The Day's Work in Wall Street

The book is 83 years old and in reasonable condition except the staples have rusted through and disintegrated, leaving a pair of neatly shaped stains at the margin of each page. The topic is the description of a profession, and regular readers will know how fond I am of these. In the past we covered dustmen and postmen. This time it’s stock-brokers.

The Day’s Work in Wall Street is a lecture on the workings of the New York Stock Exchange written in 1919 and revised ten years later by Frederick S. Todman, the head of one of the principal accounting firms of this era. The exact date of the revision – precisely when in 1929 – is not recorded, but we could reasonably assume that it was some time before the market’s dramatic unravelling that began on October 24 of that year. Knowledge of that particular event makes the book a sort of unwitting and unfinished crime thriller, one in which the murder is never consummated but might as well have been, as far as the reader is concerned, for we know what happened next. And so that the stock market should be described as such an ordered, harmonious and well-functioning machinery at this particular time is a source of some frisson, like when Yale economist Irving Fisher declared just ahead of the crash that stock prices seemed to have reached ‘a permanently high plateau’. We rightly scoff at these statements, but they are also revealing of the extent in which the financial system – long before the invention of credit default swaps – knew how to render itself opaque to the very people who ought to have been most familiar with its workings.

In spite of his technocratic confidence, Todman hints at this opacity in the lecture’s opening statement.

Probably few persons outside the stock broker's office fully understand the minutiae of the game of fortune-making in the stock market. Everything is so technical: the abbreviations on the ticker, the parlance of the street and the sign language used by the brokers on the floor.

In fact the New York Stock Exchange had a history of being quite secretive about those minutiae. In the previous decade for instance it forbade visitors from taking pictures, which is why a photographer working for the Pearson Publishing Company had to snap the one below with a camera hidden in his sleeve.

Of course it is quite possible that what the directors of the exchange wished to protect was their intellectual property in the very things that Todman set out to describe: namely, the combination of technological and human systems that allowed the exchange to carry out and record with remarkable speed and accuracy the orders to buy and sell it received each day.

On the human side, the Stock Exchange – we are assured – is governed by strictest principle of ethics. The broker is fundamentally honest, because he [sic] is trained to be honest, and besides ‘the laws governing the conduct of members on the Board also foster that habit, so that it does not take very long for the dishonest ones to be weeded out of the fraternity.’ If anything, it is the customers who frequently cannot be trusted, and several examples of such dishonesty are given. Nonetheless the broker is seldom indifferent to their interests.

Many times he is asked to carry their commitments thru a period of storm, when owing to their temporary embarrassment they are unable to finance them fully. This he does cheerfully, if he is reasonably certain that the customer means well and that his indisposition is but a matter of adjusting his bank balance.

You see how the bad reputation of brokers amongst the public was unwarranted even back then? Except of course these lending arrangements were not borne out of compassion, and the necessity to recoup the amount loaned – which at peak totalled a staggering $8.5 billion – meant that brokers had a very vested interest in driving prices higher in the lead-up to the crash.

If the psychological type of the broker is sketched rather crudely, Todman is more useful and at times more lyrical when describing the technological side of things. There is for instance in the book a lengthy description of what happens when the ‘tape is late’, meaning that the lag between a flurry of trades taking place and their being printed on the ticker tape has prevented a buy or sell order from occurring at the desired price point. Such lags of course nowadays are defined by the servers of an investment bank operating a micro-second faster than those of another investment bank. Of a similarly quaint nature are the author’s attempts to impress us with the ‘wire room’, the never centre of the broker's organization, where in one corner you might see as many as ‘half-a-dozen wires leading to the West and the South.’ All that this means is that they had a bunch of phones and telegraphs, but what they did with them was still remarkable for its time.

As an example of the speed with which orders are executed, the following will serve: The London office cables in Hartfield's Code: Smitell, N.Y. DEPEFHENEP. The cable when decoded is found to be an order to sell 1,000 shares of United States Steel Common at the market price. The order is entered, executed, coded to London, and actually sent within three minutes from the time of receipt!

The exclamation mark at the end of this passage condenses an ideology that readers familiar with Adam Curtis’ All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace would find familiar, except what it also underscores is that you don’t need digital computing to develop the idea that a market that works faster is a better market, and that if it worked even faster it would be an even better market, and so forth. We might in fact wish to reflect upon the fact that the crash of 1929 was made possible by such rudimentary technologies, and marvel that the bubble waited patiently for each sale sheet to be made up in triplicate and each comparison issued in duplicate before bursting.

Shortly after the revised edition of this small book was published, Todman’s story ‘of brains, of keen foresight and of prompt action’ came to a devastating end, and what he had called ‘a game of fortune-making’ was branded by The Times as early of October 30, four days after Black Thursday, as ‘The Great Gamble’. The very concept of a day’s work in Wall Street would have radically changed as the market went on to lose over 80% of its value in a protracted fall that lasted three whole years. As for Todman himself, his company still traded and carried his name when it was censured by the Securities and Echange Commission in 1991, long after his death, which suggests that he came through the Depression okay. What exactly we are to make of his book I don't know, but I can tell you that it is valued over one hundred dollars on the second-hand market.

After Work

All of the Terminator films except for the third one have their climactic scene set inside of a factory. That is the place where the killer robots (pardon: cybernetic organisms) are crushed or melted down or obliterated in a thermonuclear explosion. But factories are also where the Terminators are forged. These golems of the post-industrial age are born in factories just as humans – and especially first-world humans – are locked out of them, laid off, made redundant, outsourced, terminated. And so, albeit on a crude, literal level, the Terminator films are also stories about the de-industrialisation of America, a decades-long economic and social transformation that lacks a recognisable set of cinematic referents simply because blue collar work was hardly ever featured in the nation’s films to begin with.

The factories of the Terminator films are already depopulated. Unlike the research facilities that are guarded  - in Judgment Day - by their own paramilitary security forces, these are buildings without so much as a night janitor. In The Terminator, Connor and Reese waltz into one such factory and initiate an automatic production sequence simply by flicking a random series of switches on a console, thus setting in motion a series of whizzing robotic arms and appendages whose overt purpose is to remind us of the dehumanisation of work and invite us to consider the small step that supposedly separates replacing the odd worker from killing all humans.

