Interview: Sacha Hilhorst

Cover image credit: Nathaniel White.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Could you describe your doctoral research?  

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

My project is a political ethnography of Mansfield and Corby, two post-industrial towns in the East Midlands. I spent lots of time in community spaces, and in people’s homes when they invited me. Joining in in conversations that were organically happening or interviewing people about their lives and their politics to try and understand whether there’s a crisis of legitimacy in these places that have been sort of shaken by industrialisation.  

There’s a sense from some of the big quantitative survey-based studies that we have that there might be. That people are suspicious of politics. That they’re cynical about our political system. But to understand why, you have to get at these questions’ meaning and motivation, you have to get much closer to people, spend time with them.  

I argue that there is a crisis of legitimacy, because so many of the people that I spent my time with felt that our political system was fundamentally corrupt.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What is (political) legitimacy?

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

Sociology offers a classic answer from Max Weber, who described it as being about the belief that those in power have a right to rule. So, what are the beliefs that make people consent to be governed? And that could be a faith in the divine right of kings, or it could be an acceptance that the Prime Minister was duly elected and therefore has a right to be in charge. And you can have rule without legitimacy — through sheer force and violence or by catering to powerful interests, to people’s personal interests, and people could be sort of acquiescent out of habit. Or because they don’t believe they are able to change the system anyway. But Weber argues that systems where there is no more legitimacy or where that legitimacy has eroded become unstable. For me, I like to push it a bit. Because Weber’s definition is very cognitive, whereas doing this ethnographic work, a lot of it was very embodied. I’m thinking of conversations I had with people where they would talk about politics. And they would pretend to vomit; they would mime a gag. And so that’s not necessarily someone putting it into words to say, “I think the political system is illegitimate for reasons A, B, and C.” But it’s still this visceral rejection of the political system.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

It relates, maybe, to a way of conceiving of politics not as these abstract ideals that people hold and then apply. But as a sort of set of assumptions — sometimes contradictory — or not even necessarily fleshed out as assumptions. Or like ideas and content about the world.

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

Or even dispositions. Even further from something that happens in their head.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

The next question — and we’re still on definitions — is what is deindustrialisation or post-industrialisation. How should we understand it?

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

I look at share of industrial employment, which in this country peaked a long time ago, in the fifties. And manufacturing employment not too long after. But the places that I studied were relatively immune from it for a long time. As Mansfield is on the North Nottinghamshire Coalfield, which is immensely rich. So, for a long time, people still felt that they had jobs for life. And there was lots of manufacturing locally, mostly in textiles. Corby loses its steelworks in 1980. And that is obviously affecting how people work and where they work. You see a change in my field sites from people working in the steelworks or in the textile factories and a shift to them working in either care homes or in distribution centres, and that has affected how much they earn. Most of the miners in and around Mansfield that I spoke to said that when they transitioned away from mining, they lost about half their income. So, I remember an interview with a guy who had been a miner. And then he went to work in the warehouse for Boots he lost more than half his income. And alongside that, those forms of industrial and manufacturing employment came with all these ideas about what work looks like. These ideas about the nobility of work, and these ideas about what it means to be a good person. And with the disappearings of industry, that also takes a knock, and becomes unsettled.  

An interesting example was: while I was in the field, they were building an Amazon distribution centre just south of Mansfield. And lots of the people I was speaking to, I would ask about it, or it would come up. And I asked whether people thought it was a good thing. And sometimes there were disagreements where the husband I was interviewing might say, “Hm. Oh. Yeah. The Amazon warehouse.” And the wife might say, “Yeah, I think that’s good. That’s bringing jobs.” And the husband might say, “But those are not real jobs.” Because a real job is something that gives a level of financial security. And a certain type of — almost — nobility through work. And it’s involved with production. And these ideas about work are still very prevalent. Even though obviously, objectively, people who work in an Amazon distribution centre are selling their labour power for an income. In that sense, it’s absolutely work.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How have labour markets and the experience of work and particularly of power at work and as workers — whether that worker’s individual power perhaps, their ability to have control individually but also collectively through trade unions or other kinds of collective action — how has that changed in the places you were conducting field work in? How have those changed with deindustrialisation and does this have an effect on political legitimacy?

