Builders: Class, Gender and Ethnicity in the Construction Industry [1 ed.] 2011046532, 9780415688642, 9780203119082

Citation preview

Builders

Building workers constitute between 5 and 10 per cent of the total labour market in almost every country of the world. They construct, repair and maintain the vital physical infrastructure of our societies, and we rely upon and trust their achievements every day. Yet we know surprisingly little about builders, their cultures, the organization of their work or the business relations that constitute their industry. This book, based on one-year’s participant observation on a London construction site, redresses this gap in our knowledge by taking a closeup look at a section of building workers and businessmen. By examining the organizational features of the building project and describing the skill, sweat, malingering, humour and humanity of the building workers, Thiel illustrates how the builders were mostly autonomous from formal managerial control, regulating their own outputs and labour markets. This meant that the men’s ethnic, class- and gender-bound cultural activities fundamentally underpinned the organization of their work and the broader construction economy, and thereby highlights the continuing centrality of class-bound culture and social stratification in a post-industrial, late-modern world. Thiel outlines the ongoing connections and intersections between economy, state, class and culture, ultimately showing how these factors interrelate to produce the building industry, its builders and its buildings. Based predominantly on cultural and economic sociology, this book will also be of interest to those working in the fields of gender and organizational studies; social class and inequality; migration and ethnicity; urban studies; and social identities. Darren Thiel is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex. Before taking up this position, he worked in a number of different occupations including the agricultural, construction, service and military sectors. After completing his PhD in 2006 he also worked as a researcher at the Home Office and the Police Foundation, and taught sociology at the University of East Anglia, UK.

Routledge Advances in Ethnography

Edited by Dick Hobbs University of Essex and Geoffrey Pearson Goldsmiths College, University of London

Ethnography is a celebrated, if contested, research methodology that offers unprecedented access to people’s intimate lives, their often hidden social worlds and the meanings they attach to these. The intensity of ethnographic fieldwork often makes considerable personal and emotional demands on the researcher, while the final product is a vivid human document with personal resonance impossible to recreate by the application of any other social science methodology. This series aims to highlight the best, most innovative ethnographic work available from both new and established scholars. 1

Holding Your Square Masculinities, streetlife and violence Christopher W. Mullins

2 Narratives of Neglect Commonity, regeneration and the governance of security Jacqui Karn 3 Families Shamed The consequences of crime for relatives of serious offenders Rachel Condry 4 Northern Soul Music, drugs and subcultural identity Andrew Wilson

5 Flashback Drugs and dealing in the golden age of the London rave scene Jennifer R.Ward 6 Dirty Dancing? An ethnography of lap-dancing Rachela Colosi 7 Crack cocaine users High society and low life in south London Daniel Briggs 8 Builders Class, gender and ethnicity in the construction industry Darren Thiel

Builders

Class, gender and ethnicity in the construction industry

Darren Thiel

First published 2012 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2012 Darren Thiel The right of Darren Thiel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Thiel, Darren. Builders : class, gender and ethnicity in the construction industry / Darren Thiel.   p. cm. -- (Routledge advances in ethnography)   Includes bibliographical references.   1. Construction workers--England--London. 2. Construction industry-  England--London. I. Title.   HD8039.B92G767 2012      331.7’69009421--dc23  2011046532 ISBN 13: 978-0-415-68864-2 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-11908-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman and Gill Sans by Bookcraft Limited, Stroud, Gloucestershire

‘I’m digging the hole because of my workmen’ ‘Your army? I thought you were the general!’ ‘Sometimes the army does the leading’     William Golding, The Spire, 1964: 39

Contents

Figures viii Preface ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction

1

1 Contracting and subcontracting: the build, its builders and their ethnic communities

7

2 Managing ‘in the office’

28

3 Working ‘on the tools’

40

4 Time, recreation and workplace culture

64

5 Becoming a builder and being working class

84

6 Building masculinity: bodies, law and violence

106

7 Economy, informality and social stratification

131

8 Conclusion: cultures, capitalisms and class reproduction

155



160

Appendix A  Specifications and costs of the building project

Notes 162 References 167 Index 180

Figures

0.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Main participant groups involved in the fieldwork 4 Representation of the front view of Keyworker House 1 8 Representation of the parties involved in the build 9 Managing: the main characters 11 Map of London illustrating the geographic distribution of trade neighbourhoods 19 6.1 Health and safety notice in the painters’ storeroom at Keyworker House 1 109 7.1 Photo taken from the labourers’ tearoom on a very cold day noting some objects ripe for pilferage 139

Preface

Building workers constitute between 5 and 10 per cent of the total labour market in almost every country of the world. They construct, repair and maintain the vital physical infrastructure of our societies, and we rely upon and trust their achievements every day. Yet we know surprisingly little about builders, their cultures, the organization of their work or the business relations that constitute their industry. This book, based on one-year’s participant observation on a London construction site in 2003/4, redresses this gap in our knowledge by taking a close-up look at a section of building workers and businessmen. The book describes the organizational features of the building project, illustrating the skill, sweat, malingering, humour and humanity of the building workers, and showing how the project was organized, managed and built. In doing so, I illuminate the builders’ ethnic, class- and gender-bound cultural activities which underpinned the organization of their work and the broader construction economy. I show how the builders were highly skilled and were mostly autonomous from managerial control, regulating their own outputs and labour markets. The obverse of their autonomy, however, was that they were subject to a highly deregulated employment market whereby they were a hyper-flexible, subcontracted workforce with very few employment rights and no unionization. The building world I observed was not governed primarily by managerial, union or state regulation but, rather, it was underpinned by the informal cultural activities and norms of the builders. Cultural relations were consequently vital to understanding how this section of the construction industry operated. Gifts, favours, loyalties, identities, recreation and violence were part of the glue of the building marketplace and a fundamental basis of the organization of its work and labour. Long-standing traditions, framed by the builders’ class-bound working bodies and community networks, had both replaced and blocked formal regulation of their work and economy. These practices, while being pragmatic in terms of the builders’ immediate lives, had, however, contributed to determining patterns of advantage and disadvantage, locking the builders into particular lives and lifestyles, and thereby reproducing an aspect of the broader stratification system.

x Preface This book explores the interrelationships between class, ethnicity and gender in the builders’ lives, examining the continuing persistence of class-bound culture and social stratification in a post-industrial, late-modern world, highlighting the ongoing connections and intersections between economy, state, class and culture, and ultimately showing how these factors interrelate to produce the building industry, its builders and its buildings.

Acknowledgements

The PhD thesis on which this book is based was generously funded by a studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council (R42200134486) that enabled the work to be done. Parts of the book have been previously published in two journal articles (Thiel, 2007, 2010) and I extend my gratitude to the publishers for allowing me to reproduce aspects of those papers. I have many individuals to thank for their help and input into the project – far too many to name. Some had a more direct influence than others, and many of them unwittingly. In this respect, I thank all my family for lots of things, and a big shout out to the East Ham posse who taught me more about migration and ethnicity than a million books, in particular, the late Gilly Mundy – our sadly missed comrade. Thanks and utmost respect also to my PhD supervisors, Paul Rock and Janet Foster, whose encouragement, guidance and insight throughout and beyond the project have been invaluable. Their patience and enthusiasm prevented me wandering off the tracks on many dark occasions. I am also grateful to Miriam Glucksmann for providing helpful comments on a late draft, and to Dick Hobbs and Richard Sennett for their help and comments at various stages of the project. Finally, of course, my deepest appreciation goes out to all the lads at ‘Topbuild’ for their humour, co-operation and cordiality – most of the time – and for generally accepting my hanging around and asking inane questions all day long. Without them there could be no book. Unfortunately, I cannot blame any of the subsequent shortcomings on any of the above. They are entirely my fault.

Introduction

When I first conceived the research project upon which this book is based, the building industry was not unfamiliar to me. Many of my family worked as builders, as I had done sporadically throughout my youth. I had also worked more or less permanently as a painter and decorator in London for seven years leading up to 2002 when, armed with a research proposal, I enrolled on a doctoral programme to write a thesis about building workers. Like most others who had worked ‘in the building’ in London, I had laboured on numerous building sites, large and small, for many different building contractors and subcontractors, and I had been employed all over London under a variety of forms of employment relationship. Despite this, I, like most others, had initially taken builders and their industry for granted. Although builders construct, repair and maintain the physical infrastructure of our societies, work in the most private spaces of our homes and workplaces, and while we rely on and trust their achievements in almost every moment of social life, the academic world has tended to notice only buildings, their designs and design technologies but not the labour of the builders themselves (Pink et al., 2010). It is, of course, the builders’ skill and sweat that makes the building, and builders have been doing this almost since the very beginnings of the division of labour. Contemporarily, they continue to constitute between 5 and 10 per cent of the total labour market across the world (Bosch and Phillips, 2003), and, for the foreseeable future, builders will remain with us in much the same way as they are today and were yesterday. If we are to effectively comprehend contemporary work, economy and social life, builders’ lives, labour and industry require some exposition. The relative neglect of building workers within the study of work, workers and economy may have been to the detriment of that study. In relation to the numbers of studies of, for instance, service workers or factory operatives, building workers have received little attention. There are a small number of older studies of British building workers (Coleman, 1965; Foster, 1969; Higgin and Jessop, 1965; Sykes, 1969a, 1969b), and there has been some recent interest in aspects of UK construction worker culture (see Mars, 2005; Pink et al., 2010; Rooke and Clarke, 2005; Rooke et al., 2004). More information has come from the small

2 Introduction but regular flow of books about building workers in the USA (Applebaum, 1981; Cherry, 1974; Eisenberg, 1998; Paap, 2006; Reimer, 1979; Silver, 1986), yet, these North American studies examine unionized construction work – predominantly on large new construction projects, which accounts for only a small proportion of building work. In 1970, unionized construction made up 39 per cent of US building work but, by 1999, this had shrunk to 19 per cent (Lipset and Katchanovski, 2001). In the UK, despite worker unions having their genesis in the late nineteenth century building trades (Postgate, 1923), unionization has never had much hold (Austrin, 1980). In 2010, it was estimated that members of unions constituted just 14.5 per cent of British builders (Achur, 2011). The few books published about building work and workers have largely described US building workers and, within that, the minority unionized sector. However, the basis for this book is a section of the majority, non-unionized construction industry in the UK. In this type of building market worker relationships with the political economy are quite distinct from the more formalized union sector.

Ethnography Despite my previous experience of construction work, it was with some trepidation that I began to try to gain research access to a London building site. I did not want to be an overt researcher with a building company that I had worked for previously, so I wrote letters to a number of major UK construction companies asking for research access – but I never received a reply. As a consequence, I networked through an architect employed at the university where I was enrolled, who, on my behalf, spoke to some UK building contractors. Eventually, I was contacted by a director of a large building contracting company, who put me in touch with another representative of another building contractor, which I have called ‘Topbuild’. After a short telephone conversation, I arranged to meet Topbuild’s representative at a building site office where he quite reluctantly granted me access to some of the projects under his jurisdiction – if I promised to not ‘hold up production’. Initially he wanted me to tour a number of separate sites, but I stubbornly remained for 51 weeks at one interrelated collection of building jobs situated in central London. It is my overt participant observation conducted over 51 weeks at Topbuild’s repair, renovation and refurbishment project at ‘Keyworker House’ that this book describes. A detailed analysis of my fieldwork and the epistemological issues generated by it can be found in another publication (Thiel, forthcoming). Here, I offer only a brief description of the various phases of my fieldwork. I began by working on the site at Keyworker House full-time as a labourer for three months. This was done to allow me to merge into the daily life of the site, see what was going on, contribute to production and hopefully gain some trust and respect from my fellow workers. Indeed, through my work, I quickly blended into the world of the



Introduction 3

labourers, who, in keeping with London’s labour migration and building industry traditions, were mostly Irish. I felt accepted by them broadly and, despite my saying otherwise, was labelled a student who was working on the site for some extra cash. Working as a labourer did, however, obscure my view of the overall building project and it blocked my contact with many of the other work groups on the site. As a result, I moved to observing the building site office for ten weeks, followed by a period of approximately 15 weeks where I hung around at the site in no particular role, helping out with production, talking to the various workers and developing my relationships with them. It was during these 15 weeks that I conducted most of the 31 interviews that I recorded. Foremen, managers, consultants and quantity surveyors were interviewed during work time at various locations on site, and the building tradesmen and labourers were interviewed after work in local public houses. Most of the builders did not consent to being interviewed, and my asking for interviews often generated significant suspicion among some of them. I also repeatedly badgered the Irish-born labourers to agree to be interviewed but, for the few that did accede, all of those interviews were rather awkward and stunted. Conversely, however, most of the British Indian carpenters whom I had got to know but never worked with agreed to interviews and were generally very lucid. I also filled 27 notepads and countless sheets of paper with observations, ideas and conversations that I had overheard or had with the builders; and I also spent a number of evenings and two weekends engaged in inebriated leisure with some of them. I ended the fieldwork by spending seven weeks working alongside the painters in my previous trade, followed by a few more weeks in which I gradually exited the field; my visits becoming progressively less frequent. The transient nature of many of the building trade groups on the site meant that I focused predominately on the seven distinct groups who were more or less permanently involved throughout the duration of my fieldwork: the building consultants, site managers and quantity surveyors; and a larger number of the subcontracted workers: labourers, carpenters, painters, and mechanical and electrical workers – plumbers and electricians. My initial approach to the fieldwork was simply to observe and record the everyday life of the building site and the words of the builders in order to freeze a slice of social history into the text of a doctoral thesis. I had also intended, through the ethnographic tradition of inductive methodology, to try to identify forms and patterns in my data that might provide clues about social organization (see Glaser and Strauss, 1967). I had held a vague notion that I would investigate gender and informal economic activity but, otherwise, I would simply work on and hang around a building site and wait to see ‘what came up’. Indeed, many more issues, forms and patterns arose than I had considered beforehand and, while my initial notions to study gender and informal economic activity do fill a considerable number of pages in this book, the details of my case study forced me to broaden the focus.

4 Introduction Building Consultants: Mr Jaggers & Herbert

MAIN CONTRACTOR – Topbuild: Quantity surveyors: Kevin and Bobby Project manager: Steve Site managers: John, James and Paul General foreman 2: Pete

T’s Labour (Mickey T)

Trade-specific subcontractors

McMurray’s Labour (Paddy McMurray)

Danny foreman Aidan, Michael, Pat and Patrick, Seamus and maintenance men: Mike Fixit and Will

Turner’s Carpentry (The Turners)

Jamin (general foreman 1) Bapu, Naz, Mehl and Vin

Spark’s M&E (Spark family)

Norman M&E consultant, Bill foreman, Tick, Bob and Jimmy J

Coat’s Decoration (Ernie Coat)

Screed’s Plaster (Luke Screed)

Jimmy foreman, Bristols, Frank, Stew and Wayne, Freddie, Gerry, Bony, Fast Tom and Perry

Figure 0.1  Main participant groups involved in the fieldwork.

Sociology Throughout my research and analysis, what became striking was how the cultural practices and normative worlds of the building site and builders showed considerable, indeed surprising, continuity with descriptions of manual workers’ culture of the past. This was partly a result of the archaic nature of building work – a number of the building processes and hand tasks required had existed largely unchanged for millennia (Kidder, 1985; Satoh, 1995; Woodwood, 1995). Yet such continuity was also an outcome of the perpetuation of traditional classbound working practices, norms and habits that the builders utilized to manage the effects of political and economic forces and changes on their lives. Unlike the industrial factory operatives or post-industrial service workers who have been so regularly studied, the builders had largely retained their craft skills, were highly autonomous of managerial control and largely immune to formal management regimes. The concomitant of that autonomy, however, was that the builders were subject to a highly deregulated and despotic employment market whereby they were part of a hyper-flexible, subcontracted workforce with



Introduction 5

very few employment rights, and none of them held any union protection. The building world at Topbuild was primarily governed by neither managerial nor state regulation, but rather was framed by the pragmatic cultural practices that the builders themselves employed informally to manage their work, economy and labour market. These practices, based on reciprocity, community, loyalty and corporeal ability, were bound to the builders’ gendered and class-bound lives and social backgrounds, and they operated to both fill and manage the void of formal regulation of their work and economy. As Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1990) suggests, different socio-economic groups live in particular relationships to hierarchical social, political and economic systems, which determine the groups’ tastes, habits and practices. These relationships to broader society offer social groups varying levels of security, reward and status, and thus frame the development of specific cultural responses to best manage that security, reward and status. The builders practised an embodied form of class-bound masculinity tied to their physical skills and abilities, which, in combination with their community networks, constituted the major sources of power and ‘capital’ that they could utilize to negotiate and manage their lives (see Bourdieu, 1986; Wacquant, 1995; Wolkowitz, 2006). As a consequence, I highlight the process and structure of community networks and the embodied cultures of the builders, illustrating the centrality of these features to building work organization, labour markets and class reproduction. The hierarchical social world that Bourdieu describes is frequently perceived, understood and felt as a class system, particularly in the UK (Cannadine, 1999; Skeggs, 2004). Class is something that the builders lived, did and were subject to, and it intersected their gender and ethnic identities, physical dispositions, and the organization of their work and industry. As they were lived-out, these classbound practices engendered broader social relations and structures (cf. Giddens, 1984), including significant aspects of those relations that constitute what we call economy. While the broader building economy did, of course, frame the ways in which the builders lived, their activities also contributed to determining how the economy operated. The economy was then something enacted by the builders and, rather than being primarily underpinned by formal regulation or abstract laws of supply and demand, it was anchored by informal cultural agreements and activities (cf. Granovetter, 1985) which served to manage the worst effects of market despotism and caprice. Yet these practices placed the builders in attenuated and often antagonistic relationships with formal authority and the political economy; and this antagonism further augmented their informal practices, solidifying patterns of advantage and disadvantage. This book grapples with some traditional sociological questions following the now classic ethnographic works of, for example, Paul Willis (1977) and Michael Burawoy (1979), which explored how informal cultural relations, in interaction with the broader political economy, reproduce existing social strata and class divisions. These classic works, however, tie class-based culture largely into a relationship with industrial economic organization, neglecting the much older

6 Introduction pre-industrial history of worker culture, and underplaying the salient relationships between class-bound culture and the modern state system. In the light of more recent works that focus on the intersections of class, gender and ethnicity, growing largely from academic feminism (see, for example, Glucksmann, 1982; McDowell et al., 2007), I also examine the roles played by migration, ethnicity and gender – something left largely unexplored or implicit in classic studies. Through a detailed and close-up description of the work and lives of a group of London builders, this book demonstrates how class-bound cultural continuity persisted in a post-industrial, late-modern world. It examines how the builders, as a section of the working class, stayed working class, how some groups of migrants joined them there, the outcomes of this, and its implications for our understanding of building work and economy.

Terminology Throughout the book, all company and personal names have been changed, but not the dates, places and the specificities of the build. I describe the world of the building site chiefly through the vocabulary that the builders themselves used to order, construct and make sense of it. In this respect, the term ‘builders’ is an overarching one used to describe all the people involved in the collective production of building. This term is bifurcated into those working in ‘the office’: site management and quantity surveyors; and those working ‘on the tools’: labourers, tradesmen and trade foremen. These groups are further divided into particular trades and positions, and further still into named individuals. I have tried to reproduce some of the flavour of the builders’ terms and colloquialisms and, to this end, I sometimes employ parochial argot and have given nicknames to some of the men. I have also tried accurately to reproduce the talk of the builders and, as a consequence, readers should be prepared for the frequent use of profane language.

Structure of the book The first four chapters describe and analyse the organizational features, work groups and workplace culture of the construction site, while Chapters 5 and 6 focus more specifically on the development and constitution of the class and gender-bound cultures of the builders. Chapter 7 conjoins these observations into an analysis of the social reproduction of class, gender and ethnic advantage and disadvantage, which is followed by a short conclusion about the interrelationships between work, political economy and social stratification.

Chapter 1

Contracting and subcontracting The build, its builders and their ethnic communities

In this chapter I describe the details of the ‘Keyworker House’ building project, outlining its organizational and administrative structure with reference to the project’s building contractor, ‘Topbuild’, and the various trade-based subcontractors and their employees that Topbuild engaged to undertake the work. I describe the emergence and contemporary situation of building contracting and subcontracting in the UK and the legal and financial situations of subcontracted builders. I also introduce the main groups and individuals involved in my fieldwork, emphasizing the ethnic composition and division of the various trade and labour groups. In doing this, I demonstrate the building subcontractors’ central role as recruiters and organizers of building work and workers, and describe how they recruited workers predominately though informal social networks bound into their local ethnic communities. These processes facilitated the stark ethnic trade-clustering present at the site, which provided a key starting point for understanding the builders’ cultures, activities and work patterns.

Keyworker House and its delapidation The build that I was a participant observer on included three separate, but organizationally interrelated, repair and refurbishment projects of three buildings that I call Keyworker House I, II and III. Fully functional these accommodated 776 National Health Service (NHS) workers, mostly nurses, and a small number of government services and their staff. Keyworker House I also contained a crèche, counselling services, a library, and leisure facilities – a gym, swimming pool, squash courts, bar and night-club. Each key worker resided in Keyworker House in a room or, less commonly, a flat, and they shared a number of kitchens, communal areas, and bath and shower rooms. During the refurbishment, many key workers and staff remained in and continued using the buildings. Additionally, Keyworker House II also accommodated hospital catering facilities and a hospital treatment unit, most of which remained in use throughout the build. Each of the Keyworker House building projects was organized and undertaken by the same group of building consultants, site managers, quantity surveyors,

8  Contracting and subcontracting subcontractors, and building tradesmen and labourers. Although the three buildings were situated in separate geographical spaces and were of varied sizes and internal layouts, the refurbishment processes generally followed the same pattern for each edifice because they were of similar ages and structures and had experienced similar ‘lives’ and environmental circumstances. Keyworker House I was approximately 100 years old. Years of inadequate maintenance, intensive use, the onslaught of weather and gravity, and the growth of flora and fauna had pushed the building into a state of dilapidation. Water leaked through its rotten, detritus-coated and corroded roofs and seeped into the top floor rooms, saturating the internal plaster and pulling it from the walls and ceilings. Roof gutters and external piping had become loose, blocked and rusted, exacerbating the water damage. Where water had seeped into the brickwork, it had rusted the internal steel skeleton of the building, causing it to expand and force large cracks down the external masonry. The wood in the exterior windows had also expanded and crumbled, making the windows difficult to open and shut, and permitting rain, wind and dirt to enter the building through its sides as well as its roofs. The archaic heating and plumbing system was impaired and unreliable, and there were frequent floods; sinks and toilets often blocked, and the flow of hot and cold water to taps, toilets and radiators was irregular. Carpets, vinyl flooring, interior walls and internal woodwork were damaged and worn by use and leaks, making the rooms and communal areas look drab, outdated and unappealing. In addition, fire doors, alarms and water purification systems had become outmoded in terms of new health and safety regulation and required updating. Under a government-led private finance initiative (PFI), charitable housing associations were invited to tender for a 30-year contract to repair, maintain

Figure 1.1  Representation of the front view of Keyworker House 1.



Contracting and subcontracting  9

and administer Keyworker House.1 In 2001, a housing association, ‘Opportune Housing’, won the contract from the NHS, and they contracted Topbuild to organize the repair, modernization and refurbishment of the building. Opportune Housing would re-generate their initial capital outlay by running and renting the rooms and services for the following 30 years. In the meantime, they employed a building consultancy firm, ‘Assured Consultants’, to oversee the work of Topbuild and their subcontractors on a daily basis. The actual specifications and costs of the works undertaken by Topbuild on Keyworker House I are outlined in Appendix A, although, as I demonstrate in the following chapter, the original costs and specifications were initial guides to the price and planning of the work rather than absolute stipulations – largely because they were subject to emerging knowledge, extra works, and ongoing negotiation as the build progressed. For example, the original works to Keyworker House I were estimated at £3.75 million, but eventually totalled £4.6 million. Some works stipulated in the initial specifications were never undertaken, but many additional works, or ‘extras’, were added throughout the build (see Chapter 2), forcing the final cost upwards.

General contracting and building site management General building contractors were an invention of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Evidence from 1807, for example, reveals the British state’s concerns about inefficiencies in building processes which led to enactment of legislation to place each building project under the jurisdiction of a single

NHS TRUST TENNANT KEY WORKERS

ASSURED CONSULTANTS

HOUSING ADMINISTRATORS

TOPBUILD

SUBCONTRACTORS

TRADESMEN AND LABOURERS

Figure 1.2  Representation of the parties involved in the build.

SUPPLIERS

STATE REGULATION

OPPORTUNE HOUSING ASSOCIATION

10  Contracting and subcontracting responsible building contractor (Cooney, 1955). Prior to this, large building works were overseen and organized by government and church clerks in consultation with master masons and carpenters who simultaneously designed, organized and undertook building work (see Higgin and Jessop, 1965; Knoop and Jones, 1967 [1933]; Woodwood, 1995; and Chapter 4). As I describe in more detail in Chapter 4, the rise of the building professions of architect and surveyor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had initiated a process whereby building knowledge, and power, was gradually wrested out of the hands of medieval building trade guildsmen, opening the way for the development of large scale general contractors, and aligning building work organization with the dictates of mature capitalism. Consequently, by the 1850s, with building professionals and entrepreneurs firmly established (see Clarke, 1992), massive building contractors employing huge numbers of building tradesmen had become common place, such as William Cubitt in ‘Cubitt town’ on the Isle of Dogs in East London (see Satoh, 1995). Large-scale contemporary general contracting companies like Topbuild organize building projects through localized, ‘parcelled-out’, site management teams that work on-site at the location of the build (see Bresnen, 1990). Localized site management is necessary because construction projects cannot be adequately managed from a distance as a result of the non-standard and ‘one-off’ structure of most buildings. As buildings serve to form a protective layer between humans and their external natural environments, nature’s forces work upon buildings in unpredictable ways. Large built structures interact with the dynamics of gravity, weather and geology, and this commonly throws prospective building plans into some disarray. For repair and refurbishment projects – which constituted between 40 and 45 per cent of all UK building work between 1997 and 20072 – nature’s forces produce multiple ‘unforeseens’, making the details of ‘old work’, like that at Keyworker House, almost impossible to effectively plan in advance or manage at a distance. Building work is also characterized by interdependent ‘sequentialism’ whereby building tasks succeed one another in an interconnected sequence. For example, bricklayers must build walls before carpenters can build the roof frame, before roofers can affix tiles on top. Each trade builds on the previous one so that, for instance, carpenters are not required while the bricklayers erect walls, and roofers are not required until carpenters have built the roof frame. This increases organizational complexity and further impedes prospective work organization by producing unpredictable knock-on effects between the interdependent trades. If, for example, the digging-out of foundations is held up by inclement weather for two weeks, steel erectors will not be able to do their job at the time originally specified. They may then go onto another job and not return to erect the steel for many weeks, holding up the concrete pour, which may result in knock-on effects to all the following trades almost ad infinitum. In case studies of large engineering projects, for instance, tiny problems unnoticed in the early phases of a build were found to accumulate to produce amplified knock-on effects that



Contracting and subcontracting  11

created bigger problems further down the line (Graves et al., 2000; see also Rock, 1996). Building site management thus need to be localized and flexible in order to negotiate and adapt their organizational plans to the continual ‘unforeseens’, knock-on effects and alterations in building process that always arise during the course of construction. At the Keyworker House build, one site manager was situated at each of the three Keyworker Houses, assisted by the two general foremen, Jamin and Pete. The on-site project manager, Steve, oversaw the site mangers and general foremen, working in conjunction with Kevin, Topbuild’s on-site quantity surveyor, and a trainee quantity surveyor, Bobby, all of whom were based predominantly at Keyworker House I. The two building consultants, Mr Jaggers and Herbert, were also on site at Keyworker House I, occupying an office across the corridor from the Topbuild site office. The consultants acted in the interest of the client and oversaw the work of Topbuild and their subcontractors. I describe the roles and relationships between the consultants and the site managers and surveyors in the next chapter. Topbuild was, in common with the vast majority of UK building contractors, a ‘hollowed out’ contracting company (Harvey, 2003). Rather than directly employing building tradesmen or owning any means of production, Topbuild and its site officers brokered knowledge, orchestrated the build process, and negotiated with the client, their representatives and the users of the building. Topbuild directly employed their site managers and quantity surveyors, but all tradesmen, labourers and machinery were contracted-in from trade-specific subcontractors.

TOPBUILD

KEVIN QUANTITY SURVEYOR

BOBBY TRAINEE QS

STEVE PROJECT MANAGER

JOHN JUNIOR SITE MANAGER

JAMES SITE MANAGER 1

JAMIN GENERAL FOREMAN 1

HERBERT JUNIOR CONSULTANT PAUL SITE MANAGER 2

PETE GENERAL FOREMAN 2

Figure 1.3  Managing: the main characters.

MR JAGGERS CONSULTANT

12  Contracting and subcontracting

Subcontracting and self-employment The more complex a building project is, the more likely that building contractors rely on subcontracting (Eccles 1981a). As a result of the complex, non-standardized and sequential character of building, and the capricious nature of the building marketplace, building contractors employ the flexibility that subcontracting can provide (cf. Silver, 1986). Building work also tends to be hit early and hard by fluctuations in economic markets because ‘Construction slows in a recession and stops in a depression’ (Cherry 1974: 77) and ‘In most cases, when the economy gets a cold, construction gets the flu’ (Bosch and Philips, 2003: 5). When demand is low, buildings are not produced, and contractors and builders find themselves with no work. If a contractor is unable to procure new projects, subcontracting enables them to instantly ‘down-size’ because they possess little machinery, industrial space or directly employed workers. Alternatively, if building contractors wish to ‘up-size’, subcontracting provides large numbers of skilled labourers at short notice. Furthermore, due to the sequential nature of building, contractors require some skills and equipment only sporadically and they consequently employ subcontractors to supply these solely at the times they are required on the build. At Keyworker House there were 29 different subcontractors employed on various parts of the build. Topbuild employed specialist subcontractors for every conceivable aspect of the project: drilling, brick cleaning, pest prevention, roofing, tree cutting, vinyl-floor and carpet laying, mastic application, fire alarm installation, water purification, drainage and lift maintenance. They also subcontracted the more traditional specializations: tiling, plumbing, electrics, carpentry, joinery, masonry, ground-work, labouring, painting, plastering, scaffolding, ironmongery, welding and glazing. A different subcontractor represented each separate specialization and, in some cases, there were long chains of subcontractors linking the tradesman and the organizing contractor. For example, one of the workers employed to sandblast the external face of Keyworker House (‘the Blaster bloke’) told me how he was subcontracted by his boss/workmate, who in turn subcontracted to a steam-cleaning company, that subcontracted to the main masonry subcontractor, that subcontracted to Topbuild, that was contracted to Opportune Housing. Only two men did the brick cleaning, but five layers of middlemen organized their employment. Subcontracting is, then, a type of organizational system suitable for the manufacture of variable and uncertain products in a variable and uncertain market, but it is not the only appropriate system. In the past, the building guilds and the countless other artisan groups throughout the medieval period, produced ‘oneoff’ complex products for hundreds of years. More recently, those that built and maintained much of the physical infrastructure of the British post-war welfare state were permanently and directly employed by local councils, and, up until the late 1960s, directly employed builders were seen to produce higher quality and more cost-effective products than general contractors (Direct Labour Collective,



Contracting and subcontracting  13

1978; Langford, 1982). The rates of building subcontracting also vary between countries. The use of building subcontracting in the UK is, for example, two or three times higher than in mainland Europe and the USA (Harvey and Behling, 2008; see also Bosch and Phillips, 2003). Subcontracting is not, therefore, simply a result of the specificities of building product markets, but is tied up with national political economies. The dominance of building subcontracting in the UK intensified with the rise of the market-led employment policy that pervaded the building industry from the late 1960s. This deregulated labour protection and substantially impeded the capacities of building unions (Austrin, 1980; Harvey and Behling, 2008). By the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberal policies further deregulated building employment through a concerted attempt to outlaw unionization, partly as a result of the marketization of state services that reached its apogee under the Private Finance Initiative (see Evans and Lewis, 1989). Although difficult to calculate, from 1997 to 2007, approximately one third of all the building work in England and Wales was linked the public sector (calculated from Office for National Statistics, 2008). Consequently, the marketization of state services had a massive impact on building workers by signalling the near end of their unionized direct employment in local councils, replacing it with the competitive tendering and subcontracting practices of private sector building. Technically, subcontracted builders are self-employed, owning their own businesses and employing themselves. This means that contractors and subcontractors have very little formal responsibility towards their workforce. Subcontracted builders are almost completely ‘casualized’ – paid by the hour, day or by the job – tend to receive no sick or holiday pay3 and have no rights to company pensions, sickness insurance or liability schemes. Mark Harvey (2001) calls this ‘false selfemployment’ because, in reality, self-employed builders are the employees of their subcontractors and are the only self-employed group in the UK to have tax deducted by their employers. False self-employment is, furthermore, illegal under European Community law (Harvey and Behling, 2008). In 1995, 70 per cent of all manual building workers in the UK were officially registered as subcontracted (Harvey, 2003) – statistics that are, if anything, an underestimate (see Moralee, 1998). At Keyworker House, all the tradesmen and labourers were either illegally employed or technically self-employed and none of them were unionized.4 The result of subcontract casualization, in combination with wide fluctuations in the building economy, was that the tradesmen and labourers working ‘on the tools’ experienced particularly unstable work lives – and this was the case even for the higher paid and high status trades. The carpentry and general foreman at Keyworker House, Jamin, for instance, vividly expressed this when comparing his situation to the directly employed site managers and surveyors: Apart from in that office you look at everyone else, yeah … all the labourers, my chippies [carpenters], what security have they got? What security have

14  Contracting and subcontracting they fuckin’ got? When you were working here as a labourer, what security did you have? They could have told you at three o’clock: ‘You’re down the road mate’ [laid-off] … What if you broke your foot and you was at home for three weeks, whose gonna pay you? Nobody’s gonna pay, no fucker’s gonna pay. They don’t give you any notice [of leave], there’s no security, no pension, no holiday, no fuck-all. Why is that? Why when everybody else gets it ...? I suppose this is with other industries as well, but the wages go up and down. I mean it’s not too bad at the moment, but I tell you what, it’s not looking good for the future, wages will go back down. Jamin’s words, although characterized by considerable insecurity, were both accurate and prophetic as, by 2008, the ‘credit crunch’ and ensuing global recession had led to a massive decline in building work, and builders’ wages had substantially decreased as a result. According to another of the carpenters, Naz, the relative value of builders’ wages had already been decreasing for some time: I was at Stanstead Airport for two years when they done the new terminal out, I think it was [19]89, 90. I was getting £75 a day then, now I’m getting £95, and the cost of living has gone about 100% higher … It doesn’t pay on a building site anymore … Before a builder was reasonable earner but now it’s nowhere near … Anybody who has got responsibility: house, children, wife, it’s getting harder for them. Very, very hard for them. The casualized nature of building employment cast extensive insecurity over the builders’ lives and substantially reduced their wage rates. The job perks that many employees in Western economies take for granted, for example, sick pay, holiday entitlements, works pensions, regular wage raises and career prospects, were unavailable to the builders and they would have to pay for them themselves. Some received perquisites from their subcontractors, and many undertook private work at weekends, evenings and public holidays. Some also engaged in informal trading activities (see Chapter 8), but these ‘by-employments’ were unlikely to compensate for their lack of benefits. Contrary to some strands of popular opinion, the builders did not earn huge wage packets. Despite some of the men telling me about their earnings, most did not, and I was never sure of their exact wages. The reasons were illustrated by Bristles, one of the painters: There’s only one dying question in a man’s heart on the buildings, and this is the question that will go on now until building work finishes forever: it’s how much you earning? That is the only question they need to ask, but obviously don’t ask … Why? ‘Cos they all earn different money that’s why. No one talks about their wages on the buildings or, if they do, they’re a liar. Either they want to keep it quiet ‘cos they’re earning more than the man next to them, or they don’t want to look bloody stupid ‘cos they’re earning less.



Contracting and subcontracting  15

From what I could uncover, I did get an approximate idea of wage rates for the various trades.5 For the lowest paid groups, for instance – the labourers, maintenance men and painters – their wages averaged out at approximately £250 a week – not including ‘Saturday work’ which, if there were any, was usually volunteered for. This weekly wage represents £12,500 (net) per annum if the builder worked for 50 weeks of the year, which was impossible taking into account illness and enforced public holidays. By the standards of 2003/4, this was a small wage, and less than most nurses or teachers earned for instance,6 who received in addition all the fringe benefits associated with being a state employee and their wages rose with seniority and age, none of which was available to the builders. Fringe benefits are worth a substantial amount of one’s income, and illustrative of this was the men’s aversion towards public holidays; because building sites usually close during these periods, builders do not get paid. One of the site managers, Paul, highlighted this when discussing the benefits of his recently becoming a direct employee after almost 10 years self-employed ‘on the tools’: [On the tools] it’s an unstable life yeah, very insecure, you never really know what’s going on. Say you earn £500 a week and you go on holiday for two weeks, that’s just cost you a thousand pound worth of income. So it’s a very expensive business to take holidays, but you’ve got to have holidays haven’t you? Well, I’m 38 [years old] now, and last Christmas was the first time ever I’ve been paid to have a Christmas dinner basically. I’ve always dreaded bank holidays but I quite like them now, your whole perspective changes … Actually if you multiplied my daily rate [earned on the tools] by five times 52, I’m actually £1000 a year worse off [being a site manager], but [now] I get five weeks paid holiday, all the bank holidays, they pay 5 per cent of my salary into a pension, and I add to it as well. So I’m really much better off … It’s also the back-up, you know, working for a big firm, it is just secure you know.

Specialization and risk Although UK trade-based subcontractors emerged logically from the building guilds, there are today many more trade specializations than existed in the past. New technologies and building services have, through history, necessitated increasing trade specialization through the development of new trades, as have recent regulatory measures that have generated, for instance, asbestos removal, water purification and fire alarm specialists. New trades have developed and some trades have subdivided but, as I go on to explain in Chapters 3 and 4, most building work remains highly skilled and complex, particularly repair and renovation work which begs multi-skilled trades’ people. The tradesmen working at Keyworker House were thus highly skilled and enjoyed their ensuing autonomy.

16  Contracting and subcontracting As trade expansion and divisions of knowledge have dispersed building skills into many separate trade groups, general contractors are forced to employ tradebased expertise – not only as a hyper-flexible workforce – but also in order to advise and organize specialist and disparate parts of the build for them. Steve, the project manager, spoke about the necessity and problems of trade specialization and expertise: You have to deal with I don’t know how many different trades, and you either know a little bit about all the trades or a lot about a few of them. So you rely on them to do their jobs properly, which is the uncertain, the unknown, which I don’t like. Not that I could ever know every single trade inside out so that I knew when I was getting the wool pulled over, or it wasn’t being done correctly … If you could get a good knowledge in every trade then I would be quite happy, but you can’t, you have to rely on people. Subcontractors thus require a thorough understanding of their trade so they are able to estimate the cost of works, competitively tender for them, and be relied upon to carry out the work to a required standard. The business acumen that subcontractors must possess consequently differs from the skills required of their guild forebears. Becoming a master or grandmaster builder in medieval Britain had its basis in expertise and reputation (see Epstein, 1998; Rosser, 1997; Woodwood, 1995), whereas becoming a subcontractor under modern capitalism instead requires business acumen and entrepreneurial ability. Being an effective subcontractor is also contingent upon having or creating sufficient networks to locate the necessary knowledge of potential contracts to tender for, find adequate labour to do the work, and possess the capital to pay for it. Subcontracting also enabled contractors to shield themselves from financial risk by passing some of it off to their subcontractors. The biography of Topbuild’s main painting subcontractor, Ernie Coat, highlights both the risky and entrepreneurial nature of subcontracting: I’ve been working with Topbuild I suppose 30 years. I’ve done a lot of work for them, some good, some bad. You always get a job that you’re going to lose money on, because you either make a mistake on the lump-sum price or things have just gone wrong. That’s just what I term as a swings and roundabouts situation. Somewhere along the line you’re going to make a mistake on pricing the job. You’ve just got to grin and bear it, and think to yourself, well, I won’t do that again … I think all companies are the same. I should imagine even Topbuild will make a mistake in pricing, in fact I know they do because I’ve been on some of the jobs where they have made mistakes on prices. But yes, I do a lot of work for Topbuild, plus … I do a lot of work for [three other construction companies], but I don’t work for other companies who are no longer in business ...



Contracting and subcontracting  17 DT: Have you ever had any problems like that in the sense that they [the contractors] go bust and don’t pay you? Oh yes. I’ve had four companies go broke on me, McBuild being the worst. He done me for £75,000 … [I]t wiped out a lot of my money, basically that’s a lot of money … But I pride myself with the fact that I’ve never ever not paid any of my blokes [employees]. The site I was on when McBuild went broke, the blokes all got paid … I was the one who suffered … Several people [subcontractors] I know have gone broke through companies going bust on them, and it’s left them in such a situation where they can’t pay [their employees] because they haven’t got the money … McBuild who went broke on me, it didn’t harm him – Mr McBuild himself. He still lives in a massive great big house in Maida Vale [an exclusive area of West London], he’s still driving about in a big flash car, and he’s got £75,000 of my money.

Subcontractors carry parts of the financial risk from main contractors, which may ripple out to their employees, although, as Ernie states, he at least ‘prided himself’ on always paying his workers. Indeed, because of the inherent difficulties in monitoring building workers and the consequent necessity of having to trust them (see Chapter 3), Ernie had a great incentive always to pay his workforce because he was forced to rely on their skill and effort to work largely unsupervised. As a result, his relationships with his painters were quasi-reciprocal and quite paternal, rather than despotic or nakedly instrumental (see Chapters 3, 4 and 8). Ernie was also bound into the community networks through which he informally recruited ‘his blokes’, and he was thus also wedged into their ensuing community norms. In this context, it would have been very problematic for Ernie to renege on wage agreements because to do so would have lost him both his community standing and the employees on whom he relied to generate profits.

Ethnic diversity and division Almost all of the subcontractors at Keyworker House used their community embedded social networks to recruit labour and, as the subcontractors were all based in London, they and their employees reflected some of its ethnic diversity. The UK building industry has a long history of migrant labour. Even the contemporary English names for many building tools and techniques are largely Old French, emanating from the Norman tradesmen who lived and worked in many of Britain’s major cities from the twelfth century onwards. Originally working on the prestigious buildings of the conquering aristocracy, their influence spread more generally into British guilds and building trades. Moving forward into the early nineteenth century, descriptions of the crews of navvies who built the Paris railways in the 1840s show that they spoke 13 different European languages, developing a lingua franca that was spoken on railway works throughout Europe

18  Contracting and subcontracting (Coleman 1965), and, in Britain, navvies came from all over Europe to build the railways. Yet, in practice, these diverse groups were divided from one another by religion, region and nationality, with some, like Irish Catholics for instance, being subject to severe stigmatization and ill-treatment (see Coleman, 1965; MacAmhlaigh 1961). Likewise, a very diverse group of men worked on the build at Keyworker House. Their ages ranged from 16 to 69, and their religious affiliations included various denominations of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. I met men from Albania, the Seychelles, the Caribbean; various parts of India, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Russia, Hungary, Bosnia, Kosovo, Spain, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Scotland and various areas of England. Yet, analogous to the ethnic and national divisions between the builders of the past, Keyworker House was not a bastion of cosmopolitan integration. The various trade groups were clearly divided by religion, region and ethnicity. As mentioned above, building trade specialization and the sequential nature of building work necessitates divisions of work between the various trades. At Keyworker House, associations and friendships were consequently drawn from within the trades and rarely between them: the carpenters associated with the carpenters, the painters with the painters, and the labourers with the labourers. Although the main groups that my fieldwork focused on had worked on the site for the majority of the build’s duration, and although men of the different trades were familiar with one another from transient contact over the years, aside from some close associations between the site management and the labourers, the trade groups were socially and physically divided. Their work took place in separate spaces and often at separate times, as did their rest breaks and most of their out-of-work socializing. These physical and organizational divisions were reinforced by and interlaced with cultural, ethnic and residential divisions because each of the trades also resided in localities embedded in their own ethnic communities and divided from one another’s. Figure 1.4 illustrates clearly how each of the subcontract trade groups, with the exception of mechanical and electrical, lived in geographically clustered locations, and, in addition, each was composed of a particular ethnicity. At first sight this appeared unusual but similar patterns have been found in other workplaces, particularly in North America (see Franklin, 1936; Zaretsky, 1984), and they have also been observed in the construction industry in New York (Waldinger, 1995). The patterns at Keyworker House were the result of what the general foreman, Jamin, described as ‘everyone getting their mates jobs’, and this reflected sociologists’ descriptions of the patterning and processes of informal employment networks (see Granovetter, 1974). I will discuss the content and outcomes of social network processes more fully below. First I introduce and describe each of the main subcontract groups and some of their members.



Contracting and subcontracting  19

Keyworker House Painters Carpenters Labourers Managers & Surveyors

Figure 1.4  Map of London illustrating the geographic distribution of trade neighbourhoods.7

McMurray’s Labour The labour subcontractor, Paddy McMurray, was aged in his late 60s and had, with masses of other Irish, migrated from rural Ireland during the severe downturn in their economy in the 1950s. The majority of McMurray’s employees had followed a similar path; migrating from impoverished rural Ireland to industrial England in a time of the large rebuilding projects in English cities following World War Two. The 1961 Census revealed almost one million Irish officially living in Great Britain (Holmes, 1988), and the 1951 Census indicates that one third of Irish migrants had settled in London. Some left Ireland through lack of employment resulting largely from the mechanization of farming, others through over-population and rent rises on their family smallholdings, complicated patterns of inheritance, and/or to escape religious conservatism. They followed a migratory trend that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century when large numbers of Irish émigrés,8 fleeing famine, settled in industrializing English and Scottish cities, with Irish men working predominantly on the canals, railways, factories and docks of the industrial revolution (Davis, 2000).