Unpacking Hollywood technophobic fantasies is never straightforward, and mostly pointless: of course James Cameron’s rage against the machine is a glaring paradox, just like the condemnation of simulations by the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix is a glaring paradox. The underlying messages are never subversive, the social analyses always absent. These are stories that are ground out of the raw material of literature and philosophy by a semi-industrial process – think of the heavy and contested debt of both The Terminator and The Matrix to their various respective sources – and that carry trace quantities of more coherent artistic visions and more serious reflections. But what Hollywood also does, more than any other single global cultural site, is to reify fantasy, that is to say define each year what counts as real imagination. This can be observed for example in the press releases of the companies that make the software used in post-production, which are all about setting and re-setting the always shifting benchmarks of verisimilitude.

So, even at its worst, American apocalyptic cinema engages in the culturally significant task of imagining what the end of the world or the decline of particular social classes might look like, and mobilises to this end a formidable technical and creative apparatus. Additionally, a franchise like Terminator allows to observe within a single storyline the evolution of the means of producing such a fantasy over time – to be precise, the twenty-five years that separate the original Terminator to Salvation. On this, some scattered observations.

Firstly, there is the most obvious transition from mechanical to digital effects, and from low to high budget, and its failure to improve on the aesthetic of the original. I’m parting ways with k-punk here, who has expressed admiration for Salvation’s ‘CyberGothic’ – there was nothing to my mind in the last instalment that improved on the low-tech, low-budget flash forwards of the first Terminator, or that expanded on the image of future Earth as a corpse-strewn waste land that populated Kyle Reese’s memory and Sarah Connor’s nightmares in instalments one and two. And this is not just not very imaginative of the film-makers. It’s also not very imaginative of the machines.

Consider the factory where the final confrontation in Salvation is set. There is a suitably sombre moment when John Connor realises that he’s standing on the factory floor on which the Terminators are built. These are early models, T-800s. He knows them well, and so do we. One of them is a computer-simulated and, in all fairness, entirely credible version of the Arnold Schwarzenegger of 1984. The others are endoskeletons that have yet to come on-line. But what’s more notable about this factory is that it looks like it was designed by humans: it has stairs and elevators and doors, hydraulic piping and large wheels for opening and closing valves manually. So whereas on one hand the machines appear fiendish in their, well, machinations, always looking for new ways to infiltrate and deceive the resistance, they are baffling failures at creating environments in their own image. The ‘Moto-Terminators’ (an innovation of Salvation) are a typical example: these androids ride armoured motorbikes that they actually have to control, meaning that if the rider is unseated or killed the bike itself is rendered useless, for it has no intelligence of its own. Furthermore, the occasional point-of-view shots from inside the Terminators’ brains indicate that they visualise data in Arabic numbers and select options from sets of commands in English; but of course it’s not just human symbolic language but the very idea of a ‘computer screen’ for somebody to look at that is entirely redundant if you happen to be the computer.

What is most striking about the world of the machines is all this vestigial humanity, all the inherited tics that our mind children appear unable to unlearn. What was the point of becoming self-aware if Skynet was just going to take over and be like us? For that matter, why wage all-out war on humanity? On this point, The Matrix rather more intelligently suggests that the best way for machines to enslave us would be to run a programme that looked and behaved exactly like late capitalism. The takeover by means of the greater and greater mechanisation of labour is an outdated scenario that later Terminator films need to keep playing out simply because it’s what the future looked like in 1984, when the android or replicant seemed the most likely successor to the human race. Nowadays the synthetic other looks rather more like a financial instrument than a robot.

But here’s another question: why is the T-800 anatomically correct? And by the way, we can infer that it is because none of the people who briefly see it naked when it travels to the past ever shout “look, a giant naked man with no penis!”, but the approving glance of a waitress in Judgment Day, above, is the only proof positive – it’s not as if Arnie’s schlong is ever in view. Nonetheless: the T-800 is an infiltration unit, but only insofar as it needs to appear human for long enough to come within shooting range of actual humans. We also know that all T-800s look alike, meaning the disguise would only go so far if you happened to survive the first meeting with one of them.

Still, even if we speculated that Skynet gave the T-800 a penis just to stick with the design, or on the off chance that it might some day have to exterminate a nudist colony, it would be another one of those incidental, vestigial attributes, but also one that calls attention to the fact that the machines do not seek pleasure. On this point it might be worth reminding ourselves that the eighties were not only the decade of the killer robot but also of the sexy robot, meaning not just Blade Runner’s Roy, Pris and Rachael, or Kelly LeBrock’s character in Weird Science, but ones that would get naked right down to the chassis in the works of illustrators such as Hajime Sorayama, without forgetting Donna Haraway’s infinitely more layered but still resolutely pleasure-seeking cyborgs.

None of these creatures remotely resemble Skynet and its machines, whose business time is strictly regular business time: meaning the fulfilment of whatever mission might be at hand, with the corporate and military senses of the word both in play. Clare Danes’ character in Rise of the Machines quizzes the reprogrammed T-800 about this, asking it if it cares about the well-being of its charges, to which the reply is:

If you were to die I would become useless. There would be no reason for me to exist.

The liberated machines have simply turned inwards the utilitarian principle on which they were once built. And so comes the answer to Philip Dick’s question: these androids don’t dream.

If the machines are strangely maladjusted to the world that they inherit, so too are Sarah and John Connor to the world that fails to end: having trained for the post-apocalypse, they cannot adjust to society this side of the catastrophe. And so they drift, gaining a fleeting sense of community from their association with a gang of Mexican outlaws – whether criminal or revolutionary, is left unclear – but always coming back to the country where they are routinely incarcerated or lumped with the clinically insane.

She used to be a waiter. He’s an occasional road gang worker who lives off the grid and is caught stealing drugs from a veterinary clinic. Their ritual insistence that ‘there is no fate but what we make’ is belied by the fact that there is plainly no future for them in human society and that they don’t believe in the possibility of social change. And so when Sarah dies of cancer, one year after the scheduled end of the world that she had managed to defer in Judgment Day, she asks that her ashes be scattered but her coffin be filled with assault rifles and grenades, for the fight against the machines that might yet come, and the revolution that never will.