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

Yes, hugely, I think. I remember speaking to all of these women who’d worked in the textile factories, which were women’s jobs, and these were around until very recently. So, these memories are quite fresh. They would talk about having potlucks around the machines around Christmastime. It’s a level of control over your workspace, a level of autonomy where you can just choose to not do work, really, for most of December. Just sharing food, and having drinks, and having that level of solidarity and autonomy. As well as these really fond memories of the union leaders in the textile factories. When there were disagreements about piece rates, them saying, “Alright. Down tools. Everybody into the canteen.” And everybody would sit in the canteen while these rates were being renegotiated. And so many of the women that I spoke to remembered that as a real sense of togetherness and power. And that’s very different from some of the distribution centres you now have around town. Where you can’t speak to your colleague during work time, or you’ll get a formal warning. So, I think there’s a question of autonomy. There’s a question over wages, with wages being lower. There’s a question of security. People I interviewed who’d worked for employment agencies relayed stories about showing up for a job and then being told, “Oh, no, something’s gone wrong. You’re not wanted here. We don’t need you.” And that sense of, like, you’re not wanted. We don’t want you here. Go home. Having driven to go out to this job. And that is so different from both the manufacturing employment you had locally and especially the mining. For a period of time, these were workers who were at a chokepoint in the production of energy. Which meant they had such a control over the heating the nation’s homes, and fuelling the factories. And it meant that they had considerable power to make demands because they could cut off the supply.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Time and memory are something that feature heavily in your research. And I wonder if you could speak about the role of the past, and the role of the future, how those are created, and how they appear in different ways in different places.

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

Some things can change fairly rapidly; the way that the industry looks in a town. And in Corby, literally overnight, it goes from being a town totally oriented around steelmaking to being a one-industry town without an industry. That goes very rapidly. You also see some of the local civic leaders reorient themselves quite rapidly. Because they’re like, “Hold on a second. We need to bring in industry — any industry — just so we have jobs. Because how are we going to survive? The only reason this town is here is because we had this industry. And now it’s not here anymore.” So, they start working really hard to bring in any businesses that are willing to come in. But there are also things that are really slow to change or that maintain a really powerful hold even when that industrial foundation is not there anymore. Because the industry fostered not just particular form of economic life but also social life. Corby had all these social clubs. You had comedy nights. You had anything catering to just about any hobbies. People remember that there used to be a deep sea fishing club. They were like, “Corby is so far from the coast!” But some of the workers really wanted a deep sea fishing club, so there was a deep sea fishing club. There was this social life which was oriented around particular values around the importance of work and the importance of solidarity and community, particularly ideas about honesty. And again, what it means to be a good person. And those things have really stuck around. And that symbolic economy still draws really heavily on that industrial heritage. But the economic and political world that these towns are now wrapped up in is totally at odds with this symbolic economy.

The Amazon distribution centre would be an example of that. Because it doesn’t conform to people’s ideas of what a job should be for many. You see the same with political representation. Where there’s a sense that politicians should care, and they should have an involvement in the community. And they should have worked — this is really important for lots of the people I spoke to. They should know what it’s like to sweat. And that is not the world that these towns find themselves now. That’s generating a really powerful sense of illegitimacy, and for many, disgust, because people feel that politicians don’t care about them. And once upon a time, it would have been possible for politicians to prove that they cared by providing these clubs and these facilities. So, you know, every pit had a cricket pitch and a rugby pitch and a football pitch. There were all these amenities. And the baths, and the allotments, and all of these were concrete tokens of care that allowed politicians to prove that they were on your side, that they were involved, that they cared. And with deindustrialisation and then austerity on top of that, all of that has disappeared. Or a lot of that disappeared. These sports pitches are now new-built housing often. And it’s made people feel really strongly that things have been taken away, and that politicians do not care. And what’s more, if they’re not giving to us, it’s probably because they’re keeping it for themselves. They’re probably lining their pockets. They’re probably taking backhanders.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

A point you make really well is that in the standard narrative of deindustrialisation, it’s as if nothing has happened in these places, or there’s been no action. But the point that you want to make is that there has been political action by national or local government. And I’m interested to hear about how politicians have responded. And what has worked and what hasn’t, and for what goal?

