Monthly Archives: November 2010

Research Methods

Low pay no pay work

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One in five people in the UK live below the government’s poverty line. Many of these will be in temporary work, dependent on employment agencies,trapped in a cycle of low pay- now pay work.

The latest qualitative research from the JRF based on 60 semi structured interviews provides an insight into what life is like trapped in this cycle and challenges the stereotypical notion that the ‘poor’ are a bunch of welfare scroungers.

The research paints a bleak picture of people lving in two deprived areas in the North East of the UK who want to work, but, through lack of opportunity, can’t find permanent employment. The study reminds us that this is structural –

To quote from the study

Teesside has undergone dramatic restructuring and has lost much of the skilled work in steel, chemicals and heavy engineering upon which the local economy had, until relatively recently, been based. In line with national trends, service-sector employment was widespread
amongst the sample, but was not the only sort. Interviewees got jobs as care assistants, as cleaners, in call centres, as shop assistants, in food processing and textile factories, serving in bars and fast food restaurants, and as scaffolders, drivers and construction workers.

Three things united these jobs: they were low-skilled, low-paid and insecure. Employers often seemed to operate ‘flexibly’ in terms of the hours of work offered or required and the pay given. There was limited support for workers in respect of sickness and holiday leave or training. Interviewees described: not being paid for extra work done; being required to do extra hours at very short notice; having to work ‘unsocial hours’ and being denied time off for pressing family reasons; being required to undertake unreasonable tasks;being sacked for taking a day’s sick leave, and so on.

Food processing factories in particular were reported as offering easy-to-get but hard and demeaning work:

The management, they just don’t care about the staff. They treat you like robots … If you went over and said ‘I’ve cut my finger off’, they’d just say ‘make sure you don’t get any blood on the food’. That’s what they were like. (Alfie, 46)

To my mind this study is relavant to the A level syllabus because… it demonstrates the relative powerlessness of the ‘unskilled manual’ class compared to the Capitalist class who demand flexibility

It is a good illusttration of how the causes of localised poverty are historical and structural – industry moves out the in 1980s – creating thousands of unemployed people in its wake, then new industries move in – being able to demand more flexible working hours,and lower wages.

Finally, it illustrates graphically the declining power of the atomised, fragmented working class in relation to their employees. 

 The research was carried out in two very deprived neighbourhoods of Middlesbrough, in Teesside, an area that has experienced widespread deindustrialisation and socio-economic change and based on semistructured interviews with ten local employers; semistructured interviews with 13 agencies that supported people into jobs; and qualitative interviews with 60 local residents (aged 30 to 60).

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Chevron thinks we’re stupid

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You may have seen some of the new Chevron Ads – Here’s an example –

This advert and all of those in Chevron’s new ‘we care’ ad campaing should win an award – for the greatest distance between ad and underyling reality of all time.

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To counter such blatent lies, the yes men are running an ‘adbust’ campaign – or you can vote for your favourite alternative advert at this web site.

However, I would advise that you just stick to sitting on your back side doing nothing, and under no circumstances should you go and buy spray paints using cash from a non-local store and then, in teams of at least three to allow for adequate look outs, go and vandalise any of Chevron’s new ads if you see them around town -that would be illegal!

It is imperative that you allow this Corporation to use its money to lie to the general public and keep them ignorant.

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Somali Pirates and £7 billion banker bonuses

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Breaking news – that retired middle class couple who were stupid enough to go sailing in pirate territory last year have been released – not exactly sure how much was paid to release them – something in the region of half a million dollars I think – sounds about right for a stupid tax.

Small change compared to the 7 billion in bonuses the UK’s banks are set to announce later today, some of which would have been bailed out by the British tax payer last year.

So, in the grand scheme of things, who is more immoral – somali pirates jacking the ships of the rich or UK bankers siphoning off the wealth of the general public?

What they both have in common is that both the Pirates or Bankers use their positions of power to extort what they can from their victims. Personally I think the banking class are worse – at least with the pirates, they are honest, they kind of let you know that they don’t really care about your well being – and that they’re just lining their own pockets – while that’s also the bottom line of the banks – they lie to us by pretending that they’re working with us and for us; I even think that some junior bankers might actually believe that bullshit themselves.

Controlling Crime

Sociology on TV – Coppers – aired November 2010

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Danny Mack - a walking warning about the consequences of long term heroine use

The first episode of this series provides a very informative insight into the lives of custody officers- in Medway, with the star criminal character, ‘Danny Mack’, coming from my home town of Strood!

The episode demonstrates how half a dozen individuals locked up for mainly drug and public order offences have been in and out of police custody since they were ten – you get to see the photographic records of some of them over the last decade. Many of the offenders actually have a good relationshp with the police officers – and being in and out of custody seams to be part and parcel of their yearly routine. It would appear that for these repeat offenders being in police custody is just all too easy – they appear pretty well looked after and engage in lively, tit-for tat banter with their guardians while in temporary captivity. 

At the end of the day the video demonstrates how the criminal justice system is extremely ineffective in deterring people from crime – as one of the inmates says at one point when asked whether he might ever turn away from crime ‘ What’s to stop me, ‘I mean, it’s hardly scary in there is it!’