One last image. By the time the second Terminator film was made, in 1991, the steel crisis was two decades old, yet a vat of molten steel is to this day one of the stock images of industrialisation and a symbol of our capacity to manufacture things. (A current Hyundai ad campaign emphasises this.) In Judgment Day, it becomes the means of undoing progress, of literally forgetting the advances that we can speculate about but have yet to pass: it is the place where the T-1000 comes to die, shrieking horribly and shape-shifting as it flails about in its final spasms, the embodiment of the nightmare of a future without work, a future that doesn’t need us.

The Terminator (James Cameron, USA, 1984)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, USA, 1991)
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, USA, 2003)
Terminator Salvation (McG, USA, 2009)

This has just come to hand: Aaron Bady on first seeing The Terminator in 2008.

The Looting

They assembled in front of the warehouse in a late afternoon in early June: two hundred or so people who had arrived in one hundred or so vehicles, including large trucks of well-known local moving companies whose brand names had been concealed.

Then they got to work.

They forced their way inside the padlocked building and proceeded to strip it of everything that might have some value. First of all, the furniture – for this was a furniture warehouse – followed by the appliances and the computers and the stationery. Then they took the curtains and some of the carpets and tiles. Then they ripped out the electrical system and removed the copper wiring inside.

The reports vary a little on what happened next. It seems that residents of the nearby town, some say suspecting an unauthorised rave party, called the police, and that when they arrived they took down the names of the people who were still in the building before letting them go. But another version is that nobody left, and everyone waited patiently for their name to be recorded. Only then, at 9pm, the group left, each taking their share of the loot. The next day, the local Carabinieri posed for this picture.

Aiazzone was a northern Italian furniture company that was amongst the first, in the 1980s, to make use of television as a medium not just for advertising but for actual sales. Their ads, headlined by huckster extraordinaire Guido Angeli, he of the smirk and the weird gesticulation – his signature move was a circular motion of the right hand, palm down, and simultaneously a vigorous ‘thumb-up’ with the left – appeared on both national and local television, and it was in the latter that Angeli entertained his audiences with a series of seemingly interminable infomercials. The company’s slogan was Provare per credere, ‘try in order to believe’, and the ads warmly invited the public to come in for an obligation free chat with the company’s interior designers ‘over lunch or dinner’ and promised 'free delivery nationwide - including the islands'.

The furniture itself was said to be almost proverbially awful, and having furnished one’s house at Aiazzone’s became shorthand for having little money and less taste – due in part no doubt to the kind of class snobbery that made the bourgeois sneer at the popularity of formica tables, chairs and bench tops in post-war Italy, without a thought for the kind of value that being able to purchase easy-to-clean kitchen and dining room furniture represented for the working poor. But maybe it really was awful, I don’t know. At any rate the brand itself was tarnished to the point that its delivery vans often travelled without markings and logos. It was the closest you could get to having your furniture delivered in a brown paper bag.

However the business model remained highly successful, and it kept relying on Angeli and his boorish promotional style to craft its message to the masses. I still remember mornings spent home from school when Aiazzone infomercials would be running concurrently on three different channels – which was quite unprecedented in those days – but the original vision of company founder Giorgio Aiazzone was to control television directly. His short-lived GAT (Gruppo Aiazzone Televisivo) had been in fact one of the country’s earliest commercial networks and a rival to Berlusconi’s own neonate outfit.

Then suddenly in July of 1986 Giorgio Aiazzone died in a helicopter crash, aged 39. Angeli dedicated to his boss a one hour infomercial-cum-memorial service featuring a chair sitting empty under a spotlight, an outrageous piece of television that is sadly lost to the ages. But the front man’s theatrical genius was not enough to ensure the continuing success of the company, and Aiazzone went into a twenty-year decline which ended with the acquisition of the brand name by Renato Semeraro, Giammauro Borsano and Giuseppe Gallo in 2008.

'You neither wash, nor pay' - a 2010 Aiazzone promotion offering a free dishwasher with every kitchen purchased and 5-year interest-free payments

With the injection of capital and the opening of a new chain of stores came a new national advertising campaign and a new series of supermarket-like deals. To say that the project was short-lived may give the possibly misleading impression that it was ever alive at all: the line eventually pursued by the public prosecutors is that the venture was conceived from the start as the business equivalent of a Ponzi scheme. The new owners, it is alleged, leveraged the company that owned all of the factories, warehouses and shops now under the Aiazzone name – many of which were in crisis at the time of their rebranding – for a series of fraudulent transactions involving both material assets and legal entities, as well as cash withdrawals and the issuing of invoices for goods and services that didn’t exist to phantom, ad hoc companies. The businessmen proceeded then to transfer one by one to Bulgaria the ownership of all of the companies involved – which by now were empty shells left with no assets but substantial liabilities to their workers, their suppliers and the tax department – so as to avoid the normal liquidation process and prevent the creditors from recovering anything of value.

This is not a terribly unusual story – not in the country that oversaw the €14 billion collapse of Parmalat – but one whose consequences have been devastating nonetheless. The name in the Italian penal code for the main charge against Semeraro, Borsano and Gallo is suitably gruesome: bancarotta distruttiva, ‘destructive bankruptcy’. Its victims included Aiazzone’s 850 workers, who will never see their back pay or the severance money set aside from their salaries, and tens of thousands of its customers, some of whom were pressed to honour the scheduled payments even after the shops had been padlocked and there was no prospect of their ever receiving the furniture.

Which takes us back to this last first of June, and to the sealed warehouse in Pognano.

Some had already come in the preceding weeks, burglarising at the edges, as it were. But on this day they wanted to finish the job, and do it together. Two hundred people, including migrant families alongside the many locals. Former employees, former customers, all of them from the working class – or the laid-off class – a suitably multicultural, globalised gang, finding strength in numbers and a common purpose: to at least repossess something, pick whatever morsels of meat were left on the carcass of what was once a place of work and business.

I find it such a poignantly, pathetically emblematic story of our late, late capitalism. The manner in which these people organised is a sad echo of the brash proletarian expropriations of another era, their unlikely coming together a parody of unionism. And this wasn’t a riot, either. There was no vandalism except to profit from the salvage, no defiance. There was nothing brazen or consciously symbolic in the action, other than its taking place in the late afternoon, meaning that the sun was barely setting by the time they all left. Fast, efficient, well-organised – if the reports are to be believed – this was like work, if such efficiency were still valued in the workplace, and the workplace hadn’t become a front for the financial dealings going on elsewhere, in lawyers’ offices and banks and accounting firms.