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

I think so often the narrative about post-industrial towns is that they’ve been forgotten. That they’ve been left behind. It’s these narratives that are very much about time, and places somehow being left in the past. I don’t think that’s true. I can’t speak for everywhere, but for my field sites, they were totally transformed along neoliberal lines by these efforts. And you get it with Thatcher’s enterprise agenda where suddenly all of these ex-industrial workers were supposed to become entrepreneurs, and Corby becomes an enterprise zone. Which meant special tax cuts for businesses. And forms of corporate welfare, to bring in business, any business. And this was not a success, on its own on standards — because lots of the businesses left again after their perks ended. And also, by definition, the businesses that respond to this are the most footloose, they’re very able to move away again if there’s a better sweetener on offer somewhere else. That’s not true for all of them. Some of the businesses have stuck around. But for the most part, when I spoke to people locally, they remembered the story of Commodore Computers, which was brought in through the enterprise zone. And there was a big promise that this was going to give everybody jobs, all these ex-steel workers were going to be making computers. Then just before Christmas, everybody gets laid off. And people were furious, and rightly so. So, they’ve been called in and told that they no longer have a job. And one woman told me about a friend of hers who made a speech at that moment, she said, and was like, “I would like to thank you for this opportunity. And I would like to thank you for what you’ve done for us. But I can’t because you’ve shafted us.” Furious. And obviously, these steel workers didn’t become entrepreneurs, because that requires certain resources that were just not there. So, then you get a shift. And under New Labour, councils become responsible for bringing in jobs. But they’re under big pressure from the treasury to prove that they’re providing value for money. So, for every pound spent, they’re having to show how many jobs they’ve created. And what’s the easiest way to create lots of jobs all at once? You give a permit and support for a really big warehouse. A really big logistics centre. And these were big and deliberate political efforts.  

While I’m absolutely on board with the argument that there was never the funding made available that would have really allowed these places to thrive again, it’s not that politicians forgot about them. There were these efforts to remake them. It’s just that they failed on their own terms. So nobody wants to claim them. Nobody wants to say, “Yeah, we did that.” Because it’s not the success story that they wanted it to be. There are indications from Thatcher that this enterprise policy, that she saw this as sort of the big test of her brand of conservatism in practice. This was supposed to be like a beacon of free market conservatism. And instead, it’s been shoved under the rug because nobody really wants to talk about it anymore. But locally, these memories are alive and well. And so, this is not a story of these places having been forgotten. It’s a story about a failed neoliberal experiment that was foisted upon them.  

So, I tried to move away from this liberal framing of exclusion, which frames these places as having been excluded, and towards a more Marxist framing of inclusion, saying, “Well, no. The problem is that they’re part of the new economy and on a deeply adverse footing”. Which is allowing so many companies to exploit their workers in horrendous ways. This points to distribution centres just north of Mansfield built right on top of Shirebrook Pit. And these famously offered unimaginably stark working conditions.  

I think it’s not true that there’s nothing that has happened. And rather, the things that have happened have really benefited businesses that depend on precarious labour. And underpaid workers being offered very little security.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Moving to the question of political revolt or cynicism or Brexit or Labour “heartland losses”, I’m interested in what you think the standard narrative or account of these are, and where you might differ from that.

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

Speaking to people the cynicism about politics was extremely palpable. It was also like a common topic at the pub. Like when I spent time in community spaces, including like cafes and pubs, one of the favourite topics of conversation were these rumours about political misdeeds by politicians. So “Did you know that this MP did this? And it benefitted him in this and this way?” And that was a real crowd-pleaser. Then other people would jump in, and they would offer their own stories. So that cynicism has been really baked in and it’s become quite widely shared. Not universal, but certainly widely shared. And I think it’s important that we don’t on the one hand reduce this to economic change. Because this is something that is happening more widely, this is not just happening in these places, even though we do know that it seems to be particularly pronounced here. But at the same time, that we don’t uncouple it from those economic developments either. For me, it is about a particular way of doing politics, and particular forms of citizenship that were built on top of an old economic order. Then when that economic order frayed, those expectations from the state and from politics no longer had a foundation to stand on. So that those forms of care that politicians would have been able to demonstrate through these leisure centres and clubs and facilities that I’ve already spoken about, but also community structures that they could build on through unions and just this whole civic network. It’s interesting that certainly in Mansfield it was clear that people on the one hand were proud to make up their own minds. They felt that they make political choices more openly than their parents had. Because you know, they would have been staunch Labour voters. So, on the one hand, this pride in thinking for yourself. But that went along with a sense that there was nothing to choose. That all the choices were bad. Nobody was looking out for you; you were totally alone.  