20  Contracting and subcontracting Jokes abounded at Keyworker House that Paddy McMurray did not employ men of less than 65 years of age. These jokes only partly reflected reality because he also employed a second group who had left Ireland during the 1980s economic recession. Additionally, Paddy employed a number of second generation Irish – all except one of whom had existing links with him through their fathers having worked as labourers. One of these was Aiden. His father had grown up in the same Irish village as Paddy McMurray and had later worked for him as a ‘tea boy’ until he was 71 years old – a work pattern reflecting the labouring experiences of many London Irish builders. More than half of male Irish migrants to England find themselves working in the building industry (Haplin, 2000). The physical labour involved in working in agriculture ‘back home’ was transferable to semi-skilled building work in urban areas of Britain, and the Irish became infamous in British discourse for their physical strength. Yet, they were both historically and contemporarily subject to derogatory racism concerning their mental skills (see Chapter 7) and many had experienced very tough working lives. Only one of the labourers at Keyworker House was not subcontracted by McMurray. Mickey T subcontracted himself and three other men to other Topbuild jobs. He was the ‘tea boy’ at Keyworker House, which meant he made and fetched the tea, and washed and tidied up. When he completed his ‘domestic duties’ for the day, he worked with the other labourers drilling holes, concreting, shovelling, filling skips, carrying plant and materials, and sweeping up. Mickey T retired from labouring during my fieldwork aged 67. When I asked him if I he would agree to an informal interview – which he never did – he said: What would you want to interview me for? What you see me doing here today I’ve done all my life [he is shovelling smashed brick and stone into large rubble bags]. If you speak to one of us you’ll know the life of all of us (laughs) … I left Ireland in 1952 at the age of 15, and since then I’ve done pretty much every kind of job in the building apart from brickwork … Field notes Mickey later told me why he had migrated to London: Back home the parents had a few acres, smallholding like … I had 14 brothers and sisters see, and only two rooms in the house, one for the parents and the other for the kids who slept seven to a bed, top to tail. And it was half a mile to the nearest well! So when I got to 15 I felt I should get out (laughs) ... There were a million Irish in England at that time, all sending a few pounds a week back home. That was a rake [a lot] of money for Ireland. People slagoff England but it’s one of the only countries in the world that look after you when you’re sick … I’ve been cold and I’ve been wet, but I’ve never been hungry since I’ve been in England. Field notes



Contracting and subcontracting  21

All the older labourers were skilled ground-workers. They had served their time building England’s post-war infrastructure working predominately on road, tunnel, sewer and foundation works. For them, working for Topbuild was semiretirement, earning a small but regular wage for work that was often shielded from the weather and only sporadically highly physical. Nevertheless, Mickey T appeared still able to work harder and faster than I could, despite my being quite fit and 36 years his junior. Donall MacAmhlaigh (1964) suggests that during the 1950s London Irish builders were internally divided by local region where, for example, men from County Cork worked only with men from County Cork, and men from County Kerry only worked with men from County Kerry. At Keyworker House these divisions had broken down, apparently because of dwindling numbers of Irish migrant labour.9 However, all the labourers, with the exception of Mickey T, were South London Irish, living in and around Southwark, one of many areas of clustered Irish residential location in London,10 and they were all Catholic and ostensibly believers in its doctrine. Turner’s Carpentry11 The carpenters were all members of the diaspora of Kutch, a rural area of Gujarat in Northern India, except their foreman, Jamin, who was born in midGujarat and an old school-friend of one of Turner’s subcontractor bosses. They were all Hindus, albeit to varying degrees of dedication and belief. Their forefathers had left Kutch at the end of the nineteenth century to build the railway from Mombasa to Nairobi for the British East African Company.12 When the railway was completed, many remained in East Africa to administer aspects of the empire for the British, and some of the Kutchis (and Ramgharia Sikhs; see Bhachu, 1985) formed their own building companies to maintain and construct the British Empire’s infrastructure. Just as the Irish had built much of the modern British city’s physical infrastructure, the Kutchis and their Indian commonwealth fellows had built much of the British Empire in East Africa. Most commonwealth Asians left Kenya and Uganda during the rise of African nationalism in the late 1960s, and, fearing the worst, many had tried to come to Britain as subjects of the British crown. Those who remained in Uganda, for example, were terrorized by Idi Amin’s despotic rule, and, in 1972, were ordered to leave the country within 90 days. One of the carpenters, Naz, summarized an aspect of the Kutchis’ recent history and cultural identity: I came here [to England in] 1969. I was about eleven-and-a-half [years old]. My parents came in two years earlier. My mum’s father, he was in Africa, Mombasa – British used to rule. So he become a British citizen, and that automatically brings my mum British … One of my grandfather’s friends was educated, [and] he lent my father money ... He said: ‘I’ll give you the money and when you get there then you pay me back’ … So his son sent

22  Contracting and subcontracting two tickets, or money equivalent, to India, and my parents paid him in three months time or four months time – whenever they’ve got the money. So that’s how they came over … We are, us, we are Kutchi Patels. We are known as the Kutchi Patels. We are known as farmers or builders – we speak farmer and builder language in Gujarat. We never had any other trades; we never had any industries in Kutch, no big industry where you can employ like 10,000 people, nothing like that, so either you are a builder or a farmer. It is known as the Desert of Kutch. The carpenters were seasoned ‘twice migrants’ from urban areas of East Africa, or of a second generation who grew up and were schooled in Harlesden, West London. Harlesden was the residential centre for the all but one of the carpenters, but some of the older men had moved out to a more affluent suburban neighbouring area in a pattern of succession similar to that described by Robert Park (1936) in 1930s Chicago. There were three ‘bosses’ of Turner’s Carpentry, each of them also agnate Kutchis. They had been in their subcontract position for only five years and, because of this, were fighting to ingrain their business relationships with Topbuild. To build and maintain these relationships they charged a lower than market rate for their services, paid their employees less, and were informally inclined to present various gifts to Topbuild’s management (see Chapter 8). Coat’s Decoration The painting subcontractor, Ernie Coat – a white Londoner, employed a mixed collection of first and second generation Irish and Northern Irish, some Scottish, but mostly English tradesmen. All were white-skinned, which in my experience was rare amongst this occupational group in London. Many had worked for Coat’s for a number of years – up to 35 – ‘on and off’ and, similar to the labourers and carpenters, they had known one another in and out of work for many years.13 The vast majority lived in Edmonton in North London, their networked work groups predominantly revolving around five public houses in Enfield Town. A clique of three younger painters lived in King’s Cross, also in North London. They were linked to Coat’s through one of their fathers who had migrated from Kings Cross to Enfield. Like those carpenters who had moved to a more affluent surrounding area, some of the Enfield painters originally grew up in King’s Cross but had left for the more affluent and culturally homogenous Enfield (see Chapters 5 and 6). Topbuild managers and quantity surveyors Topbuild’s site managers and quantity surveyors were not a subcontract group but they did form a distinct cultural, occupational and residentially clustered group. The project and site managers were all white English who lived in the



Contracting and subcontracting  23

rural towns of Kent in Southern England. Three out of four of them rode in from Kent every morning on their motorbikes, as did one of the two quantity surveyors. The trainee quantity surveyor, Bobby, did not live in Kent, but in suburban Essex and his parents were first generation Punjabi Indian immigrants. Also unlike the subcontract groups, the site managers were relatively young – aged between 23 and 40 – which reflected Topbuild’s project director’s desire to recruit and train young managers before they became too weathered by informal culture through long periods of time spent working on the tools (see Chapters 3, 4 and 5). The managers were all career builders in that they were willing and eager to ascend the hierarchy of command to an extent and, as I explain in Chapters 2 and 5, this framed their work cultures in a slightly different way to the largely ‘non-career’ builders working on the tools. Spark’s electro-mechanical Spark’s was a ‘family firm’ that employed both plumbers and electricians, which is why I refer to them as a singular group rather than separately as plumbers and electricians. Also, in contemporary mechanical and electrical technology, plumbers and electricians increasingly do both of these trades because the machines that regulate the flow of materials through pipes tend to operate electronically. Plumbers and electricians also work together, enabling them to learn one another’s skills, working cultures and practices. Spark’s were the only subcontract group I focused on that displayed geographically dispersed and culturally plural employment patterns. They employed men from the Caribbean, Scotland, England and, on occasion, parts of Eastern Europe. This variation was a result of regulatory legislation dictating that formal qualifications were necessary for those seeking employment in these areas, and also because of the related shortage of mechanical and electrical skills at the time of my research. Bill, the mechanical and electrical foreman, explained: The building [industry] is desperate for plumbers. You can’t get plumbers for love nor money now. I mean we had plumbers, good plumbers, and I know some very, very good plumbers, but we can’t employ them because they’re not CORGI [Council of Registered Gas Installers] registered. So the thing is, anything you install now, if you haven’t got that certificate or that CORGI registration, it doesn’t matter what plumber puts it in, if he hasn’t got it then the contractor’s in trouble. So we can’t employ them, so we can’t get a decent plumber … This one guy Stan, he’s about 55 [years old], an electrician for 40 years. He’s got more experience in his little finger than most of the sparks [electricians] today and yet he can’t get a job because they want qualifications and he hasn’t got none. He just learnt, he came through the trade, and you know he just can’t get a job. Unless you’ve got that piece of paper you can’t work in this trade.14

24  Contracting and subcontracting

Why cluster? Working for Topbuild was considered by most of the tradesmen and labourers as ‘cushy’ because the rate of work was relatively slow and it provided regular employment on comparatively small building sites which were not the cold, impersonal and dangerous places that larger ones might be. The majority of Topbuild’s work was indirectly for the state, and consequently it was not influenced to the same degree by fluctuations in the economy as purely private sector work would be. Much of the work was also repair and renovation, or ‘old work’, and thus often took place inside, shielded from the weather, and on projects that did not run to more than £15 million. Topbuild’s father company, ‘Bigbuild’, did all work valued over this amount. Routes into subcontracted employment at Topbuild were therefore blocked because the existing workforce was reluctant to leave. However, the shortage of suitably qualified mechanical and electrical tradesmen forced Spark’s to advertise in the press and use the assistance of building agencies to find skilled labour rather than accessing it through social networking. Some of their labour shortage problems were also the result of the poor transferability of these skills across different countries. For example, an electrician from outside Britain may take some time learning to use British equipment and to adapt to regulatory specifications. To be employed by a large contractor they would also have to pass formal examinations or possess the necessary contacts, which would be almost impossible for a newly arrived non-English speaker. To a smaller extent, labour shortage was also operating in the labouring group. Paddy McMurray’s community of labourers were retiring, returning to Ireland, or dying. Most appeared not to wish to retire if they were still ‘fit’, which was why so many of them were aged over 65. At times, however, Paddy faced some difficulty obtaining labour by informal means and had to employ anyone he could find through using building agencies or advertisements in the London press. At Keyworker House, Paddy employed a Russian and a Spaniard. However, this non-Irish labour was the first to be dismissed when work slowed and men were squeezed off site, and all of McMurray’s regular workers remained South London Irish. Labour shortage processes were also at play for the plastering subcontractor, Luke Screed. Like Luke, many of his workers were from the Seychelles, or they were of the second generation. Yet, due to the small numbers of the Seychelles diaspora in Britain,15 on occasion Luke relied upon Eastern European labour – many of whom were presumably working illegally.16 Again, however, these recruits were first to be laid off when work slowed, thereby maintaining tight ethnic clustering patterns and contributing to the disadvantage generally faced by new migrant groups seeking employment in London’s building industry (see Eade et al., 2006; Chapters 5 and 7).



Contracting and subcontracting  25

Recruitment and trust Of the permanent subcontracted groups on site, only a very small percentage, mostly mechanical and electrical workers, had obtained their jobs through formal mechanisms. The vast majority had networked into their employment through family and neighbourhood associations that linked them to their respective subcontractors (cf. Granovetter, 1974; Grieko, 1987; Hill, 1976). Networked employment relations may be particularly salient in the building industry because of some of its novel structural characteristics. As an example of this, in a case study of mains-gas pipeline construction workers in the USA, Benny Graves (1970) describes how all of the socially homogenous ‘bunches’ of gang workers were recruited through informal social networks, mostly centred around their extended families. The nepotistic nature of pipeline employment was, according to Graves, a result of the extreme ephemerality of pipeline construction work. Parts of pipeline construction only take short periods of time to build, and pipeline builders thus work only for short durations, usually for between one and two weeks, and then have to find more work building other pipelines. Pipeline contractors, by extension, require semi-skilled and skilled labour at short notice. Pipelines are, moreover, built across large geographic areas and their builders must move across space with them, making it problematic to observe, organize and manage their work. Pipeline contractors thus require trust in their labour because of the problems of monitoring it across vast distances, and informal networking ensures that adequately skilled and trusted pipeline gangs can be found quickly (see also Graves, 1958). The ephemeral nature of pipeline construction is similar to that of building industry organizational patterns in general, albeit on a more extreme level. In such ephemeral work organization, social networks may be especially effective because large numbers of workers can be disbanded and formed in short and irregular periods of time – especially when governments ‘free-up’ employment legislation that facilitates this. The problems of monitoring a mobile workforce across large, and, often labyrinthine spaces in constant transition necessitate that workers are trusted to carry out the work at an efficient speed and to a required standard, factors that are explored in detail Chapter 3. While informal networking recruits labour at almost zero financial cost, it also generates a particular type of labour via the informal screening and training of potential recruits by existing workers, and it provides a certain amount of control over recruits through reciprocal favour-giving and receiving mechanisms that order network relations (see Grieko, 1987; Chapters 3 and 7). Ernie Coat explained these processes: Basically it’s people who know people. If I’m looking for painters I might say to the lads: ‘I’m looking to take more lads on, if there’s anybody you know?’ And of course in the building trade you’ll find a lot of people know a lot of people. So, somebody might have said to them the week before: ‘Look

26  Contracting and subcontracting I’ve been laid off, I’ve got no work’. So they ring them, they ring me, and that’s how it comes that so many people know each other – word of mouth. DT: And do you prefer that, in that your painters are coming with a kind of recommendation? Well yes. I had an incident last week where I took two lads on. Although they were recommended by somebody else, a site agent [manager] … they were bloody useless. But normally if one of the lads said: ‘My mate’s a painter’, they normally are. It does work out better through that way than advertising, as with advertising you don’t know what your gonna get. Through tapping into family, friendship and neighbourhood networks, Ernie was afforded a modicum of certainty as to the skill and character of his employees. Social networks then, not only relayed job information, but the quality of that information was perceived as reliable and therefore trusted. This functioned beneficially for networked job seekers, existing work groups and subcontractors. Potential recruits could rely on the information they received through their network which may indicate that Ernie Coat, for example, usually paid wages on time, in cash, gave regular ‘subs’ – small cash payments in lieu of wages – tended to have long durations of work and did not often ask for formal credentials or demand that his employees register for formal taxation (see Chapters 5 and 6). Work groups inherited a colleague who was ‘like them’, with whom they may be more likely to get along, and who was already integrated into a known network. The existing work group would thus usually know something about the new employee, or at least they would know others who knew something about him. And subcontractors received workers whose skill levels could be predicted, or who would be informally controlled and tutored by the existing work group. Again, Ernie Coat explained: We do give some of them a chance. If you can see they might be alright if they get into the right rhythm then, you know, we will tolerate it for a week or so. But if they’re no good at all then it’s normally a day, if they haven’t picked themselves up, then that’s it, gone. It’s the only way to do it. Ernie’s words were sterner than in practice. Those that were ‘all right’ were often tolerated for much longer periods than one week if they were linked into and liked by the existing workgroup (see Chapter 5). This was because workgroups would informally train ‘friends of friends’ (cf. Grieko, 1987) or, at least, vouch for them if they became popular characters. Indeed, as I demonstrate in Chapter 5, the vast majority of the tradesmen had learnt their skills through informal recruitment and training processes, and this was central to both their occupational lives and the social organization of the build.



Contracting and subcontracting  27

Conclusion This chapter has provided an outline of some of the main exigencies of building work organization and traced some of its history. It has described how Topbuild organized the Keyworker House build through localized site management, employing subcontractors and their skilled employees to undertake trade-specific parts of the work. The majority of subcontractors recruited their workers through informal social network mechanisms that clearly provided benefits for the subcontractors and the contractor in terms of social control and flexibility of labour. Yet informal recruitment had also guided the development of the stark ethnic trade clustering processes that stratified and divided the workplace. Community networks and the informal relations binding them were key components for understanding the organizational and cultural underpinnings of the builders’ lives and work, and, as I demonstrate in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, the outcomes of social networking were a major organizing principle of the builders’ everyday work activities and cultures. First, however, in the next chapter I describe the everyday roles and relationships occurring in the site office and discuss their place in the broader organization of the building workers and their work.

Chapter 2

Managing ‘in the office’

In this chapter I describe the roles and activities of and relationships between the various parties that held interests in the Keyworker House build, and I show how this impinged on the organization, culture and process of the build. I explain the organizational hierarchy, roles and practices of Topbuild’s site managers and quantity surveyors, and examine their interactions with the two building consultants. The relationships between the building contractor group and the consultants were characterized by high levels of conflict that were mediated, and partly produced, by the application of formalized contractual mechanisms. These formal characteristics were unusual in comparison to almost all other forms of social relationships at the build, which were predominantly informal and non-contractual. Indeed, formalized relationships occurred only in the office and not outside of it; formalized management agreements and controls affected the work practices of the builders’ working ‘on the tools’ in only minimal ways.

Interests and parties In any building project there are likely to be a multitude of parties with various and often conflicting stakes in the build. Each party may hold a different interest in the work, how it is done, its quality and its cost, but doing that work is contingent on their agreement. At Keyworker House the parties holding interests in the build included the tenants, administrative workers, the owners of the building (the NHS), the Housing Association, their building consultants, Topbuild’s site managers and ‘head office’, the building subcontractors and their workers, and state regulatory agents and agencies such as the Office of Fair Trading and the Health and Safety Executive. Large built structures are built upon the balance of these interests, their negotiated outcomes and, of course, through the sweat of labourers and tradesmen (cf. Higgin and Jessop, 1965; Kidder, 1985; Suchman, 2003). To oversee the refurbishment of Keyworker House and keep the contractor in check, the client, Opportune Housing, employed the services of Assured



Managing ‘in the office’  29

Consultants which provided two on-site building consultants, Mr Jaggers and Herbert. Opportune Housing and their consultants had previously contracted Topbuild on a ‘new build’ job, and the Keyworker House build was part of a continuing long-term ‘partnering’ agreement.1 Although generating agreements between the multitude of parties with interests in the build was often problematic, it was down to the consultants and site managers to agree on final decisions, and it was here that the most difficult and divisive relationships occurred. Indeed, a spiteful climate of distrust had emerged in which lengthy and emotional negotiations and frequent breakdowns in communication regularly ensued. Steve, the project manager, contrasted his experience at Keyworker House with the previous ‘new-build’ on which the same site management team and building consultants were involved: [The new build] was a Design and Build job and it was down to us to do what we priced to do, with a little bit of encouragement and approval from Assured Consultants. They were just approving systems and products that we were going to use for the building systems, how we were going to go about doing things and arranging them, and then the final snagging and hand-over really. They were on site there as well, they were above us in a house [using it as an office], but they just didn’t have as much input … [T]hey do have a lot more say over here [at Keyworker House]. I mean there was an original brief and specs [specifications for the build] but it changed so much. So initially, yes, they were relying on us to do dilapidation items, but then as things gradually changed, and you’re trying to work out fresh prices, that’s where it all got a bit messy, and it still is. For the previous ‘Design and Build’, the client and their consultants laid down requirements for which Topbuild drew up the specifications that were agreed upon. The subsequent build was undertaken with only minor modifications during the process, and, because the construction was new, there were less deliberation as to the quality and process of the work and only few ‘extras’ had arisen. As a result, the parties had ostensibly collaborated with only minor conflict. Yet, because of the ambiguity in the build specifications for Keyworker House and the many ‘extras’ added to the original contractual specifications, relations between the two parties were observably strained, particularly when coupled with the working practices and cultures of the quantity surveyors (see below). Tense negotiations over the specific quality, price and process of new and altered specifications continually arose, and the parties repeatedly engaged in pushing costs, losses and estimates backwards and forwards between one another, arguing about prices and building process in aggressive and emotional ways. High emotion was not, however, unusual in the site office, which was a generally loud, aggressive and very masculine space.

30  Managing ‘in the office’

Planet site office The main site office was situated on the ground floor of Keyworker House I. I was told many times what a luxury the office was because it was warm, relatively bright, spacious and clean, and not the usual rusty portakabin situated in a muddy field. There was a main desk for the project manager, Steve, and another for James, one of the site managers. Two desks at the rear were occupied by Kevin, the quantity surveyor, and Bobby, his assistant trainee, and a remaining desk was shared by me, the general foreman, and occasional visitors from Topbuild head office. The site office was for the most part a very busy and energetic room, noisy with faxes, phones, photocopiers and two-way radios continually buzzing and bleeping. There was an almost constant round of people coming in and out: subcontractors negotiating payment and instructions; foremen asking for and negotiating orders; labourers in search of keys and materials; materials salesmen peddling their wares; housing management representing tenants’ problems and complaints; couriers delivering packages; consultants shouting and swearing, and sometimes any or all of these groups just wanting a chat, a joke or an argument. It was at times such a loud space that Kevin would regularly wear earplugs so he could concentrate on his surveying duties. Office interaction was largely informal. Rarely did anyone knock before entering, and talk was characterized by aggressive and voluble joking, swearing and ‘pisstaking’ (cf. Willis, 1978, 1978). Although the site mangers and surveyors could be clearly differentiated from the tradesmen and labourers because of their adornment in smart shirts and high visibility jackets, the informality of office interaction skewed clear identification of the management hierarchy. For example, Jamin, the general and carpentry foreman, would regularly shout to the project manager, Steve, to do something, or they would engage in vociferous arguments over the best way to construct something. These encounters were frequently terminated with Jamin shouting a jocular ‘fuck you, you cunt’ towards Steve. Similarly, I once witnessed Kevin athletically jump up into the air in front of a visiting projects director from Topbuild’s head office, spin around, face backwards to him and loudly break wind. The stereotypical adornment of site office walls with lewd pictures and calendars was forbidden by Mr Jaggers in the interests of tenant relations, and these were instead hidden inside the doors of the mass of filing cabinets that subsumed the office. In their place, the walls were ornamented by month planners, first aid certificates, pictures of the office staff’s children and motorbikes, and a few humorous photographs that had been taken with the ‘site camera’. Across the corridor, directly opposite the site office was the comparatively dry and sombre office of Assured Consultants. The close proximity allowed the senior consultant, Mr Jaggers, and his junior, Herbert, easy access to the site office. Mr Jaggers, uncharacteristically for a building site, always dressed in a well-pressed pin-stripe suit and tie, and communicated in a direct and straight-talking manner. This generated an air of authority and some respect in the site office and the atmosphere would usually sober up in his presence. He was a formidable client’s



Managing ‘in the office’  31

representative, partly because he was trained in the law as a building ‘claims consultant’ to deal with contractor-client litigation disputes, and partly because he had worked in a number of other professional roles in the building industry for a considerable number of years. Herbert, however, was younger and less experienced, and had not accumulated these skills. His presence tended to generate animosity among Topbuild’s site managers and surveyors who would regularly engage in protracted arguments with him, shouting and swearing without any semblance of jocular intent. Herbert’s general demeanour and condescending attitude towards everybody except Mr Jaggers facilitated this and the more widespread asperity towards him. Topbuild’s managers and surveyors considered it stigmatising to be associated with Herbert, and insults centred on suggestions of an alleged friendship with him or, worse still, being addressed by his name. Herbert was inconsistent in dealing with building workers in all roles. He tended to tell people what to do rather than ask them, which conflicted with the builders’ and the managers’ working norms and mores (see Chapter 3). He was considered by Topbuild’s employees to have negligible knowledge of building work, and each occasion that highlighted his ignorance was talked and joked about, becoming accumulated in the site office collective memory. In this context, any kind of moral bind to Herbert’s authority was neutralized (cf. Matza, 1964), as suggested by Paul, one of the site managers: What pisses me off about building is people in high positions who don’t know anything. People like Herbert, I fucking hate them to death … He’s got a degree, he speaks very well, but fuck me, he does not know the first thing about the construction industry … It is amazing, he knows absolutely nothing; it’s scary really. I find it difficult when you’ve got to bow your head to people like him, it’s very annoying. I’d like to see people at high level … that you could look up to, not laugh at, because he’s a laughing stock at Topbuild isn’t he? I mean he’s not a bad fellow don’t get me wrong, but on a professional level … Kevin, the quantity surveyor, concurred: ‘I hate the likes of Herbert who, to be blunt, can’t understand the principles of surveying. He just doesn’t get it. Agreeing final accounts with Assured Consultants is a pain in the arse.’ Herbert’s lack of practical knowledge of building culture and processes was an avoidable constituent that contributed to obscuring cooperative relationships between the two parties. This made for an uncomfortable working environment that impinged negatively on the build process. As Mr Jaggers described: Unfortunately the construction industry is very much about relationships. It is about the relationships and the mutual respect between parties. And what tends to happen is because the person doesn’t have respect for an individual, that relationship isn’t going to work. And the higher up the chain you get, the worse it becomes.

32  Managing ‘in the office’ The relationships between Topbuild’s site management team and the consultants had been obstructed as a result of Herbert’s demeanour and practice, in combination with the on-going negotiation of ‘extras’ by Topbuild. A deeper factor that both fractured relationships and impeded the negotiation of extras was, however, the competitive business practices of the quantity surveyors.

Managing versus making money The function of localized site management falls into two parts. On the one hand, site managers orchestrate and regulate the work, and, on the other, quantity surveyors measure and cost the work and draw up contractual details. Mr Jaggers usefully summarized these roles: Surveyors are very much in tune with money. Site managers are in tune with performance and standards … So when you’re speaking with surveyors, what you’re trying to do is to make sure you get a fair and reasonable representation of costs for the works. With the site managers what you are expecting is performance and quality. Quantity surveyors were originally employed in the eighteenth century to prevent their clients being duped and mystified by the nascent entrepreneurial building contractors over the extent and costs of building works (Higgin and Jessop, 1965). This was a product of the cessation of ‘measure and value’ cost estimates of building work under which the guilds and government had provided standardized prices (Clarke, 1992). The end of ‘measure and value’ meant that contractors could exaggerate building measures by, for example, reporting that they used more expensive bricks and more bricklayers than were necessary for a particular job. To counteract the tactical move of clients employing quantity surveyors, contractors, fearing that they might then be mystified, also began to employ quantity surveyors. The eventual result was that quantity surveyors came to act as formal gatekeepers in the British building industry and went on to form much of its higher management strata working as directors, contracts mangers and consultants. Almost all of Topbuild’s ‘head office’ had been quantity surveyors originally. They were the building industry’s guardians; the ‘commissioned officers’ who, from above, commanded building contracting. The work of quantity surveyors is both technical and legal. Technically they measure the volumes of work to be carried out and prepare accounts and estimations of costs of materials and labour via those measures. Legally, they deal with the contractual arrangements of building jobs, mediating between clients and contractors. At Keyworker House, Topbuild’s quantity surveyors worked predominantly in the site office with calculators and spreadsheets, continually adding and subtracting costs of works done and about to be done, documenting works and instructions, drawing up contractual agreements, issuing payments to subcontractors, and demanding payments from clients. They were concerned



Managing ‘in the office’  33

with numbers and, as outlined by Mr Jaggers, were not particularly troubled with the quality or messy process of construction because that was the realm of the project and site managers. Kevin described his role: I spend a lot of the time here just trying to forecast the profit and loss on a job which means forecasting what we’re gonna get in the way of variations and extras, getting paid, and what we’re paying out to the subbies [subcontractors] to do it … [At] the moment it’s just balancing it. With the Year 2 works we’re gonna get £3 million paid, so now I’m just working out exactly how much that is going to cost us ... That’s how it works, it’s just monitoring it every month and every week. I mean we’ve had nearly £400,000 worth of variations here [at Keyworker House I]. I’m a glorified accountant really. As I have mentioned, the variations or ‘extras’ that Kevin alluded to contributed to the strained relationship between the contractor and the consultants. However, as a result of the small profit margins of 2–3 per cent that are factored into competitive building contracts, and due to the fact that construction work rarely goes to plan, ‘extras’ are a normal method by which contractors make profits and ready capital (Rooke et al, 2004). This is a continual source of conflict in the UK building industry, but it is also a fundamental aspect of the role and work culture of quantity surveyors. Illustrative of this was that three out of four of the quantity surveyors at Topbuild told me that part of what they enjoyed about their work was ‘screwing’ or ‘getting one over’ on the opposing parties. Bobby explained: There’s a sense of fulfilment involved. I know it’s a bit stupid, very childish, but sometimes when you’ve got one over on like, say on Herbert or whatever, and you know and you have to keep your mouth shut. You lead them to believe that they’re the big boys but really you know the background. When you know the value is not as great as what they’re actually estimating it, so you’re not only getting a few quid [pounds] extra on what you’re saving, but you’re also getting overheads and profits on top of that as well, so it’s competing like that. Kevin had a similar outlook: It’s good fun arguing even if you don’t know what you’re arguing about. Just the fact, just trying to beat them down, probably like Herbert does to a point with us, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But it’s good fun agreeing an account when you know you’ve screwed someone, but as long both parties are happy, then great. As a result of small profit margins and the subsequent desire for ‘screwing’ and ‘getting one over’, Topbuild’s quantity surveyors actively concealed information

34  Managing ‘in the office’ from the client group and attempted to ratchet up prices – actions that seriously contradicted the ‘open book’ ethos of their partnering agreement. Mr Jaggers expressed these issues from his point of view, one day barging into the site office and angrily pronouncing: They think they can get one over on me but I tell you that they can’t! I’ve been on both sides of the fence [working for contractors and clients], I know what they are trying to do, they can’t pull the wool over my eyes! Field notes Part of the reason for Mr Jaggers’ awareness that the ‘wool was being pulled over his eyes’ was because he had considerable experience of working in the building industry. Yet the practices of Topbuild’s surveyors had also been exposed because of a pre-existing long-term relationship that existed between Assured Consultants and the mechanical and electrical subcontractor, Spark’s. These two groups shared an informal business community network through which information flowed that served to clearly expose the screwing practices of Topbuild’s quantity surveyors (see also Chapter 7). Bill, the mechanical and electrical foreman, explained how: It’s this situation where it’s a bit of, you know, helping the client out, and working together as a team and everything. But Mr Jaggers comes to us and says can we give him a price for say putting all new lighting out in the courtyard, which he’s not allowed to, but he’s the fuckin’ client and you don’t wanna upset him. So he says, ‘What do you recommend’? And I say, ‘Oh 10 spotlights, a couple of tree-lights, whatever, rough guess, I’m not pricing it but at a rough guess, five grand [thousand pounds]’. ‘Okay’, he says, ‘can you do it’? And I say, ‘No, you’ve got to go to Topbuild’. He knows he’s gotta go to Topbuild, but now I might have just put me foot in it because we’ve give him a price to do it for five grand and by the time it goes through Topbuild he’s got a price more like 10 grand … Mr Jaggers’ pre-existing associations with Spark’s, and, in this case, his particular relationship with Bill, had explicitly highlighted the ‘screwing’ and ‘wool-pulling’ that eroded trust between the two parties. With little trust, and the impeded cooperation that resulted from that lack of trust, a huge amount of formal contractual detail specifying the finer details of the build was continually drawn and re-drawn by the parties. Formalized contracts had replaced cooperation and come to mediate the relationships between the contractor and consultant parties – primarily through the legal support it provided to enforce the agreements. However, this operated regressively; replacing impeded cooperation with contractual formalization further impeded cooperation, necessitating more formalization, and so on (cf. Fox, 1974). The parties had become locked in to this relationship, and it rippled out onto the work of the site managers.



Managing ‘in the office’  35

Site managers If quantity surveyors could be seen as the commissioned officers of the UK building industry, the site managers were similar to ‘non-commissioned officers’ (NCOs) who rose to their positions predominantly from the ranks of tradesmen, but rarely rose further into the professional surveyor-led worlds of consultants, project directors and contracts managers. Most site managers emerge from the ranks of carpenters, or sometimes bricklayers. The carpentry trade is particularly suited to the move to construction management because of its involvement in all phases of a build from inception to completion. Steve, the project manager, was formerly a carpenter, and his position and self-expression at Keyworker House struck me as similar to that of a regimental sergeant major. In this sense, his site managers could be seen as comparable to warrant officers who oversaw the general foremen – sergeants – and trade foremen – corporals. This military analogy should not be taken literally because relationships outside the office on the site were overwhelmingly informal. The manual building workers were largely autonomous, not at all deferential, and very averse to following orders. Yet the formal organizational hierarchy of the build did reflect a military organizational analogy to some degree (cf. Greed, 2000). The work of Steve and his site managers was monitored by Topbuild’s centralized head office primarily through bureaucratic accounting mechanisms. Centralized monitoring also occurred through the positioning of Kevin in the site office. In addition to being a ‘glorified accountant’, Kevin functioned partly as the eyes and ears of head office, a position that was reflected in the many comments made by the other builders that he was ‘never off duty, even in the pub he don’t stop work’. His position was a useful means of observation because bureaucratic accounting potentially could be fabricated and deviancies hidden from head office by the site managers (see, for example, Woodward and Woodward, 2001). Otherwise, however, the site management team was largely independent from the command view of head office. The site managers organized the flow of materials, plant and labour. The labour, although itself largely autonomous in terms of the skilled content of the individual’s work tasks, required placing in the right places at the right times, and to be supplied with the appropriate materials. The site managers also dealt with and appeased the many intervening and interested parties present at the build, as I describe below. Nonetheless, bureaucratic work consumed much of their everyday activity, and the site managers termed this work ‘arse-covering’. They had to account for their work and ‘cover their arses’ not only to head office, but also to the consultants, and, with regard to health and safety legislation, to the state. With respect to health and safety regulation, Topbuild employed a visiting health and safety officer, Mr Smith, to keep the site managers up-to-date with the mass of new regulation flooding the UK building industry in 2003/4. Out on site, all the tradesmen and labourers would know of Mr Smith’s impending

36  Managing ‘in the office’ arrival because foremen were sent by the site managers to hand out hard hats and make sure that everyone was wearing safety boots. Mr Smith rarely inspected the actual building site, preferring to visit the site office and make sure Steve had performed the necessary accounting duties. These duties included induction of workers in the formal site regulations, regular plant and scaffold inspections, and putting up notices of risks in the workers’ canteens, such as where the first aid was kept, or to be beware of rodents, hypodermic needles and repetitive strain injury. Such requirements were documented so that if a serious accident occurred – which fortunately did not happen during the time of my participation – Topbuild and its site managers would be covered against prosecution. Steve, the project manager, once joked that, for Mr Smith’s own health and safety, he would put a cork on the end of his fork at the Topbuild head office Christmas meal. The details of the building process that the site managers had to agree with the consultants were also bureaucratically accounted for. As I have intimated, however, reaching agreement between the two parties on the specificities of the build process was often very problematic. Moreover, build specifications and processes did not only involve Topbuild’s site managers and the consultants but, because of the division of trade knowledge, they also required input from numerous sources of trade-based expertise, further complicating final decisions and agreements. An example of this arose one day in an informal meeting that took place in the doorway of the site office: The mechanical and electrical consultant and foreman were debating with Mr Jaggers what the optimum type of light to fit in the shower rooms would be. Bill, the mechanical and electrical foreman, wanted one type because these did not draw excessive power from the old and fragile mains electricity supply, but Mr Jaggers was concerned about the quality of the light emitted. Steve, the project manager, said that the brighter lights were too expensive, but Norman, the visiting mechanical and electrical consultant, said that bulbs for the weaker light would need to be replaced more frequently and would thereby not be so cost-effective. Steve left to find a sample of one of the light types to see how the bulbs were replaced. He then called the maintenance man, Mike Fixit, to show him how the bulbs were replaced. Mike said that these would be very time consuming to replace, and argued that another type of light would be cheaper in the long term. The debate continued in this vein for more than two hours. Changing a light bulb is proverbially simple, and much of the build was a great deal more complex than this and agreement on parts and process was increasingly complicated and difficult. Because of gaps in their knowledge about the details of building processes, the project and site managers were frequently forced to consult with their subcontractors. Eventual decisions then had to be costed by the quantity surveyors before being formally agreed by the consultants



Managing ‘in the office’  37

and then frozen in contractual detail. If, during the build process, a task was further altered, which it often was, this too had to be agreed and formalized again. It was common occurrence for Mr Jaggers or Herbert to barge into the site office and say that a particular piece of work had not been done as agreed, but, in response, the site managers searched for written contractual detail to counteract the consultants’ claims and ‘cover their arses’. Paul spoke about his duties: It seems to be over-complicated, and it needs to be over-complicated because of the incompetence’s of the people that are involved in it. All day I find myself putting paper into files. It gives me the opportunity of each time when something hasn’t happened or somebody bollocks [reprimands] me, I just get the thing out the file and say: ‘Well the reason I didn’t do it is that fucking wanker didn’t do it’. And that’s what I do all the time, you’ve got to do that. Not to be negative about it, but covering your own arse … I try to make it as specific as I possibly can, and, you know, if it goes pear-shaped and they’re looking for somebody’s head to put on the block, you just gotta try to make sure it’s not yours. So it’s arse-covering to a certain extent John, the junior site manager at Keyworker House III, echoed this: There’s so much paper, there’s like a whole rain forest in here … It’s all to do with money at the end of the day. If something goes wrong, [and] if someone comes back and says ‘what’s happening with this’ – open the file up, there it is, this is what happened, this is where it happened, [and] this is how it happened. It’s all arse-covering really. The power to enforce bureaucratic agreements was, in the final instance, underpinned and upheld by legal sanction, and Mr Jaggers, being the client’s senior representative, held ultimate power over this. If the site managers did not effectively cover their arses they risked being ‘removed’ from the job. This was manifest in the expulsion of one of the managers, James, from the Keyworker House job.2 James’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, effort and attention to detail had disturbed Mr Jaggers, and James had evidently not covered his arse against this. Steve, the project manager, commented: Obviously if there’s a problem they’ll [the consultants] tell them at [Topbuild] head office … it’s as simple as that. And if it ain’t blinking working like it wasn’t with a certain person [i.e. James], they’ll ship them out. And that’s the way this client is. Sometimes clients are like that, if they don’t want someone there they’ll fucking tell you. And the attitude of our company is, which is quite right, we’d rather lose that member of staff than we would the business. So Topbuild either lose them or just put them somewhere else.

38  Managing ‘in the office’ Before James’ removal it seemed that it was only he who had little idea he would be ejected from the job. The rest of the managers knew what was going to happen and, although I was not told outright, I could sense from the whispered tones and derogatory speak that James was soon to be dismissed (I was observing the office at that time). Eventually, with little or no argument from Topbuild’s head office or James’ colleagues, he was moved to another job.3 Mr Jaggers’ ultimate power over the administration of the build was a very direct form of control over the site managers; the power of dismissal. Both the client and contractor groups had become locked into ongoing formalization of their relationships. Where cooperation had largely broken down, contractual detail protected both parties’ interests through a tight formal specification of tasks. Yet, as I have explained, this set a regressive spiral in motion because contractual relations reduced the need for informal trust and reciprocity, which increased the necessity of contractual relationships. The preparation of formalized agreements also slowed down the work and, furthermore, had a tendency to extract only small amounts of effort from the site managers: ‘the rules were serviceable because they created something that could be given up as well as given use’ (Gouldner 1954: 174, italics in original). The result was that the works were frequently ‘held up’, and they were often orchestrated only to the minimum specification outlined in the instructions; a kind of bureaucratic work to rule, which again further impeded relationships between the two parties.

The limits of managerial bureaucracy To confound the regulatory problems and endemic arse-covering in the office, there were many residents of Keyworker House who continued to live in and use the building throughout the works. The residents and users of Keyworker House had to essentially live and work on a building site for 65 weeks. Their privacy was invaded by electricians and plumbers entering their rooms, and by carpenters and painters walking around the scaffold outside the windows of their bedrooms, bathrooms and toilets. In effect, the residents were surrounded by builders and building works, both inside and out. These problems were amplified considerably because the residents’ worked shifts and many would be trying to sleep during the day when the building work took place. And, to state the obvious, building work is often very noisy. Out on the scaffold the hum of masons’ generators, labourers’ pneumatics, and carpenters’ drills, saws and hammers, echoed throughout the building and, amid the din, the builders often had to shout to find and communicate with one another. In addition, the vast majority of residents were women, and there were numerous complaints about the language and actions of the builders that site management had to be seen to be dealing with. Yet, to a builder working ‘on the tools’, the scaffold, for instance, is his workplace, and it could be exceptionally difficult continually to view it as attached to someone’s home and equally problematic not to swear if a worker trapped his



Managing ‘in the office’  39

fingers in a poorly weighted sash window, got splinters in his hand, or banged his bones on a scaffold bolt. The negotiations and conflicts manifest in the site office rarely filtered down to the men working on the tools physically making the product – the tradesmen and labourers. Indeed, for most, site management had such little impact or control over their work that they were virtually invisible. The workers could find that extra tasks were added to their jobs, that instructions could change incomprehensibly or that they would be transferred between the various Keyworker Houses with no forewarning or for little apparent reason. They also found that management had twice placed notices on the scaffold specifying: ‘No shouting, No smoking, No mobile phones, No swearing’. Yet these injunctions were really all the tradesmen and labourers witnessed of the negotiations that took place in the site office, and they took virtually no notice of them anyway. The notices placed on the scaffold, for instance, were treated as a source of jokes rather than as orders. Like the example of Mr Smith and his health and safety regulatory role, formal command rarely framed activities and relations outside of the site office (cf. Rooke and Clark, 2005). For instance, when Mr Smith left Keyworker House, hard hats and safety boots would often be removed. The tradesmen and labourers would not, and could not, always conduct their tasks as specified in formal contractual detail because of the inevitable ongoing alteration to their tasks and the appearance of unpredictable ‘unforeseens’ that occurred in the very localized conditions of their work, as I illustrate in the following two chapters. Formalized contractual relations between the managers and consultants were thus uncharacteristic of the relations between the building workers, managers and subcontractors. As I illustrate in the next chapter, relationships between site management, foremen, subcontractors and workers, although anchored by the violence of the market, were overwhelmingly characterized by craft traditions, informal cooperation, and positive reciprocity. As a consequence, the site-managers’ job in relation to the workers on the tools was not really one of control, but one of cooperation and orchestration. Managers organized skilled bodies in space and time, but they did not and could not organize the movements of those bodies or, in any strict sense, pre-empt the finer intricacies of localized task processes. As the following chapter explains, the manual workers’ lack of adherence to managers’ prescriptions reflected the lack of power that managers had over them. The majority of the builders on the tools were tied more to their cooperative and reciprocal-style relationships with their subcontractor bosses and work colleagues than they were to the commands of the site managers.

Chapter 3

Working ‘on the tools’

In this chapter I describe and analyse how the tradesmen and labourers working ‘on the tools’ conformed with, negotiated and resisted the various demands of managers, subcontractors and foremen. Focusing on patterns of worker control and resistance, I highlight the relatively high levels of autonomy that the builders held, which differs from most descriptions of other manual workers. I also show how the builders rarely opposed the management hierarchy, whom they predominantly accepted as given, provided instructions were administered with respect to workgroup mores. As most of the builders on the tools had been employed informally through their social networks, informal group norms, traditions and reciprocal-style relationships with colleagues and subcontractors tended to regulate their work effort and labour market participation. Indeed, social networks and their ensuing morality had embedded the building labour market and work process within informal social relations (cf. Granovetter, 1985; Peck, 1996). This meant that competitive market dynamics were overlaid by strings of social and moral activity, partially shielding the builders from the capricious despotism of capitalist labour markets and managerial regimes, but also supporting and augmenting their class-bound working traditions.

Historical continuities I tell you this tale, which is strictly true, Just by way of convincing you, How very little, since things were made, Things have altered in the building trade. Kipling, quoted in Lynd and Lynd, 1929: 106 While the mass production of standardized products displaced numerous handcrafts across the development of modern capitalism, including building-associated work such as brick-making, stone polishing, turning, glazing and moulding, it did only little to affect the building trades themselves – especially by comparison to the upheavals to many other forms of work across the modern era. Even at the height of the industrial revolution builders were not impoverished by



Working ‘on the tools’  41

despotic forms of worker control. In the late nineteenth century, for instance, Frederic Engels argued that builders ‘form an aristocracy among the workingclass; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final’ (1969 [1892]: 31). Building work also avoided becoming dominated by industrial technology during this period. As Charles Booth observed: ‘As regards machinery little need be said, for the building trade is not an industry that is being revolutionised by the introduction of mechanical appliances, nor is it likely that this will ever be the case’ (1895: 134). Even today, like their historical forebears, contemporary bricklayers continue to place every brick by hand and spread cement to the surface of the bricks with a hand trowel (Woodwood, 1995); contemporary plasterers perform almost identical tasks with similar tools and materials to those of ancient Egyptian plasterers (Postgate, 1923); and, the tools, materials and work processes used by colonial and 1970s North American carpenters were strikingly similar (Reckman, 1979). As I described in Chapter 1, from the seventeenth century the organization and administration of building work did gradually alter, influenced by the rise of building professionals, and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the rise of general contracting companies. These developments, however, did not alter the fundamental physical skills required to build something; tasks that remain largely pre-industrial or even ‘pre-modern’ (Furukawa, quoted in Satoh, 1995). The building trades have, therefore, been quite immune to the dynamic outlined in Harry Braverman’s (1974) influential thesis about the increasing mechanization and control of manual work tasks in modern capitalism. Unlike the manufacture of multitudes of other consumer products, buildings are very large and heavy, and are consequently built directly into the space in which they remain and become ‘consumed’ – they, for the most part, cannot be made in factories and stored in warehouses awaiting sale. Also, unlike the manufacturing industry where production is commonly organized within a single space by Fordist assembly-line technology and scientific management principles, most parts of a building cannot be subdivided into small units and transported to a stationary worker. Builders must move around a structure, crossing into nature, taking the parts with them, adding to the structure and altering the shape of their workplace from moment to moment (Reimer, 1979). Related to this, building sites are labyrinthine areas which make observation problematic, disabling effective managerial and bureaucratic commands (see also Blum, 2000; Graves, 1958, 1970; Roberts, 1993). Bureaucracy is only effective where tasks can be routinized and observed (Weber, 1947 [1925]) and, consequently, the non-routine nature of building negates the prospect of successful managerial, technological or bureaucratic monopolization of task knowledge. Writing about the US construction industry, both Silver (1986) and Paap (2006) argue that subcontracting has, since the 1970s, increased intra-trade specialization in building, separating the work of, for instance, paper-hangers from that of painters or that of joiners from carpenters, and has thus deskilled many building

42  Working ‘on the tools’ trades. Yet, building trade specialization, in the UK at least, has been occurring since at least the eighteenth century (Clarke, 1992) and its effects may be more apparent on large, union-controlled, new constructions of the type described in US literature. On large, ‘new-build’ constructions – the making of a new building as opposed to ‘old-build’ renovation, repair and refurbishment works – building work can, to some degree, be organizationally divided into smaller standardized sections. The building of each section may closely mirror the next and, because of this, the work can, to a degree, be rationally organized and accounted for. Tradespecific work to each section can be better planned and estimated at a standard cost by quantity surveyors, and the tradesman may often be paid a set price for their work. Piecework or ‘price-work’ of this kind represents an effective form of market-based control that cajoles building workers through the threat of nonpayment or dismissal. However, as I have described, ‘new work’ accounts just over half of all building work, and a large proportion of that is specialist, ‘oneoff’ work characterized by complex interdependences, which for the most part cannot be adequately sub-divided and standardized (Bresnen, 1990). The vast majority of building work thus remains non-standardized and builders continue to be multi-skilled and paid on a daily or hourly rate rather than by task.1 The builders at Keyworker House were all paid by the day, and they had a quite unrivalled freedom compared with published accounts of many other manual work occupations: they enjoyed freedom of movement, culture, self-presentation, work task and work speed and, to some degree, the choice of who, and who not, to work for and with. The exigencies of building work necessitated that the trades were free to move around their product applying immediate, local and heuristic knowledge to it, and they consequently controlled their own work effort and task processes through informal group relations.

Methods of worker control It has been suggested by William Ouchi (1980) that three dominant types of relations regulate employment transactions in contemporary capitalist societies: market, bureaucratic and clan relations. Markets regulate employment through payment for performance of work tasks; bureaucracies through legitimized monitoring and prescription of work tasks; and clans through informal normative group processes (see also Etzioni, 1961). Ouchi maintains that clan relations – embedded in workers’ normative and taken-for-granted work ethics – emerge where work tasks are ambiguous and cannot be closely monitored or scientifically managed. In these contexts, clan relations produce trust and reduce ‘transaction costs’, and thus come to the fore in work organization – as they did at Keyworker House. However, market mechanisms, through the violence of dismissal, did lie at the base of this, and any other, employment relationship, whereby the ‘sting’ of the market anchored other forms of consent (cf. Burawoy, 1985). This may be especially the case for the ‘falsely self-employed’ who have little employment protection (see Chapter 1). Consequently, while the subcontracted builders



Working ‘on the tools’  43

were governed largely by informal clan-style work ethics rooted in their consent to capitalist wage payment, it was the market that ultimately supported these mechanisms through the ‘good old fashioned coercive possibilities’ (Newton, 1996: 143) of the violence of dismissal (cf. Swedberg, 2005). Yet, just as workers need jobs, jobs need workers, and where jobs are complex and cannot be effectively controlled through bureaucratic or despotic methods, employers and managers must ‘trust’ work group ‘clans’ to effectively undertake their work. Trust relationships at Keyworker House were framed largely by reciprocal associations between the self-employed builders on the tools and their subcontractors and site management – something very distinct to the highly formalized relations between the managers and building consultants in the site office that I described in the last chapter. Indeed, if managers’ or subcontractors’ lines of command were overly formalized, despotic, and/or conflicted with worker mores, hierarchy was laid bare and cooperation broke down, opening the door for conflict to surface fiercely. The consequence was that management was largely at the mercy of the builders’ informal mores because, for the clan to do their work, they needed to be ‘indulged’ in their rituals (Gouldner, 1954). The tradesmen and labourers thus held a level of power over their subcontractors and contractor management, resulting in site management, subcontractors and their employees settling upon a truce over the battle for work control and the effort bargain (cf. Behrend, 1957; Goodrich, 1975 [1920]).