Forget bankruptcies: it is Capital itself that has become destructive, eating away at the capacity of labour to produce value, let alone wealth. And I’m not saying this just because it so happens that since the day of the looting, less than eight weeks ago, the Italian stock exchange has lost almost a quarter of its value: the relationship between the two economies – between the all-too-real one of the furniture warehouse and the symbolic one of the stock exchange floor, itself nowadays an entirely virtual construct – obeys its own warped logic and proceeds by way of randomly scheduled moments of reckoning.

As to what happened in Pognano that day, the penal code has the perfect word for it: it was a spoliation. Consider what would make you do that, how far would you have to be pushed before deciding to join this very orderly mob, and how degrading it would feel to barter those things of little value – the used carpets and curtains, the random, mismatched bits of shoddy furniture you managed to fit in the car, the copper wiring you’re going to have to take down to the scrap metal yard – in exchange for actual work, the thing that you used to do every day and that you thought was honest, and that there might be a future – your future – in it.

No: you worked for this, and now you have to steal it. It is the final indignity visited upon a generation brought up to believe, or rather, know, that you have to be lucky to have a job at all.

About Postmen

Another little book from D. Richardson's 'Introductions to Citizenship' series published in the 1930s by Ginn and Company of Queen Square, London. Another book about work.

I sought this from a British bookseller. It arrived at my house in New Zealand in a little protective envelope of thick cardboard. Postage can't have been more than a couple of pounds – moving things is marginally more expensive than moving information these days. Yet I am old enough to remember the special thin note-paper and the light envelopes one used to send letters by air without incurring a surcharge. Back when you still had to weigh your words carefully.

(But in fact the most expensive words of all were the ones you sent electronically. In the countries where they even still exist, nobody sends telegrams anymore – except when somebody is born, or dies. It's not hard to find ritual and symbolism in our use of communications technologies.)

About Postmen takes us back to those times, when 'the Postman [was] everywhere' (8), and 'every home in Great Britain [had] an address' (9), but still relatively few of them had a phone number, and so the postal service was the nervous system of the nation, and ensuring its smooth operation was one of the key functions of the state. The postman really had to be everywhere, go everywhere. His reach was the reach of society itself.

Across the suspension bridge and up and down 403 stone steps goes the Holyhead postman, when he delivers the post to the South Stack Lighthouse, Anglesey.

Richardson lets us briefly savour some of the implications of this ubiquitous presence when he observes in passing that '[t]he postman’s work sometimes takes him into strange and lonely places' (9). But mostly his focus is in the Taylorist efficiency of the postal service, as measured by time: in the minute that it takes a novice postman to sort 25 letters, or an expert one, as many as 50; or the nine days it takes to be trained on the job; or the rigorous demands of next day delivery, prompting the occasional reminder to please post your letters early.

Timeliness is next to godliness, and the first rule of the postman's rule book – informs us the author – is that he must be punctual.

To help him to be punctual, he is not allowed to call anywhere when he is on duty, except to collect and deliver letters and parcels.
Letters bringing important news might be seriously delayed if the postman were to stop to talk to his friends.
The postman never stops long at your house, does he? (25)

Nowhere is this need for speedy, synchronous and silent operation exemplified more sharply than in the exchange of mail bags at train stations when the train in transit is travelling at full speed.

The apparatus on both the carriage and the line side consists of a rope net for picking up the pouches, and iron arms for dropping them.
The man in the Travelling Post Office and the postman on the line side have to be ready for the exact moment to work the apparatus so that the pouches can be exchanged.
A moment too late and the train will have rushed past; a moment too soon, and the pouches may be lying on the wayside. (73)

The TPO apparatus

But the life of a postman is not measured only in instants and minutes, but in longer timeframes as well. A postman is expected to put in forty-one years of service between employment at nineteen – with exceptions made for former soldiers, sailors, or airmen, so long as they are at least 5 feet and 4 inches in height – and retirement at sixty. During this time he will be required to work for 48 hours a week, including night shifts reserved for sorting the mail and excluding the occasional Sunday shifts, that are accounted and paid for separately. The salary for this work varies from region to region according to the local cost of living and starts for a nineteen year old in London at 34 shillings per week, going up to 54 shillings by the time the postman has reached the age of twenty-five. On the subject of retirement and the virtue of the old age pension, Richardson offers his young readers the following suggestion:

When you are deciding what kind of work to do when you grow up, it is a good idea to enquire if that work will give you a pension when you grow old and have to stop working. (34)

We may read into this advice outdated ideas about job security for life – with the attendant social immobility – and a sense that the present can be seamlessly projected into the future, without disruption, for the five of six decades that separated the book's readers from retirement age, and this at no less than the eve of World War II. As if to emphasise this point, Richardson includes the facsimile of a National Savings Certificate issued in 1935 that, for an investment of 15 shillings, would accrue a further 5 shillings in value by the end of its ten-year term. One pound in ten years, and nothing but a war in between.

It's hard to fault the book in one principal respect, namely that the British postal service was a well-oiled machine that operated very efficiently and one could say – the pride it took in its royal livery notwithstanding – almost invisibly. Richardson makes this point by implication when he asks the reader to spot the postman in this picture.

Or tells us about the Royal Mail's own dedicated tube that shifted the mail underneath the Londoners' feet.

And what's a mail sorting office if not the city's double, a three-dimensional map in which each address has its own pigeon hole, and blocks of pigeonholes together track the movements of a postman in the course of his shift? This highly complex human-made system was perhaps the apex of the centralised state, operating not only as an efficient and cost-effective public service but also as a blueprint of a particular idea of the orderly society. And so the postman – like the dustman, the fireman and the policemen who complete the Introduction to Citizenship series – becomes an agent of this order, a function that is reflected in the decorum expected of him

A man who wants to be a postman must be clean, neat, and well mannered. (15)

as well in the uniform, which in the copy in my possession was just as neatly coloured-in by the original owner.