The zenith moment – Danny Mack’s poem about prison officers – Some may see this work as providing an empassioned, empathetic account of the lived-experience of being subjected to the whims of petit- bureacratic personalities while incarcerated. However, an alternative reading may be that it’s just shit.

‘Everytime I see you cunts I get the fuckin’ pox,
I bet you send your kids to school, the fuckin’ sweat box.’
etc…

Anyway, listen and enjoy…and empathise with me… this is one of the reasons why I am so glad I moved away from Medway….

Thanks to bessoyo30, whoever that is, from youtube, I bet the original version won’t be up there for much longer (C4 will probably remove it due to copy).

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The Iraq War – Legal or Illegal??

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ShockandAweIraqWar

afp_us_iraq_protest_washington_195_eng_15sep07It’s not just lefty protestors that think the war in Iraq was illegal – Kofi Annan, the then Sectretary General of the United Nations, believed the US Invasion of Iraq in 2003 to be illegal, and this  position is also shared by the present deputy prime minister – Nick Clegg

In order to understand how a war can be legal or not  you have to know something about the Charter of the United Nations – which is a legally binding agreement that came into being following World War II, and now signed by nearly 200 Nations. The gernal idea behind the Charter was to increse international co-operation and avoid another World War. To this end, one of the things the UN Charter specifies is when countries can go to war legitimately – either when invaded by another country, or when the UN sanctions the use of force. Below is an execellent video that outlines what the United Nations Charter is, the conditions under which states are allowed to go to war  – and how the United States breached these conditions when it went to war in Iraq – making this an illegal war, and a supurb example of State Crime.

War and conflict

The International State Crime Initiative

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This is a good wb site for A2 students studying state crime as part of the A2 crime and deviance course

The International State Crime Initiative is an excellent resource for basic information about state crime – As well as providing a definition of ‘state crime’, the web site explains what some of the different types of state crime are – such as genocide and corruption and outlines some case studies of state crimes – including the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Toxic waste dumping in the Ivory Coast and Civil War in Sierra Leonne – all are very clear and accessible.

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Thinking Allowed – Supermax

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Supermax prisons are on the increase the United States – these are prisons where prisoners are kept in extreme solitary confinement – sometimes for years at a time. In this podcast Criminologist Sharon Shalev provides some details some of the findings from her latest book – which draws on her access to two supermax prisons and is based on in-depth interviews with prison officials, prisoners and others.

Shalev notes that there are about 30 000 prisoners in solitary confinement in the US and 44 states have supermax prisons.

The increase in supermax is indicative of the ‘popular punitiveness’ identifitied by Criminologists such as Robert Reiner and David Garland – Shalev acknowledges that the increase was correlated with the rise of conservative (neo-liberal) power in the US in 1990s. See also my previous blog entry that summarises Richard Wilkinson’s work on how more unequal countries (like America) get more punitive.

According to Shalev, what is also interesting is how we increasingly don’t care about the negative long term effects on the mental health of these prisoners. Supermax signifies that the idea of prison is moving towards pure retribution rather than punishment. Could this also be a consequence of 30 years of neo-liberalism? – That there has been a cultural shift to a harsher ‘I don’t care’ attitude towards other people? Sociologists such as Reiner would agree with this – which is an extension of  Marxist (David Gordon) ‘dog eat dog’ theory.

I quite fancy reading her books btw – if someone buys it me for Christmas it’d be much appreciated, ta.

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Sociology on TV – Fashion’s dirty secrets

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dispatchesThe latest episode of dispatches demonstrates how garments destined for New Look and Peacocks are being made in sweat shop conditions in Leceister.

The company making these garments (Sammi Leisure Wear) pays workers less than the minmimum wage – £2.50 to £3.00 and hour and the workers work in aweful conditions – no windows, very cramped, blocked fire exits, and no safety guards on sewing/ cutting machines. 

New_Look
Profiting from sweatshop labour in the UK

The aweful pay and conditins means that the production of theses garments is in breach of New Look’s ethical code of practise. Of course New Look can claim they do not know about the conditions in the factory – and they probably don’t – (they are now investigating conditions themselves) – New Look places an order with a subcontractor for a certain price and the subcontractor delivers – without informing New Look about the immoral and illeagal practises that go on in the factory. To be fair to New Look – Sammi Leisure Wear was actually sewing fake labels into the garments saying they had come from abroad.

It is also interesting to note how subcontracting is used by a company to deny responsibility for the sweatshop – the subcontracting allows them to claim that they do not know it was going on – my arguement is that they must – all they have to do is basic maths to work out that someone, somewhere is getting exploited in order for them to make such profit margins.

Also think about how the law is applied differently here –buying and selling stolen goods is an offence – but as far as I know buying something that was produced by a company that exploits it workforce by making them work in sweatshop conditions and breaches health and safety law isn’t illegal. Perhaps New Look should spend more money in investigating working conditions in its factories and less money promoting its fake ethical image.

The web site of the programe is worth a look – it ends on the following note –

So where does the buck for this level of exploitation stop? Campaigning groups say the retailers need to take responsibility and place the factories under closer scrutiny. Others say the government needs to step in and regulate the fashion industry. But what about our responsibilities as consumers? Instead of buying blindly perhaps we should stop to ask more questions about where and how these clothes are made. After all, they’re not being stitched thousands of miles away, but right here on our doorstep by people who are being exploited because of our insatiable appetite for dirt cheap fashion.