The indulgency pattern My eldest brother works at [a] car plant. You watch them go into that factory – they go in there like they’re like robots. All go in on the hooter, all come out on the hooter. All clock-in at the same time, all clock-out at the same time. I couldn’t handle that. No fresh air, same place every day, all those rules, that’s not for me. Mike Fixit, maintenance man Alvin Gouldner, in his book Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954), compared the management of ‘subsurface’ miners with ‘surface’ factory workers at a gypsum plant in North America. The factory workers were placed predominantly under the control of formal bureaucracy and clear lines of authority that tightly dictated their movements and work tasks, and which intended to iron out their informal shop floor cultures. By contrast, the miners were ‘indulged’ in their informal work culture, which took the form of managers and foremen turning a ‘blind eye’ to lateness, absenteeism, pilfering, time banditry, and general group control over the working day – a management system that Gouldner called the ‘indulgency pattern’. The culture and methods of control of the builders were remarkably similar to those described in Gouldner’s indulgency pattern: lines of authority were often confused and always negotiable, and the workers were fiercely independent

44  Working ‘on the tools’ and protective of their autonomy. Like miners, builders of the same trade often worked side-by-side in tough, dirty and risky physical conditions; and they also worked outside of a career structure. The career offers a powerful mechanism to promote worker conformity that tends to iron out pre-existing traditional cultures (Grey, 1994; McKinlay, 2002), but career hierarchy was closed to the vast majority of the tradesmen and labourers (see Chapters 4 and 7) and thereby held no power over them. ‘Butlin’s’ This isn’t a proper building site, this is a holiday camp. They’re gonna change the sign at the front to Butlin’s next week. Bill, mechanical and electrical foreman The chippies for instance, they just baffle me because to me they’re just so slow … I never had that before. I miss the sort of buzz of being on a site where there’s a lot going on, you feel like there’s a lot of energy, things are going on and the building’s going up. Here it just seems so lethargic half the time. James, site manager The indulgency pattern resulted in the builders describing the job to me as a ‘holiday camp’ or ‘Butlin’s’ – the pace of work could often be quite slow. It was rare to see men running, rushing or sweating like some builders working more directly under the control of the market on (lump sum) ‘price-work’ jobs, or those apparently very conformist builders described in some US literature (see Paap, 2006). The multi-contingent and uncertain nature of ‘old work’ had kept the employment of price-work to a minimum at Topbuild, and the high value that the builders placed on their independence and autonomy negated their conformity to the commands of management and even the dictates of capital (see Chapter 4). Employment on ‘day work’ facilitated a sometimes slow work pace, and an illustration is provided in the following example from my fieldnotes: One afternoon [when I was participating with the labourers] I was sent from Keyworker House I to clean up four small apartments that had recently been refurbished at Keyworker House III. James, a site manager, escorted two of the labourers, Aidan and Seamus, and me, to Keyworker House III. We arrived there after a walk through central London across a distance of approximately one kilometre. James had purchased some soft drinks and snacks for us all and instructed us to get the flats clean and tidy, and to work around Bristles, a painter, and an electrician that I didn’t know, who were finishing the final stages of the refurbishment. James left, saying he would return in two hours.



Working ‘on the tools’  45 We were soon joined by the two maintenance men, Mike Fixit and Will, and we all began to chat and clean the flats in a leisurely manner. I entered one of the rooms to vacuum the floor and found the electrician asleep on a sofa, the Sun newspaper balanced upon his head to shield the light from his eyes. Aidan tapped me on the shoulder and jocularly whispered to me to ‘try to be quiet’ so as not to wake the electrician. I said with mirth: ‘sorry mate, didn’t mean to disturb you’, and left the room. We all began to joke about this, finding it quite hilarious. Comments such as: ‘Darren wants to see how building jobs are managed hey’; ‘this is a proper Topbuild job this one’; and ‘he’s doing a tidy job on those electrics in there’, became the focus of our talk. The labourers began to tell extraordinary stories about other Topbuild jobs where they had skived, or witnessed others skiving work. Three of us went into the ‘electrician’s room’ to sit down, smoke cigarettes, continue ‘the crack’,2 and devour the remaining drinks and snacks that James had left for us. We whispered, still joking around. The electrician woke up, saying: ‘Can’t a man get a decent sleep around here?’ And banter was exchanged. Will began to read volubly from advertisements in the Daily Sport newspaper for free sex from middle-aged women and swinging couples. Mike Fixit proceeded to ‘wind up’ Will, saying he should find himself a ‘real woman’ and see what sex was really like. It took two to have sex he said, it wasn’t something one did alone in their bedroom. Aiden continued to vacuum, occasionally peering around the door, winking and smiling. Bristles informed us he was going to the shop to buy some cigarettes. We never saw him again that day, and we all began to speculate whether James would really return to the job. We thought he probably would not we but could not be sure. Will argued that James always played squash on Wednesday afternoons, so he wouldn’t be back at all, and we began to talk about ‘getting off’ early. Seamus said: ‘Fuck it, I’m going down the pub’, and Will and Mike Fixit said they would take a slow walk back to Keyworker House I. I joined them and we walked leisurely through central London, looking in the shops and at the passing women. Will told me about his sexual conquests and prowess, while verbally taunting women on the street.

This was an extreme example of slow work pace and time banditry that took place during the afternoon when the trades generally did less work anyway (see Chapter 4), but it was not an isolated case. As another example, the housing management had once reported an electrician, Jimmy J, to the site management, for being found asleep at work on more than one occasion. Jimmy was not sacked for this but warned by Bill, the mechanical and electrical foreman, to sleep somewhere more secret if he was going to sleep at work at all. Butlin’s it was not, but there were solid reasons for the builders using such a metaphor: they were highly autonomous, their activity could be leisurely, and they were generally indulged in this.

46  Working ‘on the tools’ Steve, the project manager, talking about the labourers, illustrated how the indulgency pattern operated and why it could be beneficial from his point of view: You can soon read people and how they’re going to perform for you if they’re on day work, and, you know, and obviously, labourers – I know they do a bit of hanging around, a bit of swinging the lead every now and then, but I try and keep men I trust around me. And then when I want that little bit of extra, in fact I know I’m going to get it, and they ain’t going to grumble or complain. Because it’s an awkward one again, you know, labour in general. I’ve been on jobs that aren’t mine, just been there to help out and [labourers] they’re wandering around, standing leaning on the shovel and having the crack. You know, and I know you know, Pat and Patrick over there, James had to have the pits dug out and I know there was an element of that game. It’s frustrating because Kevin [quantity surveyor] sees it and gets the hump. But I say: ‘What am I fucking supposed to do, hold their hands?’ You’ve got to try and give people a bit of trust. And they don’t do it twice to me generally, they just won’t work for me again, you know, it’s as simple as that. Not in a confrontational way, but I just don’t want them near me if they’re not going to toe the line. I put a good effort in, why the fuck shouldn’t everyone else …? He continued: I think they do it generally … I don’t mind having a laugh and a crack and having a wind up and a joke, but when it’s work it’s work. And they’re not dealing with a Hitler, but even so said, someone that’s quite light hearted, I don’t mind talking about the family and kids, but we do want some work done … You have to strike relationships up here. People say: ‘Oh you got to distance yourself, wear a tie’ and fucking all that, ‘you’re the boss and they’re not’. But people resent that and they don’t, they fucking won’t work for you. And they think: ‘He’s a cunt he is, he can’t talk’ ... I don’t know quite what the word is, but it’s mixing it really. I think that works. A lot of people say it doesn’t, but in my history it works. You treat people with respect, they treat you with respect, that’s mutual … Steve knew the labourers did not work ‘flat-out’ all day long, and he was reluctant to become authoritarian towards them. But, by indulging them in this, he perceived that he maintained a workforce that was loyal and reciprocal, or ‘mutual’, when he really needed them to be. He saw it would be unprofitable to apply unilateral pressure because the men would not continue to work for him, and applying pressure was difficult because it was problematic to observe them; Steve could not ‘hold their hand all day’. Even if he could observe and put pressure on the labourers, because of the open access to most building jobs, if they



Working ‘on the tools’  47

disliked his command, they would be able to leave the site and go to another job if labour was in demand. It was co-operation that management demanded, not control.3 Aidan highlighted the importance of the mutual indulgency system from his perspective as a labourer: This is how I like it. People we’re working with you see, like the management team talk to us on first name terms. Because you can go on other sites and what they do is look down through their noses at you, you know what I mean? Cos there’s a lot of snobbery in the building game you know. They sort of think: ‘Labourer you’re a shit’ and all this business. But not with Steve and James and Pete, they muck in with us, have a joke and a laugh you know. There’s a lot of people in the building that sort of, they think they are above you, which there’s no need for it ... It’s like young Bobby [trainee quantity surveyor], I got to know him over at the Hackney job. First day I met him he says: ‘You see all that rubbish over there, I’m not trying to tell you what to do but is there any possibility of moving it out the way?’ I says: ‘Yeah no problem’, and then gradually I got to know him, then we became sort of buddies you know. That’s what I like to be like, that’s like a relationship. Then you get into banter and all this business. You know how to take Steve now, sort of being friendly, learn the ropes you know. Aidan disliked what he perceived as snobbery, and he made an explicit distinction to being told, as opposed to being asked, what to do. His sensitivity can be seen to reflect the nature of building trade status hierarchy and, particularly, his position as a labourer at the nadir of this. In this context, the symbolic injuries of a class-bound hierarchical system, which demean, stigmatize and objectify members of the manual working class (cf. Sennett and Cobb, 1972; Skeggs, 2004),4 could arise with disrespectful management demands: no one wants to feel like ‘a shit’ by virtue of their manual job. Mike Fixit, one of the maintenance men, elaborated: Steve and James, they’re not bad people to work for are they? It’s not like ‘I’m a site manager and you’re a labourer’ is it? It’s like you’re all friends. You take the piss out of them, they take the piss out of you … They get more [work] done on these jobs for the simple reason it’s the way they treat everyone. There’s none of this them and us … I mean if you ask anybody that’s worked in the building game say 20 or 30 years ago, you used to get the gangerman [foreman] would sneak round corners and watch what you were doing, make sure you’re not stopping and talking. They’d be patrolling the building site trying to catch you out. And in those days if you were caught talking and having a cigarette, that’s it, you were gone [dismissed]. Whereas on these sites if they see you standing and talking, nine times out of 10 they’ll come and join in the conversation. I think they’re, I mean, all

48  Working ‘on the tools’ the Topbuild jobs I’ve been on, they’ve been no different, you think nothing [work] is being done but they must be doing something right because they keep getting more work. I think they get more out of the men because they show the men real respect and if you got their respect they’ll give you it in return … It’s like Steve and James, they say can you do this for them. They ask you to do something almost as a favour, but you get some people and they are ordering you to do it, do this, do that. That don’t wash with me. If the boss is being an arsehole I’ll start looking for another job, simple as that … sod him. I’m here to do a day’s work and if I can’t get to do my day’s work without him standing behind me watching me or chasing me up every five minutes … I give them what I’m paid for. I’m not working harder for my money, I’m not working less for my money. They pay me X amount of money for the day and I give them that amount of work. That’s the way I look at it anyway. I don’t rush around because I’m not paid to rush around … I give them just enough to cover the money they pay me. If they want me to do more then they have to pay me more, simple as that. Mike comments that the management would ask the labourers to do things rather than tell them, ‘sort of as a favour’ and, because he saw this as respectful, he was willing to do an amount of work that he considered to be in line with his wages. Espousing a ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages’, Mike possessed a quasi-calculable form of work ethic that echoed Ouchi’s conceptualization of work as a transaction. In this sense, market control, while being coercive through the violence of dismissal, was also constructive through its being framed by workers as a ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’. However, Mike also said he would start looking for another job if the ‘boss is being an arsehole’, indicating that work meant more to him than simply wages. He also told me that he enjoyed his work, and he therefore approached his employment as one that possessed some intrinsic value (see below). The labourers and most of the tradesmen had accepted the right of the managers to manage if they were awarded what they saw as respect. It was thus apparent that it was not hierarchy per se that framed worker conflict, but the way in which it was administered (Burawoy, 1979; Edwards and Scullion, 1982; Hodson, 2002). If managers managed in a way that enabled workers to feel respected for their labour, class status inequalities did not arise and the builders on the tools undertook an informally agreed level of work with little conflict. In this respect, management hierarchy was hegemonic – its existence largely unquestioned. However, as Mike explains, if management did not adhere to the informal rules of the indulgency pattern, the situation was reversed and conflict surfaced. Bill, the mechanical and electrical foreman, gave another example: Then you get someone like John [junior site manager], now I don’t know how you get on with him, he’s probably, well I don’t really know him, but he’s a right bombastic little bastard. And I get on with anyone normally,



Working ‘on the tools’  49 but him? It’s just when people turn round and say: ‘I want it done now’. Normally I’d do it, I’d say: ‘Alright, yeah I’ll do it’. But when you get people saying: ‘I want it done now’, you won’t do it. I won’t follow his orders; I’ll try anything just to get up his nose, but it’s just the way he is. It’s why people like that, whether they get on or not in life, they won’t get on in the buildings [industry].

Bill was referring to the junior site manager who administered the smaller job at Keyworker House III. When he ordered Bill to do something, Bill resisted through stubborn non-cooperation where he would ‘try to do anything just to get up his nose’. If management administered orders without respect for informal workgroup culture, their hegemony broke down and worker cooperation ceased. All of the labourers acquiesced to the legitimacy of management hierarchy if it was administered with respect. However, the tradesmen’s situation was slightly different because they were much more autonomous than the labourers – and site management were almost invisible to them. This invisibility either made management a non-issue or sometimes engendered negative attitudes towards them. These attitudes most frequently centred on management enforcement of formalized rules onto the tradesmen’s workday. The bureaucratic and formalized nature of the office work was a particular source of disdain for the mechanical and electrical tradesmen who were most affected by it. One of them, Trick, explained: There seems so many office bods, and everybody you get in an office it seems that they’ve all got to establish some sort of paperwork routine. The reason that is, at the end of the day when you get to the bottom line, is that they’ve got to make themselves indispensable. Now if they start some little scheme off where they say: ‘Trick, everyday I want you to write in what you did there and then go and put it over there’, I mean they’re gonna stamp it and put into a file, and they’ve started this little chain going haven’t they … Everybody likes to get a bit of paper stamped and cleared, nobody bothers to look at the bit of paper to think, all this is, is did he clean the toilet out? What the fuck does it matter? Do you know what I mean? A lot of it is just nonsense ... I don’t have to see office side of things, I mean I’d love to see sometimes. I think I’d love to see what’s on these bits of paper and how important they are. I don’t say it’s all their fault because I suppose they’re being asked by the customer who wants a price for this and a price for that and a schedule for it all. And then the client don’t like the price or they don’t like the schedule and then it’s: ‘Oh, can you redo it’. So there’s that side of it for them … But bits of paper ain’t building the bloody thing is it. Trick conceded that the ‘paper chase’ might not have been ‘all their fault’, but he had difficulty in comprehending why some simple tasks were formalized and why so many management were required to do this who were essentially unproductive in building something. Management formality was non-comprehensible

50  Working ‘on the tools’ to him, perhaps because from his position on the tools other employment relations were overwhelmingly informal. Additionally, at certain points during the build, the numbers of managers were massively disproportionate to the number of manual workers on the site. For example, towards the completion of the first year of the works, most of the manual workers had been laid off or transferred to other sites, but the full number of site managers, quantity surveyors and foremen remained. Only one of the builders that I interviewed, Bristles, a painter, expressed an entirely anti-management attitude: I am a firm believer in this and I will stand by it 100 per cent: it’s always been them and us. And this most probably goes back to when I was stabbed in the back [in my old job working as a clerk] at Fleet Street, where I would never trust anyone in a tie. In the office, them and us, always. I’ve always said this, I wouldn’t trust them. Steve, I would not trust him, I would not trust that man with nothing. I wouldn’t trust him with my time keeping if I had a half a day off, I wouldn’t trust him not to tell Ernie Coat that I took a bit of paint home. I wouldn’t trust that man. That is a career Topbuild man. DT: But then Jamin works in the office and he comes walking in the canteen when you’re skiving and you just mess about with him? Jamin ain’t got a shirt and tie on has he? No, no, no, he’s not one of those, he never will be. I think deep down he’d like to be but I don’t think he ever will be. Because, well in that office he wouldn’t be, cos I think they’re, erm, they’re too far up their own arse and they are racist, … Like they are the bullies of the playground, especially when Steve and Kevin get together. Who the fuck do they think they are? I really do treat people as I find them. He could be a one-legged China man with dirty dark skin but if he’s all right, he’s all right by me. Bristles was disdainful of ‘anyone in a tie’, implying that wearing a tie was linked to a career aligned with business organization. Consequently he would not trust Steve to indulge him in the time banditry and pilfering which, as I describe below and in later chapters, were normal and taken-for-granted aspects of the builders’ activities and workplace mores. However, Bristles’ concerns were unfounded because Steve never wore a tie and he did indulge the workgroups in many of their informal desires. Steve also had no appetite to ascend the building career ladder any further than he already had done and he identified himself as ‘site’ rather than ‘office’, exhibiting some disdain for Topbuild’s ‘dead and stuffy head office’. In addition, informality became more pronounced as one ascended the hierarchy beyond the site office, where the relationships between senior Topbuild personnel and the consultants, and those between the site managers and subcontractors, were also characterized by high levels of informality embedded



Working ‘on the tools’  51

in long-term personal ties (see Chapter 8). Bristles’ disdain was, then, entrenched reflexively in his own class-bound prejudices, and not in the actuality of relations on the site itself. It was not hierarchy itself that provoked Bristles disdain, but its dualistic and class-bound nature which he constructed as ‘them’ (in the office) and ‘us’ (on the tools). Bristles’ past experiences and, I would argue, the invisibility of the managers to his autonomous work as a painter, had framed his negative attitudes towards them. Steve was aware of this lacuna in understanding, and it agitated him: It’s a very, very complicated job you know. I don’t think a lot of people realize what’s involved in what I do. There’s a lot of things going on here [in the office], and to actually co-ordinate it, even down to the labour, where the bloody labour goes, you know … There’s men out on site and you think ‘Fuck I must go and see them’, and you don’t. But they’re thinking: ‘He don’t give a fuck about what’s happening out here, he’s probably sitting in there swanning it up’. There is an element of that, but there is a lot of work going on you know, and sometimes you can’t get out [on site]. That’s where the building industry’s fucked: site managers stuck in the office and the general foreman runs the job.

Patterns of control For Bristles and the other tradesmen, managers – although symbolically and physically present – were, on an everyday basis, largely invisible. It was Bristles’ subcontractor, Ernie Coat, who represented a more visible and direct source of authority to him. Like Ernie, most of the subcontractors were employed by Topbuild on a fixed sum ‘price’ for their section of the works whereby they were directly controlled by market mechanisms. Consequently, if their part of the work was not adequately completed, the subcontractor would not get paid, and so it was in their interest, and not the site managers’, to have their employees work effectively. However, the labour and carpentry subcontractors, for instance, were contracted on a ‘direct day work’ basis. Topbuild paid a fixed daily sum to the subcontractors for each man contracted to work as opposed to paying a lump sum price. In this context, the site management had more interest in controlling the labourers and carpenters than the other trades, and, as a result, there was more interaction, and, perhaps, understanding, between them. Labourers So, labourers, all right they don’t earn the money they should earn, but then again in my mind, you can turn it [the tape recorder] off now, they are too fucking stupid anyway! Yeah but we [painters] don’t work, you know what I mean, we do fuck all, labourers really have to work … Let me explain myself to you … A painter is one above the food chain right, and labourers are one

52  Working ‘on the tools’ below him. A painter can tell a labourer what to do. Now these men are not stupid in their minds, some of them are very intelligent people, and I mean very intelligent, but they just can’t handle the pressure; a labourer just plods along … They have got the brain and they can do it, I mean, you see labourers doing bloody Times crosswords. It’s that they just can’t handle, maybe deadlines – a labourer don’t have any deadlines; two bags of sand this week, I might do one; need to sweep up, I’ll do it next week ... Bristles The labourers worked longer hours than the tradesmen and the mostly physical nature of their work meant they often worked harder. Their position of being more directly answerable to the managers also meant they were more regularly tied into a web of command. This is demonstrated in Bristles description of labouring work above, and was physically manifest in the positioning of the labourers’ tearoom next to the site office in both Keyworker House I and II, which meant that management could closely monitor their working and break hours. Yet, even under such close observation, the labourers retained a degree of autonomy and did not work ‘flat out’, nor did they labour for their formally specified work times. Starting work slightly late, drawing out breaks, malingering and finishing slightly early was a very well outlined informal rule for the labourers. Illustrative of this was my first day labouring at Keyworker House when Aidan gave me instructions about the unofficial working hours. Time-talk of this kind is common, and discovering the unofficial work times is frequently part of the ‘first day on the job’ building site foci. I do not remember ever working ‘day work’ on a building site where I laboured the full official hours. Aidan described the intricacies of the elicitation and transmission of these informal mores: When I first started I like to suss things out. I’ll say: ‘What time do you go to tea’ and all this business, yeah. I roughly know what it’s like, but you don’t really know. Like I’d never met Danny before [and] I’m thinking: ‘Does he let us in before 10 [for tea break], or does he let us in here just after 10 you know. Sort of, the proper time’s half seven till half past four [for a full workday], but then you find out the crack and say: ‘What sort of time do you get away’? It’s like the first week I was here, I’d been paid yeah; I’d started on the Monday and started sussing it out. So I wanted to go to the bank and I hadn’t seen Patrick [a fellow labourer] for a couple of months, so we were going for a drink [in the pub]. What I done was I left about 20 to 10, went around the bank and err, paid me money in, went to Benjy’s [sandwich shop] as well. Then I come back, back before 10. Come in, sat there: ‘Where’s the nearest bank’ I says (laughs), and everyone’s telling me: ‘It’s up there’ and all this business … when I’d already been you know … Then me and Patrick got a few pints in ... Danny don’t mind, he goes for a drink himself.



Working ‘on the tools’  53

The labourers, including Danny their foreman, would begin work 15 to 20 minutes later than their official 7.30am start; would leave to ‘go to the shop’ at least 15 minutes before each break time, and finish their breaks 15 minutes late. They would also begin to ‘get ready’ to go home around half an hour before they were formally supposed to leave, and almost always left 15 minutes early. Site management were clearly aware of this but they indulged the labourers, handing out informal concessions in order to manufacture and embellish reciprocal and thus consenting trust relations. In a similar vein, Danny, despite never being late for work himself, indulged the lateness of ‘his lads’. For example, one of the labourers, Patrick, was regularly late and hung-over as a result of excessive alcohol intake the night before. Danny would simply tell him, in his avuncular manner – despite being younger than Patrick – to try to be on time tomorrow, ‘because Steve will start to say something’. Patrick was also found asleep on one occasion, apparently because he had had a ‘big one’ the previous night. To facilitate management control of the labourers, Danny was issued with a two-way radio through which he received orders from the site management and the general foremen. This functioned to skirt some of the difficulties occasioned by the labyrinthine physical space of the building, which blocked lines of command. Danny spent much of his day moving around the site, monitoring where his labourers were, and what they were, or were not, doing. Often he ‘mucked in’ and ‘did a bit’ with them, and, in this respect, he was subject to many of the same work pressures as the workers on the tools, and more (see below). When I worked alongside the labourers, Danny appeared to have a peculiar talent of appearing seemingly from nowhere saying in his distinctive Donegal accent: ‘please, please, let’s have some production’ when he found us malingering – ‘leaning on shovels’ and ‘having the crack’. Frequently, however, we would hear his radio or spot him before he spotted us and we would jump into performing our work (see Chapter 4). There were also times that Danny could not find us because Keyworker House contained numerous areas in which to hide, and the labourers also possessed an armoury of excuses to justify their invisibility or inactivity: ‘I had to go to the bank’, or, ‘I had to go to the shop to get some fags [cigarettes]’, being almost institutionalized in builder-speak for almost anything but having been to the bank or shop. Alternatively, ‘I couldn’t find a barrow’, or, ‘we hit loads of rocks digging this out’, as excuses for having done little work. The fact that the labourers were informally allowed to leave work early to go to the shop or bank revealed that despite their being at the ‘bottom of the food chain’, they were afforded a certain amount of autonomy uncharacteristic of descriptions of many other types of manual workers. Free from lines of command, the labourers would work at their own rate, ‘taking their time’. For instance, when Steve was not on site, the perceived pressure of his authority was positively reduced, and the labourers, including Danny, would become more relaxed in their work. Yet this did not mean that they became undisciplined when authority was absent. When I was working with the labourers, Danny went on holiday to Ireland for two weeks, but our effort and

54  Working ‘on the tools’ hours of work remained the same: we simply worked in a more psychologically relaxed manner. Reciprocal relations between the labourers and Danny, their subcontractor, and the site management, meant that they never engaged in total malingering, and sometimes there was a large element of what was termed ‘hurry up’. A hole would need to be dug ‘now’ because, for instance, the screeder would be arriving that afternoon to fill the hole, or a ‘waiting load’ skip would have to be filled fast because the skip was paid for only for a short duration. During these times, the labourers could be trusted to work fast and hard: as Steve said above: ‘when I need them to do something for me, they do it’. The labourers informally knew this was the protocol and were implicitly aware they could lose their indulgent concessions if they failed to observe the rules of the game – or, as Aidan said above: ‘You know how to take Steve now, sort of being friendly, learn the ropes you know’. These conditions were an effect of the reciprocal clan-type work transactions at Keyworker House; the labourers really could be trusted to carry out work unsupervised. Hard-paced aspects of the work could also turn into masculinity contests in which each man would try to outwork the next or at least keep-up with the group, which even engaged the older men. The contests were maintained by ‘piss-takes’; slights that somebody or another was not ‘pulling his weight’, or, at least, the thought that piss-takes would occur. In this situation, a form of working-class masculinity framed an aspect of the ‘clan’s’ work ethic and served to partially govern social organization at the site – I expand on this in Chapter 6. Foremen and the diffusion of power Jamin, the carpentry and general foreman, spent around half of his time instructing ‘his chippies’ and overseeing all the other trades; the other half was spent in the site office. Like Danny’s role, Jamin’s foreman position extended the power of management out to those working on the tools, but in so doing it simultaneously defused some of that power. For the foremen, such diffusion was exacerbated because, as outlined Chapter 1, they were members of the same social network communities as their workers. Jamin, for example, told me that he had known most of the carpenters for much of his life. He was thus entwined in the social pressures and loyalties of a close-knit ethnically bound network, and he held a strong allegiance to the carpenters that abridged his commitment to management goals. Foremen organized the flow of work and materials and communicated with subcontractors and managers. Some of the men were willing to perform this role for a little extra wage and status, but they also commonly expressed an aversion to it, especially on larger jobs where they had to deal with unknown workers and managers. Foremen had to be trusted in particular ways by the management, but they spent the majority of their day working alongside their ‘blokes’ and not ‘in the office’. The foremen were, then, in the difficult position



Working ‘on the tools’  55

of having to show allegiance to and gain respect from their workers while simultaneously appeasing their subcontractor and the site management. Jamin provided an illustration: I don’t really like doing the foreman stuff, I don’t really like doing it at all. It’s too much hassle man, too much hassle. You’ve got to try and get the blokes to do as much work as you can, which puts you on the bad side of them. I’m not really that type of person to shout and scream. I mean I’m quite happy if I’ve got like four decent blokes who don’t need to be told to hurry up and all that, then I’m quite happy. When you start getting big jobs and loads of chippies, it pisses me off. You’ve got to try and keep them in the office happy, and you’ve got to try and keep your governor [subcontractor] happy, all three of them, so you’re in the middle, whipping boy in the middle ... I would much rather earn £5 a day less and come to work and get my tools out, take my time, do my work and go home … The foremen’s position was that of a ‘marginal man’ whereby: ‘The poor fellow is in the middle, of course, in the sense that a person may be the middle one of three in a bed; he gets it from both sides!’ (Wray 1949: 301). Indeed, because of the additional presence of subcontractor middlemen, the Topbuild foremen actually got it from behind as well as both sides. All the foremen I interviewed told me that the quality of their role depended upon who they had working for them. In particular, a high turnover of workers made their jobs difficult, again highlighting the importance of networked trust in the building work organization. As Danny, the labour foreman, told me: Not a problem being the gangerman [foreman] here really, a decent group of blokes you work with and it’s no problem. It’s different when you’re on a big job and it’s a high turnover of men, new fish coming in, and it would be totally different. Not on this firm, it’s no problem. Yeah, no high turnover like some. It was for these reasons that most of the builders on the tools did not wish to climb the building ranks. I was never told that they did not want to become part of the management because it was not ‘men’s work’ or that it was seen as a job of the bourgeois enemy. They simply did not want the extra responsibility of becoming the ‘whipping boy in the middle’. Further, many, like Jamin, expressed a desire to remain working on the tools because they wanted to be ‘left alone’ and ‘take their time’, retaining their independence. For foremen, time was no longer their own; they lost the autonomy characteristic of the tradesman and were unable to be the unrushed master of their work but, rather, were obliged to respond to others’ demands (see Chapter 4).

56  Working ‘on the tools’ Carpenters and indulgent backlash The carpenters and joiners are the top-hats of the building trade… the elite among operative builders. Booth, 1895:72, italics original Akin to labouring work, much of the carpentry was almost impossible to plan prospectively, and it was consequently difficult to estimate lump-sum costs for the woodworking. Although the carpenters were paid directly by the day from their subcontractor, they remained answerable to some degree to Topbuild’s site management, particularly through Jamin’s organizational position. The carpenters’ work also varied from the labourers in that they were more autonomous and held a much higher trade status. For example, they might be instructed which doors to fit or windows to replace, but they were relied upon and trusted to know how to do this, and they thus undertook it in their own way, under their own control and largely at their own rate. Partly as a consequence, jokes concerning the carpenters’ slow pace of work were common, and it was an image that enraged one of the site managers, who was also spitefully racist. When the main volume of work shifted from Keyworker House I to Keyworker House II, the carpenters were instructed by that site manager to take their breaks in the labourers’ canteen adjoining the site office. The site manager wanted to bring them closer to his command and he began to enforce formal working hours. This occurred near end of my fieldwork, but it was evident that the enforcement of a formal time schedule was already beginning to promote dissent. Arguments occurred, and one of the carpenters informed me that he was now looking for another job because of the actions of the ‘fuckin’ bastard’ site manager. The site manager had refused to indulge the carpenters’ informal work hours and a backlash was beginning to form. Conflict ensued and the carpenters slowed down their work rate further, defaulting on their informal effort bargain. In response, the site manager employed two building agency carpenters to ‘prove’ the Kutchis were slow. This, much to the Kutchis’ enjoyment, backfired because the ‘agency blokes’ worked at an even slower rate. I once commented to Jamin that I thought one of the agency blokes had died while repairing one of windows because I had not seen him move for 30 minutes. Jamin said: ‘That’s the best fuckin’ thing that fat cunt’s [racist site manager] done since he’s been here, getting those agency blokes in’. It looked liked the Kutchis were winning the battle just as I left the field. The event above illustrates a number of factors. First, to remove workers’ informal concessions was counterproductive; it functioned to provoke conflict and erode cooperation. As builders possess a high degree of autonomy and are self-employed under little regulation and with few career opportunities, they are effectively free to find other work if labour is in demand. Second, administering indulgence is contingent upon the political views of the administrator – if a manager holds antipathy towards an employee or group of employees, he is



Working ‘on the tools’  57

unlikely to indulge them. Third, building workers paid by the day must be trusted and reciprocated for their work. ‘Agency blokes’ are widely known for being slow and poorly skilled. This may be partly because they owe no allegiance to anyone because they are employed short term, on a low(er) wage rate, and thus are not pulled by loyalty towards any kind of reciprocal relation with a core work group, subcontractor or site manager. Painters The painters form perhaps the most disorganised and composite group in the building trade, not excepting the labourers. The chief explanation of this is found in the character of their work, for the class includes many kinds of operatives, from the ‘brush-hand’ who has picked up a certain knack, and who may be anything (or nothing) from a sailor to a waiter or a scene-shifter; or from the mere hanger-on, supported by his wife’s earnings when he has no painting job on hand, to a highly skilled decorator, who, constant to the craft of which he is master, would consider it an indignity to be ranked with the industrial gadabouts who call themselves his fellow craftsmen. Booth, 1895: 79 As I have described, for all of the trades except the carpenters and labourers, the subcontractor was paid for the work on a fixed lump-sum price but the subcontractors themselves continued to pay most of their employees by the day. In this work relationship, it was the subcontractor, and not Topbuild’s site management, who held an interest in securing an effort bargain with their workers. Yet Topbuild’s subcontractors organized jobs on other building sites all around London. They could not then be at a single job observing their workers all the time and had to a large extent to trust them to work to an efficient speed and quality. Here I discuss the painting group in order to illustrate these patterns of subcontractor– employee relationship and the ensuing organization of their work. I joined the painters near the end of my fieldwork at the beginning of the ‘Year 2’ works to decorate the external face of Keyworker House II. I had been a participant observer with the labourers and in the site office prior to this and, after my first day working with the painters, I wrote: It was very hot today and I found the work quite tiring, but the day just flew by, it seemed like half a day. In a way it was a short day, as we didn’t start until about eight o’clock and were off the scaffold by three. [One of the painters] Bony said ‘officially’ we finish at four, but we actually started later and finished earlier than both the labourers and the chippies. Field notes The painters’ official work hours were 7.30am until 4.00pm. Every morning we would begin to organize our tools and materials at 8.00am. By 9.45am we

58  Working ‘on the tools’ would be returning from the scaffold to go to the shop to buy our breakfasts; at 10.30am we went back out to work; at 12.45pm we would ‘down tools’ for our lunch; and at 1.30pm we returned to the scaffold. The painters’ informal work times were always regular, and Jimmy, the painting foreman, did not like them to be broken. However, finishing times in the afternoon varied, and afternoons were always a more leisurely affair because physical energy and concentration was depleted during the morning shifts. Most commonly we went to ‘put our tools away’ between 3.00pm and 3.30pm, but often it was earlier than this. Even if we were told by Jimmy not to leave work before 3.30pm, we would almost always ‘down tools’ at around 2.30pm and stand around chatting and moaning that we wanted to ‘get off’ to go home. The painters work times were not monitored by the site managers at all, who, as I have mentioned, were so distant from the painters’ work world so as to be virtually invisible. The painters took their breaks in their own tearoom, and management rarely came out of the office on to the scaffold to where the painters worked. Occasionally, Jamin would walk past the painters on the scaffold, but he generally left them to undertake the work unsupervised. However, the faster the work was completed, the more profit the painting subcontractor, Ernie Coat, would accrue. Ernie could not, however, be around to monitor ‘his’ painters all the time, rather he made ‘random’ spot-checks and otherwise had to put trust in the painting foreman, Jimmy, to oversee his workforce. Yet, Jimmy, like Danny the labour foreman, faced the same impositions of time and energy as his painters – as did all of Ernie’s other painting foremen working on his various other building jobs across London. As a consequence, the painters on the many sites where Ernie had subcontracts would collude with one another on their mobile phones as to his whereabouts.5 Spot checks were, therefore, never completely random. The painters’ inter-site collusion was carefully crafted. Many of Ernie’s painters had worked for him for a long time and, as a consequence, they had developed between them an informal theory that predicted his daily and weekly routine activities. The painters’ shared membership of local social networks meant that they not only shared Ernie as an employer but also lived in close geographic proximity to one another, frequenting a small number of pubs there, and/or having long-standing family or friendship connections (see Chapter 5). As I described in Chapter 1, Ernie used these networks efficiently to recruit trusted labour, but their tight-knit nature also acted to empower the painters to conspire against him. During tea and lunch breaks, Jimmy’s phone would ring with information from one of the other sites as to Ernie’s whereabouts. Usually, one of the ‘lads’ would also have some information to share as they had also spoken on the telephone that day to their painter friends. This enabled Ernie’s movements to be specifically pinpointed and, if Jimmy concluded from the information that there was little chance of Ernie visiting Keyworker House that day, the painters would leave work early, but never before 2.30pm. I guess that Ernie was aware of the ongoing



Working ‘on the tools’  59

cat and mice game but the power of performance outstripped actuality (Goffman, 1955, 1959; discussed at length in the following chapter). Furthermore, Ernie’s paternalist relations with his workers also functioned to glue them into an effort bargain that meant they never left work before 2.30pm, even when Ernie was on one of his numerous holidays to Spain. The painters always fulfilled their collectively agreed informal work effort and hours, and, if they did not, Jimmy was present to enforce the rule. For example, one of the painters, Frank, was regularly aggressively reprimanded and threatened by Jimmy with the sack because of his inexperience, low skill and an amphetamine addiction which meant he tended to complete less work within the informally specified times than the other painters. This pressurized Jimmy, who thought that Frank could expose the game and clearly outline their time banditry. The situation led to the ill treatment of Frank by Jimmy and most of the other painters whereby Frank was frequently made a scapegoat for almost any problem that arose. He was depersonalized through epithets such as ‘useless cunt’ and ‘stupid arsehole’, apparently once had a cash wage packet stolen from him, and he was eventually dismissed (described in Chapter 6). Snake in the grass To commit the acts of time banditry and other informal work activities that are discussed in the following chapters, the work groups had to trust one another not to let the team down and expose their activities. Intra-workgroup trust was vigorously maintained and enforced through tough sanctions applied to lowskilled and disliked workers such as Frank, and also though the demonization of informers, or ‘grasses’, who held a very low status among the men – almost akin to the devil. The builders’ disdain for the grass, and its function, was succinctly expressed by Bristles: Certain people in the tearoom, if they had a chance of dropping other people in it, I’m sure they would. Why don’t they? Cos your life wouldn’t be worth shit in the buildings if you grassed. I’m easy going and laid back but if someone grassed me up, well, that’s a different story. Grasses are just not acceptable. I mean they [the labourers] still talk about that 60-year-old bloody labourer [Phil] they worked with [at an older job] at Curtain Street … They call him a grass in respect of, he’s gone to work one day and saw the previous bloke not doing anything, he’s most probably told the site agent [manager] that he’s no good, he’s not pulling his weight. Now that’s something you just can’t do ... You have to watch the seeds you lay. ‘Grasses are just not acceptable’. The work groups needed to ‘keep things quiet’ because they were continually deviating from formal rules. Any group that engages in transgressive practices will necessarily attempt to influence its members to keep information about these within the group because they must

60  Working ‘on the tools’ manage impressions of their activities that are perceived as authentic. In the workplace, grasses would fracture authenticity, break down the indulgency pattern and smash informal relations with subcontractors and/or management (cf. Goffman, 1955) resulting in a loss of informal worker concessions. Through their demonization of particular activities and characters, the builders were thus able to expel from the site those whom they did not trust or like (see also Foster, 1969), thereby maintaining the value of the social capital contained in their network relations (cf. Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 1993; and Chapter 7) and improving the quality of their working day. Aidan illuminated this point: [Phil] he’s one of those fellows who doesn’t understand why people don’t get on with him. He tried to make himself out to be Danny’s best mate, which was a lie anyway. Danny tolerated him, kind of showing a front all the time. [Phil] he was telling me I wasn’t doing this properly, I wasn’t doing that properly. He’s one of those fellows sort of, he’s gonna get me off this site as fucking soon as possible, fuckin’ grass me up, which was no reason for. Course you notice it in the [workgroup] camp, no one sort of got on with him. He jacked [left the job] in the end anyway ... Look at it this way, your working day, don’t get me wrong, but I’m more with you during the day than I am with my girlfriend. I see her two or three times during the week. I ain’t being funny but you got to get on with everyone … I hate that when someone new comes on board saying this and that. I was working with him [Phil] for about a week and he was always looking down to me saying, sort of telling me what to do. Until that Saturday morning come and I just blew up [became aggressive] on top of the scaffold. He was a fuckin’ funny fucker he was, oh Jesus, cranky as fuck.

Work ethic and craft satisfaction Both the painting and the labouring group were involved in clawing back time from formally scheduled work hours, and the carpenters were involved in a battle over informal working times and trade autonomy. Through my observations of the work rates and times of the other trade groups, it was evident that each group expected to manage their own time and tasks. It might be assumed that the reason for this was because they did not enjoy their work and were trying to avoid it, but that would be an incorrect assumption. In a number of accounts of building workers they are shown to derive satisfaction and enjoyment from their work (Applebaum, 1981; Eisenberg, 1998: 87-96.; Kidder, 1985; LeMasters 1975; Reimer, 1979), and those at Keyworker House were no exception. Bill for instance, was a work enthusiast: I love being an electrician. As I say I’ve always liked working and I get job satisfaction. All weekends I work at people’s houses. I do my own private work and you see it, the finished product. It’s just job satisfaction when you know you’ve gone in there, you’ve explained what you’re gonna do and they



Working ‘on the tools’  61 either like it or they don’t like it, but you know there’s a finished article.

Gerry, a painter, also ‘loved’ his work: ‘Oh, I love it, I really love it. I wouldn’t rather do anything than be a decorator. Some jobs are just beautiful.’ Bapu, a carpenter, echoed this: Some people like drinking, well, he’s an alcoholic. I like working, I’m a workaholic. I like to be the workaholic, I love the work! A lot of time I work the weekend as well. So I built a staircase, I made it myself, and the window as well, new window, I made it myself, you know what I mean … Some don’t like to do the skilled work or the hard work, but I like it here, love it. Still I love it. I’m never tired it’s true. I never get bored. I never have day off. Only an emergency, then I can take the day off. Otherwise I come in working every day without a fail. Work is important you know. The tradesmen all expressed enjoyment in making something or in producing a ‘finished article’. As they could see the product of their labour and be masters of their production, most of them enjoyed and took pride in their work, and, as Bapu comments, work itself held an important value to them. These were not however the only reasons for their work satisfaction. Take, for instance, Jamin, talking about his trade as a carpenter: I do enjoy the actual work, and what I like about it is I’ve been doing it a long time now and I don’t have any difficulties with it. I know really what’s what and I can get on with it literally with my eyes closed, you know, no hassle, not having to look after anybody or make sure they’re doing it right, do my work, go home. Peace of mind basically, no paperwork involved, no nothing ... On the tools it’s no problem, don’t have to think about nothing, just get yourself to work, do your work, done. And I’m the type of person that likes to do a good day’s work, you know, I hate people telling me that this is not enough work. If anybody was to ever tell me that right, I’d walk off … He continued: If there is one good thing that I can say about the building game, which I have enjoyed, is the freedom, the freedom and the change of environment, change of jobs. I’ve been here [at Keyworker House for] a year and a half and it’s the longest I’ve been on a [single] building site and I don’t like it man. I’m not fussed do you know what I mean, it’s a living, and it’s decent money so I can’t complain really. The freedom, it’s one of the few bonuses. You’re usually left to get on with it and you can move around and get to see new places and new faces. I must have worked in every single part of London in my time. I mean looking at it, I can’t hate it because I wouldn’t be in it. I suppose everybody moans about what they do.

62  Working ‘on the tools’ Jamin enjoyed the freedom and peace of mind of his autonomous work as carpenter, which had been eroded by his role of general foreman. Freedom and the change of environment and jobs is the antonym of the severe insecurity that the ‘falsely self-employed’ face, and autonomy was a highly valorized aspect of the builders’ workplace mores and masculine identities, which I elaborate on in the following chapters.

Conclusion A number of writers have emphasized a capitalist dynamic that increasingly controls and degrades work tasks (Braverman, 1974; Marcuse, 1988 [1941]; Marx, 1949 [1887]; Ritzer, 1996; Sennett, 1998; Weber, 1992 [1930]). However, as I have described, building work has been largely immune to this dynamic because of its unique product environment. Organizing builders necessitates trust and cooperation, rather than naked control. Even under the most despotic management conditions, numerous workplace studies reveal that employees rarely passively submit to managerial authority (Beynon, 1973; Burawoy, 1979; Collinson, 1992; Glucksmann, 1982; Goodrich, 1975 [1920]; Gouldner, 1954; Graham, 1995; Mayo, 1933; Roy, 1952; Taylor and Walton, 1971). Work groups tend to resist formal commands, and control itself can manufacture resistance, especially if it is perceived as arbitrary (Edwards and Scullion, 1982; Hodson, 2001). As all human labour is resistant to various degrees, it cannot be totally commoditized. It is not possible to alienate labour from its incumbent person who, unlike ‘pure commodities’, has desires, goals and emotions other than to sell themself to the market (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). Indeed, market wages were not an effective enough mechanism to cajole workers into action (cf. Brown, 1988). The labourers and tradesman at Topbuild were not pure instrumentalists because they demanded also non-pecuniary rewards for their labour; most saliently, respect and indulgence. In order to maintain trust and cooperation, it was necessary for subcontractors and managers to indulge workers in their informal mores and practices, ceding significant autonomy to them. This served to cushion the builders against the more extreme effects of the labour market and labour process through embedding their rates of work and employment practices in informal mores, thereby shielding them from despotic managerial authority and the sting of the market. The state would step in to mitigate extreme market outcomes though its provision of welfare to cushion the worst effects of unemployment, but unemployment is morally violent (Skeggs, 2004) and was not an option for the builders whose work, as I expand on in the following chapters, was a fundamental source of their life styles, status, social identity and ontology (cf. Marx, 1959 [1844]; Muirhead, 2004; Sennett, 2008). It can be seen, then, that labour markets and labour process at Topbuild did not follow the standard patterns of ideal-typical product markets (see Peck, 1996; Granovetter, 1974; Thiel, 2010). Capitalist markets, including labour markets,



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also require some form of political or legal regulation in order to stabilize market relations and thus prevent business malfeasance and capricious fluctuations in market prices and employment rates. Without such regulation, capitalism could not operate effectively or enduringly (Polanyi, 1957, 2001 [1994]). The labour market in the deregulated UK construction industry was, however, largely freed from state and legal regulation and was thus subject to highly capricious price and employment variation. The subcontracted builders were, in a purely market sense, at the mercy of its forces, as were their subcontractors. Yet, what can be seen from this and Chapter 1 is that the work groups had re-embedded their labour market and employment relations in alternative informal relations – practising a form of archaic ‘moral economy’ (Thompson, 1971). These relations were framed by working traditions and the moral exigencies of the builders’ social networks that both controlled and reproduced adequate and cooperative supplies of labour, and thus were a central organizing feature of construction work and economy.

Chapter 4

Time, recreation and workplace culture

This chapter examines the underlying temporal structure of the workday that underpinned aspects of the builders’ time banditry and some elements of their informal work cultures that I described in the last chapter. I examine how work and task time was anchored by the temporal nature of modern capitalism, which impinged on the builders’ physical work rhythms, task autonomy and job satisfaction. In response, however, the builders’ had collectively developed aspects of workplace culture and activity that they used to filter and subject temporal structures, enabling them to toy with and transform the nature of time and its constraints. The builders’ informal cultures, then, not only attenuated the worst effects of capricious labour markets and formal command, but they also managed the temporal impositions on their working lives. This chapter also demonstrates how, associated with the rise of building professionals across the development of modernity, building design was separated from its construction, which also impinged on the builders’ workday, affected the build process in negative ways, and which provided a salient symbolic backdrop to the builders’ class-bound identities.