By contrast with all this I am fascinated by, and an assiduous collector of, instances of postal services failing to deliver, either by sending the mail to the wrong destination or, more pointedly, to the right destination but with immense delay. These stories never fail to make the papers, like the one about the postcard sent by a World War I Bosnian soldier that reached his family 95 years later; or the one about an almost identical case in Norwich: or the one about the Christmas card that took 93 years to cover the distance between Oberlin, Nebraska and Alma, in neighbouring Kansas. It is not so much that all of these messages trapped in time and space undercut the myth of postal efficiency – by and large, they don’t. It’s rather that they are like little tears in the fabric of modernity itself, and on the ideal of rational, timely and transparent communication on which it is founded.

When an Italian inmate at the German labour camp of Stablack writes home to reassure his family that he is okay, and the postcard reaches his widow 66 years later, it creates its own little painful hauntology. ‘I want to tell you about my health, which is excellent’, lies the man, but there is nobody to be comforted at the other end.

Richardson’s postmen are also something of an anachronistic relic, and not just because the profession has evolved, or because the Royal Mail is about to be privatised after holding out for so very long, but chiefly in terms of what they stood for, of the idea of society for which they acted as silent and efficient messengers for as little as 34 shillings a week. Postmen everywhere is the title of the first chapter of this little book, and it contained a promise of which the state itself was guarantor: that every message would reach its destination. But the book’s own message was about work itself: work for deserving men only – clean, neat and well mannered, no less than five-foot-four in height – but work with a dignity nonetheless, and a specificity of rhythms and gestures worthy of description and to form part of an education. That idea too is stuck in its time, like a lost message that can no longer be delivered.

D. Richardson. About Postmen. Ginn and Company: London, 193?

See also About Dustmen.

What Do People Do All Day?

This is Busytown. My, what a nice town!

The year is 1968. The place is a small town in the United States, somewhere indefinite: think Springfield, except running on coal instead of nuclear power. And as the name suggests, in Busytown

That is a powerful statement, if you think about it. Richard Scarry wasn’t afraid to paint contemporary American society in such bold strokes. Nor was he afraid to explain commerce and capitalism to children. Observe:

Farmer Alfalfa grows all kinds of food. He keeps some of it for his family. He sells the rest to Grocer Cat in exchange for money. Grocer Cat will send the food to other people in Busytown.

Today Alfalfa bought a new suit with some of the money he got from Grocer Cat. Stitches, the tailor, makes clothes. Alfalfa bought new his new suit from Stiches.

Then Alfalfa went to Blacksmith Fox’s shop. He had saved enough money to buy a new tractor. The new tractor will make his farm work easier. With it he will be able to grow more food than he could grow before.

He also bought some presents for Mum and his son, Alfred. Alfalfa put the rest of the money in the bank for safekeeping. Then he drove home to his family.

I return to a favourite topic: books for children and what they tell them (and us) about society, and especially about work. I continue to operate on the basis of an anecdotal hunch, not yet supported by a systematic and quantitative survey of the literature: namely, that we don’t do this any more, that there is no longer a market for this kind of book: the comprehensive telling of how the economy operates, along with attempts to place the individual in it. This is not to say, as usual, that the accounts are uncomplicated, nor that they are ideologically transparent or sympathetic. But rather that it may say something that we’ve stopped even trying – something about the less visible, tangible nature of work, but also about our diminished capacity to understand and represent it.

Scarry’s supremely fluent style is based on a panoptic principle: every window is open, every wall or outside surface is potentially see-through. Every building and every structure can be made to open up to the child’s meticulous scrutiny. The drawings are deliciously detailed but not in an overly technical way. The text is more informative than lyrical. And the scope of the work is genuinely impressive: What Do People Do All Day? is 64 pages long. It covers farming, domestic work, several clerical, retail and services professions, road building, the provision of healthcare, sea travel, railroad travel, policing, fire-fighting, the extraction of coal and its use in the production of electricity, the collection, purification and reticulation of water, saw milling and the paper and pulp industry. The occupations represented include mayors, newsagents, street cleaners, private detectives, policemen, watch repairers, shoemakers, hoteliers, newspaper reporters, newspaper editors, book printers, photographers, secretaries, artists, story writers, poets, janitors, photographers, models, violinists, booksellers and saleswomen – and that’s just in the first two pages.

The tone is generally cheerful, but watch out for the occasional weird touch: Scarry’s trademark gridlocks-cum-pileups, undermining the idea of the smooth flow of people and goods on the urban grid, and those wonderfully thing-shaped vehicles of his – the apple cart, the egg van, the baguette car – straining against the opacity of symbols and abstractions.

Nonetheless, Busytown is a place that works. Literally, in that it appears to enjoy full employment, and also in the sense that it has few obvious social problems. The police force, consisting of Sergeant Murphy, Policeman Louie and their chief, is charged with ‘keeping things safe and peaceful’ and ‘protecting the townspeople from harm’, which appears to largely consist of directing traffic, ticketing hoons and apprehending the town’s notorious thief, Gorilla Banana.

Now of course one could opine that it’s in fact diffuse surveillance and self-surveillance that keep such remarkable order. All those open windows and doors, all that neighbourly cheerfulness, have a slightly sinister edge to them, if you’re inclined to look for it, as do the lengths that some of the citizens will go to in order to promote proper behaviour amongst children.

Gender roles could also use some deconstructing, for while it is nice of the author to acknowledge that ‘Mother’s work is never done’, it would be even nicer to give the poor woman a scene in which she’s not wearing an apron. In this section we also find one of the most striking images in the book, that of the mother struggling to keep a brush salesman at bay.

You could recycle this one wholesale to describe Internet shopping. But otherwise these rigidly gendered vignettes do get Scarry in a bit of trouble with the publishers, who have developed something of a habit for doctoring his work to suit today’s more sensitive audiences.

Comparison between the 1963 and 1991 editions of Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever. A father appears in the kitchen in the later edition. From kokogiak’s excellent Flicker set, which includes several more examples.

Another distinctly of-its-time section – and it gets predictably omitted in the abridged editions – is the one in praise of coal digging to ‘make electricity work for us’. In contrast with other children’s authors of his time, like Tison and Taylor, Scarry here is refreshingly unencumbered by environmental concerns, to the point of allowing himself a little sight gag, whereby the fox’s electric barbecue produces a far larger and denser cloud than the smokestacks at the mine or at the power plant.

