I will never work, never. I will skive, skive and skive again to save the lifestyle I love. Rab C Nesbitt: Work s1e1, BBC 1990
I’m reduced to working – the ultimate perversion. Rab C Nesbitt: Fast s6e1, Happy Burger boss to tune of Follow Follow
I pity that poor swine, Benny. Nothing to look forward to but sex, drink, money and freedom. He’s never going to know the wholesome pleasure of scraping shite off a plate for £2.50 an hour. Rab C Nesbitt s8e1: Heat, Rab
I’d give anything to be back out there with the rest of the human race slaving away at something I hate for not very much money. Rab C Nesbitt: Muse s9e5, BBC 2010
People think that scum hate work. We don’t you know. We don’t. It’s jobs we hate. Rab C Nesbitt s10e2: Fugue s10e2, Rab’s commentary
The only people who are working round here are drug dealers and you. Rab C Nesbitt s10e4: Fight, Rab to Vicar
It’s a 25/7 job these days avoiding work. Rab C Nesbitt s10e7: John, Rab to John Sergeant
I grew up in the Thirties with our unemployed father. He did not riot, he got on his bike and looked for work. Norman Tebbit, speech Conservative Party Conference 15th October 1981
Hello, I’m Fred Dibnah and I’m a steeplejack. That’s an example of how I earn my living, you know. And we’ve had so many letters saying, How do you put the ladders up? And how do you actually knock the chimney down? Fred Dibnah, The Ups and Downs of Chimneys, BBC 1994
It’s almost like chopping a tree down. ibid.
It’s not so pleasant on a Monday morning when it’s cold, and the wind’s blowing, and you look up and think, Oh God. The Fred Dibhah Story: Beginnings e1, BBC 1978
Really, you’re dicing with death ... I’ve never fell off a big chimney – you only fall off one of them once, like. One day, I fell off a pair of steps in my little girl’s bedroom, and landed on a drilling machine and knocked meself unconscious. ibid.
Steeplejacking is a bit of a spasmodic job. So you can play with your steam-engine instead. It’s a bit like being very rich. You can just have a day off when you like. ibid.
I came home and I’m having my tea in the kitchen and it came on the television that here’s one that went wrong. I knew it somehow ... Just in time to see this factory chimney straight through the middle of the mill, you know. Just been kitted out for a three-shift system. ibid.
Fred Dibnah’s real heroes were the ordinary workers and labourers of the people like him who got their hands dirty. From the labourers and stone masons who built great medieval castles and cathedrals to twentieth century coal miners, mill workers and steel workers. He will always be remembered for the respect he had for all those people who made their living for making things. Wherever Fred went it was always the workers he related to. Fred Dibnah’s World of Steam, Steel and Stone: A Good Day’s Work, BBC 2006
In introducing workers’ control we knew it would take some time before it spread to the whole of Russia, but we wanted to show that we recognised only one road – changes from below. We wanted the workers themselves to draw up from below the new principles of economic conditions. Vladimir Lenin, 1918 address to All-Russian Congress of Soviets
I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back. Leo Tolstoy
It’s a fight we knew all too well in Flint, Michigan. For it was here that my uncle and his fellow workers first brought down the mighty corporate interest that dominated their lives. It was the day before New Year’s Eve 1936 and hundreds of men and women took over the GM factories in Flint and occupied them for forty-four days. They were the first union that beat an industrial corporation, and their actions eventually resulted in the creation of a middle class. Michael Moore, Capitalism: A Love Story, 2009
One thing I learned as a journalist is that there is at least one disgruntled person in every workplace in America – and at least double that number with a conscience. Hard as they try, they simply can’t turn their heads away from an injustice when they see one taking place. Michael Moore, Here Comes Trouble
6,000 SACKED PRINT WORKERS: SOGAT AUEW HGA NUJ UNITED WE WILL WIN. Wapping Union protest banner
In devilish dreams the horror show of deep-frozen Saturday nights fronting the gates of Hades at Murdoch’s Wapping. Snorting leviathan lorries smashing down the hill at the barbed wire and the purple-faced protesters, rage-red front covers of The Sun flapping like pirate flags in the windscreens. Bobby-boys in blue finger tenderly their bully-sticks. esias
In Chicago a group of factory workers watched like the rest of us as taxpayers bailed out the financial industry. Now these laid-off workers are demanding Bank of America spend some of its bail-out money on them. CNN News, workers’ sit-in of factory
Now, you stop work altogether. This is much nicer and anyone can do it. In fact, the lower-class bastards can no more stop going on strike now than a laboratory rat with an electrode on its brain can stop jumping on a switch to give itself an orgasm. Philip Larkin, letter to friend Kingsley Amis
I want to see them starving
The so-called working class
Their wages yearly halving
Their women stewing grass. Philip Larkin, A Dreary Little Hymn
Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful – great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous. Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica
Our work got us the things our hearts desired. Kirsty Young, The British at Work: Them and Us 1964-1980, BBC 2011
Are You Being Served: a bit of slap-stick silliness. A bit of saucy innuendo. And in 1975 a spasm of angry workplace strikes. ibid.
Twenty-two-year-old Penny Hale was also working in something of a man’s world. The only woman technician on a team building a great British techno dream: Concorde. ibid.
We were still in an era of full employment where government thought its main job was to make sure we all had a job. ibid.
The late ’60s would be remembered for many things. But increased productivity was not one of them. ibid.
Meet the British boss class: it was widely accepted that British management in the late sixties and early seventies was not the natural home of fresh dynamic thinking. ibid.
The Right to Work: Today it seems a rather quaint notion wrapped in the misty idealism of working-class unity. ibid.
In the 1970s it was all about the workplace: there were Acts on Health & Safety, Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination. It was nothing less than a workplace revolution. These Acts were of course enthusiastically fought for by many working women, and more often than not by the Unions. ibid.
Risk-taking was what it was all about in the 1980s. Kirsty Young, The British at Work: To Have and Have Not 1980-1995
The experience of work for millions during the 1980s was being out of work. ibid.
Mrs Thatcher’s administration simply didn’t think it was the job of the state to keep us all in work ... This new Tory administration made it clear it was time to sink or swim. ibid.
Never had so many had so few work prospects. ibid.
In the 1980s [Sun] it was dramatically overhauled at the East London headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s News International. ibid.
With their work-hard play-hard ethos, and their Bollinger and bonuses, City boys and girls are rather easy to resent and ridicule. But they aren’t just some ’80s anachronism. They really were at the forefront of a revolution in the workplace – they encouraged so many of us to be ceaseless workaholics who were dedicated to and defined by our work. ibid.
You didn’t have to read the books to be touched by their inspirational message. Our conference rooms and open-plan offices were now echoing to the sound of management speak. Kirsty Young, The British at Work: The Age of Uncertainty 1995 – Now
1995 ... When Cedric Brown, the Chief Executive of British Gas, was paid £475,000, an increase of 75%, there were howls of outrage. ibid.
Welcome to the Call Centre. ibid.