Temporal capitalism As the seventeenth century moves on the image of clock-work extends, until, with Newton, it has engrossed the universe. Thompson, 1993 [1967]: 352. The development of mature capitalism was not only contingent on partially commoditized free labour employed to generate surplus value (Marx, 1949 [1887]), but it was also deeply dependent on a changing nature and organization of time (Thompson, 1993 [1967]). Capitalist markets are virtual time machines where commodity exchange and price-setting are immensely faster than premodern forms of production and exchange that involved long strings of reciprocal relationships and barter (see Polanyi, 2001 [1944]; Sahlins, 2003 [1972]). Profit is also contingent upon speed – the faster commodities are produced for sale and sold, the more profit is generated. As Henry Ford understood, the quicker



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workers produced goods for the market, the more wages they could be paid, enabling them to become mass consumers and further augment Ford’s profits. In other words, in capitalist societies, both production and exchange are speeded up intensely, and time is money. Modern temporality has also developed as a measure and mechanism of control, coordinating human life and demarcating social activity (Foucault, 1991 [1975]; Thrift, 1990). The dictates of the timetable delineate work time and effort, and the intensification of capitalist temporality and ensuing Taylorist measures of task time impose on workers to work, and work fast. Modern capitalism has thus transformed both the use and nature of time, and, in the history of UK building industry, this led to building workers becoming increasingly rushed and ‘sweated’ as quantity often replaced quality in the building of many types of structures (Price, 1980; Tressell, 1965 [1914]). This is clearly reflected in the changing speed of constructions and the rate at which building workers undertake their labour. For example, pre-modern forms and notions of time meant that guild-organized building was, from a contemporary point of view, a quite leisurely and sometimes drunken affair. A fifteenth century bricklayer would, for example, lay 300 bricks in one 12-hour day, with part of his wage paid in beer (Woodwood, 1995). The early twentieth century bricklayer, on the other hand, was ostensibly expected to lay up to 750 bricks per day (Price, 1980). Today, bricklayers, on average, lay 350 bricks in an eight-hour day, and no longer receive beer as part of their wage.1 It can be assumed that medieval builders ‘took their time’ and many of their remaining works are a testament to the quality that ensued partly from their ability to do this.

Temporal cultures Modern time frames organize contemporary working days and immerse working lives in formally organized and synthetically imposed Newtonian or, metronomic, time forms (Adam, 1990; Thompson, 1993 [1967]). Intensified temporal framing of work and social life more broadly, is, however, rarely passively submitted to, but is interpreted through the screen of culture that enables adjustment and adaptation to temporal impositions (see Glucksmann, 1982; Roy, 1990 [1960]). Likewise, on the tools at Keyworker House, formal time schedules did not concretely delineate work activities but, as I suggested in the last chapter, these were collectively and informally negotiated. Between the builders on the tools there were frequent conversations and comments about time. These were as common a topic as those that focused on sport, the work, women, narcotics and the pub: ‘Is it nearly breakfast yet?’, ‘It’s bloody draggin’ today innit?’, ‘Christ, it’s gone fast this morning’, ‘Only another two days ‘till Friday’, ‘Do you reckon we’ll get away early today?’, were regular comments. Almost a century ago, Robert Tressell had noticed something similar:

66  Time, recreation and workplace culture [W]hen the workers arrived in the morning they wished it was breakfasttime. When they resumed work after breakfast they wished it was dinnertime. After dinner they wished it was one o’clock on Saturday. Tressell, 1965 [1914]: 92 Temporal imposition was something at the forefront of the builders’ minds and, if they could not effectively learn how to negotiate it, the quality of their work life was substantially reduced. For example, one Friday morning when I was working with the painters, we were drinking tea and getting changed into our overalls (‘whites’), for the day ahead. Everyone was sanguine, saying things like: ‘Thank fuck its Friday today’, and ‘Best day of the working week today’. Depressingly, I commented that the problem was that we would have to come back to work and start all over again on Monday. Perry replied: ‘As long as I get the weekend in between I don’t mind’. He had adjusted his thinking to the time cycle. Another of the painters, Gerry, expressed his view of work time and intricately described how he adjusted to its imposition: We always seem to be away nice and early [on this job]. On some sites you’ll be fuckin’ about until twenty to five, I can’t hack that, it flies by on here. Everything’s in sections, just think about sections, units of time. There’s only so many units in the day; three main units: morning till breakfast, breakfast till lunch, then just the afternoon. I think of it all in sections; first, second and third section … There’s so many ways of killing time, you become an expert at it, so many ways: ah, let’s go and get the steps; go and get some paint. After so many years of fuckin’ working then you know how to deal with it. You’re just going on for years so what is the rush? Time is only made by man isn’t it? Years ago they used to have time to do that work, why the rush? What’s coming, a fuckin’ comet or something? … The next thing I look around and I’m 67 [years old] and so on. Isn’t it strange that we wish time away when we don’t have enough time to do all the things in the world? It’s very fuckin’ strange because when you’re on your deathbed you’ll be wishing your way back again. I’ll wish I was back 25 years on that scaffold and it’s twenty-five past eight … He continued: Monday, Friday, back to Monday, long day, everything just comes back round. That is life ... It’s continuous, it will never end, continuous, nothing ends … Well this is what I think anyway. It’s like we’re all in a routine, course we are aren’t we? We’re often thinking ahead, it’s very hard to join the moment of time, just go with it and flow with it. There’s something special about taking the day as it is. Most of the time we’re jumping behind or jumping forward, and we wind our own heads up. We really do overload,



Time, recreation and workplace culture  67 its madness. If not, we’re chasing fuckin’ shadows, we really are, and we’re being used ... Just part of the fuckin’ machinery … but they’re using us and we’re using them, everybody’s using everybody ... It’s so unfair, I believe in a more equal world … But I’ve had some of the greatest times, the most hilarious times, by going to work with the right crowd. You’d hate yourself if you had the day off, because what it was is an understanding with the crowd. But that’s what makes work worth doing. It makes the world of difference to work with good blokes and have a laugh. But there’s some devious bastards out there. What’s the point of that? We got to work together, let’s get along together. .

Gerry’s carefully thought out theory of work time demonstrates, among other things, how he managed his day by using time markers or ‘sections’ as he called them. He also ‘killed time’ by varying his work; leaving the workspace to go and get steps and materials so as to break up his tasks. He expressed an almost Buddhist view of time as ‘continuous’, and, although he saw himself as ‘part of the machinery’, he also viewed working with the ‘right crowd’ as ‘some of the greatest times’. In talking about the pros and cons of being a builder, Jamin, the carpentry and general foreman, expressed a similar view in relation to being ‘part of the machinery’: The insecurity [of the building trade] is the downside of it really, definitely. But the freedom is the upside, do you know what I mean? That’s what I like about it. But then again you see you’re not progressing anywhere, you’re just like a machine going on and on and on. Most builders who learn their trade carry on their life in that trade if they remain working in the building industry. They rarely progress through a career because there is little career to follow. Rising above the rank of foreman is problematic for most tradesmen and almost all labourers because site management positions are filled usually by carpenters, and sometimes bricklayers. Site managers must also be able to read, write, operate computers and communicate with a multitude of parties – tasks that would be highly problematic for a number of workers, especially non-English speakers. And not all building companies employ site management. Official statistics suggest that the building industry is characterized in its vast majority by small firms employing between one and three people (Office for National Statistics, 2008) that are often administered only by an owner, his wife and a trusted foreman out and about on site (see, for example, Foster, 1969). In these firms there are simply no career ladders to climb. As a consequence, to the vast majority of builders who remain building, time can be conceptualized as a form of metronomic cycle because each day, week, year and decade, ‘just comes back around’, ‘going on and on and on’. The work simply becomes easier to do in terms of their accumulated knowledge and

68  Time, recreation and workplace culture physical habituation (cf. Waite, 2005), but also becomes physically harder as they age. Both Jamin and Gerry said they enjoyed their work but they thought themselves to be ‘part of the machinery’, ‘not progressing anywhere’. A number of the builders used machine metaphors to account for their work lives (cf. Adam, 1990), and they felt literally part of a relentless metronomic cycle. Builders in their twilight years may turn to entrepreneurial private work or maintenance work. For groups such as labourers, however, this may not always be a realistic option, and most simply carry on labouring. For most of them, a sense of linear progression was non-existent, although, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, working for Topbuild was a ‘cushy’ form of semi-retirement for the labourers who had served their time doing very tough ground and sub-ground works. Nonetheless, their lifetime was not clearly flagged by career progression or even an end-point of retirement: life was work, work was life. If they were ‘fit’ they carried on the cycle of work until their bodies deteriorated. As Danny, the labour foreman, said: ‘Depends on being healthy. If I was healthy I’d carry on [working after retirement] for a while, but there’s still a few years yet.’ Mike Fixit, one of the maintenance men, who was second generation Irish and an ex-groundworker, had a similar outlook: I might [consider being the tea boy] if I’m coming up to six months or a year until I retire. Then yeah, I might think differently about it. I don’t know really, I might do it. I got 16 years until that but I can’t see myself retiring at 65. Most people in the building don’t retire until they’re about 70. If I’m fit I’ll carry on, probably. I can’t sit around all day with her indoors. During my own years spent working as a painter I was acutely aware of the metronomic cycle of building work time and I found it incredibly difficult to adjust to psychologically. I would stand at work on a Monday and despair that I would be doing that same thing for all of the Mondays for the rest of my life. Huw Beynon noticed something similar in his ethnographic study of Ford production line workers where he describes the ‘sheer audacious madness of a system based upon men wishing their lives away’ (1973: 1100). Metronomic cyclical time was a problem for me and audacious to Beynon, but the builders could deal with it and adapt to it to a large extent. Work was, for most, Monday morning until Saturday afternoon, and took place within formally tabled hours to a metronomic beat. But, within this timetable, the builders did not strictly adhere to its temporal metronome; they worked to their own speeds, routines and rhythms. Rhythms When someone is in control of their work task they have a mastery over their approach and the time in which they do it. Task-mastery implies ‘taking time’, and taking time is enjoyable (cf. Sennett, 2008). Taking time may occur on an individual level but, in the company of co-workers, its boundaries become framed by



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tacit group relations. When working alongside one another, the builders communicated implicit messages mediated through their work cultures to collectively resist temporal imposition, synchronize working rhythms and transform the nature of time. An example occurred when I first began work with the painters. As I had not worked as painter for nearly two years before joining Topbuild, I was a little out of practice. During my first week I was shadowed by Jimmy, the painting foreman, who kept a close watch on me and my work, much to my disdain. His gaze pressured me to work faster and rush. However, after he began to see that I was knowledgeable and skilled at my job, he left me alone to do the work by myself, in my own time, which I much preferred. Approximately two weeks into this work, Jimmy instructed me to begin glossing the prepared external windows, working alongside two of my painting colleagues, Perry and Bony. Bony was officially retired, indicating that he must have been over the age of 65. He also had back problems that made it difficult for him to bend down to paint the lower parts of the windows. Perry was 34 years old and physically fit. I assume he had slowed down to Bony’s speed because they were working at a synchronic pace. When I first joined them in this task, I struggled to keep up, and my work was a little messy. But after a day or two I began to ‘get my eye in’ and ‘get into a rhythm’. The more frames I glossed, the faster I completed the task. I was not consciously aware of my continuing improvement, or even trying to work faster by this point, but my mind-body actions seemed almost automatic, caught up in a repetitive and rhythmical learning, subconsciously improving efficiency, strength, speed and accuracy (cf. Sennett, 2008; Wacquant, 2004). I soon caught up with their speed. Eventually I found I could work at a faster rate than my two colleagues, but I knew from my past experience of building work that it was always a good idea to work just slightly slower than the fastest man. Working faster could develop into race and I did not want to race; I would rather take my time. Perry, Bony and I had adjusted into a group speed and rhythm, communicated and interpreted through our tacit informal work culture (cf. Strati, 2003). In Jimmy’s words: ‘you’re all flying through those windows’. I found I had time to stop, smoke a cigarette and chat to the passing labourers and carpenters between each completed window. I also found that I enjoyed the work. Painters often say they like ‘glossing’; a shiny end product is achieved. However, the learning process and the rhythm itself also made the work anodyne and rewarding: it was satisfying to be the un-rushed master of one’s task. These conditions provide a further clue as to why the foremen described in the last chapter tended not to enjoy their responsibilities and expressed a desire to return to ‘the tools’. Foremen must move around the workspace under other people’s orders, and any task that they engage in is likely to be interrupted as they are ‘pulled off’ it to organize workers or answer to the demands of management. This upsets rhythms and smashes mastery – the foreman becomes an effect of others’ demands, set within other’s time frames, which, in their turn, are set within a synthetic form of modern temporality.

70  Time, recreation and workplace culture Routines Richard Sennett (1998) examines work routine. He criticizes Diderot who compared industrial workers to theatrical actors who, Diderot argued, mastered their tasks through rhythmical repetition. Sennett disagrees, suggesting that, as a result of the division of labour where work is broken down into small parts, industrial workers lose control over their tasks and become bored and apathetic. He concludes that industrial routine is destructive because industrial workers have little control where time is commoditized, and they thus share little in common with theatrical actors: The pin-maker becomes a ‘stupid and ignorant’ creature in the course of the division of labour; the repetitive nature of his work has pacified him. For these reasons, industrial routine threatens to diminish human character in its very depths. Sennett, 1998: 37 Sennett explains how the increasing mechanization and the division of labour in capitalist societies led to workers losing control, diminishing the character of broader society. However, as I have shown, the builders had been relatively unaffected by such trends. They retained a large degree of control over their tasks and their time, and their characters were unlikely to be diminished in this way. In the last chapter, the painter in Bristles’ description was only ‘one above the food chain’ in building workers’ trade status rankings, and the London builders’ colloquialism, ‘if you can piss, you can paint’, highlights this. Painting is arguably the least skilled of the building trades. Yet jobs such as glossing can be quite enjoyable; there is a rhythm to the work, a honed skill and a tangible finished product. From this it may be inferred that all other building trades are at least as enjoyable and, for carpenters at least, maybe more so (see Kidder, 1985), and my interview data reflects this. Like Diderot’s actor, the building tradesman masters his routine through rhythmic repetition unsullied by metronomic imposition. Moreover, for a day-worker, time is not money, but is something played with; to be twisted and turned not only in real tabled work time but also within subjective time realms. For instance, during the glossing work, where Bony, Perry and I worked side-by-side sharing the same section of scaffold, despite our close proximity, we talked little. There were the usual time requests, occasional comments and profanities when elbows were banged or splinters forced into the skin of our hands, but that was about all. Yet, in between glossing the windows, when we stopped to smoke cigarettes, we did talk – or at least Perry and I did, Bony rarely said anything at all to anybody – but we did not want to engage in conversation when we were caught up in our rhythms. Personally, I was at once concentrating and, at the same time, not painting windows at all; I was somewhere else, wandering around in my subjective space, daydreaming2 and thinking about how to write about it.



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In an ethnographic analysis of the experiential effects of truck driving, Joseph Blake (1974) noticed similar processes and provides a clue to why unsullied task immersion can be enjoyable and rewarding: In some situations, intense concentration is required to accomplish a task at hand and this may result in a new kind of experience. A point is reached at which the subtle and complex intricacies of the task begin to ‘come naturally’. At the same time, the task is such that a continual adjustment to the situation is necessary so that intensity of concentration varies intermittently over time. This continual readjustment, too, ‘comes naturally’ and a situational rhythm emerges in which the person becomes one among a number of elements co-existing and co-acting in the situation. Mere concentration … is required of a number of occupations (including factory work), but situational rhythm is required of only a few … While in the state of situational rhythm the individual is capable either of reflection on totally different situations or of total situational immersion; the later meaning that he ‘lets himself go’, he gets ‘high’. The situation of total immersion engenders a feeling of situational power that is real to the extent that it reflects the fact of temporal, immediate control. Blake, 1978: 206–7, italics original In these situations, mind, body and motion combine with a tool or machine to produce rhythmical and temporal mastery over the task (cf. Katz, 1999: 18–87; Polanyi, 1969), which can have the effect of ‘getting high’ or, getting into a ‘flow’, and turning manual work into play (Sennett, 2008). This may explain part of the reason why the builders expressed enjoyment in their work. It also reveals that the conceptual separation of minds and bodies in modern discourse is a largely false dualism (Katz, 1999; Rose, 1999 [1989]; Wacquant, 2004). Knowledge is stored not only in minds and symbols, but is spread throughout bodies in the form of feelings, dispositions and corporeal skill (cf. Gherardi and Nicoloni, 2003; Marchand, 2009, 2010). Indeed, as the following chapters indicate, the builders’ bodies were fundamental sources of their knowledge, knowing, and of their class-bound gender identities.

Subjecting time Anyone who has ever been in a hurry and had to wait unnecessarily will be aware of the vast contradictions between clock time and subjective time – one passing minute can seem like tens of minutes. The colloquialism, ‘time flies when you’re having fun’, represents the opposite of this and further reveals time as a flexible entity. Even seemingly inevitable biological/mortal time may be subjectively negotiated, most usually in the form of religious belief and ritual (Adam, 2004). Like waiting time, boring work or work where one is unable to develop a rhythm can ‘drag out’ subjective time immeasurably (see, for example, Glucksmann,

72  Time, recreation and workplace culture 1982: 112). And, while some building work is rhythmical and enjoyable, some of it is not. The worker, like the foreman, was not able always to ‘harmoniously interact’ with his task. This was due to the demands of the work process and it was particularly apparent for the labourers. As Michael told me: Yeah, the time goes when you’re busy. I’d rather be kept busy. The busier I am the better I like it. I don’t like to be hanging about – a day will be like two days humm. That’s what I don’t like, but that’s the way it goes innit, that’s the way it is. The labourers sometimes enjoyed fast-paced hard work. Shovelling a mound of sand or ‘gunning’ and digging holes could indeed be quite enjoyable, despite, and sometimes because of, it being physically tough (see Chapter 6). During these tasks, for which the labourers possessed some autonomy and an end product of sorts, work rhythms were established like those of the painters described above, and these rhythms had an effect upon subjective time, making the labourers’ work more enjoyable. Shovelling sand has an end point: one knows where to begin and when one is going to finish. In these situations the labourers could decide their own rate of work, when to stop for a ‘breather’ and their progression through the task could be tangibly perceived. These time marking processes were illustrated by Trick when talking about how he liked his mechanical and electrical job: I enjoy doing anything where you’ve got all your tools and all the gear you want in one area. Like doing those showers, you’re carcassing out [removing all of the old mechanical material from the area] a whole wall of pipework and you’re being left alone. As long as you know what you’re doing, and what they want ... Yeah it’s good, you enjoy it ‘cos you look back on the day and you think yeah, you know in yourself what you want to get done. It doesn’t matter if it’s cutting a hedge and you want to get a quarter of a mile of it cut back that day, or paint half of a building, you know where you should be and what you want to do. So with the showers, you carcass one out, get on with the job and you say: ‘Yeah, I enjoyed that, good’. Unlike tradesmen like Trick, the labourers were not so regularly left alone working in one place for long durations of time. It could sometimes be difficult for them to comprehend the tasks they would perform within a specified time frame and they could not always set themselves task and time markers. A labourer may begin a task only to be ‘pulled off’ it through the demands of ‘hurry up’, or conflicting commands. Aidan explained: Well an example is yesterday. We’re short on labour and all this business yeah. Now Pete and James wanted me to do one job yeah, Steve wanted me to do another job, and Danny wanted me to do another job. I knew what I



Time, recreation and workplace culture  73 was gonna do, which I started – sweep all the roof off yeah, knowing the day before that I was gonna do that. But by the time I’d got up there, things had changed. So I was pushed onto another job. Pete wanted me to go check all the work we’d done for him last week, and then the lightning conductor blokes come down and said the holes [for the earth cables] wasn’t big enough. And now it’s only me and Danny [to do all the work]. So they are all rushing and all this business. I mean a little bit of organization you know what I mean? That’s what I don’t like about it, organization yeah, I like planned.

It was not that Aidan wanted to shirk work that was the problem, but there were not enough labourers on site to do all of the ‘hurry up’ work and he was given conflicting orders from different lines of authority. This was a common scenario for labourers at the nadir of the builders’ status hierarchy because their work was general and they had to clean up the mess made by the trades. Disturbance of time markers and work rhythms upset psychological mechanisms to subjectively deal with time, but various cultural defence mechanisms were used to manage these upsets. One mechanism, as indicated in the last chapter, was to steal time – to prize open the timetable and smear it into personal time. The term ‘break time’ literally reflects this, and, for instance, I rarely enjoyed my fieldwork so much as when I took my break times while working as a labourer. It was time to physically rest, refuel the body, and take ‘time out’ of imposed orders and time frames. Even the managers acknowledged this if they entered the labourers’ tearoom during break times: ‘Sorry lads, have your lunch first, but could you go up on the roof and get all the old roof tiles down when you’re done?’ The managers would always be ‘sorry’ for making demands in break times. Having the crack I quite like it sometimes, no pressure. Labouring you do what you’re told and that’s it, end of story … I do enjoy it for the crack. We have a good crack don’t we? Michael Rhythmical task mastery, taking breaks and time banditry were ways in which temporal imposition could be negotiated and transformed. Another mechanism was to break up time by ‘having the crack’. In talking about why he liked to work as a labourer, Aidan discussed this in some detail: I do like it [labouring] yeah. I like meeting people, getting to know them, having the crack with them you know. I’ve known Patrick [a fellow labourer] now, well, a long time. I used to have great fun with him, having the banter like. They lie to me and I tell them lies. Make big stories up, you know what I mean (laughs) – getting people to believe you and all this

74  Time, recreation and workplace culture business. And you think in your mind you know, where Patrick came out the other day and said he went for fish and chips that night and the fish was so fresh it ate all his chips (laughing). All things like that you know … I’d say to Patrick, ‘cos he knows my dad see: ‘Oh I saw so and so in the pub last night’. All these different names and all this business, pick on people you know. ‘Oh I met him last night and he was asking me, “Oh what are you drinking”.’ It’s all lies like. And then telling him white lies, having the crack like. I was telling him [that] me and Danny were working Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday, like £70 a shift and all this business (laughing). Having a good laugh in the morning, I think it sets the day up. You go in there and get some long faces and all that, but there’s always one of us out the group that’ll come out with something interesting or something funny. Or we pick on someone just for the sake of it, ‘Poor old Paul’s over there and all this business, fat bastard this, fat bastard that’. But he’s not there with us is he, but he’s sort of made a joke of you know ... That’s why I like winding them up, you can always see them thinking, ‘Now is he winding me up?’ Things like that, like mind games, having the crack, no offence to anyone. Almost all the builders expressed their enjoyment in the crack and it was an essential aspect of their workplace culture. Through their jokes, lies, piss-takes, and wind-ups, they ‘had a laugh’ which added to their work satisfaction. The form and content of the crack is integral to Anglo-working-class cultures, and the builders were reminiscent of the antics of the ‘lads’ having a ‘laff’ in the school and the factory described by Paul Willis (1977). These features are embedded in British working-class culture and are enacted partly in adaptation to capitalist metronomic time structures where tasks and time, and minds and bodies, have became conceptually split (see below). The crack not only served to break up monotonous dragging-time and make the day more interesting, but it also framed a kind of cultural adhesive among the builders. As Mike Fixit said: On a building site everybody’s lumped together the same. We’re all there, we all know what building work is like, we all know it’s hard sometimes and we all know it’s easy sometimes. And the blokes, they, it’s a special group of men that work on building sites, they’re like their own sort of family. You get the odd one or two that are a bit loud and this, that and the other, but they don’t really last long on a building site because everyone’s there for the easy life – get the job done, go home … The content of the crack was predominantly cast in a masculine framework that also formed a major constituent of the builders’ cultural adhesive and which had consequences beyond breaking up time (as I describe in Chapter 6). The crack could though be seen to release workers from dull and dragging time



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through breaching everyday reality and/or though manufacturing excitement – commonly through ‘piss-taking’ linguistic jousting tournaments. Tournaments are, of course, a source of play (Huizinga, 1970 [1938]) in which excitement transports participants into another subjective world within a different order of consciousness. Excited individuals are released from normative sociality and metronomic temporality, and inter-subjective ‘dragging-time’ relinquished (cf. Ferrell, 2004; Lyng, 1990). Donald Roy’s (1990 [1960]) groundbreaking participant observation with factory workers in 1940s North America graphically illustrates this function of the crack. Roy found that the monotonous work led him into a battle with time that was eased by developing a ‘game of work’ (see also Burawoy, 1979; Sillitoe 1994 [1958]). This involved setting personal targets and sequences in the work process, much like the ‘sections’ described by Gerry. Similarly to the builders, Roy’s work group eased the battle through taking informal time out and by joking and messing around. Roy suggests that without ‘the talking, fun, and fooling which provided a solution to the elemental problem of “psychological survival” … (p. 155), Monotony was joined by his twin brother, Fatigue’ (p. 158). Even physical fatigue is largely socially constructed, and having the crack both released workers from the constraints of dragging-time and subjectively provided corporal energy with which to do manual work. Narco-time Drug use was common among the builders, and almost all of the men stimulated their physical energy with the use of caffeine and nicotine. One of the older labourers, Patrick, would, for instance, follow his morning cup of tea and cigarette by sucking a large pile of snuff up into his black-coloured nostril. It was also common for some of the builders to visit the pub, particularly on Friday and Monday lunchtimes, and, as I describe in the following chapter, alcohol consumption was almost institutionalized among Anglo cultural groups on UK building sites. Alcohol is a psychoactive depressant that numbs minds and, like excitement, it may hinder reflexive consciousness. Alcohol has also become historically tied up with the ideals of ‘strength’ entwined with working-class masculinity. For most of the builders; to drink was part of being a man (see Chapter 6). It was not only legitimate narcotics that were used throughout the workday. Along the scaffold one could literally smell the use of some forms of illegal drugs. Illegal drug use appears common among builders and is highlighted by the statistic that, between 1980 and 2000, painters, scaffolders, roofers and glaziers were more likely to die through drug misuse than any other occupational group apart from the ‘artistic and literary professions’ (Office of Population, Census and Surveys, 1995; Office for National Statistics, 2009). The statistic may bear more relation to the height at which these building trades work than their social backgrounds or work practices (see Chapters 5 and 6), but it came as no surprise.

76  Time, recreation and workplace culture The majority of painters I met at Keyworker House regularly used illegal drugs both in and out of work. As Gerry explained: I love to smoke [cannabis] at work. I’ve been doing this [work] for 25 years, and when I’m doing it I’m not thinking about silly things like work, I’m just stoned and playing little mind games with myself. The day just flies by. Not thinking about the work in hand and ‘playing little mind games’ helps time to pass quicker. The hallucinogenic properties of cannabis may help to stimulate vivid daydreaming and thus assist a user’s release from dragging-time. Gerry also used amphetamine, cocaine and ecstasy at work, and he was not alone in this. As I have mentioned, another of the painters, Frank, boosted his mind-body everyday by ingesting amphetamine.

Doing nothing and making work Labouring work could be dangerous, boring, hot, too cold, tiring, painful and dirty. Yet, as intimated above, all of the labourers, including myself, much preferred to do something rather than nothing. Nevertheless, it was common to have days and hours where there was little to do; where the labourers had to ‘scratch around’ to find work tasks. The nature of labouring also meant that it sometimes necessitated a slow pace. This was partly because the work could be physically demanding, but also because the labourers were forced to try not to ‘snooker’ themselves and run out of things to do. Labourers mostly reacted to the demands of others; if holes were to be dug, materials transported, or mess cleaned up, they were asked to do it. Yet materials and plant did not always need transporting, holes were not required everyday and, sometimes, there was not much mess created by the trades. Consequently, if a labourer was required to dig a hole in an afternoon, he would need to make sure that he timed it correctly so it took him all the afternoon to complete. If he were to finish the task early, he may no longer have a job, or he may have to begin another task which could possibly take him too much time and energy in terms of his informal working hours and activities that afternoon. Additionally, if a labourer did finish his task early or, if there were nothing or little for labourers to do on a particular day, they would have to ‘make-work’, that is, perform the actions of work without actually doing any. During work it is understood that time is symbolically owned by the employer (Thompson, 1993 [1967]). As a consequence, an enforced informal rule exists for workers and, particularly, labourers on building sites, which is not to be seen to be inactive (see also Paap, 2006). If labourers could, for example, sit down during slow times they might not face the problem of ‘a day will be like two days umm’. Filling time and making work were thus necessary aspects of the labourers’ skill, and to not make-work within the gaze of a boss would transgress the moral rules of the employment agreement and negate trust. As an example of this, Erving Goffman quotes from Archibald’s (1947: 159) study of a shipyard:



Time, recreation and workplace culture  77 It was amusing to watch the sudden transformation whenever word got round that the foreman was on the hull or in the shop or that a front-office superintendent was coming by. Quartermen and leadermen would rush to their groups of workers and stir them to obvious activity. ‘Don’t let him catch you sitting down’ was the universal admonition, and where no work existed a pipe was busily bent and threaded, or a bolt which was already firmly in place was subjected to further and unnecessary tightening. This was the formal tribute invariably attending a visitation by the boss, and its conventions were as familiar to both sides as those surrounding a five star general’s inspection. To have neglected any detail of the false and empty show would have been interpreted as a mark of singular disrespect. reproduced from Goffman, 1959: 112

Make-work for the labourers at Keyworker House usually took the form of finding a broom and endlessly sweeping up dust and cigarette ends. The term ‘endlessly’ has salience here as make-work involves no sense of a beginning, middle or end because there are no time markers, nor is there a finished product. In my experience and, as suggested in the words of Michael above, make-work slows down time almost to a stop. It also all but completely drains physical energy and forces ‘clock-watching’ which, as all manual workers are aware, acts to eternally drag out subjective time. Shields and tournaments One method for evading time ownership problems or having to make-work was for the labourers to group together and ‘have the crack’. Almost every afternoon leading up to 4.00pm, they would gather around the skips at the back of Keyworker House – usually inciting piss-take jokes from the trades. Danny, however, was not always so jocular when he found the labourers ‘holding up fences’ or ‘leaning on shovels’, but he could not dismiss, or even really reprimand, the entire labour team for doing nothing. If he was in a ‘cranky’ mood and expressed dissatisfaction towards their malingering, he was met with an onslaught of excuses and disdain, and it would have been very problematic for him to sack all ‘his lads’ at once. Their grouping together created a situation of safety in numbers that shielded the power of dismissal by distributing Danny’s reactions to their transgression among the numbers of the group. In this situation, the labourers negotiated time through talk and having the crack, but also through the excitement generated by transgression and the possibility of getting detected for doing so. When they were bored and/or listless, or when they grouped together for the crack because of that boredom and listlessness, the labourers could transform make-work into entertainment by exploiting the lacunae in formal control mechanisms and thereby toying with managerial command. Non-imposed make-work in this context could be made into a game, and games are by their very nature,

78  Time, recreation and workplace culture fun, and fun transforms dragging-time. As Goffman (1959) comments, makework is a performance of etiquette and ‘the show’ is more socially salient than actuality. Such encounters are caught up in a kind of performative surrealism whereby each party plays their part in the encounter while simultaneously being aware this is mere performance. Like the scene in Archibald’s shipyard, superiors both know and don’t know the workers are merely performing, and workers know and don’t know what the superior knows – but each party is inclined towards the ritual of surface performance rather than actuality. This is because the rituals have a sacred property so that for a manager to accuse a worker of mere performance would be to contravene ritual etiquette by discrediting the worker’s honesty, opening up a panoply of often aggressive excuses and interchanges in which managers risk ‘losing face’ (Goffman, 1955). Loss of face may relinquish respect, break up indulgency patterns and stiffen reciprocal elasticity, and was, therefore, largely avoided at Keyworker House. The examples cited in Chapter 3 concerning ‘going to the bank/shop’ can be seen as false game-like performances. Another example occurred when I participated in the site office. There was an occasion when the mangers could not contact Danny on his two-way radio. He later appeared in the office and excused himself saying that he had ‘gone to the bank’. The managers accepted his claim outright but, when Danny left the room, Steve and Jamin laughed and joked about the performance with Steve saying: ‘gone to the bank my arse, he’s been to the fuckin’ pub’. They had followed the ritual of the encounter, but if this had been contravened by Danny saying he had gone to the pub, it would likely have invited reprimand. Yet, by Danny offering an excuse and performing the ritual, Steve and Jamin had no need to become involved in an encounter where they might have to admonish or discredit him and run the risk of losing face. In such contexts, workers could feel they had out-witted managers, and out-witting someone is integral to many games. These social performances were a source of play, fun and excitement that were tied integrally in to, and which buffered, the structure of work-time in particular and human life in general.

Time and money by design The site managers and quantity surveyors appeared to steal time to a much lesser degree than the builders on the tools. Part of the reason was simply that their physical energy was not depleted during the workday in quite the same way as the manual workers. For those on the tools, break-time was for sitting down, refuelling and resting, whereas generally the management could sit down, rest and refuel whenever they wanted. Their work also consisted largely of talking, and, as shown in Chapter 2, their talk commonly took the form of the crack. The managers, quantity surveyors and general foremen also worked alongside one another every day in the site office and they had negotiated an implicit interactive rule system between them. They knew what they could and could not say to one another, which, provided Steve, the project manager, was not in a bad mood,



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could be almost anything within the realms of masculine discourse. The crack therefore flourished unbounded in the office and was constantly refreshed by the numerous people who entered and left. The officers’ perception of time was thus very different from that of those on the tools. The officers, although autonomous from direct hierarchical control, were, however, fiercely driven by time pressure. The site managers’ primary role, for instance, was to guide the build towards its completion date, which, as is perennial in building work (Bresnen, 1990), they had failed to do. In part this was because ‘extras’ kept being added to the work, but it was also because of problems with ‘unforeseens’, inclement weather and late arrival of materials and subcontract groups. Being behind time pressured the managers to enforce ‘hurry up’ on various occasions, but this also gave them something to do. Additionally, unlike those on the tools, the officers rarely had to make-work. For example, during the close of Year 1 works, the officers were left with little to do but they were in a position to play numerous games of squash and could simply sit down, talk and eat and drink at their leisure. Dragging-time was negligible for the officers, but commoditized linear time drove their workday and affected them in negative ways. This rippled out to the labourers and tradesmen, and, inevitably, affected the overall quality of the build. As Steve explained in some detail: What pisses me off is speed. The quality goes. You know, everything’s rush, rush, rush ... I know you have to have an element of that because otherwise things would start to cost a fortune. But I don’t like it, it’s constant pressure: monitoring things, how long things are taking, pushing things, getting more labour, getting more work out of them [workers], it don’t stop you know ... I hate brickies, they’re laying bricks like fucking lunatics, and it’s going up so quick and you can miss window openings. And if you’re not on the ball and you’re fucking farting around with your [site] diary and your paperwork in the office, there’s no fucking window where you want it. And the foreman says: ‘Well fuck me, I didn’t know’. And yet somehow the blame ends up back with the site manager, ‘Well you didn’t fucking go out there and tell him’, you know. But it is the speed, and they’re [bricklayers] there to earn money ... He continued: A lot of people want a [lump sum] price and that’s it. The chippies we’re in control of, we just have to kick their arse every now and then. But it’s when you get people on price [work] and they’re up your arse saying: ‘this ain’t done, that ain’t done’. You got to be well organized, well prepared for people to come and do their job and let them get in, make their money and get out. It would be nice to have them all on a day work, but as long as you knew you were getting a decent day’s work out of them. Yeah, that’s one thing I

80  Time, recreation and workplace culture don’t like, is the crash bang wallop of it all, and, with that, obviously quality goes … It’s hard to get quality because this [Keyworker House] is making the best of a bad job in the first place. It’s bodging, we’re just tinkering with everything [and] rather than doing it properly we’re doing everything on the cheap. It’s not our fault, we’ve only got money to do it on the cheap so we have to do it on the cheap … I do enjoy it, but it’s just so much work to do now ... But that’s what drives me mad about these office set-ups. I’m as bad as the rest of them: I scream, shout, and rant and rave, have a bloody laugh and a ball, but it isn’t actually that productive, very unproductive. Even down there in that office [at Keyworker House II], you know, me and Paul are pulling our hair out at the moment because it’s all very loud. It’s a smaller office and you can’t concentrate, you do need them plugs in your ears. It’s a fuck up, it really is … because what happens is, to my own sort of a detrimental effect, I end up taking it home ... As I have described, the intensification of capitalist market exchange transformed time into money and forced high-speed work. Employed on price-work, tradesmen, like the bricklayers described by Steve, work with pound signs mediating them and their work, their body movements dictated by pecuniary measurements of time. This can be dangerous, as one of the painters, Bristles, explained: There’s two ways for this: health and safety will really bother you if you’re not on a price, [but] if you’re working on a price you won’t even notice it. At the end of the day all you are looking at is the big bucks – that’s all you want. You’ll only be sensible when you’re on day work. When you’re on price work you think you can like twizzle like a ballerina and extend the length of your arms or something. As Steve suggests, insufficient time and money could also affect the quality of building jobs, and this has knock-on effects down the line to the tradesmen. While the tradesmen enjoyed their work, they did not enjoy being rushed or having to ‘bump’ jobs – that is, to undertake work to an inferior standard. Overarching time and money pressures reduced work satisfaction, negating the tradesmen’s task immersion and pride in making something, and thereby demotivated them (cf. Sennett, 2008). Stew, one of the painters, expressed this: I enjoy standing back and looking at the finished product. That does me well, but then again, it’s like I say, it’s jobs like this that I can’t deal with, where there’s not too much quality, just slap it up … It’s things like that that annoy me, that I don’t like with the job. All this untidy stuff, it’s rubbish. I don’t really like it at all. Echoing Stew, Bill, the mechanical and electrical foreman, derided the effects of commoditized time pressures:



Time, recreation and workplace culture  81 All they worry about is getting in and getting out quick. Honesty’s gone out the window. It’s all, (sighs) – there’s no honesty because everyone’s there to make as much money as they can for doing as little as possible. That wasn’t the building game years ago. A tradesman would do the job properly. All right he might have had time, he might have had a good price but not no more … To me, the way I was brought up and the way I was taught compared to now, it’s basically, I think it’s just cheap and nasty. We used to have inspectors come along behind us and check our work, and if it weren’t right they’d make us do it again till we got it right. But now I mean, who comes along and checks the work now …? Yeah, me. But half the time it’s just covered up quickly because [contractors] they’re in a rush to get the painters in to finish it. They don’t care, just cover it up ... I think personally, looking at it from the electrical side of it, the quality of work has died in the building game. It’s like everything else, nothing’s made to last now. It’s a plastic world.

Bill points out that the tradesmen from the past would have more time to undertake their work. Although his admonition may have been partly the result of nostalgia, the processes he describes support revisionist histories tracing the intensification of time across modernity (see Thompson, 1993 [1967]; Thrift, 1990). Even 100 years ago Tressell’s (1965 [1914]) house painters talked about of the changing nature of time and the ensuing fall in the quality of work. Moreover, time continues to intensify in present-modernity; speeding and intensifying the work process and social life in general (Donaldson, 1996).

Minds and bodies, design and class As I mentioned in Chapter 1, large-scale medieval building works in Western Europe were overseen and organized by government and church clerks in consultation with master masons and carpenters. During this period, building design was not separate from its construction (Cooley, 1987; Knoop and Jones, 1967 [1933]; Sennett, 2008). Rather, in the ‘slow tempo’ of the guild system ‘The master artisans worked it out amongst themselves and with the client as they went along’ (Higgin and Jessop, 1965: 39) under an ‘organic tradition’ with few, if any, written plans (Shelby, 1964). Indeed, in twenty-first century Mali, the highly skilled masons of Djenne continue to work largely with no prescriptive plans (Marchand, 2009). However, in Western Europe across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rise of the professions of architect and quantity surveyor invaded the traditional power and expertise of the master craftsmen through their invention of building design. This separated design from physical construction and began to smash the guildsmen’s sources of power and control over the building industry. Nonetheless, because of the complex, sequential, interdependent and ‘unforeseen’ nature of building, skilled tradesmen remained necessary in order to adapt, innovate and rectify the design problems that inevitably occur throughout the

82  Time, recreation and workplace culture building process (see MacVicor, 2009). Building tradesman thus retain their skill and autonomy, and many of the specific details of their work continue to be largely unplanned by architects or designers. Yet, the building professional, in combination with the rise of professionals more broadly, wrestled away the status and power of skilled manual workers through the professionals’ elevated status as the design ‘minds’, symbolically relegating building tradesmen to ‘bodies’ that construct. This historical shift is also associated with the beginnings of the broader formation of merchant and professional groups and it may be seen as the beginning of the birth of social class (Cooley, 1987; Day, 2001). Within this process, the nascent professions and merchants radiated and augmented the increasing hegemony of rational science that sparked the discursive decoupling of minds and bodies (Rose, 1999 [1989]), and which went on to symbolically separate professional mental work from the embodied labour of the manual working class. The bifurcation of minds and bodies, and the related social construction of class-bound mental and manual work (see Willis, 1977) thus became wedged into organization of modern workplaces, including the building industry. This process reduced builders’ power and status and, as I illustrate in the following chapter, had come to tie the builders’ class-bound, gendered identities and cultural foci largely into their corporeal abilities. Another consequence of the historical division of mental and manual work is that designers and quantity surveyors generally have little consideration for the ‘bodies’ that physically construct, maintain and repair their designs – the building tradesmen and labourers. Procuring contracts, client satisfaction, professional egos and the immediate end product are the professional groups’ more immediate concerns – not the messy procedures that occur during and after the build (see Brand, 1994; Ness, 2009). Design with disregard for those who put it into practice reduces manual workers’ job satisfaction, and may have knock-on effects for the quality of the work through impeding their embodied situational rhythms. Trick voiced this, and its consequences: I would love to sit down, maybe in a little group with the designer and talk about the design, like they do in the Japanese car plants. It’s crazy [some of the ways they design things], all that time and money. You work on something and you’ve got no access to the pipes, no space to work in, and then people get pissed-off with the job. There’s nothing worse than getting pissedoff with your job because nothing gets done does it? You lose interest, you throw it in and just think: ‘Oh fuck it, I can’t be arsed’, do you know what I mean, ‘That lot up there are taking the piss’, or whatever.

Conclusion The reordering and intensification of time was an essential development in the effective emergence and operation of modern capitalist markets where time became money and profit became speed. The ascent of modern capitalism was a



Time, recreation and workplace culture  83

major development in separating humanity from the rhythms of nature (Adam, 1990, 2004; Donaldson, 1996), casting a synthetic temporal order over social life in general and work life in particular. Despite the powerful symbolic division of knowledge from its corporeal base associated with the rise of modernity and its professionals, workers’ minds and bodies, of course, remain fused. Yet such temporal and organizational conditions framed, and formed, a backdrop to the builders’ situational work activity through intrusions on the quality of their working lives and work. The temporal order was not, however, passively submitted to, but informally and subjectively adapted, whereby linear time was transformed into alternative forms. In industries where workers are cast as mechanical bodies and despotically tied to machines and Taylorist measures of time and motion, those workers become dissatisfied and drained of interest. Even under such despotic conditions, workers do, however, negotiate time (See Beynon, 1973; Collinson, 1992; Glucksmann, 1982; Roy, 1990 [1960]), but their cultural mechanisms for doing so become significantly restricted. It can then be little wonder that all-embracing management and bureaucratic work regimes in factories for example, tend to generate large-scale dissatisfaction and resistance: cultural mores and mechanisms to manage time become blocked, restricting adaptation and play and, thereby, insidiously effecting humanity itself (Huizinga, 1970 [1938]; Sennett, 2008). For the majority of the builders employed on day work, time was, though, informally for their taking, and it had been culturally reconstituted as task- and fun-time – rather adverse to capitalist imposition. Because the knowledge of how to physically construct buildings had not been wrested from workers into scientific management formula and the machine, the builders on the tools retained an element of control over the time and manner in which they undertook their tasks. They were able to transform boring work into play, and thus enjoy their work. The builders’ workplace cultures had shielded them partially from both the despotism of the building market, and from the despotism of capitalist constructions of time. However, as I expand upon in the following chapter, the symbolic division of minds and bodies, designers and operatives, had cast an enduring corporeal framework over the builders’ identities and cultural foci. Yet I also show how these foci had readied the builders with the cultural abilities to resist and reorder the worlds around them.

Chapter 5

Becoming a builder and being working class

Through a presentation and analysis of the builders’ personal biographies, this chapter shows how their life courses had been directed by their ethnic and class position within the UK stratification structure, and it explores how these features had underpinned the work cultures present at Keyworker House. The impact of social networks tied predominantly to their families and residential locations had largely framed the builders’ opportunities and life chances, and thus also promulgated traditions that anchored their identities and cultures. Class and class background, in combination for some with ethnic and migration history, continued to have prime significance for the men’s lives both in terms its symbolic resonance and its influence on the resources and opportunities with which they were presented. Indeed, rather than having ameliorated working class cultures, habits and identities, major twentieth century political and economic change had actually contributed to forging them. Class was not, however, a collective political position nor a regular or explicitly discussed element of the builders’ lives, but its significance lay in the broader division of mental and manual work, and, in intersection with the builders’ ethnic and gender identities, in the particular opportunities and statuses that were generated across their lives.

Diverse routes Collectively the builders followed no common route into their work and occupations. A minority had entered ‘the building’ after leaving school and had worked in it for most of their lives. Others had simply found themselves in ‘the trade’ having been previously employed in a range of other, mostly manual, occupations. The majority had drifted into becoming a builder under the impact of social and economic changes, and, importantly, via the patterning of their social networks. Steve was in a minority at Topbuild as a formally apprenticed tradesman who had begun his carpentry career on leaving school. He had then moved up the ‘non-commissioned’ building ranks to become a project manager: [Y]ou know what they do at school where they try and forecast what job you should do when you leave ... I did that and eventually got a letter



Becoming a builder and being working class  85 through from Surrey College of Technology ... So we went to a seminar, which was I think orientated round carpentry and joinery. Next thing you know I was signed up. One of the teachers there was in with Topbuild, knew the director … Well I thought, fuck it, everyone saying: ‘You should get an apprenticeship and be on the tools … you’ll never be out of work’, so I thought that’s fair enough. I’ve always been inquisitive and fucked around with stuff, being the man about the house with mum being divorced, always handy, so, fuck it, go for that. I did a release to site, 6-month college, 6-month doing a day release and evenings, and after four years training I got me Institute of Carpenters and Institute of Carpenters Advanced [qualifications] and then I was out on site full time ... First job I ever went to was actually groundwork – shuttering concrete. I got there and thought, well, I’ve been at college hanging doors and door frames and now there’s this fucking Paddy [Irishman] standing up to his knees in concrete saying, ‘Pass me a rip of ply’. What? What the fuck’s that? That was a bit of a culture shock ...

For young men from working class backgrounds, ‘getting a trade’ is commonly viewed as one of the best career options: ‘you should get an apprenticeship and be on the tools … you’ll never be out of work’ is a statement heard time and time again. Steve also mentioned the ‘culture shock’ of the reality of working on site as compared to his formal training in carpentry. Formal apprentices must engage in informal learning of building site culture, and it is here that many workplace traditions become inculcated into the culture of neophytes. Steve’s route into the building industry via a formal apprenticeship was a situation that he accurately saw as waning.1 Bill, the mechanical and electrical foreman, echoed this: I had no intentions of coming into the building trade. I left school and we had a careers officer and I just went up the office and he said ‘What do you wanna be’? I said, ‘I want to go in the Post Office, telecommunications or on the telephones’. So they sent me to a place in Wimbledon where I sat the exam, and then two weeks later I got a letter through saying: ‘You’ve passed the exam but unfortunately you’re only 15 … you’ll have to wait a year before we can enlist you.’ So I went back to the old careers officer, told him, and he said: ‘Well anything else’? I said, ‘What about electricians?’ I didn’t even know what an electrician was really, it was just that you heard about electricians so I said electrician. So they sent me down to a firm and they enrolled me. You had to sign indentures then and they sent you off to a college. I then spent five years on day-release at Brixton College. I mean it was a different way of life then because all the big firms had apprentices, not like now, I mean we ain’t got none on this firm. When they took me on they must have taken on about 15 trade apprentices, so you all grew up together. That was 1971, when I left school.