However I am just as impressed but the extent in which Scarry’s work has in fact not dated very much at all. While the book covers an almost bafflingly broad range of occupations and includes sections on the extraction and transformation of raw materials, there is one notable omission: large-scale manufacturing. And without industry, from a Western perspective the book seems in fact almost presciently current. Some of the jobs the author describes have evolved, very few of them have all but disappeared (you can’t easily bump into a blacksmith, much less one who sells tractors); the texture of our cities has changed and those little shops have given way to larger chain stores; but by and large we still do the things that occupy Scarry’s anthropomorphic menagerie: we fix the sewers and serve the meals and cut down the trees and drive the trucks and cultivate the land and so forth. It’s almost as if Scarry made a conscious effort to draw only the jobs that could not be outsourced overseas, and had thus future-proofed the book for his domestic audience.

Which rather begs my usual question: so why is it that we no longer make these kinds of books? Why is it that we have shifted our focus to how things work or how people used to work as opposed to how people work now? Is it that work is too elusive, that new economy jobs are harder to draw? Can we not deal with the fact that Alfalfa has become a derivatives trader? But work of course is far from invisible. It’s not just that we do so many of the occupations lovingly drawn by Scarry, and in more or less the same way. It’s also that people still work in manufacturing, only mostly elsewhere. We could teach our children about that, just like we teach them that everybody poops. They both seem worthy topics. And it will be fraught, of course, and the politics of it will seem hard to navigate – because they are – but that’s not a valid reason not to do it.

Above all 'what do people do all day?' strikes me as such an excellent and important question. If you’ve ever had to explain to a child what it is that you do, you’ll know it can be a rather sobering exercise, rather like in that series of radio sketches by David Mitchell and Robert Webb where in order to keep your job you’d have to explain it to a panel of old ladies first. How do we occupy our time, and how valuable or fun or enriching is it? To attempt a proper answer that goes back to the first principles means having to reflect on what we mean when we use words like economy and ecology, and to frame these reflections imaginatively, as children’s literature requires, adds further value to that. Simplified, purified, prettified, the economy as depicted by Scarry seems so much more humane, so much less monstruous, yet also perplexing and strange, in that everything is de-naturalised and has to be re-learned, which is to say reimagined.

It would be far too grandiose to call it the beginning of an education in utopian thinking, wouldn’t it?

Richard Scarry. What Do People Do All Day. New York: Random House, 1968.

This benefited from a conversation with and linky suggestions by Jolisa Gracewood, whose blog is, if I may be allowed to say so, practically eponymous.

Go to part one in this series, About Dustmen. Also in the series: The Happy Worker, Work-Slash-Life.

Work-Slash-Life

Late capitalist society is engaged in a long-term historical process of destroying job security, while the virtues of work are ironically and even more insistently being glorified.

(David Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler)

If you can say of an unemployed person that they are between jobs, then you could also say of the North-facing office on the third floor of the commercial property at 50 Manners Street, Wellington, that it is currently between tenants. At times of economic strife, you need upbeat euphemisms. But is the empty space comforted? Is it ever lonely? Does it look forward to becoming again a place of work, or would it rather be left alone, to mind its own lack of business?

A vacant commercial space is a site of anxiety, more so than a vacant dwelling. If it happens to include a shop front, its emptiness becomes a concrete representation of crisis. An empty shop on the corner can bring down the whole neighbourhood. We use phrases like that: to bring down, to depress. Things take on mood.

Image by SomeDriftwood

Sophie Jerram and Mark Amery have been exploiting this mood for some time in their Letting Space series, in which empty commercial premises are repurposed as temporary art spaces. I wrote some time ago about Dugal McKinnon’s Popular Archaeology, but of more interest to today’s proceedings is the Free Shop set up last May by artist Kim Paton at a former nut store in Ghuznee Street. ‘A social exercise in interrogating the false economics of production in capitalism and in particular the murky terrain of wastage,’ is how David Cross summed it up. I recall asking myself at the time if those premises, which had accommodated a picture framer before becoming a nut store, and before that who knows what else, had ever been as crowded as they were on the day of my visit. But then of course at that point it had really become the opposite of itself, an anti-shop, existing solely by virtue of temporary arrangements with regular shops and their suppliers.

And so too The Beneficiary’s Office which has installed itself at 50 Manners Street is the product of careful mediation: with the property owners, with funding bodies, with the welfare provisions that allow Tao Wells to call himself an artist and not charge an admission for it, all on the taxpayers’ dime. Another murky terrain, another interrogation – of the nature of labour, of what are the products of art, and of who should pay for them.

The work itself is an exercise in misdirection. It is called The Beneficiary’s Office, but if you visit the premises the sign on the door says The Wells Group. (No, not that Wells Group.) Inside, you’ll find the artist, the receptionist, a couple of desks. Go on, you can talk to them. Or you can visit the website. It won’t tell you much. The home page is all sidebar, no content. The Media section is where all the meat is, in the form of the responses that the project has garnered. All it took was for Jerram and Amery to send out a press release in which Wells was quoted saying things like

[t]he average carbon footprint of the unemployed person is about half of that of those earning over $100,000 […] Surely, an advanced society would see us work less, and enjoy the benefits of unemployed time. We need to work less, so we consume less.

The mainstream press became aware that this very timid and relatively uncontroversial critique of our economic system received public funding from Creative New Zealand, and that Wells himself was on a benefit pursuant to the artists-on-the-dole scheme. Lane Nichols of The Dominion Post duly proceeded to prepackage the news so that it could be gnawed at by the predictably outraged.

The first to bite was blogger Inventory2 over at Keeping Stock, immediately followed by David Farrar. Regular readers know that I don’t make a habit of linking to that particular forum, but the first post at Kiwiblog on the topic is a remarkable case study of the downright irrepressible anger of the over-entitled and over-employed. Writes Farrar:

It’s unfair that I have to work 60 hour weeks to fund your fucking life style, you bludging wanker…
Not just a greedy selfish bludger, but a stupid one also…
He refuses to work, but is happy to apply for grants so he can preach about why people should bludge like him…
Listen Mr Fuckwit, you are not forced to take a job. So long as you don’t want those of us who do work to pay you a benefit, you do not need to ever work again…
Having a layabout wanker who is illegally claiming the dole, promote dole bludging as a lifestyle choice is not innovative. Would Creative NZ give money for a tax felon to set up an office and advise people not to pay their taxes?…
This makes my blood boil…

As the righteous indignation spread, Work and Income swiftly responded by suspending Wells’ benefit. Except, contrary to Farrar’s claim, the benefit wasn’t ‘illegally claimed’ at all, and the artist managed to have it reinstated in short order. In a second, less expletive-filled post, Farrar shifted his focus and intimated he would put his influence to good use and lobby for the funding of Creative New Zealand to be cut. And while ACT MP Heather Roy, whose unit of measure of public spending are glue ear operations, managed to sound like the moderate, composed voice of reason, the time came for a new issue of The Listener – formerly our weekly magazine of ideas, now the bastion of the sagging, propertied middle class – to hit the stands.

