(Please press play on the Youtube video and then read this simultaneously. Go on. It’ll be a laugh.)
I’m going back into work tonight.
Tonight, and every night until Christmas Eve, as I agreed when I signed my contract. A contact I now know not to be worth the paper it was printed on. The pay dispute incurred after a soon to be privatised Royal Mail hired the cheapest, nastiest, most incompetent recruitment agency it could, has now become a national news scandal. For the privilege of working for minimum wage and being treated like utter scum by pinched-faced hirelings with additional duties, the Christmas Casuals and I are not going to be paid – perhaps ever.
But I am still going back into work tonight.
I am 41 years old. I’ve worked all my life until the last two years, during which I’ve been pretty much continuously unemployed after being made redundant, along with some brilliantly talented colleagues. There’s been the odd freelance gig, but it doesn’t pay the bills. All I want to do is work. And that is what I intend to do, cycling 10 miles across town in foul weather in order to do so.
Not for Royal Mail, not for David Cameron’s bland, branded, PowerPoint-presented vision, not for any boss. Just for me, and the admittedly dimming sense of pride I feel in doing a day’s work; in feeling my back ache after some manual labour; and, yes, probably like old Boxer the horse, in feeling halfway alive simply by doing so.
And that is why I’m going back into work tonight.
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