86  Becoming a builder and being working class Both Steve and Bill appeared to have little initial aspiration to become a builder but were directed into it by their school careers officers, and/or simply through a desire to leave school early. Although formal indentured apprentices like them were in a minority at Keyworker House, these groups formed many of the ‘non-commissioned officer’ positions of foremen and site managers. On the other hand, the vast majority of the builders working on the tools had followed rather more informal roots into their occupations, and some had begun to engage in training while still at school. Yet, like Steve and Bill, the ‘part-time-job apprentices’ also showed little desire to be builders. As Bristles, a painter, said: My old man [father] was a carpenter, and his father before him, and his father before him. But I tend to do things different to whatever my family do, always have done, always will do. So I was at school, 15 [years old], and I was already doing odd jobs then for a Jewish man. He was teaching me bits and pieces [about decorating]. He gave me a paintbrush and told me how to hold it, how to hold a paint kettle, certain ways to paint a door, to paint a window, everything. He was a friend of the family and it was like a Saturday job type of thing. Everybody had a Saturday job then – there weren’t that much money around so you done that and got a couple of bob [shillings]. That’s normally how you got into trades then because the kids that had Saturday jobs washing cars for the mechanics became mechanics; the one’s that helped out on the fruit and veg became fruit and veg men … Bristles later left his Saturday job to work as an advertising clerk in Fleet Street. But after five years he was ‘stabbed in the back’ by one of his managers and forced back into relying on his local networks and what he was familiar with so that he could make a living: Now the office work, that finished … but I always tend to look at the good sides. I earned loads of money, I had a great time and saw things I’ll never, ever see on the buildings. But having said that, now we came onto this section of labouring. Now that was hard but at least you had a laugh … So, my brother, who went on to be a bricklayer, he got me a job labouring on his site. Them days there was no machines at all. When they used to shout: ‘Oi, there’s 5,000 bricks coming’, there was 5,000 bricks that had to be off-loaded by hand 2 ... One man used to stand up there and just throw four bricks every time. It was gruelling. I thought, oh well, I’d better get out of this; even as a young lad, oh it was hard work … [So I] went back to the Jewish man who had by then become very old all of a sudden to me. He was always quite a nice man to me. When I first worked for him when I was 14 and 15 he used to pay me something in the region of 10 to 15 shillings for the day. It weren’t bad money, he’d also give me some steak or a piece



Becoming a builder and being working class  87 of beef or something for my mum to cook, always – that was my wages on a Saturday. Dread to think what the mechanics got – 15 shillings and a gallon of oil? That’ll put hairs on your chest; that’ll put hairs on the inside of your arse to be honest!

He continued: So, I’d already started decorating when I was 14. Now I had to get back into it. Mr Cohen was a true decorator. He went to work, suit, collar and tie. He used to get his overalls out, but not the overalls that we wear now, they used to be like carpenter’s overalls … like the ones Fast Tom [a semi-retired decorator who worked for Coat’s] wears now, he used to wear those. They’d be brilliant white and I don’t know how but at the end of the day they used to go back even whiter … Well, he said to me: ‘You stay with me and you can have all my customers when I’m gone’ ... And then he died. Just old age really … But true to his word, the list and everything like that was given to me, all his customers. I did manage to keep hold of some of the old customers that I knew from six years ago ... But the work they were asking me to do was above and beyond normal decorating, it was like painting gold roses around the ceilings and stuff like that. I hadn’t done it before properly … [And] 99 per cent of his customers were Jewish, it was all word of mouth, everything was done by word of mouth or in a pub … But by then I suppose, three quarters of them [customers] I had never, ever met, and [my] not being of the best Jewish nature: I’d knock on their door and say: ‘Oh I used to work with Mr Cohen’, but a lot of them had never saw me before ... I earned a fair few shillings but not enough really and I eventually moved out of London to Milton Keynes where the overflow from London was going. Out there they were building thousands of houses. Plenty of money to be earned, plenty of money. While still at school Bristle’s part-time job served as an informal apprenticeship but his break from Mr Cohen for six years, and his not being Jewish, impeded what might have been a lucrative business. Similarly to Bristles, not all of those who engaged in part-time informal apprenticeships fully completed their training. Aidan, a labourer, was one of these: At school I was sort of, sort of, in a way encouraged to leave (laughs), because my work wasn’t up to standard, in the wild days, sort of hopping school and taking chances you know what I mean …What it was, I was working part-time at a garage. I was filling up cars with petrol; was the days when you used to have petrol pump attendants and that. And then they used to use me as a grease monkey, greasing up cars, putting oils in cars, minor work. Standard cars, not like the technology cars you’ve got today. Simple things like changing spark plugs, fan belts, putting starter motors on. Just the

88  Becoming a builder and being working class easy sort of thing. I used to work from seven o’clock in the morning till five in the evening. I was getting a weekly wage of £12.50 take-home, but I was getting a bit cheesed-off [upset] because all my mates started doing other different jobs, getting a lot more money than me, in the £20s and £30 a week. So I got round me dad [who was a first generation Irish labourer] in the end, and he says to come on labouring with him … I went with him and my first week’s wages was £50 on five days. From £12 to £50 pounds! So you can imagine then, bloody hell, how much money have I got now! It was like five weeks money, good money … I used to sweep up, clean all the mess rooms, clean the toilets out, all the sort of shit jobs you know what I mean. Then I would go in on the site, sort of later on, me and a cousin of mine, we was working together. We would go in on the site, sweeping up, general clearing up, moving this from there to there. After seven years labouring, Aidan left the building industry and took a job as a van driver in his brother-in-law’s packaging firm, in which he later became a shareholder. With the expanding business he became the warehouse manager, but the firm encountered financial problems: We all took loans out for these new premises and to this day I’m still paying for it (laughs). So that’s when I started working for my brother doing groundwork. But when me brother had no work for me I asked Paddy McMurray if I could work for him. My dad was the tea boy for Paddy in his later years [until he was 71], semi-retirement like, and Paddy and me brother are good friends. This was last year, and Paddy took me on until me brother got some more work. That’s why I’m struggling a bit you know, that’s why I’ll work seven days [a week] if I get it because it’s really [financially] tight. After encountering financial difficulties, Aiden returned to labouring in the building industry, guided back into it through his family networks. His initial entry into building meant that he had left his part-time-job apprenticeship, lured by the bigger wage packet that labouring with his father could offer. This was common: the men entered the building industry when they were young, drawn by the attraction of large wage packets. However, as Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrated, money was not the only factor making building work attractive to them. Many said that they took pleasure in their work and most said that they enjoyed ‘the crack’ that was integral to the culture of the building site. This is expressed above by Bristles in his statement that ‘it was hard but at least we had a laugh’, but his story shows that he was also drawn along by the attraction of money when he moved to Milton Keynes – a new town that was being built to accommodate London’s slum dwellers where there would be ‘plenty of money to be earned out there, plenty of money’.



Becoming a builder and being working class  89

Adaptation and informal learning For many of the men, like Aidan falling back into building after his family business went bankrupt, at particular life junctures ‘the buildings’ were one of the few wage packets they perceived they could get. Ushered into the building industry as a result of shifts in the economy, many had few advantageous choices but to take a job as a builder when the opportunity arose. One of these was Trick, a plumber and sometimes electrician. It might be assumed that to do such highly regulated and dangerous work,3 one must first undertake a formal apprenticeship and obtain formal credentials, but Trick was given ‘a chance’ to learn much of his trade informally: I left school at 14 and a half with nothing [no qualifications] but … I went straight into a car factory. I was there for about a year and that was all … [and I] went from that to doing temporary electrics, [then] I went to another firm making electrical re-winders in Cricklewood. It was amazing then [in the 1960s] because you could look in the local paper and get whatever job you wanted, whereas now you wouldn’t get your foot in the door unless you had a piece of paper [qualification] from a college or something. I wished I’d stayed there now, it was an interesting job … I got into the building game because I was unemployed for three years at the end of the [19]80s. I mean I used to work for myself for 15 years. I was refurbing and reconditioning washing machines and vacuum cleaners, that kind of stuff. We used to buy the old ones that people part-exchanged … do them up and sell them back as trade … So that went on for a couple of years and then the Japanese started sending over their bloody cheap versions of motors, armatures and windings … [I’d] built up quite a nice little business. It was a great little life, great little life you know … [But] at the end of the 1980s that all went tits up with Maggie Thatcher, thank you very much. I was unemployed for a good couple of years because I’d cracked 40 and I was wrong side of 35 let alone anything else. Every time I went down the Job Centre, you’d look on the boards and there’d be nothing, or they’d want paperwork or certificates … After I worked for myself for 15 years there was nothing … it was like ‘bloody hell, where do I go now? What do I do’? To be honest I was gutted because I thought washing machines and vacuum cleaners, that domestic side of it, would see me out. I thought I can do this for another 20 years, but of course I didn’t. I should have seen the writing on the wall because years ago you’d have taken a kettle to be repaired, you’d have taken an iron, a hairdryer, toaster – all those little small appliances you would have taken to be repaired. But, of course, over the years the little things, the kettles, the irons and the toasters, all drop away because the price is getting cheaper. The next thing up the ladder was the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine ... I mean they don’t even part exchange them now do they? You just throw it away …

90  Becoming a builder and being working class So I was looking on the board in the old Job Centre and it was like you gotta get a certificate or some sort of qualification. So I decided after six months on the dole I think it is, you can go training. I went down to South London – the Training Factory of all places it’s called! And I decided to go for air conditioning … That was all right, come out of that, got all me certificates and whatever, but of course it’s nothing like a proper five-year or three-year apprenticeship … I mean to me it doesn’t make you an air conditioning engineer or anything … I’m 53 now, so I would have been about 46 at the time. I mean I was gutted. At that time they were saying at the Job Centre: ‘Don’t apply if you’re over 35’ and all that you know. I thought ‘bloody hell, 35, that was 10 years ago!’ Then you start hearing things like, like the family over in Ireland for example, the guys that were 35, 40, they were saying: ‘They’re putting us on permanent unemployment because they got so many youngsters coming through, they haven’t got time to sort us out.’ I mean I was really fucking trying because I’d worked all my life. I must have written three or four hundred [job application] letters. Half of ‘em you didn’t even get a reply …. So where did I get my job? I got my job out of the pub! I do all this paperwork, all this City and Guilds, and my brother-in-law, he’s chatting to a guy in the pub who works for Rank Xerox and the guy’s saying: ‘I’m losing the air conditioning man, he’s buggering off to France’ or something. My brother-in-law just happened to say: ‘well Trick’s just done his City and Guilds, he’s got no basic work knowledge, he just done the bloody course.’ The guy said: ‘that’s all right, bring him in.’ I literally phoned him on Friday night and I went to Uxbridge eight o’clock on Monday morning. The man didn’t give an interview or nothing ... After a couple of weeks I turned round to the guy and I said to him: ‘I’m gonna have to jack it in, I’m out of my depth here,’ but he was very good, ‘no that’s all right’. So from there it just sort of went on. That’s where I met Bill and eventually come on to this firm. When they lost that contract my governor said to me: ‘Well I know you’re doing air conditioning, do you fancy coming out onto the sites? But you’d be doing the plumbing side of it only.’ I said: ‘Yeah I’d give it a go’ … And that was it really, I just kind of learned as I went on. So I sort of come into the building game in the back door, not expecting it, the last place I expected to be to be honest. But I quite enjoy it actually, I quite enjoy the work. Trick, like countless other British working-class men – and women4 – was affected by distant and largely unpredictable social and technological changes, and his skills had became outmoded by global economic restructuring and the influx of inexpensive consumer goods. Having little control over these changes he had found his way into a ‘chance’ in the building industry through a government training scheme, his brother-in-law, and the pub.



Becoming a builder and being working class  91

The pub The pub was mentioned by many as a place where building work opportunities could be found, and it sometimes formed a justification for going to the pub. The pub is central to traditional and contemporary British life and, as Jeffery Reimer (1979) argues with respect to North American builders; the use of alcohol is almost institutionalized in building site culture (see also LeMasters, 1975). A clue to why the pub holds such a significant place in Anglo working-class cultures, and in builders’ culture in particular, can be found in the past. In medieval England, beer formed part of the perquisites that builders expected alongside their wages (Woodwood, 1995). Brewing sterilized drinking water against life-threatening bacteria such as typhus, and made beer a staple part of the medieval British diet. Further forward in time, Robert Tressell’s (1965 [1914]) portrait of the lives of house painters at the turn of the nineteenth century describes how many lived in cold, overcrowded and uncomfortable houses where large extended families, over-worked women and illness were almost constant aspects of daily life. It is of little wonder that the men sought out warm, bright, public houses to engage in the little leisure time that they could, or could not, afford. In the 1830s, gin palaces were specifically marketed towards the poor as an escape from the desolation of the slum, and by the 1850s there were 5,000 of these in London alone.5 As Charles Dickens wrote: Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are greater; and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a halffamished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery … gin-shops will increase in number and splendour. Dickens 1836: 106 By the 1950s the pub continued to perform a similar function to that of Tressell’s house painters and the gin palace. As one of the labourers, Mickey T, explained: When I come over in 1952 I’d earn £7.50 a week, would pay £2 for me digs, send £2 home and still have enough money to go out and get pissed [drunk] (laughs). Everybody says about the Irish being big drinkers but it weren’t like that back home. I never been much of a drinker like, but in those days we didn’t have much of a choice … We had to live in digs that were dark and cold, sharing with strangers, all sorts of fuckin’ people (laughs, and goes on to describe a fight that he once lost with a stranger in a ‘dig’) … In some pubs in the winter they’d put on a fire and soup for the workers ... We was all in there, [so] that’s where the gangerman would come to find blokes [to labour]. Field notes Building work since its inception largely took place away from the home. Builders must necessarily be mobile in order to travel from building to building

92  Becoming a builder and being working class because they are only required on a single building site for short trade-specific periods, and they thus always had to travel to their places of work (see Clarke, 1992). Like the experiences of Mickey T, they sometimes trekked large distances and lived in temporary makeshift and shared accommodation ‘with all sorts of fuckin’ people’.6 As a result, builders do not share a common workplace in which to gather and so the public house becomes their meeting place. This explains why the early building trade friendly societies – the precursors of building trade unions – met in pubs and how they later functioned as an early form of labour exchange (Postgate, 1923) – something that is still reflected in the names of many British pubs today, for example, the Bricklayers’, Carpenters’ or Joiners’ Arms. The pub became inscribed into British working life through its relationship with poor pay, polluted drinking water, inadequate housing and a cold climate. It thus became a natural recruitment centre for those that needed building labour, and, by extension, a place where builders went to offer labour. It was this circular process that institutionalized the pub and its close relation, beer, into British working life, and, due to builders being necessarily mobile, the pub became a particular part of many of their lives.

Adaptation and chain migration Drinking and the pub were a central feature of many of the men’s lives and cultures, but this was not so for everyone, in particular the carpenters. The carpenters were entrenched in a cultural network emanating from a hot climate which frowned upon the use of alcohol. All the older carpenters did tell me that they had been drawn into the Western vices of drinking, smoking, gambling and eating meat at some point in their lives but, most had, after a few years, moved back into more sober and traditional family-centred activities. The first generation Kutchis did, however, tell stories of their life choices being highly structured by large-scale historical events. Economic and political developments had pushed them out from their homeland and into East Africa and, later, into London’s building industry via their social networks. Bapu, the oldest carpenter at Keyworker House, explained: My grandmother and grandfather left Gujarat about 100 years ago. At that time it was very hard to work in India, that’s why we go to Africa – Uganda, and split up the family. Then work, work, work, send for family to come over. All my family, my father, brother, sister all grow up in Uganda, everybody was over there … My father was a builder in Africa. He did very well – own company, own business, everything all right, and suddenly the big Idi Amin Dada was the problem. All the English and Indian was the guilt of the problem but they all coming to this country, all settle here now.7 I came in 1972/73, I was young – 24, 25. My father teach me on everything of the trades in Africa: make the chair, make all the joinery work, furniture. You see my father was builder, my grandfather was joinery and builder. We are



Becoming a builder and being working class  93 two trades in the family. My father has five brothers, all work as builder. My own brother as well, he is a builder …

‘Work, work, work, send for family to come over’. Chain migration processes both supply and restrict choices through the relative values of the social capital built up within social networks (Portes, 1995; Portes and Landlot, 1996). The Kutchis were not free to migrate anywhere they chose because historical, political and economic factors directed their movement: they had migrated across the world, but in a pattern tied to British colonialism. In this context, their movements were not strictly global but international, framed by specific colonial nodal points. Most of the carpenters, however, maintained strong attachments to Kutch (cf. Anwar, 1979), and there were robust normative reasons for this. Some of their family members had remained in Kutch and the carpenters’ nostalgic image of homeland provided a layer of subjective security over what had been a very insecure history. Consequently, regardless of the poverty, illness, conflict and fatal earthquakes in Kutch, and despite the carpenters’ increasing Anglicization, many held strong subjective attachments to their homeland, despite most of them never having lived there. Naz explained why: [With the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan] big, big arguments, court cases everything, I mean nobody wants to lose a land which belonged to the grandfather and the grandfather’s father … So I bought my own land from a farm, you know, unwanted land so the farmer sells it as building blocks … it’s just there for me. Now, if my daughter wish to go there, I say: ‘Okay, I got enough land so you can build your house’ … It’s like the Jewish. There was Israel, then they went away. Then there was no Israel. But when Hitler messed them up they wanted a base. So it’s the same you know, we got a base. Nobody leaves that. The carpenters maintained their links with Kutch partly by sending money back to their villages. As Naz went on to say: We [Kutchis] got together in London to build a massive school, massive. Seven rooms, big yard and everything. We’ve done a big hospital, cancer research, and everything in it, paid for by private donors, then later the government might give subsidies … I mean even the water supply in my village was done by individual donors you know. Then you pay like say 10 rupees a month or whatever for the water bills. Well, they don’t come in bills, they just – you know it and you go and pay it. The donations of Naz and the London Kutchis appeared morally driven. The carpenters held strong affective ties to their homeland and remained connected to its moral community. All of the first generation owned houses in Kutch and tried to visit them at least annually, and these actions reinforced their symbolic

94  Becoming a builder and being working class attachment to Kutch and the Kutchi-bound social capital that had been so formative to their lives – activities that were both instrumental and expressive (cf. Lin, 2002; and Chapter 7). Migration and opportunity The choices of many migrant men who came to Britain after school leaving age were often restricted. The first generation Kutchis, for example, would have faced blocked employment opportunities as a result of racism (see Bowling, 1999) and, partly because of that, they would have initially possessed few network links outside of their ethnic community (see Chapter 7). Employment opportunities for migrant men with few or no formal educational credentials were restricted to a small number of occupations including building work. As one of the labourers, Michael, explained: When I first got in the building trade? It’s so long ago I don’t know (laughs). Must be, 20 year ago I started on it. When I left school I was in a caravan factory, back home, mobile homes and all that. Next thing I joined the army, I went there for three years. Then I worked in the forestry for a while, at home, done that for a couple of years ... Then, worked in the building over here, and that’s where it started, doing a bit of groundwork, labouring, that’s it … I’ve not a lot of choice have I, hmm? But I quite like it sometimes, no pressure … DT: Why did you come over here in the first place? Because all the family moved over here. So, they’re all over here, the whole lot of them except the father, he used to work for a farmer years ago, farm labourer, he done that for about 50 years [until he committed suicide]. I been coming over here on and off for the last 20 years. Michael worked in England largely because his family were there. He always seemed a reluctant émigré, yearning for the village life in which he had grown up, and he felt compelled to labour in London’s building industry because he perceived that he had little choice but to. His work as a labourer continued a long-standing London Irish tradition, transferring bodily strength and skill from an agrarian to an industrial environment – a tradition that both supplied and restricted his choices and opportunities. Not all of the recent migrant builders interpreted their migration to Britain with such ambivalence as Michael. Some, like Mickey T, had migrated for more direct social and economic reasons, beginning the chain of migration that Michael was reluctantly pulled along on the end of (see Chapter 1). Gerry, a painter from Northern Ireland, once described by one of the other painters as a ‘maverick’, spoke about his migration to London:



Becoming a builder and being working class  95 Ireland’s greatest export is its people … A lot of Northern Irish [in England] come from the little place I came from. I lived about three mile from the border to the Republic of Ireland – Donegal is the next place to me. We would go over to the Republic for drinking because they have different drinking hours. Yea, I just, one Friday, in pub with wages, and this bloke, he’s going over to work in London … does anyone want to come with him? So, we come over … and err, that was fuckin’ 19 years ago. I only come over here for two weeks … but the menu you’ve got in London! Everything is on the menu. I miss London when I’m away …

Social capital and social order A substantial number of the builders grew up the sons of artisans or, for the first generation Irish, the sons of farmers and farm labourers. For others, like Bapu, being a builder was almost part of their pedigree; they did family-bound apprenticeships, were the descendants of long lines of tradesmen and had become tradesmen themselves. For others, however, their situation was different. A number of the men did not possess the relative advantage of family members in occupations to guide them into work and informal training. Stew, a painter, was one of these: I grew up in a fuckin’ mad house. It was like [in the 1980s] before I was even ten I fed meself and clothed meself, I done most of everything for meself ... All this comfort, security, prospects, I didn’t have none of it ... My dad was in a rehabilitation centre when I was a kid, we lived in squats and he used to beat me mum up. That was due to the fact that he was fuckin’ wired you know; he was totally stoked [up with drugs] ... I watched many of my friends getting hooked, my mate’s mum and dad both died of AIDS through using needles. It’s a fucked up world … We were lucky to eat let alone have clothes on me back, so, at the time, I was like nine or ten, I was out there smashing cars. I was going behind market stalls and grabbing fruit and clothes and that ... But I started to think I might get nicked so leave it alone, go and get yourself a job. Mind you saying that, when I was 14 I had more money than I do now … But I feel better for it, peace of mind, it’s not all about money. Materialism, you can shove that up your arse, I’m not into it … He continued: As I got older I started juggling [selling drugs] … But in the end I just thought this is violently impractical, I’m getting nowhere. But, like I say, for every amount of drugs that I’ve taken I’d be a rich man. Me and millions of others … I miss those times of taking the piss and going out and earning good money for things that you shouldn’t be doing. I know now it’s violently not a good idea. Me being banged up in the cells is not gonna do me or me

96  Becoming a builder and being working class family any favours. So I have to strain me greens everyday, earn tuppence and try and live as good as I can … So, basically … when I was about 19 … I just needed to do something to occupy my mind, so I did a City and Guilds [qualification] in painting and decorating … Then I left it for about a year … After a while I went off working in a tyre place. Don’t take much to do that – fit a tyre. I stuck it out for a while, nearly two years. It was just the fact that I was only earning £130 a week … So I started labouring for this bloke and then one day I was talking to the governor and I just turned round and said: ‘Look, I went to college and I’m a painter and decorator’ ... From there it just picked up. I’ve not looked back since, but I’ve always worked on and off like. Sometimes you just think ‘fuck it, I don’t give a shit’, but the next thing you know you’re back in trouble8 … I mean with Ernie Coat, I’ve worked for him on three occasions, this is the longest I’ve ever been with him. The first couple of times I worked for him it was only a trial basis so there was none of that being on the cards or tax, he just wanted to see how I would get on with the job. Stew was one of a clique of three younger painters aged in their late 20s and early 30s that had grown up in ‘the Cally’ – a small area of Kings Cross in central London residualized and stigmatized by its image as an illegitimate service centre. Another of the painters, Bristles, also grew-up in this part of London. He told me how as a child he worked as a runner for some of the local prostitutes, fetching alcohol and cigarettes for them. The Cally Road clique, Stew, Frank and Wayne, still lived in the area. Frank described how he had found his way into the building trade: I first got into the trade through my uncle. When I was at school I used to work with him weekends for some extra pocket money. When I left school he set me on as a labourer. Crap money and I had to do more work than anybody else because, relatives, family, you know what I mean? Then from there I went to dispatch to do van driving, then I went back to labouring on the building sites. Then, what was it, then my brother was working for a painter. He wanted a painter just for the one night so he asked me to come in and I was there four years. One nights work, four years! This was, must be going back about 10 years ago now. Then, well he sold up the firm, and after that I did more building site work, talked to Freddie and [his son] Wayne [who found me a job with Ernie Coat]. DT: How’d you know Freddie? Through Wayne. We grew up together me and Wayne – his mum and dad used to look after us when my mum was out working, used to babysit for us, and they brought us up basically. My fuckin’ dad was always pissed-up [drunk] you know. Yeah so, Freddie always looks out for me. He always has,



Becoming a builder and being working class  97 he always says if there’s any work coming up and I’m not working he’ll give me a bell [phone him up]. And then like, spoke to Freddie one day and he said: ‘There’s a job going with Ernie Coat’s at Hammersmith’. So I’ve been with them ever since. I bought Stew over, got him the job, basically it’s, you know what I mean, it’s just like getting in contact with people innit.

Frank’s relationship with Freddie had got both him and Stew their jobs with Ernie Coat. Again and again, people’s social networks enabled them to become builders and later find work at Topbuild. For Frank and Stew, whose own fathers had spent much of their lives intoxicated and out of work, individuals such as Freddie who ‘always look out for me’, provided a vital link into employment in community networks that were largely bereft of valuable social capital (cf. Wilson, 1987). Informal routes into work were particularly important for Frank and Stew because both had simultaneously worked and claimed state benefits, and trusted links with Ernie Coat had enabled them to do this. Frank explained: To get by, you just gotta look for different jobs, like off the cards [outside of formal regulation and taxation]. I can’t afford to go on the cards now I got three kids and a wife, know what I mean? So as long as this [job] lasts, just keep it going … I’m claiming [income support from the Department of Social Security] for my two kids; the wife claims for my daughter and I claim for the others separate … the [Department of] Social [Security] thinks we’ve split up. I’m meant to be [living] at my mum’s with the two kids … What it is, is that it’s coming up to five years now that I’ve been trying to get a flat near the school, but I can’t get one … So I claim for single parent benefit. It’s not bad [money] but [my wife] she changes it [the cheque] for me and then she spends it. The money I get from Ernie Coat just covers the surface. I have to borrow money off my mum, so I’m paying her back … so basically the wages don’t even cover you. DT: What’s she [your wife] spend it on then? Nine out of ten it is drugs anyway, but what can you do? I do them as well but … it’s expensive … She starts moaning if she don’t get any [drugs], withdrawal symptoms you know what I mean, it’s no good man (laughs). With his own addiction, an addicted wife, three children and another on the way, apparently little chance of being housed by his local authority, and with just over £200 per week of self-employed casual wages, Frank felt forced to fiddle in order to continue the lifestyle to which he and his family had become accustomed, and networked employment enabled him to do this. Information that accrues in a network is likely to remain within it because network groups, while circulating information to their members, also act to conceal information from those outside (see Grieko, 1987; Portes, 1995; and Chapter 3). In Frank’s case,

98  Becoming a builder and being working class this enabled him to work and claim non-working welfare benefits, concealing his illegitimate activities from the state. Stew’s story showed that he left his entrepreneurial work in the informal economy because of his feelings of guilt about his unorthodox occupation (cf. Braithwaite, 1989). He had also become head of his own family, for whom he felt a great responsibility (cf. Hirschi, 1969). As I argue in the following chapter, the strong associations between the families and mainstream conformity were something that many of the builders experienced. To highlight this further, I reproduce the biography of Jamin, the carpentry and general foreman – another of the builders who had ‘chanced’ his way into the building industry. His story clearly illustrates how job networks and families were powerful sources of both social control and social capital: I was [at college] doing A levels: maths, computer science and physics, yeah serious boy! I was well on my way, but women and wine, and that was the end of college … I was going to college and I took the freedom for granted you know. I used to bunk off college and go drinking and fucking and all that shit. My dad just got pissed off [upset] and he said: ‘Right that’s it, if you don’t want to go to college tell them you’re not coming in and come to work with me.’ About eight months I worked with my dad in the factory when he hauled me out of college. He tried to train me up [as a goldsmith] but he just wanted me to keep out of trouble basically. I was getting into all kinds of fuckin’ trouble. I would have ended up in jail man. DT: What kind of stuff were you doing? Stupid stuff. Fucking puffing [smoking cannabis] and I had mates who did robberies and that, went in jail. I must have visited every jail in fucking London … Yeah, I was lucky to escape from going to prison man. It’s a phase you go through isn’t it, you just want to be out with the lads don’t you. And your dad’s telling you: ‘Don’t go out, don’t go out’, and you’re thinking why can’t I go out and have fun? Looking back on it he was fucking 100 per cent right! Yeah, but it’s one of them things, as I say everybody goes through a funny patch and a phase. Luckily I escaped from it without too much damage … So I was with the wrong crowd, that didn’t help, I fucked it up ... So I left college, worked with my dad, then did nothing for about six months, started getting little jobs here and little jobs there – furniture store and all that sort of rubbish. My mate was in the building game and he was boasting like: ‘I’ve been at work and I’ve dug a hole a metre deep and that long’. I said: ‘So fucking what’? He said: ‘I bet you couldn’t do it’. So I thought: ‘All right, let’s go mate’ … I started off labouring, proper labouring: digging holes, cement mixing and concreting, proper building you know. At that time [in the early 1980s] building was booming, you could just literally walk on and get a job … I was a good grafter man by



Becoming a builder and being working class  99 anybody’s standards, and I just carried on from there: labouring, labouring, watching, labouring … I went where the money was and did that for about two years I think it was, slowly got my tools together and then sort of became a chippy. DT: In the sense that you were labouring, how did you learn chippying? Well when I was labouring there was a lot of chippies on site, as there is here [at Keyworker House]. I was watching them, giving them a hand, working with them, talking to them, mucking in a little bit, seeing how they do it. Eventually I got the confidence, got me tools together, phoned up the agency and said ‘I’m a chippy’. No one ever really found out that I’m not a chippy as such, I did quite well, did quite well. Never ever got thrown off a job, never … I did quite a long time with the agencies, must have done about two years with them, floating round here and there. And then I got onto a firm, Hillpark Builders. They were like a subby, they weren’t an agency, [they were] a proper firm you know … The recession came in 1990/91, no work about. So I did a bit of cabbing for a while … and then slowly got back into chippying when the work picked up. Never looked back since, no, never had time out man, never had time out since then. Cabbing, that was quite fucking enjoyable. It’s too dangerous now. When I did it, I’m going back to when there was a recession, it was fucking dangerous then. And I also did it before that, just to sort of like earn extra money in the evenings, which was like 1986/87. And a fucking good time I had doing that man; the women, freedom, going to parties and that, it was good.

Learning to labour in post-industrial capitalism The stories of Frank, Trick and Jamin highlight their informal routes to becoming tradesman, stories that were common and which reflected my own experiences of becoming a painter and decorator. It can also be seen in a number of their accounts that many of the builders did not learn the formal educational curriculum at school– perhaps, thereby, resisting ‘normalizing’ state power (See chapter 6). At school, they rather learnt how to ‘piss around’, ‘have a laugh’ and be a ‘lad’. Or, in Paul Willis’ (1977) terms, they ‘learnt to labour’, implying a masculine valorization of manual work, something that clearly initially pulled Jamin to working in the building industry, and, as I demonstrate in the next chapter, had cast a powerful discursive framework over the builders’ identities and cultures. Learning to labour in post-industrial capitalism could be very restrictive, however. Global restructuring of the economy in the late 1970s left Britain without the mass of industrial manual work opportunities into which the ‘lads’ culture melds so well. Building sites, along with old car mechanics, street cleaning,

100  Becoming a builder and being working class and driving are perhaps amongst the few fitting and legitimate career options for ‘lads’ in contemporary Britain. The ‘no questions asked’ policy, workplace autonomy, ephemeral career structure and the working class, masculine environment provide a relatively culturally familiar way to make a living for many such men. On the other hand, formally educated individuals, or ‘Ear’oles’ (Willis, 1977), who come to work on building sites must also learn to labour. This was indicated above by Steve in his description of his fast learning of the informal world of the building site after he first left carpentry college. Silence and hedonism The informal and corporeal nature of building employment practices also facilitated a drift into the industry by individuals with poor or ill-fitting communication skills. As opposed to burgeoning forms of professional and service work where employees are encouraged to perform specific types of personality work (Hochschild, 1983; McDowell, 1995; Mills, 1951), one’s personality is almost irrelevant for building work so long as one can perform the necessary physical tasks. Individuals who are unable or unwilling to communicate or to present themselves in a, perhaps, feminized manner as dictated by the North American service ethic, might then at least work on the tools in the building industry. This explains the large concentrations of migrant groups in London’s building industry, and how others, like Bony for instance, literally never said more than a few words to me or anyone else throughout my fieldwork. The building industry’s disregard for personality work also facilitated frequent drug use and may provide another clue as to why alcohol use was institutionalized in the building industry. Put simply, one can do manual work with a hangover and, with practice, under the influence of narcotics. In comparing his labouring work to his previous job as a warehouse manager, Aidan illuminated this: With the packaging firm its shirt and tie and all this business, all that hassle. Got to make sure your shirt’s ironed for the next day, gotta wear a different tie, what over-jacket you gotta wear and all things like that you know. Least you can come here and just chuck anything on, ain’t gotta shave every day, come in smelling of beer and all that. Just come in do your job and that’s it. These features cast light on why early sociological studies of working-class men and boys associated drug use with ‘short run hedonism’ (e.g. Miller, 1958). Manual workers may be hedonistic simply because they are able to be so. Language and personality are relatively unimportant in terms of getting manual work done and, as I described in Chapter 4, simultaneous work and drug use are possible and help to combat boredom and make aspects of the work more rewarding. Moreover, some forms of drug use may also support working class masculinity and thus provide a prop for masculine identity (see Chapter 6).



Becoming a builder and being working class  101

Social mobility and class identity Post-industrial economies based in knowledge work, service and consumption (Bell 1974; Lash and Urry, 1987) have resulted in a growing and affluent consumer middle class and a shrinking manual working class. For example, the proportion of Britain’s manual working population declined from 75 per cent in 1901 to only 38 per cent in 1991 (Gallie, 2000; from Bottero, 2005). However, 38 per cent represents a substantial proportion of British society, and, within that stratum, the ‘old’ class system continues to have an impact upon peoples’ lives. Society’s physical infrastructure must be built, cleaned, maintained and repaired, and somebody must do that work manually and somatically. In this sense, not only did the builders grow from manual working backgrounds, they still did manual work, and their activities, dispositions and cultures were soaked in classbound symbols and circumstance. Social mobility continues to be tied to class and class background (Goldthorpe and Marshall, 1992). In contemporary Britain it remains significantly less likely for the children of the working class to achieve middle-class occupations compared with the children of the middle class, and it is much less likely for the middle class to be downward mobile into the working class (Goldthorpe et al., 1987). The working class is thus largely recruited from the working class, meaning that manual work and class inequality runs in families, stamping its influence on the formative stages of individuals’ lives and contributing to the maintenance of working class tradition and identity. However, as I have described, a significant number of the builders had not grown up in the English working class, but under the shadow of British colonialism and had later migrated to London. Nonetheless, even the traditionally caste-bound carpenters had adopted class categories to interpret their social position. Naz highlighted this, and part of the reason why: [In the past] we used to go on the caste culture, now we don’t do that, well, it’s changed a lot … I’m a working class, yeah. I mean we have a caste for barbers, we have a caste for shoemakers, we have a caste for every cunt. But it’s changed … [my son-in-law] he’s from the barbers, he’s got four brothers and none of them are fucking barbers anyway … I mean his father wasn’t a barber either. Another of the carpenters, Mehl, used class symbolism to account for his life, albeit one entwined with Hinduism: If you do good things now you will get good future, you might be born in wealthy family and have an easy life. I got a friend, his dad he’s a rich man. He [my friend] has no problem in the future. Think about that, he’s born in good and we are born in working class. How come that guy born in wealthy family, how come we weren’t in middle class? Because he did good things in another past.

102  Becoming a builder and being working class Despite the builders’ allusions to class, almost regardless of ethnic and migration history, there was no semblance of a collective class-based politics among them. Their political outlooks were varied, inconsistent and conflicting. Bill, for instance, identified himself as a socialist but did not agree with the existence of unions. Mike Fixit was fiercely right wing for the most part, but supported gay marriage and adoption – much to the disdain of everyone else. Mickey T was a committed Irish Catholic but he entertained the idea that Jesus was black and his attitudes were, in general, as liberal as my own. I could continue with many examples but what I want to illustrate is that despite the builders’ lives and identities being framed by social class-based symbols and circumstance, there was no sense of a coherent or collective politics. In a broader sense, ‘Britain is not a deeply class conscious society’ (Savage, 2000: 40) and, as McKenzie and Silver’s (1968) research and Robert Tressell’s (1965 [1914]) reportage indicates, a dearth of collective politics among the British working class is a regular aspect of their history. Class, for the builders, was not political, but it was a lived existence and the symbolic interpretation of that (cf. Bourdieu, 1984). Any semblance of a broad class collectivity was fractured by gender and ethnic divisions, competition over jobs, housing and women, and, importantly, ethnic and status distinctions between the trades. Trade-status divisions were based around pay, the amount of mental work deemed to be involved in them, and the levels of dirt accrued doing them. As an example of the later, when I left the site office to participate as a painter, Steve said to me: ‘What do you want to work with them for? Painters are the scum of the earth.’ Class represents people’s collective structural and symbolic positions in a hierarchical stratification system that emerges as a discursive category that the British – and others – use to make sense of hierarchy and culture (Skeggs, 2004), and this is most commonly bifurcated into working and middle class categories (Cannadine 1999). This discursive structure, however, fed the administrative, organizational and symbolic patterns of the Keyworker House build, and in building in general. This was reflected in its class-bound organizational structure of ‘clean’ middle class professional ‘mental’ workers – quantity surveyors – and ‘dirty’ working class ‘manual/bodily’ tradesmen and labourers. As a consequence, the quantity surveyors were the only group I asked who considered themselves middle class, although they were quite defensive, alluding to class snobbery (cf. Savage et al., 2001). For instance, I asked Topbuild’s quantity surveyor, Kevin: ‘In your occupation, do you consider yourself middle class or working class?’ (Laughs) What a horrible question! I dunno. Where are the boundaries? Where are the boundaries these days … My wife would consider herself middle to upper class because she’s a snob. Me, middle to lower I think. I’d hate to ever think that, because I came from a real working class background9 … So I wouldn’t consider myself anything really … I’d hate to classify myself as middle class, lower class or anything like that. I think that’s



Becoming a builder and being working class  103 why a lot of surveyors have problems in the [building] industry, they do tend to look or walk around site in a suit as if they should have respect just because they’re wearing a suit and they’re a surveyor …

Kevin’s trainee, Bobby, also took a defensive view of his class status, but from a different angle. Perhaps contingent on his social background as a second generation Punjabi whose parents were members of the Brahmin caste, Bobby’s account was swamped in the class- and caste-bound moral symbolism of dirt: In the job that I do, yeah middle. But I am, your bringing up another thing … [If] I come into a crowd of people at home, especially my mum’s side of the family … without going into too much detail, they are extremely well educated … ‘Oh, I’m in the construction industry’, and straight away they’re like ‘Ah’, you know what I mean … It really annoys me, really annoys me because straight away people think like mud, shit-shifter, like dirty you know. Quantity surveyors were in fact the only occupational group on the site that did not ‘shit-shift’. Even the project and site managers would occasionally get dirty by engaging in manual work. Perhaps partly as a result of this, coupled with their earlier careers as manual workers and their familial social backgrounds, all the ‘NCO’ site managers differentiated themselves from the quantity surveyors. They also made a distinction between themselves and the building tradesman and labourers who they categorized as ‘on the tools’. Nonetheless, they continued to self-identify as working class, and their identifications were not at all defensive. As Paul said: I’m working class yes. Quantity surveyors consider themselves middle class don’t they? Because I think it’s a professional qualification QS, but it’s bullshit isn’t it? All it means is that the chief honchos sit in big leather chairs like Wing Commanders … No I don’t see myself as being middle class, not in the least. Definitely working class. Wouldn’t even cross my mind until you asked the question. I’ve got a degree [in construction management] but would you say that a lot of people who’ve got a degree would consider themselves to be middle class? ... [Site management] is a desk job to a certain extent but I wouldn’t say it puts you alongside dentists or doctors, but it’s, it sounds quite impressive doesn’t it, ‘building site manager’, you know, it sounds something more than it actually is. Despite his management position, Paul clearly identified as working class. It was for this reason, and because the Kutchis also identified in this way, that I did not ask the tradesmen and labourers what class they identified with. At the time it seemed so obvious that it would have been tantamount to asking them what gender they thought they were.

104  Becoming a builder and being working class Consumption A number of writers claim that late-modern social and economic conditions have levered social identity out from its entanglement with work, becoming replaced by consumption as a major source of social identity (see, for example, du Gay, 1996; Ransome, 2005). This was not, however, apparent for the builders on the tools. As Stew said: ‘Materialism, you can shove that up your arse, I’m not into it’. The builders’ lack of interest in identity consumption may have been partly a result of their financial insecurities. Paul provided a clue to this when reflecting on his change of career from manual worker to directly employed site manager: [W]orking for a big firm, it is just secure you know. And with the security you want more things yourself. Like, I’ve never been interested in a nice car but now all of a sudden when you’ve got a stable income, you think, ‘Yeah I’ll get one’. And also when you’ve actually dug a hole for money it’s less easy to part with it. Paul’s words cast some light on why consumption, in particular the consumption of mechanical and technological objects, were common foci for the site managers and quantity surveyors but not for those working on the tools. Also, however, identifiable symbols of the manual workers’ occupation followed them for the much of their everyday lives, which was not the case for the managers and surveyors. At, before and after work, the builders on the tools dressed regularly in dirty work clothing and sometimes drove battered vans, projecting a public image of their builder occupation and rendering them largely unable to display consumed identity equipment. They did, of course, consume, but this was tied largely to traditional desires to engage in leisure in the pub, experience sporting contests, or it was family centred whereby what they consumed was redistributed among their families; forms of ‘simple consumption’ (Ransome, 2005) that have occurred for hundreds of years. Consumption may, however, be highly gendered. The builders might have left consumption work largely to their wives and partners to consume and signal their family identity through smart clean houses and fashionable consumer durables. As I did not observe home lives, this can only be guessed at but, certainly at work, the consumption of goods was not talked about or performed by the builders on the tools with any salience at all, although many of them did talk about what they perceived as the sometimes excessive shopping and cleaning habits of their partners.

Conclusion The life stories presented in this chapter reveal that the builders involved in manual labour all accounted their lives as contingent on circumstance external to their control, and some felt they had few choices in life but to become a builder. Those that I asked also clearly identified as working class – an identification



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framed by the discursive binary mind-body/clean and dirty, which I expand on further in the following chapter. Although not presented here, only the life narratives constructed by the self-defined middle-class quantity surveyors projected stories of life and career choice. Perhaps thinking of one’s self as middle class entails conceptualizations of life as guided by personal choice and autonomy (see du Gay 1996; Rose, 1999 [1989]; Skeggs 2004). Yet this seems illusory because life trajectories are necessarily embedded in and contingent upon historical foundations, the actions of everybody else, and in the power structures these reproduce. What some early sociological research classified as lower class as ‘fatalism’ (e.g. Miller, 1958), was thus a realistic interpretation of lives at particular positions in the stratification system. Indeed, the further one descends the stratification structure, the less choices one has (Bottero, 2005), and this is exposed in the effects of schooling (Aidan), negligible parenting (Stew), careers officers (Bill), technological change (Trick), and political uprising (Bapu): conditions largely out of one’s personal control. The men’s ability to negotiate large-scale social change were limited by their lack of power, or, in Bourdieu’s (1986) terms, a deficit of high value cultural, symbolic, social and money capital with which to empower their choices and opportunities over limited resources. The builders’ lives were ones of adaptation and reaction to often distant social, economic and political events, or to the less advantaged circumstances that they were born into, and they clearly saw that through a stark realism that their lives were structured and contingent (cf. Croteau, 1995). Faced with social disadvantage and/or large-scale social change, they relied on the relative stability of their working bodies and community networks in order to grasp opportunity, meaning and status. Their communities and bodies had thus become central to the builder’s identities and cultural foci. However, as I elaborate in the following two chapters, those bodies and communities were situated within the relative disadvantage of their class, ethnic and national backgrounds, which operated in combination with their ensuing pragmatic cultures to reproduce their existing class positions, identities, and structures of opportunity.

Chapter 6

Building masculinity Bodies, law and violence

This chapter focuses on the centrality of class-bound gender to the builders’ lives, examining how this affected their habits, identities, self-presentation and social interaction. Their masculinity was tied up with body-bound notions of heterosexuality, physical strength and the associated roles of protector and provider, which infused the builders’ self-conceptions and interpersonal relations. I begin the chapter by examining the builders’ masculine expressions and then I turn to look at the exigencies of working-class masculinity that lay in the informal and sometimes violent nature of working and community life. These features stretched deep into the history of builders and the working class more generally, so that formal state law held little real of symbolic resonance for them and, instead, informal lore, sustained by the threat of violence, provided a social order central to the builders’ lives and masculine identities. This form of masculinity, tied into the builders’ physical capabilities, was a pragmatic cultural resource that they utilized to provide meaning and negotiate the peculiarities of their everyday lives. Their masculine cultural foci, however, positioned the builders in a set of broader symbolic power relations that worked back against them to reproduce class and ethnic disadvantage.

Gendered organization All the builders at Keyworker House were men. Women comprise only 2 per cent of the manual building trades and of 6 per cent professional and managerial jobs in the British building industry (Greed, 2000). The building industry is a ‘gendered organization’ (Acker, 1992), soaked in masculine imagery that is reinforced by popular cultural images of builders and building sites as masculine exemplars (see Figure 6.1 below). This imagery reflects reality to some degree (Denissen, 2010; Eisenberg, 1998; Paap, 2006) but it also works back upon builders, framing their identity construction in a self-fulfilling process (cf. Wicks, 2002). In preceding chapters I described how group interaction between the builders frequently took the form of humour and ‘piss-takes’. These events were regularly bound into a form of gendered hierarchy whereby ‘less’ masculine and ‘more’ feminine actions invited jocular censure and more. My field notes were filled



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with examples of these forms of masculine-bound interaction. In particular, the building project at Keyworker House accommodated many nurses, most of whom were women. This supplied ample opportunity for expressions of heterosexuality through ‘women-talk’ and lechery in which the nurses and female cleaners were objects of ‘red-blooded’ conversation. During initial encounters with and between the builders, and during group encounters where piss-takes occurred, I was struck by how their demeanour was specifically masculine. This was a result of more than the builders’ body shapes but was tied to forms of masculine posturing performed through tough stances and facial gestures, loud, deep voices, constant profanities, and in confrontational and often aggressive reactions to anyone who tried to ‘push them around’ or ‘take the piss’ too far. Like numerous descriptions of working-class men and boys: ‘The touchstones of this world were manliness, roughness and directness of interpersonal conflict’ (Wills, 1978: 13). Day-to-day interaction at Keyworker House was not, however, a constant round of masculine banter, piss-taking and bellicosity, but these were performed in specific contexts. For example, one-to-one interaction took different forms from group interactions and was contingent on how familiar actors were with one another. At many other times, the builders were simply quiet: they regularly worked alone in spaces cut off from one another, separated by distance and/or the noise of building work, and/or they were caught up in work rhythms and daydreaming (see Chapter 4). Even break times were often quite silent – the men simply refuelled, recuperated, read newspapers and sometimes slept. Yet, during quiet times, few normative signals were conveyed, merely signifying that it was acceptable to be quiet. Loud, boisterous and masculine times on the other hand, signified normative frameworks. Masculine-saturated encounters thus influenced the builders’ public expressions and activities to a larger extent than their actual proportion of daily events. Below is a short example of an encounter between Perry, a painter, and Bapu, a carpenter. Bapu was a committed Hindu, the carpenter group elder and one of the most congenial people one could meet. He may not be considered a masculine actor in an Anglo-Western sense, but because building sites can be rough, tough and aggressive places, and Bapu had worked on them in London for more than 30 years, he had adapted to this world – as had the other first generation Kutchi carpenters. Bapu would sometimes enter the painter’s canteen to ask if he could take one of the ‘dirty papers’, by which he meant the Sport, a soft pornographic daily ‘newspaper’ regularly consumed by some of the painters. The canteens of the trade and labour groups were littered with copies of semi-pornographic newspapers – the Sport, the Star and the Sun being particular favourites. Only the labour foreman, Danny, bucked this trend because he read the broadsheet Irish Times. During my participant observation, the Sun ran a week-long series of photographs of semi-naked women standing on building sites, wearing hard hats and handling building tools. Tabloid publications of this kind were almost badges

108  Building masculinity of working-class masculinity, celebrating men, practical straight-talk, sport and young female bodies. Bapu, however, being religious and living in a tightly knit and quite pious community, was apparently too shy or ashamed to buy these publications, but he ostensibly enjoyed the titillation provided. One day when I was working with the painters, Perry and I entered the painters’ canteen to find Bapu clutching a copy of the Sport. Perry said in a straight-faced, but perhaps jocular fashion: What are you doing in here you thieving old bastard? Oh the fuckin’ Sport! Shouldn’t you be praying or something, not playing with yourself? Go buy your own [news] paper you dirty old bastard. Keep coming in here and nicking our stuff, I’ll phone immigration and get you deported if you ain’t careful. Field notes Bapu stood up straight, expanded his body size, looked Perry seriously in the eye and replied in a possibly threatening tone: ‘You wanna go to hospital you bastard’? Perry gave no reply. The event provided one among many occurrences of the expression of heterosexuality, bellicosity, piss-take sarcasm, racism, and the frequent impossibility of being unable to detect whether the builders were joking or not. These interactions were ‘aggressive, sexist and derogatory, humorous yet insulting, playful but degrading’ (Collinson and Hearn 1996: 68) and, because of their possible humorous and playful content, they were not usually perceived as insults per se (see Emerson, 1969). Indeed, in terms of racist piss-takes, because these were also expressed in a seemingly jocular manner, the carpenters had developed explanations and mechanisms of accounting for them as mere jokes (see Chapter 7). Bodies matter Most of a builder’s working day continues to rely on dextrous strength, embodied skill and handicraft production. Builder’s bodies are consequently central to their life-projects and self-concept – not merely in terms of gender status or as a site of pleasure, but as part of the ‘capital’ that they expend to negotiate their lives (cf. Bourdieu, 1986; Thiel, 2007, 2010; Wacquant, 1995). Masculine bodies were sources of skill and labour power that the builders sold in the marketplace, but they were also sources of interpersonal power utilized in particular interactive contexts. These corporeal features of their lives were ingrained in the builders’ cultures and made salient by the historical bifurcation of mental and manual work that I described in the last chapter, through which manual work and manual workers had become became delineated in broader discourse as bodily. Take for example, Paul one of the site managers, reflecting on his recent change of career from general builder to site manager:



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Figure 6.1  Health and safety notice in the painters’ storeroom at Keyworker House I.