Once again, don’t get used to my linking to such disreputable sources, but the editorial of the October 30 issue of the magazine must be read in its entirety to be fully appreciated or, indeed, believed. Wells’ installation is nothing less than A Blow to the Art, shrieks the heading, going on to rhetorically inquire: ‘When an artist bites the hand that feeds it, does he deserve that public funding?’ The analysis of the merits of the project runs as follows:

To further bedevil our sense of the balance between free speech and public decency, Wells has accepted public money to create an art installation in which he disparages working people, and exhorts them to ditch their jobs, live off the state and become minimalist consumers. Officials deemed it art for the 37-year-old long-term beneficiary to glorify the notion of slacking and bludging off one’s fellow citizens.

The conclusion, in equal parts veiled threat and stern warning, is just a smidgen more oblique than Farrar's avowal to deal with the blaspheming funding agency directly:

The risk for [Creative New Zealand] if it continues to make similar funding choices is that soon taxpayers may not be asking the question of the artworks, but of CNZ itself.

So this is it: a $3,500 grant ($2,000 to Wells, plus expenses), and the ongoing support of a scheme that puts artists on the same footing as the regular unemployed, are enough to buy off your freedom to make statements that are minimally provocative. It should be pointed out that Wells never called for a universal living wage, nor for an actual policy of degrowth. Nor did he at any point advocate or postulate the end of work. He simply set up shop, and used the word ‘beneficiary’ to mean something other than ‘welfare recipient who ought to be bloody grateful’. It’s literally all it took.

In another breach of my usually high standards, Wells’ op-ed in the print edition of The Dominion Post made me buy a physical copy of the paper. By that stage the controversy had died down somewhat, as reactionary and liberal pundits alike became more interested in the industrial dispute surrounding The Hobbit. Now I'll confess that I didn’t think that Wells' piece was particularly incisive, certainly not very radical: it emphasised the consequence of ever-increasing production and consumption on the environment, and the consequences of being forced to take work, any work, on the sense of self of job-seekers. Its conclusion petered out somewhat into a vague series of statements:

What we have been advocating for, is to do those things that we love, not because we are told that we love them, but because we have found real love there, enough to share.
We need to explore the idea, intellectually, of embracing our collective welfare - by taking a break.

But then I closed the paper, and my eyes fell on the main headline.

You can read the full article here.

Twenty-two (more) years of dumping, a simple statement that contains all of our dogged determination to run down the clock on the capacity of our environment to sustain us, in the name of the Economy. The value, the force of Wells' work is to be found in these juxtapositions, just like his rhetorical and artistic masterpiece isn't the opinion piece that he wrote himself, but rather the one he had The Listener write for him: a brilliantly succinct formulation of capitalist realism, with its coolly enraged curtailing of the slightest departure from the script that says that growth equals work equals wealth equals equity – a belief as entrenched on the Right as it is on the Left.

As for Mr Farrar we might wish to ask: what is it that makes him work 60 hour weeks. Is it fear? Greed? Or is he just another inmate, a prisoner of society, bereft of options? (In which case, is work going to set him free?)

He’d likely respond that it is the dissenters, the bludgers, who are forcing him to always be working, so that he can support them as well as himself. But two years ago and then again this year his taxes were cut. Is he working any less? I doubt it somehow, and he doesn't appear capable to even entertain the question without exploding into a fit of rage. But somebody should, it is perhaps the single most important question of our time: how to revolutionise society and the very concept of labour, no longer in the name of equity and justice, but the survival of the species. David Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler wrote this over ten years ago: 'What has been called utopian in the past is now a practical necessity.' To work less, so that we all can work. To discriminate between the work that makes us richer, and the work that makes us poorer. To imagine a post-work society and create the material conditions for its existence.

In the meantime, The Wells Group will close its doors this Tuesday; Tao Wells will go back on the dole while he works on his next project; the North-facing office on the third floor of the commercial building at 50 Manners Street will be emptied again; and on Wednesday, all over the country that has chosen a currency trader as its Prime Minister and where questions cannot be asked, thousands of beneficiaries will wake up wishing for work, (almost) any work, as without a doubt in their place would I.










The Beneficiary's Office closed on November 2nd. It would be remiss of me not to link to the thoughtful reviews of the exhibition by David Cross at EyeContact  and Lew at Kiwipolitico. 

The Aronowitz  and Cutler quotations are from Post Work: The Wages of Cybernation (New York: Routledge, 1998), pages 40 (the epigraph) and 69 (the quotation in the post).

Educating Rosie

Lyn Childs, one of the interviewees in Connie Field’s documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, has explained more succinctly than anybody else I have come across the origins of Rosie.

When we first got into the war, the country wasn’t prepared. They needed all the heads they could get, and they drafted them all. And as the manpower in the country was getting pulled into the service, all of the industries were wide open. So they decided, ‘Well, we better let some of those blacks come in.’ Then after the source of men dried up, they began to let women come in. It wasn’t a struggle to do it, it was just plain necessity. The doors were opened.

That is how in 1943 Ms Childs, an African-American woman, found employment as a welder in the San Francisco shipyard. As she goes on to explain

[w]e’d never had the opportunity to do that kind of work. Do you think that if you did domestic work all of your life, where you’d cleaned somebody’s toilets and did all the cooking for some lazy character who were sitting on top, and you finally get a chance where you can get a dignified job, you wouldn’t fly through the door?

