow shipbuilders endured, admittedly in earlier decades.
Job insecurity came with industrialisation - JW's 'move away from the land'. But living from the land whether in organised farming or as hunter gatherer in centuries prior is not something many of us would have the stamina for I suspect. Job insecurity remains however and will probably never be addressed. Housing insecurity is joining it and again, there is a complete failure to address it. With so many households 'one pay-cheque away from homelessness' I wonder where we are heading.


As far as the house purchase goes, it seems Walker's just wouldn't be able to peddle fast enough to get on the ladder, but a couple with similar jobs 15+ years later would easily get a mortgage with a modest deposit. Some will say he should tighten his belt, but it's only natural to want some form of social life and pleasures after putting in those day and night shifts.


Of course there are more arduous jobs than JW's and although I don't know much at all about the conditions endured by the Glasgow shipbuilders, I think it's safe to say that mining is no mans friend. It would be interesting to find out the wage (Risk/Reward) of a miner vs JW's wage in 1971.
 
I think the ladder was still the mortgage for a private property one and it would take the 15 or so years you mention to be scalable. Noticeably, although he never expected promotion, neither did he contemplate shifting employer or trade. For the former I guess a pretty stagnant picture of no one moving so no vacancy elsewhere and the latter just pure unthinkable - that generational thing.
Tighten his belt? Yes, but the peer social pressure to be with his mates trumped the 'jumped-up notion' of house ownership. The mindset of the time was very restrictive. (Billy Elliot was a movie that had to be made!) Today, I think a great many do without just to get by but it is not obvious to most as we tend to notice the spenders.

By the 1970s I think the miners were paid well but for significant risk. Decades prior they endured the risk, worked harder (without any mechanisation) and were paid very poorly.
 
As a result of the post war building booms ('homes for heroes') the rate of home ownership rose from only 20% in 1918 (only 20% of the adult population had the vote due to the property requirement, hence the vast majority of men who marched off to the 'Great War' had no vote...) to 50% by 1971.
My parents bought a new three bedroom semi in 1971 (for '2,300 Guineas') on his ordinary factory workers wage and most of the neighbours were manual workers or 'clerks'. Not that 'jumped up' by then.
Interestingly, the rate of home ownership peaked in 2001 at 69% and has since fallen back steadily to 64%...

With less than 2% unemployment from 1946 to the mid seventies there were actually plenty of jobs - my old man get laid off just once, and had a new start before the next Monday. When I first started work in the mid seventies I went to a Labour Exchange and the clerk gave me a list of jobs, asked me to pick one, then phoned them up and got me an interview the next day and I started work on Monday. All perfectly normal.

As to miners wages...well a quick read up on the 'three day week' would show their wages went from below average in 1971 to well above average by it's end in 1974.

That looks pretty light work by the standards of the day, absolutely nothing like mining back then. The miners didn't strike just for more money...

Should point out that we were building up to 350 000 new homes a year around this time many of them council houses and flats...
 
Last edited:
Until relatively recently I worked for one of the largest food manufacturers in the world, we employed people on zero hours contracts, they had to attend the plant and wait to see if any work became available. No work = no pay,and had to pay transport costs to/ from the plant into the bargain.

I remember seeing news reels of things like the above happening during the 1920's depression years, so much for progress and economic morality.

Spookily similar to what my granddad said of his young days before and after WW1, men queuing up outside the works, doffing there caps to the gaffers and waiting to be told who had been picked to work that day.
(and slipping the foreman the odd tanner when times were especially tough)

Plus ça change, eh.
 
And of course there was much less pressure to get out of council housing as most of it was in better condition and better maintained than equivalent private property, and few council estates were the zoos they have since become (promises mainly made out of fear of millions of blokes who had faced poison gas, machines guns and barbed wire and were unlikely to be cowed by a few coppers with truncheons) - mostly they were just places where ordinary people lived.

Obviously council housing was not available to buy until Thatcher spat on the memory of the dead and wounded of two wars by reneging on the promises of a 'land fit for heroes' in 1980 by beginning the process of selling off public assets for a quick buck and reversing all the tenant protection regulation which had been designed to improve the lives of ordinary people by protecting them against rack renting spiv landlords.

The fact that practically all the decent council housing has already been hived off is well illustrated by the latest plans to start selling off housing association properties as well.

The major factor making house buying difficult for ordinary people was the high deposit requirement, which seems to have undergone such a resurgence in the last few years
 
One of the positive sides of the sale of council houses is that many who bought such a property (who would otherwise be destined to keep on shelling out rental payments) were on the ladder and had some equity for their retirement years. Some that bought were then able to climb the ladder which gave them equity equal to a very good pension pay off.
Also, some could use their house as collateral against a business venture. I know a man who started with nothing and after buying at the very low end of the market now employs around 200 people and is reputedly worth around £20 million. A fantastic achievement and (apart from the very smart suits he now wears) is the same guy now as he was in the leaner years of his life.

It's a long time ago now, but I dearly wish my that Grandfather (to whom I owe so much) had bought his council house which would have enabled him to have a better lifestyle in his later years.
IIRC, he had paid rent on the property for over 40 years, but we couldn't persuade him to buy it, even though the purchase price was so low in relation to the value of the house. This was in the late 80's and perhaps nowadays (as owning is more commonplace than then) he would have made the right move.
 
Last edited:
I spent many years of the Eighties persuading my Mum to buy her council house, and initially, she was very pleased with the situation.

Unfortunately, the mortgage payments, maintenance charges (which she had no control over) building insurance etc etc kept going up to the point where they were higher than if she had stayed a council tenant and accepted the legitimate payments and relief she would have been entitled to.

She didn't make me suffer too much for my crap advice, and of course the flat would always be hers till she died.

Some of the money I inherited meant I could buy the ML. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere...
 
Obviously council housing was not available to buy until Thatcher spat on the memory of the dead and wounded of two wars by reneging on the promises of a 'land fit for heroes' in 1980 by beginning the process of selling off public assets for a quick buck and reversing all the tenant protection regulation which had been designed to improve the lives of ordinary people by protecting them against rack renting spiv landlords.

It ran deeper than that though. For those who bought they then had a mortgage to service and missed payments ensured homelessness with much greater rapidity than missing rental payments to the council ever would. Thus the working man thought twice before answering back to his boss. This situation was by no means accidental.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top Bottom