You can’t really term it [site management] as earning your money. I always think to earn your money you’ve got to work hard for it. I don’t consider this to be work, I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense but I think work, I would relate it to physical work you know. This is just the lighter end isn’t it ... You really get paid extortionately for doing no real work, but you’re paid for your knowledge aren’t you. It’s a strange thing to say, but using your brain isn’t really working I think. Bodies and work were intimately connected, and work was framed as physical. This did not mean that the builders totally devalued ‘mental work’, as some other studies have claimed (for example, Willis, 1977). Indeed, they made distinctions between the trades through their perceptions of the skill and knowledge involved,

110  Building masculinity which was reflected, for instance, in the trade status ‘food chain’ described by Bristles in Chapter 3. However, in other contexts, physical ability was a prime source of status and strength, and physical toughness could be elevated far above skill. Size matters [T]he popular valorisation of physical strength as a fundamental aspect of virility and of anything that produces and supports it (‘strong’ food and drink, heavy work and exercise) is … intelligibly related to the fact that both the peasant class and the industrial working class depend on labour power which the laws of cultural reproduction and of the labour market reduce, more than for any other classes, to sheer muscle power; and it should not be forgotten that a class which, like the working class, is only rich in its labour power can only oppose to the other classes – apart from withdrawal from its labour – its fighting strength, which depends on physical strength and courage of its members, and also their number … Bourdieu, 1984: 384 Talk of size, strength and toughness were common among the builders who would often remark on how large or strong some of their colleagues were. It was as if being big was somehow more distinguished than a smaller person. Size and strength were revered and, more broadly, body size and strength were part of what it was to be a working-class man. Masculine reverence for strength begins in schools where being physically strong can elevate a boy’s status and self-confidence (Edley and Wetherell, 1997), and this carries over into street confidence (Goodey, 1997), which, for those attending tough schools, streets and workplaces, may be a vital practical resource.

Legal vacuity and ephemeralism In the building game you get blokes from all walks of life, I bet you half of them have seen the inside of prison walls. Because on the building site there’s no questions asked. You walk on a building site: ‘Looking for labour mate? ‘Yeah, start tomorrow’. They don’t ask about your background, they don’t ask for your CV. There’s no discrimination on a building site. If you can do the work, fair enough. It’s not like you go into an office job where they want to know your background, want references and all that. Mike Fixit, maintenance man The informal nature of employment in London’s building industry had an impact on the builders’ everyday masculine practices. London building sites are culturally plural and characterized by the ephemeral comings and goings of various



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workers and trade groups, and workers that nobody really knew formed a significant ingredient of the world of building. For example, the scaffolders worked solely with one another because they worked different hours and in different physical spaces to the other builders, and interaction between the scaffolders and others was fleeting. Even within trades, some individuals came onto site for only a short duration. These might be the low-skilled men who were soon dismissed, those that did not ‘fit in’ and were informally driven out, or the peripheral workers who joined the teams only for a short duration. Ephemeral comings and goings restricted detailed biographical and interactive knowledge, which sustained a particular interactive order and facilitated myth-making. Aidan, a labourer, for instance, told me how most scaffolders were good drinkers and even better fighters – tough men revered for their strength and daring. And Bristles, a painter, described bricklayers as ‘bulldogs’ who were not to be messed with. Physical and social distances facilitated caricatured images, which in turn framed interaction. In a world of relative strangers, working-class masculinity functioned partly as an interactive resource that united the men around particular issues and actions. Group interaction would commonly centre on what the men knew they had in common – what they could typically predict of one another – that everyone else was male, a builder, expressed himself as heterosexual, and was interested in football or, at least, sport more generally. If people did not really know one another, they could not trust one another in particular ways. Bristles aptly summed this up: Nobody on this site knows me really, they might think they do, but no one knows anything about me … People on the building sites, they’re all friends, they’re all enemies, they trust everyone and they trust no one… To trust everyone but no one was a pragmatic attitude to adopt. During my fieldwork, on a number of occasions, tools, materials and the builders’ personal possessions were stolen, and workers who were not accepted by the workgroups could be treated harshly and violently. An example of this occurred when I was working with the painters: One Friday morning I was working with the painters at Keyworker House II. Ernie Coat, the painting subcontractor, was away on holiday and he entrusted Jimmy, his foreman, to hand out the painters’ wages. Jimmy gave Frank two wage-packets – the extra one for Frank to hand to his painter friend, Stew, that lunchtime, who was working over at Keyworker House I. However, at teatime Frank claimed that Stew’s wages had gone missing from his coat-pocket. The painters – Jimmy, Perry, Gerry, Bony and I – searched the scaffold and tearoom but we could not find the wages. Frank said that Jimmy might not have given him the wages in the first place and they proceeded to have a protracted and aggressive argument in

112  Building masculinity which Jimmy threatened to take a hammer to Frank’s head in response to the accusation. The incident became our focal point of the day. Privately, Gerry told me he thought someone must have stolen them and he offered a theory as to who it was. He said Frank was foolish to leave them unattended in the tearoom, especially considering they were someone else’s wages, because ‘you just don’t know who anyone really is in the building’. We both agreed that whoever took them was low: ‘You just don’t take a man’s wages’, Gerry said. ‘It’s a bit fuckin’ rough’, I replied. Gerry told me stories of similar incidents that had occurred on other building sites throughout his career as a painter. Some of the painters began, behind one another’s backs, to accuse one another and Frank of committing the offence. Frank protested his innocence, saying he would have to give his own wages to Stew in order to pay him back, which he did. But this was problematic because Frank’s wages were less than Stew’s – Frank had missed a day from work in the last week and earned less than Stew anyhow. Soon after the event, Stew phoned up from Keyworker House I. He had gone ‘on strike’ until he received the outstanding cash and said he was going to call the police. Stew was vilified by everyone for this, particularly for wanting to call the police. ‘What the fuck’s it got to do with them?’ Bony said. The following Monday the wages saga continued. Two of the labourers, Michael and Aidan, told me that ‘something stinks’ about it all. They also told Frank to stick to his story and ‘look after number one’. They said one of the other labourers had his expensive penknife stolen from their tearoom the week before, and they thought one of the asphalters had taken it but could not be sure. Aidan reminded me of a similar incident that occurred just before Christmas when his mobile phone was stolen from the labourers’ tearoom. Michael said: ‘You have to watch out for this kind of thing on the buildings’, to which Aidan replied: ‘You expect it on big sites but not on here where we all know each other’. Will arrived and told a story about the time Danny ‘lost’ his wages and everyone had a collection for him. Danny apparently ended up with more money than was in his original wage packet, but he was popular and long serving at Topbuild, Frank was neither of these. All of the builders found this event morally reprehensible and each of them censured the theft. However, no one could be accurately blamed for the misdemeanour because it was possible that anyone could have committed the act. It was common to blame ‘outsiders’ for thefts, although it may have been nothing to do with outsiders but they were logical and safe targets for accusation and scapegoating. Transitory outsiders held few ties to Topbuild’s parochial networks and were therefore free from network morality and the social pressure of the regular work groups. It made more sense to everybody that outsiders were not to be trusted. The stolen wage packet also contained cash, which itself contributed



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towards the theft in the form of simple opportunity (Clarke and Cornish, 1986; Felson, 1994). Subcontractors were, however, inclined to pay some workers in cash. Ernie Coat, for instance, paid Frank in cash because Frank was working on false documentation, claiming non-working state benefits and not paying any tax. Similarly Gerry had no fixed address and thus no bank account to pay a wage cheque into. The payment of ‘subs’ during the working week further reinforced the necessity for cash payments. Many of the builders could have been paid by cheque and it is possible to exchange wage cheques for cash in certain pubs and – more recently – shops in London, but the builders preferred cash, and Danny, the labour foreman, explained why: Oh [cheque-cashing pubs] they were rough and ready places all right yea. Those publicans were supposed to declare all the cheques but they didn’t declare it at all. So it’s been all stopped now, most of them anyhow. There’s a big pub, McGovern’s in Kilburn, they used to do it. You’d give them your cheque, have a bite to eat and they’d charge you 4 or 5 per cent. But you’d spend maybe £20, 4 per cent for the cheque and £40 for the drink, pure con job. DT: It’s all right with Paddy [McMurray, the labour subcontractor] though, he pays everyone in cash doesn’t he? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah (in under-the-breath whispered tone), well no not everybody, some have cards, CIS cards,1 not everybody, it’s up to yourself. Paddy McMurray and the painting subcontractor, Ernie Coat, paid in cash because some employees were operating a tax dodge and could only be paid in cash, and others simply preferred it that way. It is salient then to consider the builders’ reaction to the wage theft described above. No one wanted to call the police because it might attract attention to illicit employment practices and perhaps more illegitimate things that I was not aware of. The builders’ informal practices had erected a barrier to the infusion of formal law and its agents and, in this respect, Jimmy’s threat to take a hammer to Frank’s head was an example of what the law rested upon between the builders: their law was parochial, summary and corporeal, and the builders’ expressions of masculinity were partly embedded in this.2 Cash payments and the ‘no questions asked’ recruitment policy of London’s building industry also generated problems for subcontractors themselves. Ernie Coat explained: I’ve always paid cash, which I’m going off of doing now. I’m trying to get most people paid by direct payment into the bank. Basically because a [subcontractor and] good friend of mine got done in Enfield, in broad

114  Building masculinity daylight. Come out the bank, had his briefcase taken, which was even locked to his wrist, but they had bolt cutters and they smacked him across the head with them. He landed up five days in hospital and he’s still not back at work even now. So when that happened I thought to myself, it’s time I got back to 2003 and started paying people either by cheque or through the bank, which a lot of them won’t like but they’ll get used to it. Contracting violence Formal employment contracts rarely exist between building workers and their subcontractors. Both workers and subcontractors rely, to a degree, on each other’s morality to loyally honour verbal agreements. For example, I never saw or signed any kind of contract for the paid work I did at Keyworker House, was not asked for my CIS card, and I was paid in crisp £50 notes every week even though I had not asked for payment. When I first began work with the labourers I was unpaid but, after a few weeks, I was reimbursed at about 50 per cent of a labourers’ full wage, which gradually increased until I was earning the full amount. I never asked for payment or more payment, but the labourers were incredulous about this, perhaps reflecting their normative construction of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages’ (see Chapter 3). I can only guess that their incredulity had filtered up to Paddy McMurray and that the moral exigencies of London Irish paternalism resulted in my increasing payment. At Topbuild, verbal employment contracts between workers and subcontractors were always honoured, and, as was my case, honour could exceed agreements. Emile Durkheim (1960 [1893]) claimed that all modern contractual agreements were framed and honoured by some kind of collective morality. If they were not, he argued, they would rarely be fulfilled in large, socially differentiated societies. At Keyworker House, employment relations were embedded in the morality of the various ethnically bound network groups. This was partly a result of the long-term nature of their members’ relationships, and partly because subcontractors, being themselves part of the communities, were enmeshed in community morality. Of course, payment was also a taken-for-granted result of hegemonic notions about work and pay. However, the moral rules surrounding employment agreements were buttressed by an underlying threat of violence. Mickey T provided a vivid example: Before I was subbying I got an old van like, and I’d charge the whole gang to pick them up in Cricklewood [a North London suburb], take them out to London airport and bring them back in the evenings. I’d pay them out their wages on a Friday as well … One week they didn’t get paid so they all came at me with picks (laughs), the whole lot of em with fuckin’ picks (laughs lots) ... I has a word with them, says ‘It weren’t my fault’, I was only the fuckin’ driver like! So I drove them all down to the agent’s offices and they



Building masculinity  115 took their picks in with them and confronted one of the directors. ‘Oh, oh, a mistake’ he says. He went straight down to the bank with these rake [lots] of blokes following behind him with picks and paid them out of his own fuckin’ pocket (laughs). Field notes

If subcontractors did not pay and were naive enough to remain in their offices, the collective bellicose power of working men was utilized to enforce the contract. This, however, could also be deployed against workers. For example, I asked Ernie Coat if he paid employees that turned up for work but who were ‘toshers’3 not skilled enough to do the work: Well, no I don’t actually. I pay them for the day they’ve done, but if they’re sacked the next day by lunchtime they won’t get paid for that half-day, because obviously they’re no good. If they’re sacked after the first day I normally pay them until teatime or something, but they don’t get paid for the whole day. DT: And do you ever have any problems with them wanting that money? I’ve never had any problem no, no, never in all the years that I’ve been doing it. I’ve never had any problems. Well, they haven’t got a lot of choice really. There’s a lot more blokes on site than what there are the person who’s sacked. I mean the blokes who are on site have been with me for some time, so I’d have plenty of people to call on, shall we say. Loyalty to enforce agreements could also be bought. As Aidan described: It’s not so long ago now, like the old subbies, what they used to do is they knew some labourers out of work. If they wanted someone turned over and all this business, they’d give them a day’s money for it. They might get about 10 of them for it, £50 each, smashed his pub up, ‘the landlord upset me’, things like that you know. Even Mr Jaggers, a quantity surveyor, building consultant and man of the law, was acutely aware of the foundations of social order in the building industry: I worked on a job years ago, there was this bricklaying company that had a terrible reputation. And what happened is that the site manager kept goading them ... He’d got them to take down their work and all sorts of things. One day two labourers came on the job, new labourers, and they were working with this brick company, yes. And the site manager came up to them and had a go at them. They beat hell out of him, put him in hospital. That’s what happens.

116  Building masculinity The social organization of building employment rested on habit, normative tradition and network reciprocity supported by an underlying threat of violence. These conditions were particularly expedient because of the informal, noncontractual, and ‘no questions asked’ nature of London’s building industry. Employment contracts were not instituted in formal labour market processes – not only in terms of employment rights, but also in terms of simply getting paid – and the consequence was that informal social mechanisms – reciprocity and the threat of violence – ensured contractual agreements were met. These ingredients, which it can be assumed stretch deep into labour market history, facilitated the tough atmosphere among the builders and framed a willingness to perform bellicose styles that underlined the builders’ group relations and masculine identities. Reciprocity and violence are always partners because one implies the absence of the other (Mauss, 1970 [1954]). This impinged not only on the men working on the tools, but filtered into the culture of the quantity surveyors which, to some degree, negated their professional imagery. As Bobby, the trainee quantity surveyor, commented: It’s very aggressive in the building actually. You have to be very firm …. I enjoy that part to a certain extent but sometimes it gets a bit frustrating … I’ve got to have respect here so I’ve got to be professional, sometimes I want to just hit them but I’ve got to be professional. Although the quantity surveyors were the only professional occupation on the site, because they worked within a highly masculine environment and were the people who sanctioned payment, they too adopted aggressive and bellicose interactive styles (see also Chapter 2). Trouble and trust In his analysis of the street culture of young black men in inner-city Philadelphia, Elija Anderson (1999), following the historical sociology of Michael Mann (1986), argues that in situations and areas where formal law is blocked or lacking, informal cultural forms arise to manage conflict situations. On the violent ghettoized streets of Philadelphia, formal state law had broken down, leaving a legal vacuum in which a highly masculine ‘code of the street’ emerged; a cultural form developed to protect individuals from actual or symbolic attack. Similar to, although not nearly so extreme as the streets of Philadelphia, the London building industry, because of its informal organization, illicit practices and the social backgrounds of many builders, had too rendered formal law largely noninvasive. Law had become displaced and replaced by alternative informal lore of which embodied bellicosity formed a major constituent. In a legally sterile environment the performance and posturing of strength and toughness were instrumental – functioning to underpin lore. Yet these practices were also counterproductive. Largely unprotected by formal legal mechanisms,



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fear of both real and symbolic forms of violence provoked the enactment of masculine styles that stimulated a fear of violence, and which motivated masculine styles as a response. As I described Chapter 5, a considerable number of the builders had grown up in inner-city areas where disorder, fear and violence were a regular part of daily life. For many, therefore, bellicose interactive styles were pragmatic cultural resources utilized both in and outside of work. Take for example, Frank, talking about where he grew up and still lived: Like there’s one lot of flats wanting to fight you, the other lot wouldn’t back down, it was quite rough. It’s like tit for tat, you know what I mean. It’s just like fighting every single night – more than anything else with people who you know. I still see some of them but they’re all settled down now or in prison. You try to avoid them, or not really them ones but the next generation – you try to avoid them because they’re the ones who are the real troublemakers. They’re the ones who’re going out and getting crack cocaine, getting stoned, getting killed, so you try to avoid it. Plenty of the old junkies down in the Cally [in North London] anyway. I was one of the fortunate ones, I wanted to do something with life, but I still haven’t found what I want to do. ‘The Cally’ was area of concentrated disorder and social disadvantage where groups of young men attempted to assert their power over public space by battling, or threatening to battle, with one another. In such potentially dangerous and legally sterile environments the approach one takes to deal with problems and conflicts is necessarily parochial and summary. Frank states that he was one of the lucky ones because he was not a crack or heroin addict. As I have mentioned, however, he was a regular user of amphetamines and sometimes cocaine – if he could afford to buy it. Perhaps reflecting the centrality of class-bound masculine bodies as a central resource of pleasure, mastery, strength (cf. Blackman, 1997) and display, Frank was decorated in home-made tattoos created with his friend ‘down the flats’ when they were younger and would test one another to see who could bear the pain of the needle for the longest period. One of Paddy McMurray’s employees, Will, who worked alongside Mike Fixit as a maintenance man, was the youngest builder at 21 years old. He was energetic, entrepreneurial, exceptionally voluble, and associated in the violent world of his local neighbourhood. He bore a foot-long scar that ran from the centre of the back of his neck past his throat which looked as if somebody had tried to cut his head off. He told me in conversation – he never agreed to be interviewed – that he was walking home three years previously near to the local authority housing estate where he lived in Clapham, South London, when he glanced at a young man he did not recognize. The stranger confronted him saying he knew him from somewhere, but Will told him to ‘fuck off’ and continued walking home. A moment later, Will thought the stranger had punched him and so he gave chase, yet he soon realized that blood was ‘pumping’ out from his neck and he collapsed to the floor. Will had been stabbed and slashed with a Stanley knife.

118  Building masculinity Will continued to have blood pressure problems, and the attack affected his mental health. He had difficulties with reading, writing and some problems with his mental well-being: That fucked me up, fucked me up. I was mad after that. I tell ya man, never ever will I back down from anything after that. You back down, you get fucked. Not any more boy, not any more. Even my mates, if someone starts on them I’m there like a fuckin’ psycho … I’m a fuckin’ mad man, I don’t give a shit anymore. Field notes The attack left Will sick and unable to work for some time. During his recovery he began to get into trouble with the police to whom he was already known from his youth because he and his friends ostensibly went ‘queer bashing’ and ‘robbing’ in their local area. Will had made many enemies during this time and, like Frank, and Jamin in Chapter 5, he said that most of his friends were now in prison and/or had moved onto using hard drugs. This lifestyle had strained Will’s life at home with his parents. As a result, his father, a first generation Irish labourer, asked his friend, Danny, if he could get Will a job (‘a start’), keep an eye on him and hopefully keep him out of trouble. Danny obliged, and Will became a popular character at Keyworker House, despite provoking constant complaints from the tenants’ committee for his loud profanities. Yet although Will had become involved in legitimate work at Keyworker House, he also continued to inhabit his illegitimate street-bound networks and he frequently acted as a ‘fence’, advertising and selling various stolen goods at the site. These activities, in conjunction with his perception of frequent harassment from the police and street enemies, erected a barrier to formal law. His lore, like the lore of the building site, rested largely within closed social networks outside the purview of formal governance and, instead, upon the background of violence. While bellicosity and ‘rough’ backgrounds were a fact of life for many of the builders, not everybody had or made trouble in their lives. Yet, the statistic that scaffolders, plasterers and painters were among the occupational groups most likely to be victims of homicide between 1979–2000, higher than both police officers and military personnel, for example (Office of Population, Census and Surveys, 1995; Office for National Statistics, 2009), provides further evidence of the problematic circularity of informal lore and masculine bellicosity among builders. Moreover, staying out of trouble can be troublesome itself among groups of working-class men and boys. Pete, one of the two general foremen, illustrated this: As I grew up I hung around with a few lads, and the older you get you just go on building sites and rummage around and that don’t you, as kids. Then they started smashing the place up and nicking everything, and then it’s gone to cars. I thought I’m not interested in this, but then no fucker wants to know



Building masculinity  119 you. I’ve never ever broken into any car; even as a kid when people have walked past somewhere at night and nicked a bike out of a garden or something. I didn’t want to do it but I’m there you know, and I just didn’t want to be around with that. I’ve not for one minute even thought about breaking into anyone’s car … I didn’t, as a child, have a lot of friends really. There’s been my best mate I live with now. He’s been the same, he’s never broken into anyone’s cars or beaten anyone up, he’s never wanted to do that. And we sort of grew up together, which is not a bad thing.

Some of the builders brought a tough masculine culture with them to the building site. Others did not, but they were acutely aware that among workingclass men and boys, tough masculinity was the norm and not to take part in the antics of the lads could result in ‘no fucker wants to know you’. In this sense, an extant social pressure to appear strong, risk-taking and masculine was present throughout the men’s lives and is likely to have outweighed the pressure to conform formally in many male group contexts. As for the carpenters, they were able to switch from expressions of tough masculinity and bellicosity to a more Hindu-bound gentility. They also did relatively high status and clean manual work and thus may have had less reason to so regularly dramatize their strength and toughness as a source of esteem. The carpenters were perceived by the other groups as holding a high level of collective toughness; that is, their tight collectivity and number was feared and revered by the other trade and ethnic groups and they were perceived as not to be messed with. Cultural transmission Frank, talking about his eldest son – also called Frank – highlighted some of the processes whereby the use or threat of violence as a masculine cultural resource was passed down the generations. These processes, in conjunction with a working-class history and everyday life, entwined violence into masculinity: I don’t want him to be scared to go out on the street, to be scared that someone is gonna come along and do him if that’s what its going to be like. Anybody hits him, hit them back! I don’t care if you bite them or hit them with a lump of wood, you hurt them … What can you do? Kids fight but I’m not gonna stand for people bullying them … They get in trouble [at school], and [my wife] Trace will explain that his dad said if he gets any trouble he’s told him to hit them. I don’t care. There’s no way I’m letting him get bullied at school. Because if you don’t stick up for yourself you’ll go to secondary school and get bullied even fucking more. If he wins, fine, and if he gets beat, he gets beat. But if he gets beat he knows he can go back because he knows that he can use something [a weapon], he will not get in trouble by me. If he has a fight with somebody in school and he gets beat, I say to him: ‘Don’t let them walk all over you, if they walk all over you they’ll keep on picking on you.’

120  Building masculinity He continued: Me and my mate Dave, we got picked on at school. Until Dave thought: ‘Right that’s it I’ve had enough.’ He didn’t want to fight them, right, [but] they chased both of us and he fought with one and then they all jumped on top of him and beat him up severely. So, he thought: ‘Right I’m not going to have this.’ He got them one by one. He done the whole lot of them, yeah, but then when they were all together they started again. He grabbed hold of the leader in the metal-work room and put his hand in a fucking vice, got a hacksaw and started hacking his fucking arm off. He goes: ‘Do you want me to do this every time you start?’ They backed off and got nicked [arrested] soon after and put away [in prison] anyway. I got done over as well, they kept on doing it, they kept on coming after me all the time. I’d had enough, I got a lump of wood and battered fuck out of them. They left me alone after that … I didn’t feel proud of myself fucking doing it. I don’t like fighting, I’d rather just live my life but I’m not going to let my son go through what we went through. There’s no way I’m going to let him get done and just walk away. If he does then they’re making him do this and that for them, jump for them ... Because they see people backing down then they think they rule, like rule your life know what I mean. What Frank describes was the lore among boys at tough schools and on the streets. Frank was little concerned with his son’s achievements in the formal world of the school, which was a pragmatic reaction to the circumstances he was in. He feared his son would live life in fear of violence and be constantly pushed around, and his fear of this led Frank to instil both a bellicose disposition in his son as well as a norm delineating that one should not be pushed around. Urban survival and masculine pride had taken precedence over remote formal educational examinations and middle-class achievement status. In my experience, Frank’s child-rearing methods are common familial instructions among the English working classes. The ability to at least act in a way that presents one’s self as able to work hard, fight hard, drink hard and screw hard is central to working-class masculine expression. Dick Hobbs (1994), for example, argues that violence is a ‘cultural expectation’ of working-class men; a normal part of growing up, and later, its use or threat is central in the construction and maintenance of their identities. Likewise, violence constituted part of the framework that supported the builders’ gendered self-concepts and social action, and their public culture was in certain contexts, a symbolic display of the threat of violence. Symbolized violence4 cloaked in the men’s’ dispositions was a reservoir of both status and power. As Erving Goffman observed: Power of any kind must be clothed in effective means of displaying it ... Thus the most objective form of naked power, i.e., physical coercion, is often



Building masculinity  121 neither objective nor naked but rather functions as a display for persuading the audience; it is often a means of communication not merely a means of action. Goffman, 1959: 234

Common violence and the fear of violence in the lives of many of the builders provoked a willingness to be violent, or at least to present oneself as potentially violent. To deal with the threat of violence, the men fought ‘fire with fire’ and combated the problem with violent expression. Doing this, however, added further fuel to the flames, maintaining bellicosity in a cycle of masculine circularity. Of course, actual physical violence manifests itself relatively infrequently outside of war and family life, and I never witnessed any actual physical violence at Keyworker House. Yet, the infrequency of the manifestation of actual violence is a paradoxical function of omnipresence of the threat of violence: symbols of violence prevent actual violence (Hobbs, 1995; Marsh, 1978) and guide social order.

Law, custom and violence Contemporary masculine expressions necessarily build upon the foundations of the past. Parental cultural transmission integrates the past into the present both explicitly and implicitly, and this stretches deep into history where families experience little social mobility through the generations and thus remain wedged into the exigencies of working-class life (see Chapter 5). The high rates of homicide in Europe until the seventeenth century bear witness to the inefficiency of legal technologies and regularity of violence in the past. Paul Rock’s (1983) analysis of crime and control in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England, for instance, outlines how much of the country was disconnected from a central coherent legal apparatus. Even dense urban areas of London, ‘constituted a mosaic of discrete and bounded areas’ (1983: 207), where law was ambiguous and parochially negotiated. The powerful were commonly immune to legal sanction, and agents of the law were often the perpetrators of crimes. Rock argues that ‘such variation had the consequence of confusing the borders between morality and immorality, between legality and illegality’ (1983: 216). At best, the law was distant and ambiguous, offering little abstract or real protection from victimization. In this period, emerging legal technologies paradoxically began to shift from concern with physical injury to creating crimes against ‘things’, such as property (Thompson, 1990 [1975]). A mobile proletariat, pushed into densely populated towns and cities, were thus forced to protect themselves from one another, and the fear of one another, and cultural forms developed to manage these conditions. Additionally, mass education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did little to erase informal custom and suppliant it with modern norms and discipline: the working class tended rather to engage alternative school cultures (Willis, 1977),

122  Building masculinity and archaic cultural wisdom continued to be passed through the apprenticeship system, festival, and in the marketplace during a period of ‘free time’ between paternalism and harsh factory discipline (Thompson, 1993). Indeed, the English working class were, from their very genesis, distrustful of the state (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]), and thus unlikely to be convinced of, or constructed by, its proscriptions. Builders, moreover, have never been bound by factory discipline, and most of those at Topbuild had culturally bypassed formal education (see Chapter 5). Like the plebeian’s, the builders’ law was not written but was informally learned and enacted within the exigencies of their everyday lives in the family, school, street group and workplace, and it was exacerbated by informal and sometimes illegal employment practices. Quite separate from modern formal legal technologies, the builders’ lore was composed of anachronistic customs enforced by ‘sanctions of force, ridicule, shame and intimidation’ (Thompson, 1993: 9). This formed a central framework to the builders’ class-bound masculine identities, cultures and activities, and it leads us to question some of the claims emanating from Michel Foucault (1991 [1975]) and his followers that modernity had programmed and ‘normalized’ entire populations. Symbols of strength and class variation Pre-modern social order and hierarchy rested on violent strength and the ordination of God, but, through history, strength mutated into a revered, almost sacred, social symbol co-opted by men in particular. Strength begs respect in collective discourse and daily interaction, and its brother, violence, forms a backdrop to social action, order and power that stretches deep into the past and remains in the present. The reverence for strength, and strength as a potential of violence, continues to be expressed overtly in countless contemporary social forms regardless of social class. Mass produced entertainment, for instance, is saturated with stories of masculine heroes utilizing corporeal strength and violence to overcome adversity, and many popular sports are too intertwined in this image. Violent masculinity, in this respect, may be seen as an anachronistic subterranean value that we all share (cf. Matza, 1964). However, for manual workers with little access to middle class status values and who may feel the hidden injuries of class (Sennett and Cobb, 1972) that devalue their mental skills; strength as a form of power also provides a source of symbolic status (Collinson, 1992; Pyke, 1996) and, as I have argued, instrumental effectiveness. Working-class men thus co-opt and reproduce the values of corporeal strength and violence, becoming implicit in their self-expression and supplying a reservoir of power and status embedded in broader ‘subterranean’ meaning. In contradistinction, middle-class men may obtain status through business, art, career, money, science, generosity or piety. Middle-class expressions of masculinity thus diverged from the symbolic expressions of strength and violence witnessed in the strut of the working classes. The construction of the gentleman is a clear illustration of middle class alternative masculinity. Initially meaning ‘noble’ (OED, 2001), the term ‘gentle’ has



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taken on a different meaning in the present that clearly highlights the direction of the nobleman’s distinction. In seventeenth century Western Europe, with the growing importance of royal courts and the gradual promotion of the new bourgeois class into the old warrior nobility, the gentleman became divorced from the noble warrior life, developing a highly contrived courtly culture that eschewed the body and its emotions (Elias, 1983 [1969]; Huppert, 1977). The status-hungry professional and merchant classes of this time disciplined their children in the expanding public school system to become gentlemen leaders, culturally homogenizing their class and increasingly distinguishing their middle class ‘mental’ status from the corporeal and emotional mass (Mason, 1982). As I have mentioned, the ascendancy of the middle class and their value system based in rational thought and self-control symbolically robbed the emerging working class of their mental capacity. This, by distinguishing the new middle class from the somatically bound working classes, gave birth to powerful and antagonistic polarized class-bound masculinities. As Foucault (1998 [1976]) describes, polarized class-bound sexualities were born of the same period. The gentleman did not need to prove or posture his power because it was underpinned by his social, economic and political position, dramatized through mythopiesis and discursive structure, and supported by legal technologies. Even today, middle-class masculinity: ‘serves to cover up gendered power advantages of higher-class men that are built into the institutions they control and camouflaged by an aura of merit and righteousness that accompanies their privileged position’ (Pyke, 1996: 532). Middle class gentleman culture, as both a mechanism of distinction and domination, has thus left a powerful trace in the present. The expression of corporeal strength, revered and utilized by the builders as an instrumental cultural resource and a reservoir of subterranean status, was, and remains, therefore, devalued by broader ‘polite society’. The value of violent strength became, through history, relegated to realms of the theatre, stadium and the battlefield, and working-class masculinity became objectified as an endemic social problem. This is frequently found in writings of the past in the guise of the mob and rabble, and in the present as: delinquency – in politics and criminology; worker intransigence – in business and industrial relations; naughty boys – in schools and education studies; and misogynist patriarchs – in feminism and gender studies. These foci are also a likely product of middle-class-bound fear and distinction, framed by their oppositional difference (cf. Bourdieu, 1984; Skeggs, 2004). Yet, it is the very same devalued culture that motivates men to fight and die in wars and to undertake low status dangerous work in peace-time.5 In these contexts, working-class masculinity is rarely deemed a problem at all. As a result of the delineation of working class as ‘bodily’ and its ensuing stigmatization, according to some researchers and writers, being working class is commonly denied (Reay, 1998; Savage et al., 2001; Skeggs, 1997). However, class denial is a gendered process. As I illustrated in the last chapter, the builders that I asked did not deny working class identity labels, and, in a broader sense,

124  Building masculinity survey data reveal that British men do not deny their working class status to any great extent at all (Surridge, 2007). Stigmatization of working-class-bound masculinity is two-minded and contradictory: devalued in one context and not in another, and it continues to bubble up under the surface in common cultural value. The builders had, however, shielded class-bound stigmata by elevating the value of their physical abilities, virilities, and, as I show below, their duties as protectors and providers for their families (see also, Bourdieu 1986, 2001; Pyke 1996; Sasson-Levy 2002; Sennett and Cobb 1972; Thiel, 2007; Willis 1977). They were, then, very unlikely to deny their working class status but, rather, utilize it as a source of interpersonal power, subterranean status and positive self-identity. Symbols of gender Historical class-bound variations in masculine expression and the concomitant hegemony of the powerful might also help to illuminate gender variations. The anthropologist Maurice Godelier (1999), for example, describes how men’s violent domination of women in the Baruya in New Guinea was motivated by their fear of women’s power. The men justified their violence through a sacred ideology dramatized by their possession of sacred secrets and objects. In more complex societies, men have symbolically justified their dominance over women through their enhanced ability to protect and provide as a result of rhetorics and realities of physical strength. Analogous to the construction of the gentlemen leaders in seventeen and eighteenth century Western Europe, men’s ability to protect and provide was and is legitimized through evolutionary and scientific myth-making. Thus men become ‘naturally’ stronger, bigger, more assertive and practical than women. Of course, inhabiting a male body may not actually provide these advantages, but physicality is the material reality onto which gender constructs are inscribed. From birth, an array of social categorizations and interactions are etched on to bodies, and individuals are named and decorated in gendered ways by the association of physical body-shape with social gender. As Pierre Bourdieu (2001) describes, these significations order bodies in social space and guide them into polarized streams of gendered interaction resulting in differing interactive universes and action regimes for men and women. Antagonistic and relational identity framing further supports polarized gender identities through the oppositional framework of the categories male and female and their associated sub-oppositions. The idea of strength, in addition to being an actual source of interactive power and class-bound status, has thus become conflated with a whole series of other sub-oppositions related to masculine gender. Thus, ‘independence’ and ‘strength’ occupy similar positions on the masculine binary apogee, drawn in relation to the ‘feminine’ signifiers ‘weak’ and ‘dependent’. The ideology of man as provider and protectorate makes him revered and indispensable, and like God it may seem impossible to reciprocate him for his life-giving position. However,



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God can punish as well as provide, and, as I highlighted in Chapter 3, all forms of hegemony rest upon some form or threat of violence.

Violent hierarchy The power of violence spun a web of discursive meaning through the masculine cultures of the working class in general and the builders in particular. For those who descend the masculine symbolic hierarchy, their interactions and intraactions usher feelings of low self-esteem and stigma, and part of the persuasive power of symbolized violence rests upon its ability to threaten descent in that hierarchy. The content of ‘the crack’ was commonly framed by this, and the builders’ masculine linguistic jousting or ‘piss-taking’ outlined rules of interaction and thereby contributed to maintaining their class-bound masculinity. David Matza (1964) demonstrates that piss-taking or, what he terms ‘sounding’, enables the elevation of an individual’s status within a group through challenging the masculine status of others. The result is that members suffer ‘status anxiety’ that cannot be talked about or shared among the group because that individual would become ridiculed by further piss-taking, enabling other group members to overcome their own anxieties. The outcome is group ‘pluralistic ignorance’ (Schanck, 1932) whereby each member believes the piss-taking frameworks to be real despite the fact that they sometimes or often privately disbelieve the meanings. During piss-takes, combatants may attempt to out-manoeuvre one another by finding general status weaknesses in the other’s identity and symbolically drawing these out so as to feminize their opponents. Piss-takes of this kind can only function within a discursive constellation that valorizes tough masculinity and subordinates other genders and sexualities (cf. Connell, 1995), but the activities also refresh the discourse making it seem contextually real and important (cf. Goffman, 1963). At Keyworker House these processes had stark consequences in terms of gendered identity and interaction. They promulgated masculine pluralistic ignorance and restricted group interaction to guarded and superficial levels. Stew, a painter, spoke about how this could operate: It was like this guy I worked with, I told him too much. It doesn’t do good to be so open, it’s the wrong thing to do. I should be working him out, but why I’m doing all the talking he’s working me out. Anyone can pretend to be someone they are not. The way I am is that I am genuine, but a lot of people are not and they take advantage of that. Stew was a likable and open individual but he also plainly ‘carried the world on his shoulders’ and was frequently overtly anxious and worried. His sincerity was not recommended because it displayed a gendered weakness that opened him up to exploitation and piss-takes. Stew was consequently learning not to be so expressive and to interact at a more superficial and, perhaps, publicly

126  Building masculinity more masculine level – although he remained the butt of harsh ill treatment by some of the other painters. By interacting in these ways the builders reproduced the masculine discourse that they may have privately disbelieved. The process manufactured pluralistic ignorance in which their guarded social performances provoked guarded social performances that established contextual norms. As the interview data presented throughout this book illustrates, the men tended to be candid and, I think, honest towards a ‘trusted’ individual when in a one-to-one situation. It was group situations that restricted interaction to the superficial or overtly masculine, and piss-taking was both cause and effect of this. Group interaction could also elicit the telling of extraordinary masculine stories that too served to refresh masculine discourse and form guidelines for action. The stories concerned rhetorics of sexual conquests, violent battles, and extreme drink and drug-taking – that were likely to have been exaggerated or apocryphal (see Patrick, 1973). Yet they were exciting to listen to and emphasized the masculinity of the teller. They also framed normative boundaries for listeners and served to force tellers into substantiating their authenticity when or if they encountered similar situations. For example, a man who says he usually drinks 20 pints of lager in an evening and always fights his aggressors may be forced to do that when in the company of men or ‘lose face’ (Goffman, 1955). There were more tactics available than the simple returning of jibes during piss-take encounters. For instance, Bristles once strolled into the site office volubly announcing ‘I’m a raving homosexual’. His was a method of seizing and playing-up linguistic self-presentations that provoked laughter from the social audience and paradoxically conveyed the speaker’s solid masculine confidence. Bristles was, after all, the father of 11 children by three different wives. There were, however, limits to piss-take ritual: a piss-take too far could result in people becoming ‘pissed off’ or in the perpetrator looking foolish and discrediting himself as a result. As Aidan mentioned: I don’t go overboard with people, I wouldn’t go overboard with people, ‘cos you can. When you’re young yeah, like you can see young Will, he’s young but he gets a bit bolshie, he thinks he knows life yeah, but he hasn’t. I mean we was like it that age. I can see that. It’s no good me saying: ‘You stupid cunt why don’t you shut up’. You gotta say to yourself: ‘I was like that’, and I was. Just laugh at it, you got to laugh at it. David Matza argued that when juveniles grew older and moved away from street-groups into work and relationships with women, they also moved away from the trappings of group pluralistic ignorance. While this may be the case to an extent, and is illustrated in Aidan’s account, what Matza neglected was that in moving into manual jobs, juveniles would end up in other masculine groups where similar processes took place (cf. Willis, 1977, 1978). In some contexts therefore, ‘boys will be boys’ and may continue to engage similar sorts of interactive practices to juveniles.



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Families of meaning Notions of masculine strength and the related roles of provider and protector, crystallize around the family (Collinson and Hearn, 1994; Connell, 1995; Sasson-Levey, 2002). It has also been argued that working-class men subjectively negotiate their working lives as a sacrifice for the sacred nature of the family; working in order to provide their children with better opportunities than themselves (Sennett and Cobb, 1972). This was also the case for many of the builders. Jamin, the carpentry and general foreman, provided an illustration: I know a lot of guys who fucking don’t give a shit about their kids and leave it to the missus to bring them up; down the pub every Friday and Saturday night. I’m not really one for that at all, I want to be at home with the kids … help them along in life, know what I mean. When I look at my kids I see myself. Sometimes how they behave, things they do and say, what they’re scared of and what they’re not scared of, it brings me back to when I was young. I don’t want them to make the same mistakes. And the only way you can do that is by spending time with them, even if you just sit there of an evening and watch a film and have a laugh with them. They learn from that you know. Now maybe because my dad never done that with me, he was just too busy working and all that. I never went to football with my dad or went to the pictures [cinema] with him, never man. I mean he was good to us, he wasn’t bad or anything, but he was never, we were never close in that kind of way you know, not like I am with my son … DT: Would you be happy if your kids went into the building trade? No, you’re fucking joking! Not as manual labourers, be it chippies, plumbers, no way, no way man … I do push them at least to do some sort of job where you’ve got job security you know … Why fucking get dirty when you can sit in an office, you know what I mean? I definitely sort of push them into doing some sort of office work, or not necessarily office work but something better than this. I mean when I say not in the building game I wouldn’t mind them being an architect, surveyor, or something like that. I mean when I wake up in a morning and I’m the first cunt at the train station, you must know that. We get up early, we get dirty, we’re fucking fools man … I don’t want my kids doing that. Many of the builders imputed extra meaning into their work by viewing working as a way to make their children’s’ lives better than their own, and, in this context, the role of provider was a salient element of work discipline. Alluding to the classbound moral symbolism of dirt, Jamin did not want his children to have to get up early and do dirty work when they could be in an office job, and he clearly delineated professional building jobs from his own position as a manual craftsman.

128  Building masculinity Masculine notions of provider were also largely tied to pragmatics in that working-class men, on average, were able to earn more money than their wives (Donaldson, 1991). One of the painters, Stew, was aware of this: At the moment [my partner] she’s extremely frustrated. She wants to get out but she’s trapped with the two kids, one of them’s only two years old. I’ve give her the option to get out at weekends, go do something or, during the week, go to college learn something … She turned round to me one day and said: ‘Why don’t you not work and I’ll go out and work.’ I says to her: ‘Well, that’s because if we do that you’ll be lucky to earn a £180 a week, if that.’ At the end of the day it’s impractical, you ain’t gonna earn much money unless you go out and learn a trade. Stew’s account of being the provider was not cloaked in masculine symbolism, but it was represented as a pragmatic response to the economy and society in which he lived. Moreover, the role of provider was conflated, via discursive notions of masculine strength, with the role of protector, and fathers are thus historically elected to protect the family in this way. As Frank mentioned: ‘I would not let anybody harm them kids, nobody, I’d go to prison first, seriously.’ Attitudes to women Sociological literature frequently portrays working men as those who, because they are belittled at work, compensate by exercising more power at home (Cockburn, 1983; Collinson, 1992; Massey, 1994). Perhaps builders were a different case to printers, miners or factory workers, for instance, because the builders were relatively autonomous at work, but wives and girlfriends were actually talked about as problematic sources of control and the pub and workplace as affording more freedom than the home. Talk about wives, girlfriends, mothers and sisters was, however, quite different to talk about women in general. Women in the builders’ private worlds were regularly described as impudent nags and sources of control, but those in public worlds were described as ineluctable slags or as failed sexual objects. I did not observe any of the builders’ actual home lives, I only heard about them, but empirically wives are sources of control and conformity (for workingclass men at least; see Pyke, 1996). While men possess corporal power over women, women and the family unit hold power over men through the morally integrative nature of social network relations. Social integration of this kind is a source of collective conscience and thus control and conformity (Durkheim, 1960 [1893]; Hirschi, 1969) – a point that was illuminated by Bristles when I asked what his third and longest-standing wife had that the other two did not: Well, she’s truthful and honest, and she knows how to look after her man. When I go home and I’ve had a hard day she’ll say: ‘Right kids come over



Building masculinity  129 here, leave your dad alone, he’s having a nice quiet cup of tea. Here’s a cigarette, ashtray, chill-out, I’ll run you a bath.’ And she puts up with some shit from me … Now if there is one thing she needs to know, it’s where I am. As long as I tell her, she’s great like that, she don’t care where I am. If I said I was in a brothel, she’d say ‘Where?’, I’d say ‘France’, she’d say: ‘Okay, what time you coming home?’ And then she knows, you know what I mean.

As Bristles’ illustrates, some wives were perceived as more controlling than others, and ‘good’ wives were not sources of control. As another example, when Steve, the project manager, was away from site office, Danny, the labour foreman, would almost always enter and phone his wife to see how she was or to discuss some family business. His sentimental actions were inconsistent, although not incompatible, with his talk about ‘the old lady’ as a source of control who regularly nagged him for going to the pub and getting home late. Thus despite the builders’ publicly expressing attitudes towards wives as impudent nags, actions like Danny’s contravened this to an extent; wives in reality were both nags and companions. Additionally, saying that one could not go to the pub because, for instance, ‘the old lady’ would be unhappy about it, could to some degree act as a partial escape route from going to the pub if one did not want to. Yet using wives as an escape route from masculine pluralistic ignorance could also backfire. Some of the builders severely ‘took the piss’ out of Mike Fixit for not going on ‘drink-ups’ because he said he had to go home to the ‘old lady’. Mike received a barrage of disdain for not leaving his disabled wife at home to look after their violent alcoholic son.

Conclusion This chapter has described the content of the builders’ class-bound masculine values and expression, illustrating the historical backdrop to their development and the contemporary exigencies that maintained them. This occurred despite a fast changing late-modern London characterized by intensely global interconnections, governance structures, mass consumption, migration and transition, and was also performed by migrant groups whose cultures had not grown up fully under the shadow of England’s class system. However, the migrant groups had lived their lives within British colonialism, and, later, when in Britain, they had endured life in a similar position to the more indigenous groups with regard to their relations to political, legal, symbolic and economic structures. They had thus experienced similar class-bound social conditions. The forms of working-class masculine culture central to the builders’ identities and self-expression had not become decoupled from tradition or from broader economic and political structures as has been claimed by some observers (for example, Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991). While class-based masculine styles may have mixed, merged and become objects of reflection for some in contemporary society (see Giddens, 1990; 1991; Skeggs, 2004), their basis lay in the social

130  Building masculinity exigencies of the past, and the builders continued to lead distinctively classbound lives. Their personal and collective identities were intimately connected to their gendered bodies, manual work life and trade status, and working bodies and communities were a primary source of identity and cultural foci for most of the builders. Yet, akin to the men’s reverence for physicality serving to restrict their broader opportunities through its devaluation in wider society; the builders’ embeddedness in and reverence for their families and communities could also restrict social and economic opportunity, and it had stark outcomes in terms of class and ethnic stratification, which I explore in the following chapter.