However this is not the picture of the vast new contingent of female factory workers that was being presented through the media at the time. First of all, the women on the posters and in the newsreels – and who became collectively known as Rosie the Riveter from one of the songs that celebrated them – were unfailingly white. Secondly, and no less importantly, they hailed from the middle class. If they already had jobs at all, they would be as floor managers in a fashion store, not as waitresses or chambermaids, but mostly they were housewives or brides to be, first-time workers whom the propaganda reels urged to join the ‘invisible army’ as a temporary sacrifice, just like going to war was a sacrifice for the soldiers; not to get a better, more dignified job, much less gain long-term financial independence. Yet long before the image on the J. Howard Miller poster above and on the Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post were reclaimed by the women’s movement, many of them had developed a sense of themselves as belonging to a new generation of women: skilled workers who – in the words of another of Field’s informants, Lola Weixel – could contribute after the conflict to the reconstruction of the cities, ‘do all the good and beautiful things for America, because Fascism was destroyed’.

But America had different ideas, and just as quickly and meticulously as the image of virtuous Rosie was constructed, it was deconstructed. Suddenly the women in overalls depicted in the reels started being asked by the man off screen if they had plans to continue working after the war. ‘I should say not. When my husband comes back, I shall be busy at home,’ replied one. ‘My job belongs to some soldier. When he comes back, he can have it,’ said another. Women belonged in the home, and jobs didn’t belong to women. Suddenly too the children for whom the work recruitment trailers had promised largely non-existent childcare provisions became victims of neglect due to the selfish career pursuits of their mothers, and the very fabric of modern marriage and society had come under threat. It’s all rather neatly condensed in the following 100-second reel segment, which culminates in the staggering musings of Marynia F. Farnham, MD.





A formidable text to unpack, I think you’ll agree. But it’s not my intention to point and laugh at the crude propaganda, rather to argue that things in fact haven’t progressed much further. There is much still that is crude about contemporary ideas regarding women in the workplace, and the contradictions are just as glaring. Writes Nina Power:

When people talk about the 'feminization of labor', then, their discourse is often double-edged. The phrase is at once descriptive (work is generally more precarious and communication-based, as women's jobs tended to be in the past) and an expression of resentment ('women have stolen proper men's jobs! It's their fault - somehow - that we don't have any proper industry anymore!').

Nowhere is this tension, this simultaneous pull in two opposite directions more evident than in the figure of the working mother. While the message in the United States in the immediate post-War period was that such a creature could not by rights exist




Western societies have since become much more comfortable with extracting from women both the labour and the children, and without having to provide very much at all by way of provisions or compensation. We simply ask that they be both things at once – the feminine nuclear wife and the hard(nosed) worker, the tender mother and the ambitious career-seeker. Of course there is no inherent contradiction between any of those terms: what constitutes anti-progress is that this modern-day Rosie - just like her predecessor - is presented not as a possibility open to women but rather as a demand put on women.

‘juggling kids and career while standing on her head’

Enter SuperMom, the action figure. This brilliant creation from the team at Happy Worker ‘magically creates extra hours each day juggling kids, schedules, chores and career’. Her ‘eight accessories of mommy might’ include an interchangeable calm or frazzled head, a ‘super-long to do list’ and naturally a baby, whose mood can also be changed between ‘little angel’ or ‘mini monster’. Available in three different ethnicities (‘while each cultural version has unique mom and baby paint detailing, all share the same packaging with Caucasian pictures’), SuperMom

[navigates] jungles of toys and mountains of kiddie stuff, [...] prepares tasty-yet-healthy snacks, tames dust bunnies and banishes stubborn stains. With an invisible third arm and a never ending pursuit of work / life balance she can help with a school project and answer an all-important business call while wrist deep in dirty diapers.

Oh, and by the way: she cannot sit down, which, as the makers quite appropriately point out, is actually a feature.

What’s happening here? Is this a humorous send-up, or is it in fact integral to the indoctrination of the modern woman? If the material that accompanies SuperMom doesn’t read like a piece of propaganda, if you think it’s much too light-hearted, firstly I’d respond that so was Rosie’s song, and so were many of the reels in which she starred, but I’d also suggest that what might have occurred is simply a rhetorical shift in the kinds of texts that we invest with constructing our social realities. We no longer model our behaviour based on the instructional videos issued by government agencies, by and large; but maybe we take our cues (also) from comic strips, action figures, glossy magazines, always feeling that we are subjects capable of evaluating autonomously the truth value of their statements, which is likely how the original audiences of those World War II newsreels felt about themselves. But ironic distancing is not the same as safeguarding one’s autonomous judgment, as standing outside of a text – if there was even such a place. So the problem remains of how to get past the feeling of self-satisfaction that comes from getting the joke; how to substitute the inexorable logic, the perfect interplay of signs and meanings (‘SuperMom’s mood is usually determined by her children’s’) with a gesture of defiance, or the call for some sort of action, as opposed to just another piece of analysis, another blog post for like-minded people to nod at.

I don’t know how to do that. Well, obviously! I tend – perhaps because of my topic of interest – to search my memory and the past for political projects, instead of looking forward to them, and I tell myself that there is a place for that kind of work. But at the same time I feel a growing sense of impatience, when I read, say, about SuperMom or watch the new ad for the Sienna SE. Impatience at myself, for wanting to deconstruct these texts, for almost physically needing to do it, and impatience at them, for being so perfectly maddeningly clever and wrong. And I seek solace in gestures, writings or images capable of pushing back. Today, it’s in the extraordinary clarity and strength of the women interviewed by Connie Field, so glorious even in defeat; in the energy of Nina Power’s book; and in the frescoes of the chapel of San Precario, a place where to pause and contemplate what work has become, what we have allowed it to become. And there I find a rather different image of the working mother.



Here too we find that tension, that literal pull in two opposite directions, but this time without without the illusion that those obligations can in fact be successfully mediated, or that the choice – your baby and your job – is a meaningful one if it’s not accompanied by profound changes in the way we do things, in work itself. And that’s a good way to begin to look forward: by starting again to formulate demands.



Connie Field's The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (which is also where the YouTube segment comes from) is now available on DVD through the link on the title - whereas Amazon will tell you it's out of print.

Nina Power. One Dimensional Woman. Winchester: 0 Books, 2009. The book was reviewed by Dougal here.

This just came to hand: Visualising the 100-hour week of the 1947 housewife, by the redoubtable Mr Ptak.

(And before somebody points it out, I'm aware that technically the J. Howard Miller poster at the top of the post is not of Rosie.)