The Working World: A Life Centred Around Earning for the Powerful

I once made the mistake of working for a big business. I think everybody makes that mistake at least once in their life; be it as a lowly retail worker, or a managing director. Though, when I reflect on it, I realise that I learnt an extraordinary thing. Working in business cemented my beliefs about power structures in society. I’ve read a lot of books imploring me to reassess my place in society, and they had a great effect on me. Though, when I think back to my work in a business, those ideas have never seemed so translatable to the practical world.

My place in the business world was that of a lowly retail worker. Many will argue that I have no knowledge of the way that business works or the London professional culture. I argue that retail work gives one unique perspective over not only business and capitalist construction, but also humanity. When I was a retail worker, I was the bottom rung of the social ladder. When you’re on minimum wage the powerful don’t care about your experience in their business, because you’re entirely powerless. If you ever want to understand how much power corrupts people, interview a retail worker. Sadly, every retail worker will have a story. Yet, the base of a business rests entirely upon the front line worker. If every minimum wage retail employee stopped selling warranty and refused to work, then the business that they represent would fail within a few months. Thus, there is a question of how powerless we are in numbers.

I remember that I used to wake up when the sun woke up, I rushed down some breakfast, forced wash etc. Then I would make the journey to work, be briefed, and led to my position for the day (you will never meet a more multi-talented person than the retail worker, we could work in several positions in the store). I was given targets to reach for the week in how much warranty I sold and how many store cards I sold to customers, who I might add, were only there to purchase products. If I didn’t reach these targets then I was berated by the chain and whip of the management team who offered nothing practical apart from the look of a person who has been in the retail world for far too long. The problem of this was that I would sometimes get upwards of £100 in terms of insurance, based on my lowly minimum wage, I wouldn’t earn that in a week. Indeed, the berating sessions easily forgot this, it was something to be expected.

It is no secret that minimum wage workers are poorly treated in society. I implore the reader to practice kindness and understanding of the retail worker’s position when next in contact. Perhaps what is certainly most clear is the importance of the front line worker. For without them, there wouldn’t be directing and managing positions alike. Without the hard working retail slave what would there be left to manage? Entirely nothing. When I worked on the front line at Christmas, I saw the evils of capitalism, the greed that it encourages and develops in people. The retail worker should be the most highly regarded person in the working world; their selfless attitudes in the face of sheer chaos, brutes, and injustice is to be commended. One thing that stuck with me the most was that I was consistently earning money for the owners, my life was centred around earning other people money. The means of my suffering was found in the ends of gaining wealth for the wealthy. Now ask yourself, isn’t yours too?

You wake up, you work as a slave throughout the daylight only to end long after the sun sleeps. You come home to desolation and joylessness, and you’ll have to do it all again tomorrow. It’s an endless cycle. Marriages break up because people spend so much of their lives earning other people money and taking a small portion of it for themselves. Life is surely more than this, yet the powerful shepherd people into these positions like sheep. There are arguments against what I propose; but perhaps we as people should aim a little bit higher than living around serving the wants of the powerful. My solution is simple; we understand our unity, we communicate, we work together and understand our worth. We raise the minimum wage cap and recognise that front line workers aren’t always there through choice. We recognise that we’re victims of a system developed to aid the powerful and weaken the powerless. There’s a reason the wealth gap has grown.

The Education of Compliance: Authority vs Creativity

Authority is present in every fabric of our existence. It is the driving force of human action and the hypocrite of the conceptual world. Perhaps what one gains most from authority is the theft of the soul, the injustice of the justice system, and the disease of obedience. For, as long as societies have been created and developed through accident after accident, authority too has aided in keeping the powerful powerful, and the powerless powerless. If like me, you understand human beings to be born a ‘tabula rasa’; then the problem of authority is a deep one indeed. For, if when one is born a blank slate, then they must be painted on. If authority is the defining force of the paint brush of socialisation, then of course, obedient is what the young blank slate shall be.

I was trying to remember my existence just the other day. I remembered that I had a key for creativity. I could write fantastic stories, I’d paint you a picture, draw you a gorefest of intestines and spleens falling from open wounds of a stomach. Though unconventional, my art, my creativity, was always singled out as incorrect by the government agent that called herself ‘teacher’. When set homework at the age of ten to write a story about ‘Jason and the Argonauts’, my story was picked on for being too off the point, too far from the context. Though, it was the education system that was too far from the context. Really, my story was an outlet for my creative urges, since for once, I was excited to write a story instead of being landed the usual mathematics or spelling homework. My art would be criticised because I wasn’t sticking leaves onto the paper in the right way, my drawings were ‘grotesque’ and marred outside of the norm. I wasn’t outside of the norm any more than anyone else was. My drawings were an outlet for me to release my creative urges which were repressed in a system that seemed to take value in telling me what was right or wrong.

Though, it was only their take on right and wrong. If I wanted to, I could spell incorrectly and write sentences that made no sense. You would find it annoying because it doesn’t fit with how you were taught to read and write the English language. Though, you would still recognise it as a communicative form. In reality, it would be no more incorrect outside of the context of our human construction of language than our current one. For heavens sake, different societies don’t conform to our language constructs, they formulate sentences in different ways… Many don’t use the same alphabet. Closer to home, different social groups use different variations of the English language. A communicative form only finds its use inside of the context of the society that it is relevant to. Outside of that context, it is no righter than if I made one up. So how right is it? This dominant language form that one is taught isn’t necessarily the most right form of language, it is rather the most valued by powerful groups. As a result, it carries connotations of dominance in social context on many different levels, from professional to casual acquaintance. In essence, authority attempts to distil a sense of ‘correct’ forms of action from the most basic forms of communication and behaviour towards the most sophisticated.

Authority never leaves us. What I mentioned above was simply primary school. Though, everywhere in the education system one will find the drill sergeant of the assembly hall barking at the child that dared to act as a human being. I wish that I was a rebel in secondary school, I wish that I had taken more pot shots and questioned the authority system to a greater extent than I did. I think if I went back now, I probably would. Yet, back then authority was so potent, obedience was key to survival. By this point my creative impulses were being further crushed by the art teacher that thought she knew what art was. Music lessons were given once a week. We were physically educated in a bizarre manner, and technology consisted of what a ‘good’ box was. There was so much maths and science, subjects that I never appreciated; I wasn’t the Anti-Christ, I just didn’t understand how there was no room for creativity in a set of subjects that billed themselves in the black and white areas of right and wrong. There were so many English lessons that never taught one how to write a creative poem or story, but rather, took joy in having one regurgitate knowledge over and over again. That’s what the authoritative education system teaches you; how to regurgitate. Ultimately, in that action of regurgitation, the individual learns compliance and conformity. Education seemingly pushes one away from that originality that they are prone to and towards compliance.

Thus, through the socialisation of the education system one is taught compliance at the most intense of levels; that of thought. This translates today more than ever, the internet has made regurgitating each other’s thoughts easier and more prominent which ultimately reinforces the practice. Indeed, we must think for ourselves, because in learning regurgitation, we are left as drones. We must educate the educated out of compliance and back towards originality, or we must educate our children to embrace their creativity further. I think that the latter would be more effective. For, it is in this creativity that the proletariat will break free from simply being the herd. We must teach ourselves to never be the herd.