Chapter 7

Economy, informality and social stratification

This chapter explores the exigencies, content and operational processes of the social networks that were central to comprehending the builders’ lives, cultures and the broader organization of the construction marketplace. I demonstrate how community networks intersected with economic processes, not only in terms of uncovering employment opportunities and ordering work organization but, in combination with the builders’ expenditure of physical ‘body capital’, they also provided the acquisition of various other services and goods. The social network and body capital utilized to obtain these opportunities, however, facilitated the development of barriers that stratified and structured broader social opportunity. This was particularly salient for recent migrant groups whose social and symbolic capital held small value in broader society as a result of stigmatizing racism and the groups’ immersion in the ‘strong ties’ characteristic of ethnic community networks. Social networking was also employed by more advantageous contractor and subcontractor groups to maintain their social and economic position, whereby they, parallel to the actions of their employees described in Chapters 1 and 3, worked to close down the construction market by re-embedding it in informal social content through the creation of business cliques. These practices had a tendency to transgress into illegitimate realms that further blocked the infusion of formal law into the building contract market, and which also impeded the opportunities and labour power of those possessing lower value forms of social capital – particularly recent migrant groups. The combination of these factors reveals the construction marketplace as quite divergent from dominant notions of capitalist market processes.

Social networks, bodies and economic opportunity Employment opportunity and thus a substantial aspect of social opportunity is, to a large extent, tied to an individual’s contact networks (Granovetter, 1974). Social networks can be ‘earned’ and manipulated to a degree (Boissevain, 1974), but they are also largely ascribed and contingent on one’s social background (Becker, 1963; Bottero, 2005). Educational qualifications and symbolic and money capital may negate the necessity of ascribed contacts to some extent but, as I

132  Economy, informality and social stratification have demonstrated, the majority of the builders had bypassed formal education, were born into families bearing little money or valuable cultural and symbolic capital, and recent migrants often found their formal qualifications worthless in England’s host economy. As a consequence, the builders’ corporeal skills and social contacts were their major forms of capital that they utilized to negotiate their lives. Corporeal skills were a form of body capital (Bourdieu, 1984; Thiel, 2007; Wacquant, 1995; Wolkowitz, 2006) which, used in conjunction with the builders’ social capital, had generated informal training and employment in London’s building industry – in addition to the self-identity, status and enforcement of contracts that I described in the last chapter. The consequence, however, was that the value of the builders’ embodied knowledge was hugely diminished if it was utilized outside of their social network groups. This was revealed by Vin, one of the carpenters: If I come into Indian company, they don’t ask for papers [qualifications], as long as you know the work they’ll employ you. But if I go to a big company with white people, normally they will ask for not just what you know, they would want to see papers as well. With Indians it’s all right, as long as you know them they will take you on and employ you. Social networks had provided the builders with information concerning employment opportunities and informal training, and it also partially protected them from market and management imposition, and had provided subcontractors with cheap recruitment, control and training of labour. However, in finding employment for families and friends, the builders’ networks reinforced themselves because the value and power of their labour was diminished if utilized outside of the networks. Additionally, network members became further bound to one another through the elasticity of the favour mechanisms that ordered the networks. These factors had locked some of the builders into a world of ‘strong ties’ (Granovetter, 1973) that further restricted their mobility, opportunity and power in the building labour market. Reciprocity and gift-exchange Network associations were guided by norms of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960) that were fuelled by the exchange of gifts. Gifts exchanged within networks were not only material but could take the guise of information, favours, friendship or trust itself. In his work on gift exchange, Marcel Mauss (1970 [1954]) observed that gift-giving establishes asymmetrical relationships that provoke social connections through reciprocal obligation and the eventual the return of counter-gifts. Return is not bounded by rigid temporal frameworks like formal economic exchange systems, but it is reciprocal, moral and normative. As a result, giftgiving involves and reinforces human relationships, and, as Marshall Sahlins’ widely quoted dictum observes: ‘If friends make gifts, gifts make friends’ (2002



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[1972]: 186). Reciprocal gift exchange is a collective social method developed to limit the consequences of egoism, which is why it became a common, universal norm (Gouldner, 1960). It is a collectively beneficial way of doing things together that produces group members who are perceived as and become trustworthy and predictable. As I demonstrated in the previous chapters, predictability results from the taken-for-granted nature of norms, and is underpinned by sanction because failure to abide by the norm of reciprocity could result in exclusion from the network, violence and/or stigmatization. Networks thereby reinforce trust by enhancing the predictability of their member’s actions through the informal social controls they radiate. The norm of reciprocity does not however operate in all contexts. Unfettered reciprocation only occurs within reasonably egalitarian relationships because power imbalances negate responsibility to reciprocate (cf. Fox, 1974). Slavery is a prime example of non-reciprocal exchange, as are capitalist employment markets which skew the norm through the power and violence of dismissal. For instance, at Topbuild, reciprocal-style relations bound the building tradesmen to their subcontract bosses, but these were characterized by false reciprocity because the subcontractors took much of the surplus value created by their workers and could choose to dismiss them (cf. Marx, 1949 [1887]). In effect, services were given by the tradesmen but only partial monetary reciprocation was given back by their subcontractor. This was an outcome of the hegemonic and structural existence of capitalist employment relations whereby employees have little choice but to accept such conditions. Yet some employees held more power in their relations with subcontractors than others, particularly the highly skilled and the foremen who were relied upon by subcontractors to organize the work. Consequently, some employees’ relationships with their subcontractor came closer to unfettered reciprocity whereby they received a range of extra informal benefits. This was illustrated by Bill, the long-time and hardworking foreman of Spark’s Electro-mechanical: The governor is a real first class governor to work for. I mean he can be an old bastard, but I’ve had things where he’ll go and pay for my holiday, or come Christmas he’s popped £1,000 in an envelope, you know little things. One day I phoned up and he says: ‘What’s the matter with you? You sound like you’ve got the hump’. I said: ‘Fucking fridge-freezer’s just packed up’ and I’d just been out and bought all the food. Next day there’s a £500 fridgefreezer delivered to the door. That’s why I suppose over the years I’ve gained his respect and he’s got my respect. He’s been a decent fella and a sort of loyal fella to work for. I get me company car, don’t pay no petrol, company phone, I give him the phone bills. I don’t go begging to him but if I need anything it’s always there, it’s set out for me. Mr Spark’s reciprocal-style relationship with Bill maintained respect and promoted loyalty that reinforced the certainty of trust. This was necessary

134  Economy, informality and social stratification because Bill was highly skilled and required to maintain an adequate work ethic and labour quality among the electro-mechanical work group. The result of this was that subcontractors, despite having little formal responsibility for their workers and occupying the powerful end of the quasi-reciprocal relationship, often gave more than wage payment to some of their employees. They bought extra loyalty by offering perquisites as ‘gifts’ – symbolizing their reciprocation, provoking loyalty and strengthening its influence. The need to trust workers was not the sole reason for augmented subcontractor reciprocity. Being members of community networks themselves immersed subcontractors into the moral world of network obligations. For example, the plastering subcontractor, Luke Screed, unusually for a building subcontractor, paid his Seychellian workers sick and holiday pay. Luke’s community standing and the mores of his British Seychellian community encouraged him to do this. Additionally, the labour subcontractor, Paddy McMurray, while not disbursing sick or holiday pay, did pay for his employees’ funerals if they died in poverty, which many did. In this case, Paddy was not buying trust from his dead employees but was enacting the morality of his network group. His moral involvement in his local London Irish community acted upon him to be a dutiful employer of that community. He may not have been subject to overt community pressure, but his self was grounded in that community and their morality was his. As Nan Lin (2002) argues, individual utilization of social capital takes two conceptual forms: instrumental action to improve one’s economic position, and expressive action enacted to maintain existing social capital and to generate positive personal identity and community standing. In this conceptualization, the subcontractors were, through gift-giving, maintaining their social standing and positive social identity, and protecting the social capital of their networks by sustaining community norms – a similar process involved in exchange of job information between the building workers.

Social ties and social mobility Mark Granovetter (1973) argues that ‘weak ties’ in a network are more beneficial for employment advancement than ‘strong ties’ because one will tend to receive broader and more varied information through ‘weak tie’ linkages – information that lies outside the reach of smaller ‘strong tie’ networks. In some migrant and working class communities where local networks may be strong and links with other ethnic and social groups often limited, ‘weak ties’ are likely to be fewer in number and therefore occupational advancement restricted (see Bottero, 2005; Portes, 1995; Portes and Landlot, 1996). Consequently, networks, while presenting important benefits in terms of obtaining jobs – and housing, goods and services, as described below – simultaneously functioned to restrict such opportunities. Networks are necessarily finite, if they were not they would not affect employment chances in the first place (cf. Granovetter, 1974),1 which is how clusters of individuals inadvertently produce and reproduce social strata



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when performing in-group reciprocity (Bottero, 2005; Bottero and Prandy, 2003; and see below). Strong ties could also restrict occupational mobility because of the elastic nature of reciprocity and ensuing loyalties that ‘lock-in’ individuals to particular social and economic positions. This illustrates the ‘weakness of strong ties’ (Grabher, 1993) in that they ossify social strata and pattern disadvantage. Jamin, the carpentry and general foreman, provided an illustration: I always seem to get hooked into this fucking foreman crap, really get hooked into it. I mean I sat my governor down one day and said: ‘Look I don’t want to fucking do it, just leave me alone.’ And he was all right for a couple of days, but the bloke who he put instead of me was fucking having a hard time. So then he said: ‘Look please, it’s not working out, can you come back and do this and that, you’re good at it, help me out’ … Maybe I’m just too loyal sometimes you know. I should have put my foot down and said: ‘Fuck you man, I just want to go on the tools, now leave me alone’, but it doesn’t work like that … I know him [my subcontractor boss] from school see, he’s all right, he’s a mate of mine. I mean it works both ways, I’m tolerant with him and he’s tolerant with me. I don’t take the piss just because he’s a mate of mine, and he doesn’t really take the piss with me, well he does but I don’t mind. At the end of the day I get my money. DT: What do you mean he takes the piss? Well you know, I don’t get paid every Friday, it’s not a great, it’s not a big thing. Sometimes I get paid Monday or Wednesday, or sometimes I get two weeks together. But they do look after me, they’re all right, I can’t complain. Jamin’s dislike of being a foreman and his not being paid on time was tolerated because a friendship and community relationship bound him to his subcontract boss to whom he was reciprocally loyal and trusted to pay him eventually. Jamin’s actions at Keyworker House illustrated further how he was locked-in to this relationship. On many occasions Steve, the project manager, asked if he would ‘come on the books’ and work directly for Topbuild as a general foreman instead of being subcontracted by Turner’s. This would have provided Jamin with the possibility of promotion to site management and removed him from the costs of subcontract casualization. Jamin frequently said he would think about this but never seized the opportunity, largely, he said, because he perceived he owed loyalty to his boss because he was his ‘mate’. Jamin’s work networks were tied into and cross-cut his family and neighbourhood networks, forming a powerful moral web entangling him into his existing work position. Like the actions of the subcontractors paying for funerals and employee sickness, morality, duty and friendship underlined Jamin’s choices, illustrating the power of expressive needs over his individual instrumentality and demonstrating how home and work lives melded into one another.

136  Economy, informality and social stratification Networks could act as both mobility traps and springboards. In Jamin’s case, through his community networks he had obtained a relatively good job, but he was also locked into that job. Another, but reverse, example, involved the other general foreman, Pete, who worked mostly at Keyworker House II. Pete was not a skilled tradesman nor had he served a long time working in the building industry, and his managerial skills were rather infantile – on one occasion provoking industrial sabotage from a group of painters under his instruction.2 He was not then employed because of his supervisory skills but he had been ascribed his position through his local community and ethnic and cultural relationship with James – one of Topbuild’s site managers. James himself had found his way into building site management through nepotistic means as his father worked in the higher echelons of another London-based building contractor, and where James worked, Pete followed. Danny, the long-serving labour foreman was, for instance, apparently much better equipped to take the general foreman’s role but he remained Pete’s subordinate. Pete’s particular position within a network relation had acted as a nepotistic network springboard and propelled him to his rank of general foreman, and later to the position of junior site manager. This example indicates that it was not only residential location that ordered the patterning of employment networks, but also the effects of various forms of symbolic and cultural capital. Pete shared similar social characteristics and culture to the site management, whereas Danny, being Irish, did not. Here, symbolic discourses on class- and ethnically-bound status, in combination with social network processes, impacted the builders’ opportunities, a theme I expand on below.

Informal economies In addition to guiding them towards their occupations, the builders’ social networks were also implicated in a broader informal economy consisting of the exchange of various goods and services of varying degrees of legitimacy (cf. Ditton, 1977a; Henry, 1978; Mars, 1982; Pahl, 1984). Like informal recruitment mechanisms, informal exchanges of goods and favours both supplied and restricted opportunity, and, for some of the men, they had become bound up in informal economic activity to a point at which they were locked in. For example, Mickey T told me that in the 1950s and 1960s, building labouring – probably in association with being Irish – was not considered a stable enough occupation to secure a mortgage from banks or building societies. To buy his first house, Mickey had to manufacture false references and proof of income. Informal methods of attaining adequate housing were also apparent for the carpenters. When East African Asians arrived in the UK in the 1970s, they were unable to apply for state housing for their first five years living in Britain and, like Mickey T, they also found it difficult to obtain mortgages. As a consequence, in parts of the British East African Asian community, informal landlords and money lenders were established, resulting in a network-based housing economy consisting of ethnically specific buyers, sellers, renters, money lenders and agents (Desai, 1963;



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Shaw, 1982; Tambs-Lyche, 1980). Housing and finance brokers would provide informally arranged transactions and mortgages, and could waive deposit money for potential buyers and tenants. Rashmi Desai (1963) describes how these exchanges were informal and non-contractual in order to avoid attention from the Inland Revenue, and also because many Indians had smuggled considerable cash and jewellery into the UK. Contractual agreement was thus verbal and maintained by dense trust relations ensuing from their tightly knit ethnic networks, high levels of community social capital, and, most probably, enforced by the shadow of potential violence that lies behind and enforces reciprocity and trust (see Chapter 6). If a house is purchased informally, its owners may be forced to sell it informally in order to avoid detection for their initial transgression. Informal actions thus display a tendency to feed upon themselves, generating and maintaining further informal activity by locking network members into particular courses of life and disenabling them from participation in some formalized spheres (cf. Becker, 1963). Indeed, within social networks where ‘social distance’ is minimal, informality further reproduces itself because formal law is only rarely called upon to govern social relations, even in encounters with high levels of conflict and illegality (see Black, 1993). Housing and residential location determines the forms of social and cultural capital that individuals are presented with in the formative stages of their lives, and thus plays a substantial part in the formation of life chances and identities. Like the builders’ jobs at Topbuild, it was probably not however, that housing per se was found through networks, but rather ‘good’ housing (see Granovetter, 1974; Young and Willmott, 1990 [1957]; and Chapter 1). Goods and services In addition to access to good housing and employment opportunities, the builders’ networks also provided them with various services and other goods. For example, many of the tradesmen did ‘privates’ – private work – in the evenings, at weekends and on public holidays, commonly working for people within their communities. These were often done as ‘a favour’ and guided by network obligations, which was something mentioned by Jamin: I got my own place to do man but yeah, fuckin’ family and mates and that: ‘Can you do this, can you to do that’, for peanuts you know what I mean? Or nothing even … I mean I don’t mind sometimes, depends who it is you know. Doing privates was not a purely instrumental action because it was framed by, and reinforced, social and moral processes. The action of doing a cheap private as a favour, depending on ‘who it is’, did, however, accumulate forms of indirect utility to the builder who would be owed a return favour/gift within the elastic mechanisms of network reciprocity and it would also contribute to their

138  Economy, informality and social stratification augmented social standing in their community. Jamin’s activities thus simultaneously accumulated extra informal income, strengthened his network relations, and could possibly ‘pay off’ in the long term in the form of return gifts and elevated social stranding. The informal acquisition of various goods was also generated at Keyworker House. For example, I witnessed numerous occasions of fiddling, pilfering and informal trading (cf. Ditton, 1977a; Henry, 1978; Mars, 1982), undertaken by both those ‘on the tools’ and those ‘in the office’. Building sites are particularly ripe for pilferage because builders work largely unmonitored where goods are stored and they tend to have freedom of movement around space (cf. Mars 1982). It was mostly small, easily transportable building materials that were pilfered, indicating that pilferage tended to be opportunistic (cf. Felson, 1994). Yet normative mores infused these activities, indicated by the fact that no goods were apparently ever pilfered from the key workers and that theft between the builders was highly morally sanctioned – as in the case of the ‘missing’ wage packet described in Chapter 6. The builders often spoke with great mirth about their pilfering exploits, and the jokes and occasional political justification contained in the stories indicated further that the events were framed morally (cf. Mars, 1982; Sykes and Matza, 1957). I witnessed, for example, large numbers of easily transportable objects that were housed in the site storeroom leave the room disproportionately to their requirements for the work. These objects included: ironmongery, boxes of screws, nails, hinges, brackets and glues, and ‘domestic equipment’ – cleaning fluids, protective gloves, mops, brooms and brushes, light bulbs and fittings, and vacuum and rubbish bags. Pilfering these objects was almost institutionalized, and a clue to understanding that may be found in the past. Forms of what today are called pilfering were common rights in medieval England but, with the development of capitalism they became criminalized (Ditton, 1977b; Thompson, 1990 [1975]). Yet, in effect, the builders continued to adhere to pre-modern rights to various perquisites. Another example of the institutionalization of informal economic activity at Keyworker House were the ‘totters’: two men who drove a large van around building sites across London and paid cash in exchange for scrap metal – and I presume anything else of value – that was ‘found’ by builders during the course of their work. I never met the totters, but Mickey T told me they were ‘two old cockney blokes’ who were probably richer than most builders because they paid no tax. A further and related instance of institutional nature of pilferage was the sale of two originally expensive cookers legitimately removed from Keyworker House during the refurbishment of its kitchens. Bristles had found a buyer for the cookers and for his networking services he was given a ‘drink’ (cf. Mars, 1982) by the site management in the form of £30 and, I suspect, another drink by the man who bought the cookers. Bristles profited financially from his brokerage services and in doing so he also displayed his skills as a network broker, simultaneously strengthening his position as a man ‘worth knowing’. Indeed, Bristles was worth knowing in this respect because he also regularly traded in bargain contraband



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Figure 7.1 Photo taken from the labourers’ tearoom on a very cold day noting some objects ripe for pilferage.

goods. He, and a number of the other builders, would, for instance, frequently do business in smuggled cigarettes, illegal drugs, pornographic movies, and various stolen and pilfered goods. Analogous to the actions of their employment networks, the builders’ work and home lives cross-cut one another to bring bargains and favours into and out from the workplace: goods were taken from work and distributed in outside of work networks, and goods from outside of work were distributed through work-based networks. These forms of informal trading were not market-led, but framed by moral economic norms (Thompson, 1971). For instance, the prices charged for informal goods tended to vary with the seller’s relationship to the buyer; closer associates paid less than more distant associates (cf. Henry, 1978) – similar in this respect to variation in prices charged for ‘privates’. As few questions were asked about the origin of the goods, the potential for more favours and bargains to flow through the network was maintained and the exchanges reinforced network ‘glue’ and social capital by enhancing gift and trust relationships between the participants. Yet, in so doing, the builders, already distanced from state proscription because of their historical distrust for it, combined with state’s inability to protect them from victimization and the worst of economic caprice (Chapters 1, 3 and 6), became further distanced from formal legal regulation.

140  Economy, informality and social stratification Informality and class variation Builders, and manual workers more generally, work in producing, fixing, vending, cleaning and transporting material goods, and are thus likely to have ungoverned backstage access to those goods. Office workers, on the other hand, have access to different forms of value that they mine and exchange. At Keyworker House, the site managers and quantity surveyors actively engaged in numerous job-specific fiddles. For example, Kevin, the quantity surveyor, told a story about how part of his on-the-job training involved a senior surveyor coaching him how to exaggerate his expense account. Kevin said he had never even thought this before he was told – and neither probably, had Bobby, the trainee quantity surveyor, until Kevin told these stories. Similarly, Steve spoke about how one of Topbuild’s other contracts’ managers regularly earned substantial extra income by fiddling his expense account. Both Kevin and Steve found this funny and said that while they occasionally exaggerated their expenses, they would not push it as far as some of their colleagues. The site managers also pilfered. When walking out of Keyworker House with a small radiator wedged under his arm, Steve felt a need to justify this: Every other fucka’ gets stuff off here. Rocky Weiler [a fellow contracts’ manager], refurbed his whole fuckin’ house with nicked gear from the Tottenham job. This is the first thing I’ve taken off this job, seriously, and I need it so I’m having it. Field notes Steve required no such justification when he did a favour for Jamin by ordering a skip through Topbuild’s business account to be delivered to Jamin’s home, making it clear that no one tell Kevin about the event. Despite experiencing a need to justify his own fiddling, Steve felt little dissonance in performing a favour for Jamin, a hard-working, trusted and reliable general foreman. He was building and buying reciprocity that could save Steve time, stress and effort in the long term (see Dalton, 1959; and Chapter 3).

Business networks, embeddedness and cultural exclusion Pilfering and trading activities accrued extra incomes or ‘pocket money’, earned for little effort, and also strengthened network ties by initiating and maintaining reciprocity and, thereby, cooperation and trust. Reciprocal associations rippled throughout almost the entire organization of the Keyworker House job. They occurred within the builders’ communities, between site managers and their staff, and also further up the building hierarchy in the formation and fixing of lucrative building contracts and subcontracts. In this sense, while builders working on-site had informal access to particular objects of value, those further



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up the building business hierarchy had access to more lucrative goods in the form of potential building contracts and profits. Social networking at these levels served to shield against the competitive and capricious nature of the construction contract and subcontract market – much in the same way as the builders on the tools utilized informal culture and social networks to mitigate the worst effects of market structures. Yet just as the manual workers’ social networking and informal mores served to restrict their opportunity, the informal actions of those further up the hierarchy also restricted the builders’ social mobility and it contributed to the ossification of social stratification patterns. Ernie Coat, Paddy McMurray and Mickey T, for example, had all subcontracted skill and labour to Topbuild for 30 years or more. Such long-term contractorsubcontractor relations are a regular feature of building subcontracting. Robert Eccles’ (1981b) survey of building contractors indicates that in almost all nations there tend to be stable relationships between building contractors and subcontractors over time, with contractors in only 20 per cent of cases using competitive bidding to recruit subcontractors. This was partly the result of contractors’ preference for subcontractors whom they know and trust. However, because it takes very little initial capital outlay to become a building subcontractor (see Waldinger, 1995), an integral feature of the building market is that subcontractors face the continual possibility of being undercut by rivals. This may be particularly salient where large numbers of economic migrants are willing to work for smaller wages than more indigenous workers, as in twenty-first century London (see Anderson et al., 2006; Eade et al., 2006). As an example, Ernie Coat’s painters would not work for fewer wages than they thought they could earn elsewhere, but a group of Russian migrant painters might, and did, work for half of that wage. Two Russian painters that worked for Coat’s for a short period were reported to be working for £50 per day, while some of Ernie’s other painters earned almost double that wage. Consequently, a Russian migrant subcontractor, by utilizing his community networks, could tender for works at a lower price than a subcontractor representing more ingrained and indigenous groups. A newly formed subcontractor may also not take a high percentage cut from the wages of his workers in the first instance, or may even operate a ‘loss-leader’ so as to build initial business social capital. To maintain their lucrative positions, therefore, existing subcontractors need either to prove their extra economic worth and/or somehow block the access of rival groups. The subcontractors at Topbuild employed both types of practice. Most saliently, they engaged in various forms of gift-giving in which they purposively developed asymmetrical associations and ensuing social ties (cf. Granovetter, 1985; Macaulay, 1963). This both enhanced Topbuild’s preference for existing subcontractors and restricted the flow of contract information to rivals. The finite functioning of business information, and its manipulation, had dictated that only a select group of subcontractors’ were in the position to bid for work at Topbuild – others were left out of the network loop and thus excluded from making bids. In discussing the history of Turner’s carpentry, Jamin highlighted how newly

142  Economy, informality and social stratification formed subcontractors could enter a closed market but only if they possessed the ‘right’ social networks, and, as I explain below, through enhancing their value by gift-giving: Turner’s, I was with them when they started the company. What it was, me, my governor [subcontractor], all of us [Kutchis], were all working for a firm called Woods. My governor, he was the first one to work for them, the first Indian on that firm … Then he bought me in there, two of us, and then three, and then four, and then we started getting a bit of a posse together. And he [Mr Woods] liked the way we operate, liked the way we worked: regular, no hangovers, no days off, on time ... In the end there was about 25 Indians working for Woods ... Things were going all right and my governor had a little bit of an idea. He says: ‘I’d like to try and do my own thing with Topbuild’. He was just making a few enquiries and his dad knew a few people. His dad had a firm as well, he knew one of the top blokes in Topbuild and it just so happened that Woods were doing work for Topbuild at the time. My governor, he was sort of connecting with Topbuild, he wasn’t really trying to take the work away from the bloke but he was just trying to start his own thing. But the governor from Woods must have got wind of it because he sacked him. But by this time my governor had sown the seeds, spoken to the right people ... Social networks had a major impact on the structural opportunities that groups of employees confronted, but also on the opportunity of those in higher, more lucrative business positions. In Jamin’s description, the father of ‘the governor’ of Turner’s Carpentry was linked to ‘the right people’ in the Topbuild hierarchy. Without these links it would have been difficult for the governor to acquire the information necessary to bid for subcontracts. Furthermore, the rates that Turner’s charged for their carpenters were lower than average. This was most likely so that Turner’s could, at least initially, undercut their rivals and build business social capital. The youngest carpenter, Vin, explained how ethnic status affected wage rates in the building subcontract system: Generally, like all the Indians I’ve worked with its less money [wages] than any other company. For example, if you go to a white person’s company, or I’m not talking generally Indians, I’m talking, you know Singhs [Punjabi Sikh Indians], they generally pay more, but not as good as white people – they pay the top wages. Indians, it’s as I say, they are known for trying to get the cheapest labour that they can. Quite how British Sikh carpenters formed such embedded relationships in the building industry was outside the scope of my study. However, they are sometimes famed for their carpentry skills and they also carry masculine culture more akin to that of the white English working class than of the Hindu Kutchis.



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Perhaps through this culture and their embeddedness, the Punjabis were able to charge higher prices for their work and pay higher wages than the Kutchi group, but still not as much as white English groups. The example above illustrates that access to valuable business networks and information, like the nepotism that had propelled Pete up the building hierarchy, was not a simply socio-spatial and temporal issue but also a cultural one. Although subcontract entrepreneurs needed be in ‘the right place at the right time’ in order to access information about potential subcontracts to bid for, they also needed to possess the ‘right’ cultural and normative knowledge to be able to join and sustain membership of the business community (cf. Scott and Griff, 1984). Just as the particular languages and cultures of the Topbuild carpenters may have excluded, for example, the labourers from access to informal training and employment in carpentry, the languages and cultures of building contractor management may have excluded new migrant subcontractor entrepreneurs. Without adequate knowledge of the cultural norms of ingrained business networks, opportunities for new and socially distant migrants were likely to be restricted. As another example, in New York’s building industry, Caribbean building contractors spoke about the ‘golf advantage’ of their white-skinned counterparts (Waldinger 1995) whereby white contractors were seen to be able to generate lucrative building contracts because they ‘played golf’ with wealthy white clients. The cultural knowledge necessary for entry into these business networks involved at the least, knowledge of how to ‘play golf’ and gain membership of a ‘golf’ club, and it also required acquisition of knowledge to suggest that ‘playing golf’ might be economically beneficial. Recent migrant entrepreneurs are, at least initially, unlikely to hold such knowledge and may also be barred from ‘the club’ through social distance and, perhaps, racist sentiment, and thus their opportunity restricted. At Topbuild, the effects of these forms of socioeconomic blockage and closure impeded opportunities for subcontractors outside of dominant business networks and also rippled out towards their networks’ of employees, eroding their power in the construction marketplace and impinging negatively on their work lives.

Migrant labour and body capital In the old days, [19]50s and 60s, no stop in rain, work away. Those days are all gone, for the best …Oh it’s much easier now, of course, much easier. Danny, labour foreman The older labourers would often tell me that the building trade had become easier and softer over the past 50 years. They recounted stories about working in rain and snow and having to take their breaks in wet, unheated and squalid conditions. ‘Youngsters’ did not know how easy they had got it ‘these days’ because times, they said, had changed. Certainly health and safety legislation since the

144  Economy, informality and social stratification 1970s attempted to enforce rules that make building sites safer places to work and stipulate warm and dry domestic areas to rest in. This was one area where legal regulation had pervaded the building industry at least to some degree but, like other aspects of formal law, health and safety regulation was far from allencompassing out on the site. It could be simply neutralized in the face of other goals – such as ignoring it when engaged in price work (see Chapter 4) – and it was always negotiated though the screen of workplace culture rather than being concretely set (see also Hayes, 2002). Moreover, a cursory glance at recent migrant builder groups highlights that they still frequently work in poor conditions, in the rain, at a faster pace and for a smaller wage than more established groups. As one of the labourers, Aidan, mentioned: My brother is a subby, [he] does groundwork, underpinning, drains, paving and all this business. He employs Bosnians because they’re cheap and they’ll work like donkeys. He employed one for £25 a day and he’s out there in the rain breaking his fuckin’ back. Poor fuckers some of them. Bosnians, being recent and, perhaps illegal, migrants to Britain, had little informal work power because they had not developed the valuable cultural and social capital necessary to secure socially embedded relationships in London’s building industry, and, partly as a consequence, were compelled to work harder for less remuneration. Their situation was similar to that of the Irish 50 years ago but, as time passed, Irish contractors and subcontractors secured a virtual monopoly over groundwork and their power over the work process increased. The Irish had, over time, sweated, talked and bought (see below) their way into a niche in English building economy. Bristles, who was second generation Irish, noted this process: Years ago it was hard, there was loads and loads of gangermen and they all seemed to be Irish for some reason … I worked for a firm called McHannon’s. The dad came over with a shovel and a pick, started digging away. Well, their premises now, this was only like 40 years ago, their business now it’s actually been floated on the stock market, worth well over 100 million [pounds]. And this was just through dad starting off digging holes. Same as Murphy’s [a large building contractor] really, he’s no different, no different at all. But it’s changed round slightly now, it’s more like the Kosovans and the Russians and people like that, they’re the ones doing the hard graft now. It’s funny how things change round. I suppose in 10 years it’ll be them running it and then maybe we’ll have an influx of Chinese, seeing as, well, we haven’t got that many countries left to come over here. London’s building subcontract system operated through a process whereby new migrant groups offered cheap and hardworking labour in order to get a foothold in the industry. This was likely to occur in times of labour shortage – as the



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Irish had done in the 1950s – and/or through accumulation of relevant cultural knowledge and penetration of appropriate business networks. As cultural and social capital becomes augmented and subcontractor representatives solidify their relations with contractors, their prices and wages appear to rise, and their workers have more choice concerning which subcontractors to work for. Migrant worker networks, contacts and, therefore, labour market power, may for some groups consequently increase over time and their workers will no longer be ‘out there in the rain breaking [their] fuckin’ back’. As the value of social capital increases, labour becomes empowered to expend less physical capital. Ethnic disadvantage and racism The builders were aware that recent migrant groups offered cheaper and harder working labour than more ingrained groups, and many perceived this as a threat to their livelihoods and lifestyles. Stew, a painter, spoke for many of the men when he said: ‘Without being racist, you’ve got all these people coming over and working for peanuts, they’re just fucking up the [wage] rates, and as time goes on it’s just getting worse and worse.’ This dynamic provided some of the builders with a tension and means through which to express racist attitudes. Such views were fuelled by broader antipathy towards new migrant groups projected by mass produced media, particularly the right-wing tabloid press. The terms ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘asylum seeker’ were, for example, akin to expletives among many of the builders (cf. Kushner, 2003), and these tensions were accompanied by defensive discourses on recent migrants as dangerous and low skilled. As Bill commented: I got Kosovans or whatever coming up to me [looking for work] and I have to tell them to go away, you know, not nasty but I said ‘No, no work’. And they’ll work for £10 a day if you give them a chance ‘cos they’re desperate for money. But then comes in the health and safety. They can’t talk English and yet Topbuild – all building sites are the same yeah, really strict on health and safety … But they have blokes walking about who can’t even talk English. So if you say to them: ‘Mind your head there’s a brick coming down’, they don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re dangerous, simple as that.3 Both Bill and Stew were white English and, in terms of their ethnic affiliations, were a dominant group. Yet their views were not elicited by the skin colour or a colonial history of others because their words were directed largely at white Eastern European groups. Furthermore, it was not only the white English that expressed these kinds of attitudes. Take, for example, Naz, one of the Kutchi carpenters: Topbuild was doing a job in Hackney and there was Albanian and Romanian [men on site]. Somebody tells me to tell them to do job but they can’t

146  Economy, informality and social stratification understand so I have to go and show them. I might as well do it myself while I’m showing them. But most of them, they have picked up tools and just started building, some of them are fast picking it up … I mean you pay an Indian [British Indian] labourer £50 [per day] because he’s got a house, wife and children, he can’t survive on less. But you get an Albanian or Romanian or whatever, he’s living with three people in one room, he can do £20 a day and he wouldn’t argue about it. Plus the physical fitness is different, they can work harder than the Asians because they’ve got more height or body weight … It’s a two-way story. If I was a boss then I’ll help them because they are hard workers. If I was employed by a company then I’d say: ‘Fucking hell they’re not giving me a chance to get my [pay] rise because the boss can get two of them for one of me.’ Builders sell their labour in the marketplace in a very tangible and direct fashion: wage rates are negotiated at the start of each new job and new jobs are started frequently. Additionally, because builders are largely non-unionized and possess very few working rights, their wage rates vary capriciously and their labour can be exchanged for cheaper workers at bosses’ discretion. This occurs infrequently because of the finite functioning of business information networks and the necessity to trust building workers, but the shadow of cheaper and harder working labour represented an ever-present pressure. Social groups in capitalist societies compete over finite goods and resources (Bourdieu, 1984). For the builders living in London, such competition was not theoretical but everyday reality. They were palpably in competition with other ethnic groups for employment, housing, street power and sexual relations. Take Frank, for example: Five years now I’ve been on the housing list. They [social security office] keep telling me they ain’t got no information, blah, blah, blah. I just want to settle down, get a flat. If I was a fuckin’ refugee I’d get a flat straight away, but if you start mentioning refugees, you’re racialist, you know what I mean … [Y]ou get a lot of refugees round there [‘the Cally’] selling fags and that, but when I go down to the market round Holloway you look around and you think it’s completely different. Up there (whispers) are untold blacks you know what I mean? You could say it was Nigeria or Africa because that’s what it looks like at the end of the day. We’re like the refugees up there … The black birds [women] are nice man but it’s just the geezers, they go round thinking they got a chip on their shoulder, going round cussing people. And like if you got a crowd you gotta walk around them, if you bump into them they’re gonna cause an argument and all that …. up there it’s just like a no go area for some people … The only thing I ain’t going to do though is let my daughters go with blacks. And that’s not being racialist because I’m not. At the end of the day there’s enough white blokes out there … I tell you the best black bloke you can get right is a dead one (laughs) even though I’ve got black friends, you know what I mean.



Economy, informality and social stratification  147 DT: Yeah, well, they’re alright though aren’t they? Well yeah, but when they’re like in a group – right, let’s say I went out with them yeah, and they met up with all their mates and they’re all black. What are they going to be like to you at the end of the day? Like all their pals saying: ‘What’s the white boy here for blah, blah, blah’. Even though these two, Billy and like Si [Frank’s black friends], they will do anything for me, always look out for my family and my brothers and everything else. But at the end of the day they can turn.

Within such competitive and anxious social struggles, some of the builders stigmatized and dehumanized some ethnic groups. Partly as a result, ethnic groups turned inwards for jobs, housing, goods, identity and security – forming ethnically based networks and clusters. The ensuing segregation restricted the flow of information across the divided networks, generating social distance filled by typifications that accentuated the differences between, and homogeneity within, the groups, further promulgating segregation and so on (see Blum, 2002). Divides also restrict gift exchange between groups, impeding the formation of multi-ethnic networks and thus restricting the development of trust. Carpenters and labourers Despite Frank’s harsh words above and the spitefully racist site manager described in Chapter 3, I only rarely heard expressions of racist hate at the site. This may have been a result of the historical multi-cultural composition of London builders, but certainly I had heard much worse on other London building sites in my past. The carpenters and the labourers had worked on Topbuild jobs for many years, as had many of the other tradesmen. The trade groups were accustomed to working on the same building sites and were thus familiar with one another’s presence. It may also be assumed that normality and the work process kept racial tension to a minimum (cf. Burawoy, 1979) but, furthermore, the trade groups were actually so tightly stratified by ethnicity that they were not encroaching on one another’s jobs. Racism did occur, but some men were more racist than others, and some expressed racist views in one context but not in another. Both the carpenters and labourers were, however, subject to everyday racism in the form of ‘piss-taking’ typifications tinged with demeaning and generalizing meaning. For the carpenters, these usually involved comments about their having ‘just got off the boat’ or their – illusory – lack of skill and poor quality tools. I asked Jamin if he had experienced racism in his job: Oh yes, of course I have yeah. But nothing major, just day to day thing, nothing too – I can have a laugh about it so it’s never, it’s never bothered me. And the thing that comes into it again is on a building site you’re only six months here and then you move on. So you know, it’s not nothing that really

148  Economy, informality and social stratification goes on and on and on and on. But I’ve never had any serious problems, not at all. Because, as I say, I was brought up here [in London] and I generally get on with most people, so no I can’t really say that I have any problems. I mean you get it here and there but how seriously you take it is up to you, you know, you can brush it off or you can go into a raging fit which is pointless really. I just tend to ignore it. Some people take it seriously, some people don’t ... Works both ways doesn’t it – I give back as good as I get really. At the end of the day they’re just strangers really, they’re not really part of my life so why should I take it seriously, what’s the point? If I take it bloody seriously I’d be fighting every day, you know what I mean. And generally in London it’s not too bad, it’s all right … any dangers out there are as dangerous for you as it is for me. Jamin’s response was unusual compared to the most of the other carpenters who I asked if they had experienced racism in their lives – as most of them told me they had experienced little. Naz told me: I’ve been in this county since 1969, all right I got a couple of smacks from skinheads, apart from that I had more arguments and fights, literally fistfights, with Asians or, Gujaratis, than anyone. I’ve never had a fight with Blacks, with Pakistanis, or Whites, apart from my home village, you know [where I fought with Pakistanis]. While Bapu said: No, no, no. I haven’t [experienced racism]. I tell you the truth, never even any little argument in 30 years. If somebody’s trouble I straight away give up: ‘Sorry my friend, my fault’. I give up, I don’t want any trouble. I never had any problem about racials, never. Never with me because I’m straightforward man, never trouble. Naz’s account is peculiar considering that racism in the form of demeaning ‘piss-takes’ were an everyday occurrence at Topbuild and because he had got ‘smacks from skinheads’. Additionally, Bapu’s statement, ‘If somebody’s trouble I straight away give up’, was an act of impression management because I had observed him challenge at least one event that I interpreted as racist (described Chapter 6). However, racially flavoured piss-takes were generally presented as jocular and, framed in this way, the carpenters could respond to and account for them as jokes. As Jamin said: ‘I can laugh about it’ and ‘If I take it bloody seriously I’d be fighting every day’, indicating that he had few choices but to interpret racist piss-takes non-seriously as a joke and thus a non-issue (see Emerson, 1969). Yet, he also said he could ‘ignore it’, ‘give back as good as I get’, and that he could ‘move on’, indicating a number of strategies that he had developed to manage racial slurs (cf. Dennisen, 2010).



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Bill’s racial-flavoured piss-takes were particularly venomous but he did not consider himself racist: I’m not racist. You hear me take the piss out of Jamin and you hear me fucking run him down sort of like, but I’m not a racist as such. I won’t knock ‘em. I won’t say anything about them because they work hard. Where else can you get a packet of fags in the middle of the night?4 I don’t knock ‘em, they’re working people, it don’t matter what race you are or whatever … Just because you’re black you’re second-class citizens, that is totally wrong, totally wrong. Bill’s account that ‘I’m not racist’ was filled with wild typification but not antipathy. Also, in Chapter 3, I described how Bill protected one of his electricians, Jimmy J, who the housing management had complained about for being found asleep at work more than once. Jimmy was first generation black Caribbean and, in this context, Bill’s racist piss-takes appear to have been simply piss-takes – the product of insensitivity rather than antipathy. Nonetheless, piss-takes are by their nature demeaning and stigmatizing, and I personally found some of Bill’s comments offensive. While these were framed as jokes, engaging in them promulgated status boundaries and institutionalized racist stereotyping. This manufactured a kind of ‘pluralistic ignorance’ whereby it became normality to express such attitudes. Bill and others therefore propagated forms of racist discourse in a similar way that piss-taking promulgated working class masculine culture (see Chapter 6). As the examples illustrate, everyday racism at Keyworker House was not usually expressed with hate, and the fact that Jamin was the general foreman bore testament to this; Bobby, the trainee quantity surveyor, was also second generation Indian. Only one of the carpenters, Mehl, told me he faced real problems with racism in the London building industry, which had occurred early on in his career and, as Jamin suggested, Mehl’s solution was to leave the job. In this context, racism in the UK building industry may not be quite as insidious as in more permanent and less networked occupations where employees may need to work outside of their protective networks and be stuck into a single job, reliant on references to get other jobs, or desire promotion through the hierarchy. In the building industry, employees could exit the situation and try to find work somewhere else to work, most likely among trade groups of their own ethnicity. Although, as I have described, the wage structures for ethnic groups tended to be lower than for more indigenous workers and this thus represented a form of institutionalized racism. Racially tinged piss-takes were also directed towards the Irish labourers and generally related to their mental skills. Whether this was class- or race-bound was difficult to distinguish because the builders frequently jibed at one another’s mental skills and trade status regardless of ethnicity, and the labourers, by virtue of their work, were set at the bottom of the building trade hierarchy.

150  Economy, informality and social stratification However, this type of stigmatization of the Irish is deeply embedded in English culture and is expressed over and over in jokes that continue to be viewed as legitimate. I never asked the labourers how they felt about these slights because my interviews with all of the first generation were rather stunted and awkward – perhaps partly as a result of their experiences in this respect. Nevertheless, the Irish may be seen historically as having been more frequently the recipients of racial discrimination and exploitation than, for example, the Kutchi Indians. Indians were not enslaved by the British like the Irish were (Blum, 2002), Kutch was one of the few areas of India that was not colonized by the British and, when in East Africa, Indian migrants formed a middle class who, in general, dominated and exploited the native population (Ghai and Ghai, 1970). This perhaps provides another clue as to how the Kutchis appeared to be psychologically resilient to racial piss-takes. Their cultural history meant they did not feel themselves to be a subordinated or discriminated group; they were proud working men in a high-status building trade. Symbolic forms of racism were part of the everyday work life of the carpenters and labourers, but the networks they were part of provided them with an element of protection from racism’s more insidious effects and supplied the men’s social standing and status within. Yet, by living life largely inside ethnically bound networks, this furthered the exclusionary processes outlined above. As I have also mentioned, subcontractors too played a part in this process, blocking opportunities to entrepreneurs outside of existing business networks. This was not simply an unintended outcome of business relations, but the business cliques actively colluded and manipulated their networks in order to block potential competition.

Gift economies and cartelization It would certainly seem that “such factors as personal acquaintance, goodwill or favours owed often come into play in the setting up of the construction team” (Higgin and Jessop, 1965: 30). Closed business relationships occurred between the contractor and subcontractors, and they also took place between the members of Topbuild head office, Opportune Housing and Assured Consultants. As in primitive societies, where gifts are exchanged to create relationships that function to prevent violence from neighbouring clans (Mauss, 1970 [1954]), in the business network complex at Topbuild gifts were exchanged to shield against the violence of the market, that is, to solidify lucrative business relations and prevent their severance. Supplying gifts created reciprocal asymmetries that facilitated the formation of ‘business clusters’ which closed down the construction market to competition. For example, as I described in Chapter 2, Topbuild’s site managers had been obliged to subcontract Spark’s Electro-mechanical because Spark’s, Topbuild head office and the Assured Consultants shared a pre-existing business relationship. Bill highlighted these associations and part of the mechanism through which they operated:



Economy, informality and social stratification  151 You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. I mean he [Mr Spark, the subcontractor] does all right. I did him a favour this morning. I’ve been to the house of the boss of Topbuild putting sockets in. Tomorrow I’ve got to go to another place to put cookers and fucking hobs in. This weekend where am I? Working at his [Mr Assured Consultant’s] house, putting in a new bathroom and new showers and whatever. It’s all for nothing … Oh I get paid but my governor don’t get paid for it. But my governor isn’t doing it for nothing though. He knows he’s got something coming on the end of it … My boss is Assured Consultant’s boss’s best mate. They’re all the same guys, all the ones that over the years they all go for their monthly meals and their big meeting up in their lodge or whatever it is. That’s how Topbuild gets on so well with Assured Consultants and Opportune Housing, because they’re all mates at the top of the ladder.

Bill’s reference to the ‘lodge’ may appear archaic and apocryphal, but the Masons and other former guilds groups continue to exist in the UK and, anecdotally, have became populated by building professionals and business people who, it can be assumed, like the New York building contractors ‘playing golf’, use these gatherings not to regulate trade skills or terms of agreement but rather to maintain and network lucrative acquaintances and give and receive ‘gifts’ as a result. During my fieldwork I witnessed many forms of gift being exchanged between the building business groups. For example, four site managers, two surveyors and I drank champagne and cocktails in expensive Central London bars, had our entry paid to a night-club and were given free food in a restaurant afterwards, paid for entirely by Turner’s Carpentry. Moreover, during the time leading up to Christmas, the site office literally overflowed with alcoholic gifts that were given by subcontractors to site management and surveyors. At this time I was observing the site office and I was also presented with gifts. For instance, Luke Screed once offered me an expensive bottle of malt whisky, which I said he need not do, but Luke insisted and replied: ‘I may need you to do something for me one day’. Even small-time subcontractors practised this tradition. Mickey T only subcontracted himself and three employees to Topbuild, but he told me how he had acquired a drinks list from 11 site managers and quantity surveyors. He was required to give each a bottle of what they stipulated on the list and an additional bottle of wine. Failure to do so may have fractured Mickey’s relations with the management and surveyors. In order to sustain his economic position, Mickey needed to reciprocate these opportunities and maintain his business networks. The existence of formal drinks lists illuminated how gift exchange of this type was virtually institutionalized in the building subcontract system – and not only at Topbuild. As a construction foreman said to an ethnographic investigator in the mid 1990s: Oh, you know, the construction industry. These bloody site agents we’ve got. They get used to a standard of living. Cases of whisky. Weekends in Paris.

152  Economy, informality and social stratification Helicopters to race tracks with a wad in an envelope for betting with. We’ve tried to cut it out, but you just end up chasing your tail. You’ll never get rid of it. They just look at it as part of their salary. Harvey, 1996: 91 There may have been numerous other forms of informal gift-exchange occurring at the Keyworker House build that were hidden from me as an overt researcher. While I never witnessed any money passing between the managers and subcontractors, I was told by numerous tradesmen and labourers that they had seen ‘brown paper bags’ change hands, and the site management frequently talked about ‘other’ site managers who took bribes and booked in ‘dead men’.5 There was also talk about one of Topbuild’s directors ‘doing deals’ with various subcontractors and clients. The stories may have amounted to nothing but rumour, yet, because so many people talked about them, it was probable that they were normal part of organization of the London building market. The way in which the business networks operated illuminated why many of the contractor-subcontractor relationships had been in existence for such long periods of time, despite fierce competition from other subcontract groups: giftgiving had cemented their relationships. This also provided an indication as to why it was that Topbuild had been undertaking work for the same housing associations and state departments for many years, and further indicates why Topbuild had recently been bought out by a larger building contractor but, despite running at a loss, had not lost any of its senior staff: Topbuild and its managers were wedged into particular local relationships that would be lucrative to the new parent company. Institutionalized collusion and forms of in-group reciprocity in Topbuild’s business practices may also indicate why bid rigging, the formation of cartels and other corrupting practices are common in the construction industry in general (see Clinard and Yeager 1980; Office of Fair Trading, 2008). What can also be seen is that informal network practices were spread almost throughout the entire social and economic organization of the build. Only the relationships within the site office – those between Topbuild’s site management and quantity surveying team and the consultants – were formalized. Part of the reason for that was because of pre-existing informal relations between Spark’s Electro-Mechanical and Assured Consultants that had exposed the ‘screwing’ practices of Topbuild’s quantity surveyors, leading to conflict and a regressive decline in trust relations (see Chapter 2). It is also salient to note that the Keyworker House build was part of a statesponsored private finance initiative (PFI) introduced in 1992 to make state services more competitive, cost-effective and streamlined (Feigenbaum, et al., 1999; Rhodes, 1997). What can be seen, however, is that the Keyworker House PFI had not opened up state services – the housing of NHS staff – to the supposed competitive dynamics of market principles because embedded associations and informal ties framed contractual relations and restricted competition. Topbuild



Economy, informality and social stratification  153

were participating in a socially, rather than an institutionally, embedded marketplace (Granovetter, 1985; Thiel, 2010) characterized by informal agreements, strings of social networks and alternative forms of exchange that took place within and outside of the capitalist market and its formal properties.6

Conclusion Informal network practices may be seen as practical strategies that all groups and individuals engage in for both expressive and instrumental reasons (Lin, 2002). Yet, for some groups at the wrong end of the stratification system, subject to high levels of stigmatization and status devaluation, and who suffer restricted opportunities and economic caprice, network processes may be particularly necessary, and they thus have a tendency to become characterized by strong ties. While strong ties may restrict broader social advancement and opportunity, in a more immediate sense they provide opportunity and ontological security. At Topbuild, networks were utilized by the tradesmen and labourers to cushion the worst effects of the capitalist labour market, labour control and stigmatization (Chapters 1, 3 and 5), but, for the business groups, informal practices forged networks in a more singularly instrumental sense – to protect from market competition. The practices of both groups reduced market competition and contributed to the reproduction of social stratification patterns. Yet, the social trust generated by network properties also prevented malfeasance on contractual agreements: the builders got paid and received perquisites; contractors received perks, payments and future contracts; and the client group received a product built to an adequate standard as well as receiving their gift-based perks. Because of the secrecy inherent in network relations, informal practices bore a propensity to drift outside of formal law and into illegitimacy. Hence, some of the builders could work illegally, and the business groups had cartelized their section of the building economy. This feature, however, also contributed to further informalism and to the content of class-bound masculine expression that I described in the last chapter. Economic markets are not always politically or legally instituted as is maintained by some academic commentators (for example, Block, 2003; Harvey, 2010; Krippner, 2001; Swedberg, 2003a; 2003b; 2005). In the UK construction industry neo-liberal political economy had stripped its market of most formal regulatory mechanisms. Yet, in response, the various building groups had themselves informally ‘re-embedded’ the marketplace through alternative exchange relations that operated in distinctly different ways to ideal-typical market processes. The builders on the tools and their subcontractors were thus engaged in anachronistic forms of ‘moral economy’ (cf. Thompson, 1971) anchored in reciprocal face-to-face relations and the expressive dimensions of social capital. The building business groups on the other hand, played on the normative and expressive dimensions of moral exchange in order to create and cement their socio-economic positions.

154  Economy, informality and social stratification These informal strategies worked back upon the manual workers and their subcontractor representatives by reproducing power differentials in terms of the relative values of their forms of capital and, through patterns of social closure, they had ossified social strata and social (dis)advantage. Market processes thus intersected with interpolated patterns of class, gender and ethnic socio-economic positions, and vice versa. The effective functioning of the building marketplace was contingent on these interpolations as they provided a relatively selfmotivated, reliable, inexpensive and trusted labour force that was an essential ingredient to building work organization – especially where money payment and formal management practices were, alone, ineffective in organizing construction work and workers (see Chapter 3). The intersection of these factors thus constructed the builders as particular types of workers and consumers, providing a social framework for their occupations, determining how they participated in the labour market and the work that they did on an everyday basis. The operation of the capitalist market could not, therefore, be separated from broader social patterns and power differentials, or from informal exchange and cultural activities. Market exchange, informal exchange, lore, morality, power, status differentials, and stratification processes, all intersected to make up this section of the London building market, providing a platform for all the social and economic life that springs from building and its buildings.

Chapter 8

Conclusion Cultures, capitalisms and class reproduction

This book has had two main aims: first, to describe and explain a slice of an otherwise largely invisible section of social history through my representation of the lives, labour and industry of a group of London building workers; and, second, to demonstrate how the builders’ lives, labour and industry were patterned through cultural relationships that had been forged in relation to broader social, economic and political factors, which produced and reproduced social stratification patterns. On these foundations I have demonstrated the socially embedded nature of a building marketplace and its work organization that was characterized by traditional, informal and moral forms of exchange – something that a number of influential writers argued were ameliorated with the rise of capitalist exchange relations (for example, Marx and Engels, 1967 [1848]). At the fieldwork site, social networks in combination with corporeal ability had framed the men’s social opportunity and buttressed their identities. Social networks were powerful vehicles of tradition, as was informal inculcation into workplace mores where long-standing pragmatic traditions predominated. The builder’s local and ethnically bound social network ties had, however, locked some of the groups into their existing social and economic positions and restricted their occupational mobility. Any semblance of class homogeneity among the builders was, however, fractured and divided, particularly through gender and ethnic division and competition over limited resources, but also as a result of status distinctions between the various building trades and positions. As informal relationships sometimes involved transgression of the law, contractual agreements, while anchored by traditional normative frameworks, operated largely outside of the law, underpinned by various sanctions – most saliently an underlying threat of violence. This served to enforce agreements and to provide a prop for the sustenance of traditional class-bound masculinity. The cultural mores, networks and workplace autonomy of the tradesmen and labourers also meant they held considerable autonomy and a degree of power over their employers and managers. This was partly a result of the non-standard nature of buildings that provided a relative immunity to the building industry’s domination by bureaucratic, technological or scientific management techniques, and partly because of the builders’ performance of particular forms of social and

156 Conclusion cultural activity in response to the exigencies of the market. As Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]) observed, all labour is fundamentally resistant to total commoditization and does not ‘fit’ exactly into market exchange technologies. Commoditized labour, like land, becomes depleted of energy, forming resistances, and workers continue to hold strong normative motivations other than simply to obtain a wage packet. A human desire for social acceptance, camaraderie, security, identity, play and respect is a perennial feature of humanity; people do not work simply for wages in order to consume and compete, but work remains a formative social activity in terms of its expressive, cooperative, ontological and identity-forming elements (Marx, 1959 [1844]; Muirhead, 2004; Sennett, 2008). It would seem premature to suggest that these important human features of work have disappeared in recent times to be replaced by consumption. Informal business and work practices exhibited a tendency to merge into illegitimate realms characterized by illegal employment practices, informal gift-giving, collusion and social and economic closure. These practices also represented what I have described as informal re-embedding of the market. Re-embedding, however, further contributed to market malfeasance whereby networks of informal practices maintained and necessitated secrecy and permitted collusion, which, through generating socio-economic closure, provided a further constituent of the reproduction of social strata. More generally, a number of studies have shown informal practices as a common feature of business organization (Dalton, 1959; Granovetter, 1985; Macaulay, 1963; Punch, 1996). And, as Edwin Sutherland (1949) convincingly argued, informal and illegal social relations are, and were, central to the development of capitalism itself – something almost totally neglected in contemporary understanding of capitalist markets. Changes in production, consumption and work in late modernity, which a number of commentators have described as wrenching culture away from production (see, for example, Bauman 1988; Beck 1992; Giddens 1991), have thus been shown to not apply to my case study. Rather, large-scale, ‘macroscopic’, social change, alterations in political economy and the development of ‘hegemonic despotism’ in late capitalism (Burawoy, 1985), had framed the continuation of traditional class-bound cultures. In terms of the changing reach of the state over social life, the builders’ had actually lived, both historically and contemporarily, at a distance from it. The dispersal of normalizing discipline and the expanded observational reach of the modern state (Foucault, 1991 [1975]) had then affected the builders little – they remained alienated from it and lived life largely outside of it – just as their plebeian and working class forebears had done.

Modernity, capitalism and culture The intensification of modernity and the associated rise of mature capitalism did, of course, significantly affect human life, bringing formal markets and contractual relations increasingly to bear on many kinds of social and economic associations (Tonnies, 1955 [1912], partially commoditizing land and labour (Polanyi,



Conclusion 157

2001 [1944]), and creating the basis of a modern class system. Importantly, however, these processes, including the formation of social classes, began long before the advent of industrialization. Nonetheless, such historical developments did not completely mould more traditional forms of human association into purely market-led, individualist, or utilitarian forms. Within home lives, for example, expressive social relations, of course, predominate, as they also do between workers at work, and, as I have shown, between workers, managers, employers and business people at Topbuild. Framed by the builders’ social networks, the realms of work and home crosscut one another, and expressive social relations filtered into work and economic markets, linking the realms together (cf. Glucksman, 2009). As Ferdinand Tonnies (1955 [1912]) described, the development of modern capitalism, bound up with the growth of formal and legal Gesellschaft relations, would not ameliorate past forms: Gesellschaft relationships would always contain elements of expressive, face-to-face and moral Gemeinschaft associations carried over from the premodern (see Cahnman, 1973; Deflem, 1999). At my fieldwork site, both forms anchored and opposed one another, and their doing so had significant implications for comprehending not only how building construction got done, but also for the reproduction of social advantage and disadvantage, and the process and composition of modern economic practices. Modern capitalism as an organizing principle of this section of London’s construction industry was not supported predominantly by modern formal law, state governance and regulation, the operation of abstract market principles or price-setting mechanisms, but by the cultures and interactions of the groups of people enacting, negotiating and performing moral economic relations which both shielded and supported formal political economic mechanisms. The builders’ informal associations thus constituted part of the larger organization of modern capitalism and its interdependent patterns of social stratification whereby the culturally bound activity ongoing behind the formal façade of the building industry, largely drove that industry (cf. Burawoy, 1979; Dalton, 1959; Goffman, 1959; Roy, 1952, 1990 [1960]; Willis, 1978). Rather than having obliterated past cultural and social forms, the march of capitalism had competed, coincided and reproduced them; and history reigned into the present. If many of the features of my case study were divergent from the elements described as characteristic of modern capitalism; the builders’ work, industry, cultures and lifestyles thus corresponded even less closely to the descriptions of social life in late-modern capitalism. The worlds described in this book thus provide a corrective to the many claims in recent British social thought pertaining to epochal changes occurring across history, and over late modernity in particular (cf. Katz, 2010; Latour, 1993; Savage, 2009) – theories which, by their nature, are commonly a-historical, excluding the integration of the past into analysis of the present – something that would seem very myopic with respect the London building industry and its workers. In twenty-first century capitalism, global economic restructuring and the shift to post-industrialism had left a

158 Conclusion profound mark on British society, polity, economy and work. Productive industry altered and shrank, and the class structure changed shape as a result. Yet local traditions and human relations filter global economic processes (Burawoy, 2000; Robertson, 1995) and, class, in both a symbolic and structural sense, continues to envelope British social structure and symbolic discourse – despite fast and large-scale social, political and economic change.

The futures of class reproduction Intergenerational social mobility is significantly lower in, for example, Britain than a number of other Northern European countries, and it has seen a decline since the 1980s (Blanden et al., 2005), while stigmatizing discourses on class and ethnicity endure (Pearson, 1983; Solomos 2003; Skeggs, 2004). The combination of these factors reproduces class and ethnic disadvantage, which saliently underpins culture and identity construction. Class reproduction is also partly a result of the failure of formal education to lift groups out from their stratification position (Blanden et al., 2005; Bourdieu, 1986 Willis, 1977) and an outcome of continued discrimination in the workplace (see, for example, Hughes, 1994 [1949]; McDowell, 2008; McDowell, et al., 2007; McLlwaine et al., 2006). Yet, as I have described, it is also powerfully framed by the cultures and social networks that groups form and maintain – partly in response to symbolic and structural disadvantage – and by human competition over limited resources (Bourdieu, 1984). The London building economy was, of course, a specific industry with a particular history and economy, and my study focused only on one small section. The building market that I observed operated within a global city situated in a highly competitive and deregulated marketplace in which the state had largely pulled back from labour market regulation, both directly in terms of employment protection and, indirectly, through the privatization of the building and maintenance of state services and its encouragement of the decline in building trades union membership. The absence of mechanisms formally to regulate the UK building market meant that the market was highly capricious and competitive, negatively impinging on those living and working within its dynamics. Yet, as I have shown, the builders – both workers and businessmen – had re-embedded the market through their reproduction of traditional and anachronistic mores and cultural tropes that served as pragmatic resources shielding them from the most insidious outcomes of market dynamics. If deregulated global markets more generally facilitate and amplify social networking, informal exchange and socio-economic closure, this may provide a clue as to the broader operation of contemporary capitalist markets and the part they play in social reproduction. Current post-Fordist global capitalism demands less-standardized products and ushers increasing global competition to make and sell them (Lash and Urry, 1987; Piore and Sabel, 1984). In the ‘hegemonic despotism’ of global capitalism (Burawoy, 1985), where markets



Conclusion 159

become increasingly deregulated, local labour markets and short-term working practices predominate, and self-employment and subcontracting emerge as a standard feature of employment, particularly for less advantaged workers (see Hyman, 1988; Pollert, 1991; Portes et al., 1989; Sennett, 1998). Under this ‘flexible’ capitalism, the state regulation of markets that Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]) saw as necessary for the effective operation and reproduction of the capitalist system, is increasingly insignificant, and may consequently become informally re-embedded. These features of contemporary capitalism would bring the organization of significant sections of contemporary work processes close to the London building contract and subcontract markets that I have described. This being the case, it might be expected that workers and business people may increasingly engage in informal re-embedding of economic markets, thereby reproducing social strata and facilitating business malfeasance. In neo-liberal political economies like those most visible in the UK and USA, the persistent low levels social mobility and high levels of class reproduction and ethnic disadvantage are likely to be an indirect outcome of this. While business malfeasance is almost impossible to measure, it is certainly a routine feature of contemporary business relations. If neo-liberal political economy continues to dominate, we may then expect the sustained reproduction of inequality and business malfeasance, and perhaps their increase, as a result.

Appendix A

Specifications and costs of the building project at Keyworker House I

These are the actual prices for the work that was carried out in central London in 2002/3 and are taken from Topbuild’s original bill of quantities. Dilapidations and wants of repair: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Scaffold total building, wash down and repair roof, gutters and cornices (£267,000); remove pigeon detritus, add spikes and netting (£5,000); identification of pipes containing asbestos (£unknown until inspection); repair and replace lightening conductors (£34,000); replace gutters and repair brick ledges (£21,000); repair roof railings (£5,000); repair balconies and railings (£3,000); brick cleaning and repointing (£554,000); repair all wooden windows (£91,500); repair and replace metal windows (£18,000); replace broken glass (£6,000); overhaul doors (£7,000); redecorate all externals (£32,500); mastic all external doors and windows (£8,000); and overhaul roof leadwork and slates on roof slopes (£21,000).

Internal works: • • • • • • • •

Fit emergency lighting to all public areas (£43,000); rewire all faulty light fittings (£205,000); fit smoke detectors (£187,000); repair cracked plaster in stairwells (£25,000); decorate all common areas (£180,000); repair steps (£5,000); repair wooden floors (£16,000); repair compartment firewalls (£25,000);

 • • •

Appendix A  161 repair ceiling damage to top floor rooms (£10,000); fit new carpets (£5,000); and upgrade and test electric’s (£45,000).

Added to the expenses for the actual building work outlined above, Topbuild charged an extra cost for their ‘prelims’. Prelims included costs of ‘hardware’, including desks, computers, phones, faxes, photocopiers, stationery, storage facilities, and ‘management services’ – the wages of Topbuild’s project and site managers, quantity surveyors and the two general foremen. Prelims also included ‘house keeping’, which paid the wages of six labourers. The cost of the prelims totalled approximately £8,000 per week for all three Keyworker Houses.

Notes

Chapter 1 1 The PFI was introduced by the Conservative Government in 1992 as part of a broader neo-liberal marketization of state services that intended to make those services more competitive, cost-effective and streamlined (see Drakeford 2000; Feigenbaum et al., 1999; Rhodes 1997). 2 Calculated from Office for National Statistics (2008). 3 Harvey and Behling (2008) point out that in 2008 self-employed builders became legally entitled to holiday pay under European law but, despite this, many remained unaware of their entitlement or subcontractors refused to pay for it. 4 Trade unionism membership and strikes by British builders have always been relatively low. A closed shop has never operated in the British building industry, and small firms, which form, and have formed, the vast majority of building employers, rarely paid much attention to the centralized bargaining machinery of the unions (Austrin, 1980). Building firms employing between one and three employees constituted around 70 per cent of all firms in 2007 (calculated from Office for National Statistics, 2008). 5 The mechanical and electrical workers generally expected to be paid approximately £470 (net) per five-day week (i.e. after tax has been deducted). The carpenters received a lower wage than carpenters in general (see Chapter 8), earning approximately £350 per five-day week (net). All the labourers received equal wages to one another as far as I was aware, which was £250 per five-day week (net). The labour foremen received an extra £5 a day, and the maintenance men, also employed by the labour subcontractor, were the lowest paid group at £230 per week (net). The painters’ wages varied substantially between them depending on their skill and their relationship to their subcontractor. The lowest paid painter received just under £230 a week (net), slightly less than a labourer, but the highest skilled painter was earning around £320 a week (net). 6 The wage rates of nurses employed by the NHS in 2004 went from a bottom-end entry wage of £17,060 to £34,920 (gross) for the most senior. The carpenters, for example, earned £23,750 (gross) if they worked for 50 weeks of the year, regardless of seniority. 7 The numbers of points on the map are deliberately ambiguous. This is because I was unsure how many men each subcontractor employed. For example, I overheard talk about other men who worked for Topbuild’s subcontractors whom the builders had seen in their local pubs, streets and homes, and about others who were retired or sick, but I never got to know all of these men.



Notes 163

  8 The 1961 Census shows more than 800,000 Irish living in England and Wales (Thomas, 1973) accounting for over 4 per cent of the total population of England and Wales. Because of the open border between Ireland and England there were probably many more Irish in England at this time but not registered in census data.   9 Anecdotally I have heard that Irish regional divisions still exist on large and lucrative tunnelling jobs in London building. In the building of the Channel Tunnel, for example, particular tunnel works were monopolized by regional clusters of men from particular areas of Ireland and work opportunities blocked to anyone outside of those regions. 10 Irish clusters in London are becoming increasingly indistinct. Second generation Irish tend to assimilate into English culture and many older Irish have returned to Ireland (Malcolm, 1996). Danny, the labour foreman, bemoaned the decline of the Irish community in a recorded interview. The traditional Irish pub, the centre of the community in London was, he said, fast becoming a thing of the past. 11 I have used an Anglicized company name for the carpenters because the actual company name was Anglicized. 12 Five labourers – all from the Indian subcontinent (Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims) – were reported to have been killed in an accident for every mile of track they laid for the British East African Company (Patel, 1979). 13 Working for a subcontractor for up to 35 years was uncommon compared to subcontract employment practices in the UK in general. For example, evidence from the Disparities survey shows that, on average, a self-employed builder works for a single firm for only 1.2 years (Harvey, 2003). 14 Bill was talking in general terms. Not even all of Spark’s employees possessed formal skill certificates; see, for example, the biography of Trick in Chapter 5. 15 The numbers were so small that the Seychellians did not appear in UK minority ethnic statistics as a distinct group. 16 My fieldwork was conducted before A8 accession permitted most of these groups legal employment in the UK (see, for example, Anderson et al., 2006).

Chapter 2   1 Long-term ‘partnering agreements’ in building contracting for state-based work were recommended as best practice by influential Government reports into the inefficiencies of the UK building industry (Egan, 1998; Latham, 1994). The reports suggested that for follow-on projects, successful building teams should be re-employed by clients for further works without using competitive tendering. The ideas drew on the success of team working and ‘quality management’ in Japanese manufacturing. Applied to construction work, these were deemed to increase trust and reduce the competitive and adversarial nature of UK construction projects (see Bennett, 2000). Yet, in practice, partnering agreements have been beset by problems (see Barlow et al., 1997).  2 James’ position within the site management hierarchy was different to the other site managers. Unlike them he was not a tradesman but had found his way into site management through nepotistic means, because his father worked as a director of a large building contractor. James’ position can be seen as similar to a second lieutenant learning his skills amongst the NCOs in the field.   3 The move was short lived. Topbuild did not dismiss James, but instead forced his resignation by ill treatment at the new site where they had sent him to work. James soon left Topbuild for another building company.

164 Notes Chapter 3 1 Paap’s (2006) claim that building work had become deskilled seems to be belied by her own seven years of training and working as carpenter where she worked for one firm doing ‘rough’ and less skilled carpentry shuttering work; another undertaking more skilled commercial remodelling work; and another employed in high skilled residential work. Silver (1986) also claims that building had become deskilled, citing the divisions between, for example, painters, dry-lining decorators and paperhangers. In my own experience of being a decorator in London, however, I learned all of these decorating skills as well as aspects of carpentry, rendering and plastering, and the longer I worked in this occupation, the more skills I accumulated. My experience reflects much more the social relations described by older US studies of construction including Reimer (1979) and Applebaum (1981). 2 The term ‘crack’ (or ‘craic’) originates from Irish and its frequent usage by the builders highlights the influence that the massive numbers of Irish building workers have had over London’s building site culture. 3 In my past experience working on building sites, where management and their foremen attempted to control their workers coercively and without respect – usually through aggression and threat of dismissal – the builders would often collude to do substantially less work than the workers at Topbuild and/or there would be high rates of employee turnover. In addition, I only observed one act of industrial sabotage at Keyworker House (see Chapter 8), whereas sabotage was common on other building sites were there was little respect and reciprocation. 4 Sennett and Cobb (1972) view the injuries of class as a result of the working-class being part of a non-descript mass. I would add that the symbolic injuries are also constituted by the devaluation of working men’s humanity, in particular their intellectual abilities and cultural tastes (cf. Skeggs, 2004). 5 I had worked on building sites before the mass use of mobile phones. In these situations, van drivers and workers moving across the various sites would be the most common source of information as to the ‘governor’s’ whereabouts, and often junior members of the workgroups would be given excuses to visit the other sites and return with information (see also Tressell, 1965 [1914]).

Chapter 4 1 These averages are, and would have always been, seasonal, with bricklaying in particular stopping or slowing in the winter months. Thanks to Andy ‘Plug’ Thiel for our discussions about contemporary bricklaying. 2 Daydreaming can be seen as a form of psychological escape from the constraints of time in all its forms (Cohen and Taylor, 1972). It releases the dreamer from cyclical or linear time to somewhere else. Such attempts to escape everyday reality form a substantial element of human culture (Cohen and Taylor, 1976), and the subjective effects of daydreaming may be compared to contrived and mediated ‘dreams’ that take the form of entertainment in stories.

Chapter 5 1 The numbers of apprentices registered with the Construction Industry Training Board in 1985 was 8,700, which dropped to 2,500 in 1994 (Harvey 2003), and it can be assumed that the numbers began to drop off long before 1985. 2 Bricks and other heavy materials are still commonly transported manually, which I can testify to having worked many times as a labourer. However, it is a slight



3 4

5 6 7

8 9

Notes 165 exaggeration to say that there was no machinery in the 1960s. Cranes for example, have been used at least since the medieval period. In recorded interviews I asked all the mechanical and electrical tradesmen if they had ever been injured at work. Each of them proceeded to show me substantial scars on their bodies caused by electric shocks. Working-class women have always been a peripheral and flexible workforce with few working rights. Yet they might have experienced a somewhat different transition to the post-industrial service economy than working-class men. Many would have remained in bottom-end service jobs that they have always done, and those pushed out of factory work, may have been absorbed by the increasing numbers of service jobs and proletarianized white collar jobs, something that working-class men may find emasculating and therefore a poor option (see, for example, MacDonald and Marsh, 2005; Newman, 1999). The Gin and Vodka Association (www.ginvodka.org). See, for example, Coleman’s (1965) description of the ‘truck’; temporary villages that the railway navvies lived in. Not all the Ugandan Asians came to Britain. Patel (1979) writes that at the time of their expulsion, the British government would not accept them into its country and many went to North America, Italy and Canada. Eventually the British government let a certain number of those they had originally displaced, enter Britain (see also Bowling, 1999). See Duneier (1999) for an analysis of how thinking ‘fuck it’ releases people from moral binds, and the consequences of this. His father worked as a police officer.

Chapter 6 1 Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) cards were formal certificates of registration that all building workers required to legally work on British building sites. 2 Henry (1986) suggests that most organizations invoke formal law only as a last resort. However, for organizations where illicit practices are involved, it may be even less likely for formal law to be called upon to mediate disputes. 3 London painters frequently use this term to describe their less-skilled colleagues. Its original usage was to describe the men who unblocked London’s sewers in the nineteenth century; a trade of very dirty low-status. 4 I mean this as a separate notion to Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic violence’ (see Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) because symbolized violence was not part of unconscious symbolism but involved a conscious intentionality. 5 Soldiers, like most builders, are not necessarily integrated into the nation they fight and work for, but they risk their lives via discursive notions of protectorate of the family (Sasson-Levey, 2002) and of one another (Kier, 1999).

Chapter 7 1 Milgram’s (1989 [1967]) small world problem can be seen as artificial in that its recipients were asked for a ‘favour’ by Milgram’s study, but not by one another (see Crossley, 2008) which was thus authorized by the power of scientific authority (see, intriguingly, Milgram, 1974). 2 This was a surreptitious act undertaken by a transient painter group who left an open and upturned can of black oil-based paint on a board on the scaffold. When the labourers tidied the scaffold and moved the can, the paint splashed down the masonry and windows of the building. The painters were disillusioned with Pete’s talk about

166 Notes

3

4 5 6

how he was going to become a site manager and ascend the Topbuild management hierarchy. They came to dislike him, seeing him as undeserving of his position and ‘too big for his boots’. The painters were employed on ‘price work’ and they had duped Pete and undertook sub-standard work. Topbuild’s management refused to pay their subcontractor and heated arguments ensued between Topbuild and the subcontractor, which were ongoing when I left the field. Following this episode Topbuild returned to contracting only Ernie Coat for painting works. As I have shown, while the UK building industry may be strict on health and safety, this often does not translate into practice. Indeed, Bill himself would stubbornly only wear safety boots and a hard hat when he knew ‘the bosses’ or health and safety officials were on site (see also Chapter 2). Bill is referring to the large numbers of British Asian owned shops in London that tend to have long opening hours. The term ‘booking in dead men’ describes collusion between site management and subcontractors who employ labour that does not actually exist (see also Dalton, 1959). State legislation did reach into the organization of building contracts when, in 2008, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) issued a ‘Statement of Objections’ against 112 English construction companies alleged to have engaged in bid rigging and ‘cover pricing’ – collusion between companies to artificially over-inflate tenders in order to purposively increase the chances of a single tender winning the contract. According to the OFT this ‘harm[ed] the economy by distorting competition and keeping prices artificially high’ (http: www.oft.gov.uk/news/press/2008/52-08). In September 2009, the OFT fined 103 of these companies a total of £129.5 million. However, in April 2009, the UK Government had announced a ‘rescue package’ of £2 billion to be loaned to building contractors undertaking PFI projects who, because of the ‘credit crunch’ were unable to obtain credit to finish the works. A large number of the building companies undertaking the PFIs were those very same companies fined by the OFT.

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Index

Acker, J. 106 adaptation 89–91, 92–5, 105 Aidan (labourer): construction 100; crack (joking) 73–4; indulgency patterns 47, 54; interactions 126; McMurray’s Labour 20; migrant labour 144; myths 111; relationships 60; routes into construction 87–8; tasks 72–3; violence 115; working hours 52 alcohol 75, 91, 92, 100 ambiguity in building projects 29 Anderson, E. 116 apprenticeships 85, 90, 122 Archibald, K. 76–7 architects 10, 81 Assured Consultants 9, 28–9, 150, 151 attitudes to women 128–9 authority 5, 30, 31, 43–4, 51 autonomy: builders 4, 40, 62; carpenters 56; foremen 55; indulgency patterns 45; labourers 52; time management 72; tradesmen 15, 49, 82, 155 Bapu (carpenter) 92–3, 107, 108, 148 barriers to opportunities 131 benefits 15, 133 Beynon, H. 68 Bill (mechanical and electrical foreman): community networks 34; craft satisfaction 60–1; decision making 36; gift exchange 133–4, 150–1; Keyworker House 44; legislation 23; migrant labour 145; politics 102; racism 149; routes into construction 85; time pressures 80–1 Blake, J. 71 Bobby (trainee quantity surveyor): class 103; indulgency patterns 47;

Keyworker House 11; racism 149; roles 33; site office 30; Topbuild 23; violence 116 bodies 108–10, 132 body capital 143–50 Bony (painter) 57, 69 Booth, C. 41, 56, 57 Bourdieu, P. 105, 110, 124; socioeconomic groups 5 Braverman, H. 41 break time 73, 78 Bristles (painter): alcohol 96; crack (joking) 88; informal economies 138–9; informers 59; labourers 51–2; management 50, 51; masculinity 126; migrant labour 144; price-work 80; routes into construction 86–7; trust 111; wages 14; women 128–9; work culture 45 builders 38–9, 43, 67–8, 127, 137–9 building: design 81; employment 116; guilds 12; industry 106–10, 149, 152, 158; projects 28–9; sites 9–11, 41, 107, 111–12, 138; trade 143–4 Burawoy, M. 5 bureaucracy: building sites 41; employment relations 42; limits 38–9; site managers 35, 37; tradesmen 49; worker control 43 business 140–3, 150, 156 Butlin’s 44–51 caffeine 75 cannabis 76 capitalism: construction 10; cultural practices 154; employment relations 42; manual work 99; modernity 156–8; pilfering 138; social networks

 153, 158–9; social relations 156; time 82 career patterns 67 carpenters: British Indians 3; cultural networks 92; cultural practices 119; indulgency patterns 56–7; labourers 147–50; migrant labour 22; site managers 35 cartelization 150–3 cash payments 113 casualized labour 13 chain migration 92–5 clans 42, 54 class: builders 84, 102, 155; denial 123; formation 157; identity 101–4; masculinity 5; migrant labour 129; minds and bodies 81–2; perpetuation 4; reproduction 158–9; social mobility 101; variations 122–4, 140 clock time 71 Coat, Ernie (painting subcontractor): authority 51; business networks 141; cash payments 113–14; employment policies 22; history 16–17; payments 115; profits 58–9; social networks 25–6; Stew (painter) 96 Coat’s Decoration 22 communications 29, 54, 78–9, 100 community morality 114 community networks: builders 27; employment relations 114; Jamin (general foreman) 135; migrant labour 131; occupational mobility 136; stability 105; subcontractors 17, 34, 134 construction 12, 67, 100 construction industry 153 content of crack (joking) 125 contracting 9–11 contracts 34, 114–16, 137, 156 control: builders 104; patterns 51–60; reciprocity 133; time management 65, 83; women 128, 129 cooperation 38, 39, 47, 56 corporeal skills 132 costings 36–7 crack (joking) 73, 79, 88, 125 craft satisfaction 60–2 see also job satisfaction; work satisfaction cultural exclusion 140–3 cultural knowledge 144–5 cultural networks 92

Index 181 cultural practices: builders 4, 155–6; business networks 143; capitalism 154; class 156; crack (joking) 74–5; cultural relations 5–6; informality 5; masculinity 110; Topbuild 5; violence 120; worker control 49 cultural relations 5–6, 108, 136, 155 cultural transmission 119–21 culture 156–8 customs 121–5 Danny (foreman): cash payments 113; community networks 136; families 129; labourers 77; migrant labour 143; performance 78; retirement 68; roles 55; Will (maintenance man) 118; working hours 53–4 day rates 42, 51, 57, 70, 83 decision making 29, 36–7 deregulation 13, 63, 158 Desai, R. 137 design and class 81–2 Dickens, C, 91 Diderot, D. 70 dilapidation of Key worker House 7–9 disadvantages 145–7, 158 discipline 122 discrimination 110, 158 division 17–23 division of labour 70 doing nothing 76–8 drug use 75 Durkheim, E. 114 Eccles, R. 141 economic opportunities 131–4 education 131–2, 158 electricians 23 employees 12–13, 133 employment 94, 110, 131–2, 134 employment contracts 116 employment market 4–5 employment policies 13, 17, 25–7 employment practices 122, 156 employment protection 158 employment relations 42, 50, 63, 114, 133 employment rights 5 Engels, F. 41 ephemerality 110–11 ethnic diversity 17–23 ethnic groups 147 ethnic identities 5

182 Index ethnicity: builders 6, 7, 84; class 155; disadvantages 158; employment relations 114; hierarchy 147; racism 145–7; wages 142–3 ethnography 2–4 expense accounts 140 false self-employment 13, 42 families 127–8, 130, 157 fieldwork 4f0.1 Fixit, Mike (maintenance man): discrimination 110; factory work 43; families 129; indulgency patterns 48–9; politics 102; relationships 47–8; retirement 68; work culture 45, 74 flexibility 12, 54, 71 Ford, Henry 64–5 foremen 3, 54–5, 69, 86 formality 49–50 formalized relationships 38 Foucault, M. 122, 123 Frank (painter): cash payments 113; families 128; ill treatment 59; illegal drugs 76; racism 146–7; routes into construction 96–8; theft 111–12; violence 117, 119–20 Freddie 96 games 77–8 gender 6, 104, 106, 123, 124–5, 155 gender identities 5 gendered organization 106–10 general contractors 10, 16 gentlemen 122–3 Gerry (painter) 61, 66–7, 68, 76, 94–5, 113 gift exchange 132–4, 136, 141, 147, 150–3 globalization 157–8 Godelier, M. 124 Goffman, E. 76–7, 78, 120–1 goods and services 137–9 Gouldner, A.: Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy 43 Granovetter, M. 134 grasses (informers) 59–60 Graves, B. 25 group interactions 126 group relations 42 guild system 81 Harvey, M. 13, 151–2 health and safety 35–6, 80, 109f6.1, 143–4

hedonism 100 Herbert (building consultant) 11, 29, 30, 31–2 hierarchy 106, 125–9, 149 Hindus 21 history 9–11, 40–2 Hobbs, D. 120 homeland ties 93 honesty 80–1 housing economy 136–7 hurry up work 73, 79 identity 101, 106, 130, 156 ill treatment 59 illegal drugs: Bristles (painter) 139; builders 75–6; construction 100; Frank (painter) 97, 117; Jamin (general foreman) 98; Stew (painter) 95–6 illegal employment 13, 156 illegality 153, 155 indulgency patterns 43–51, 53, 62 informal economies 136–40, 152, 154, 159 informal networks 153 informal practices 113, 153 informal rules 76 informal trading 139 informality 50–1, 100, 140 information 132 insecurity 13–14 interactions: gender 124; hierarchy 125; Keyworker House 107; masculinity 107, 126; myths 111; rules 125; site office 30 Irish labourers 3, 18, 19, 144, 149–50 Jaggers, Mr (building consultant): Assured Consultants 29; authority 38; bureaucracy 37; decision making 36; Keyworker House 11; making money 32, 34; relationships 30–1; violence 115 James (site manager) 30, 37–8, 44, 136 Jamin (general foreman): career patterns 68; carpenters 56; craft satisfaction 61–2; employment networks 18; families 127; instability 13–14, 67; Keyworker House 11; management 50; occupational mobility 135; private work 137; racism 147–8; reciprocity 140; relationships 30; responsibilities 55; roles 54; routes into construction 98–9; Turner’s Carpentry 21, 141–2

 Jimmy (painters’ foreman) 58, 69, 111–12 job satisfaction 82, 88, 90 see also craft satisfaction job security 13–14, 104, 127 John (junior site manager Keyworker House III) 37, 48–9 joking 45, 148 Kevin (quantity surveyor) 11, 30, 31, 33, 35, 102–3 Keyworker House: building project 7–9; Butlin’s 44; gift exchange 151; illegal drugs 76; informal economies 138; interactions 107; making work 77; male builders 106; management 11f1.3; masculinity 125; office staff 140; Opportune Housing 28–9; participant observation 2; Planet site office 30–2; private finance initiative (PFI) 152; quality 80; racism 147, 149; reciprocal associations 140; refurbishment parties 9f1.2; residents 38; schedules 65; social networks 155; subcontractors 12; trust relationships 43; work culture 84 Keyworker House I 8f1.1 Kipling, R. 40 knowledge 71, 109, 143 Kutch diaspora 21 Kutchis 22, 92, 93, 94, 103, 150 labour 108 labour exchange 92 labour market 1, 62–3 labour shortages 24, 144–5 labourers: autonomy 155; carpenters 147–50; flexibility 54; indulgency patterns 46; Jamin (general foreman) 99; Keyworker House 2–3; making work 76–8; painters 51; shields 77–8; speed 79; subjective time 72; tearoom 139f7.1; time management 60; working hours 52–4 law 113, 116, 121–5, 155, 157 lechery 107 legislation 9–10, 23, 35–6 legitimacy 49 life chances 84 lifestyles 157 Lin, N. 134 London map 19f1.4 lore 113, 116, 118, 120, 122 loyalty 46, 115, 133–4, 135

Index 183 MacAmhlaigh, D. 21 making money 32–8 making work 76–8, 79 management: building sites 9–11, 32–8, 51; Jamin (general foreman) 54; Keyworker House 11f1.3; legitimacy 49; quantity surveyors 32–3; worker control 43, 48 managers 3, 22–3 Mann, M. 116 manual work 71, 99, 100 manual workers 82, 122 market control 48 market dynamics 40 market forces 12, 42 marking time 72 masculine posturing 107 masculinity: builders 5, 106, 118; class 129; contests 54; cultural practices 110, 119, 122; families 127–8; illegal drugs 100; interactions 111, 126; strength 124; violence 116, 117, 122; working class 123 Matza, D. 125, 126 Mauss, M. 132 McKenzie, R. 102 McMurray, Paddy (subcontractor) 20, 88, 113, 134, 141 McMurray’s Labour 19–21, 24 mechanical and electrical engineers 3 mechanization 41 meeting places 92 Mehl (carpenter) 101, 149 Michael (labourer) 72, 73, 94 Mickey T (labourer): business networks 141; gift exchange 151; informal economies 136, 138; migration 94; politics 102; pubs 91; subcontractors 20; violence 114–15 middle class 122, 123 migrant labour: barriers 131; body capital 143–50; builders 17–18; class 84, 129; education 132; Irish labourers 19; Turner’s Carpentry 21; wages 141; weak ties 134 migration 6, 94–5 minds and bodies 81–2 mobility 91–2, 121, 132 modernity 156–8 money 65, 78–81 monitoring: building sites 41; Danny (foreman) 53; labourers 52; painters

184 Index 58; pilfering 138; site managers 35; trust 25 moral economy 63, 153 morality 40, 114, 121, 134 myths 111 narco-time 75–6 Naz (carpenter) 14, 21–2, 93, 101, 145–6, 148 negotiations 29, 39 nepotism 143 network reciprocity 116 networking 141 new technologies 15, 41, 90 newspapers 107 nicotine 75 normative worlds 4 notices 109f6.1 occupational mobility 135, 136, 155 occupations 84–8 office staff 78, 79, 140 Opportune Housing 9, 28–9, 150 opportunities: barriers 131; builders 84, 130; business networks 143; families 127; migration 94–5; restricted 136 organization 27, 41, 64, 72–3 organizational complexity 10–11, 12 Ouchi, W. 42 Paap, K. 41 painters 3, 51, 57–9, 70, 141 Park, R. 22 participant groups 4f0.1 participant observation 2, 7 partnering agreement 29 Patrick (labourer) 53 Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy 43 Paul (site manager) 15, 31, 37, 103, 104, 108–9 performance 78, 116, 155–6 performance payment 42 perquisites 14, 91, 134, 138, 152 Perry (painter) 66, 69, 107, 108 Pete (general foreman) 11, 118–19, 136 physical skills 5, 41, 100, 109 physical work 52 physicality 124 pilfering 138 see also theft Planet site office 30–2 planning 10, 56, 72–3, 81 play 71

plumbers 23 Polanyi, K. 156, 159 police 112 political economy 13 politics 102 power: bodies 108; builders 5, 154, 155; foremen 54–5; master craftsmen 81; reciprocity 133; social change 105; violence 125; women 124, 128; working class 124 price-work 42, 44, 79–80, 144 pricing 16–17 private finance initiative (PFI) 8, 13, 152 private work 68, 137 productivity 48, 80 professions 10, 82 profit margins 33 profits 58, 64, 82 protection 26, 124, 132, 149, 150 providers 124, 127, 128 pubs 91–2 qualifications 96 quality 60, 65, 66, 81, 82, 83 quantity surveyors: aggression 116; class 102, 103; construction 81; Keyworker House 3; relationships 152; roles 32–8; Topbuild 22–3 racism 20, 94, 108, 145–7 reciprocal associations 43, 46, 140 reciprocity: gift exchange 132–4, 152; pilfering 140; private work 137–8; relationships 153; strong ties 135; violence 116 recruitment 7, 17, 25–7 refurbishment 7–8, 9f1.2 regulation 62–3, 153, 157 Reimer, J. 91 relationships: asymmetry 132, 141; authority 5; builders 157; building sites 29, 39; Coat, Ernie (painting subcontractor) 59; formalized 28; gift economies 150; indulgency patterns 46; Jaggers, Mr (building consultant) 34; management 50; reciprocity 153; site office 30–1, 152 remittances 93 representation 9f1.2 research 2, 4f0.1 resources 84 respect 49, 133–4

 responsibilities 13, 55 retirement 68 rhythms 68–9, 72, 83 risks 15–17 Rock, P. 121 roles 32–8, 51, 54, 55 routes into construction 84–8 routines 70–1 Roy, D. 75 Sahlins, M. 132 Screed, Luke (plastering subcontractor) 24, 134, 151 self-employment 12–17 Sennett, R. 70 shields 77–8 shipyards 76–7 Silver, A. 102 Silver, M. 41 site management 10–11, 27, 38 site managers: apprenticeships 86; career patterns 67; carpenters 56; class 103; pilfering 140; roles 35–8, 51 site office 28, 30, 152 situational rhythms 71 skills: builders 1, 5, 15; craft skills 4; general contractors 16; knowledge 71, 109; multi-skilled workers 42; painters 70; tradesmen 82 Smith, Mr 35–6 social capital: Bosnians 144; builders 5, 60, 132; chain migration 93; gift exchange 139; housing economy 137; individual utilization 134; migrant labour 131; reciprocity 153; social order 95–100 social change 105 social class 82 social contacts 132 social history 155 social identity 104 social integration 128 social mobility 101–4, 134–6, 158, 159 social networks: Aidan (labourer) 88; builders 7, 63, 131; class 158; deregulation 158; economic opportunities 131–4; employment 25; foremen 54; Frank (painter) 96–7; hierarchy 141; impacts 84; informal economies 136–40; Jamin (general foreman) 98–9; Keyworker House 155; lore 118; migrant labour 145;

Index 185 morality 40; painters 58; reciprocity 132, 133; routes into construction 97; subcontractors 141–2; Topbuild 152–3; weak ties 134 social order 121, 122 social organization 116 social pressure 119 social relations 157 social ties 134–6 sociology 4–6 Spark’s electro-mechanical 23, 133 specialization 12, 15–17, 41–2 speed 64, 79, 82 status: builders 47, 84; carpenters 119; interactions 125; labourers 149; manual workers 82; professions 123; tradesmen 102, 110, 155; work culture 124 Steve (project manager): communications 78–9; health and safety 36; history 35; indulgency patterns 46–7; Jamin (general foreman) 135; Keyworker House 11; labourers 54; management 50; pilfering 140; relationships 29; routes into construction 84–5; site office 30; speed 79–80; staffing 37; tradesmen 16 Stew (painter): background 95–6; craft satisfaction 80; ethnicity 145; interactions 125–6; materialism 104; providers 128; theft 112 stigmatization 18, 124, 147, 150 strength 108, 110, 116, 122–4 strong ties 132, 135, 153 subcontracting 12–17, 41–2 subcontractors: builders 4–5; business networks 141, 150; capitalism 158–9; cash payments 113; community networks 34, 114, 134; decision making 36; employment policies 25–6; indulgency patterns 62; Keyworker House 12; painters 57; power 154; profits 58; social networks 131; strong ties 135; violence 115 subjective time 71–6, 83 Sun, The 107 supervision 17, 69 Sutherland, E. 156 symbolism 150 symbolized violence 120 symbols 122–4

186 Index task management 71 tasks 68–9, 70–1 tearoom 139f7.1 temporal capitalism 64–5 temporal cultures 65–71 Thatcher, Margaret (Prime Minister, UK 1979-1990) 13 theft 111–13 see also pilfering Thompson, E.P. 64 time 65, 78–81, 82 time banditry 45, 59 time management 60, 64, 65, 75–6, 78 time pressures 79, 80–1 Tonnies, F. 157 Topbuild: builders 2, 147; business networks 141; closed relationships 150; cultural practices 5; day rates 51; foremen 55; gift economies 152; hollowed out 11; Kevin (quantity surveyor) 11; Keyworker House 7, 9; labourers 21; Opportune Housing 29; painters 57; price-work 44; reciprocity 133; relationships 32; social networks 152–3; trade-clustering 24; verbal agreements 114 tournaments 77–8 trade-clustering 7, 18, 24 tradesmen: building sites 10; construction 81–2; craft satisfaction 61; ethnicity 18; Keyworker House 3; London map 19f1.4; price-work 80; reciprocity 133; routes into construction 85, 99; specialization 15; status 102, 110, 155; time management 60; Topbuild 147; training 26; worker control 49 training 25, 86, 132 Tressell, R. 65–6, 81, 91, 102 Trick (electrician) 49–50, 72, 82, 89–90 trouble 116–19 trust: builders 62, 111; clan relations 43; community networks 137; foremen 55;

gift exchange 133; intra-workgroup 59; making work 76; reciprocity 140; recruitment 25–7; trouble 116–19 Turner’s Carpentry 21–2, 141–2 union protection 5, 13 United Kingdom (UK) 2, 42 value 123, 132 variations 122–4 verbal agreements 114, 137 Vin (carpenter) 132, 142 violence: employment relations 114; fear 121; hierarchy 125–9; law 121–5; masculinity 117; men 124; reciprocity 133; social order 122; threats 116 wages 14–15, 141, 142–3, 145, 146, 149 weak ties 134 weakness 125–6 Western Europe 81 Will (maintenance man) 45, 117–18 Willis, P. 5, 74, 99 women 124, 128–9 work 109, 156 work culture: builders 88; crack (joking) 74; Keyworker House 44–5, 84; time management 64; worker control 43, 83 work ethics 60–2 work life 66 work pace 45, 76 work rates 53–4, 56, 65, 69 work rhythms 72 work satisfaction 80 see also craft satisfaction work time 67, 83 worker control 40, 41, 42–3, 49, 62 working class: alcohol 75; builders 6, 104–5, 130; families 127; size 101; status 123; trust 122 working hours 52–4 working practices 4, 28