I see that as an understanding of politics that developed in response to a political socioeconomic moment. When its economic foundations have been washed away, instead of bolstering the legitimacy of the political system, it turns against it. Because whatever politicians would promise, whatever policies they would propose, whatever there would be in the manifesto, for a lot of the people I spent my time with, that didn’t matter, because they didn’t believe politicians would do any of it anyway. All of that was just a charade to get your vote. So many people said, “You know, they’ll just promise you whatever. And then they’ll do whatever they want for their entire term.” So, there was no belief that there was any way to hold politicians accountable; that there was any connection to them and to the places they were supposed to represent. And that was leading to a deep, deep cynicism, particularly in these places where these concrete tokens of care have been removed.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How does that story differ from the dominant one we might hear in the press, for example?

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

I think there’s a dominant story that just sees this as a secular decline. That says, “Well, there’s less and less trust in politics. It’s probably because of social media. It’s probably because of technology. Might be something to do with sort of the decline of sort of big ten civic institutions. And now politicians are having to govern a much more sort of volatile world.” I don’t want to deny that some of that stuff is at play. But if we look at the places where this has been most pronounced — like Mansfield, with its seventy per cent Brexit vote — then you can really see the way that this is also about the erosion of the civic and political infrastructures that were built on top of a particular economic settlement, which is now no longer with us.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

The next question follows on, perhaps, it maybe relates to what you were saying just then about how it doesn’t really matter what the exact policy or manifesto offer is, that cynicism comes from somewhere else. So, with that in mind, how have political parties and politicians responded to this crisis in legitimacy? What has worked, if anything.

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

It’s so interesting because you see political parties and the whole ecosystem around them with think tanks and polling firms, they’re still running polls and focus groups to see what people want, what policy offer might appeal to voters. But I know that they are also picking up on this political cynicism, and they are flagging it in their reports. They’re saying, “Hmm. This is something we should probably deal with.” But this is so fundamental; you cannot get a hearing with so many of the people I spend my time with, because they’ve been told all of these things before. They have been promised these dreams of regeneration many times. And they have had politicians come to them with big promises. And they don’t buy it.  

In fact, in some cases, big promises were taken as an insult to people’s intelligence. I remember spending time with an ex-miner and his wife, who are both now retired. We were talking about political promises. And I remember the woman, whom I’ve called Mary, saying, “I think they promise us things because they think we are thick.” They make promises because they think we are stupid. So, all the rest of it —all the polling, all the little bits of insight from the focus groups and whatnot — it will serve political parties not at all if you can’t get past the idea that whatever you promise voters, however cleverly you target your message, if people feel that ultimately, you’re talking down to them and you’re trying to fool them, that is a big problem for politics.  

And I think there are politicians who have responded to that really acutely, or who’ve been tuned into that. We know you get it mostly for migration stuff. But Nigel Farage will also always talk about the “political class” and how the political class is self-serving, and how they’re in it for themselves. In that sense, he is tapping into something that I also very much found. I think people were much more measured on immigration, but on politics, many people I spent my time with were ferocious. And so yes, there are people who have successfully tapped into that, who have understood that to get a hearing with so many disillusioned voters requires showing that you’re somehow not part of the political class. That you’re somehow sort of different from the rest of them. That this is not politics as usual. I don’t think either of our major parties right now are really clued into it.  

There seems to be a sense that because people don’t like big promises — because so many people have become sceptical of big promises — you should avoid them altogether. You should just do a sort of more quietist politics that has a much more limited horizon. But that seems to me the wrong approach. Because you end up just affirming people’s sense that nothing is possible and nothing can change, and that horizon just shrinks further and further. And so instead, you’re going to have to find a way to tap into that political discontent, which is scary. We don’t want more politicians to be threatened. We don’t want to fan the flames. But that disgust with the political system is real. And we need to find a way to harness it for political renewal. I think that’s something — there is a real opportunity here for progressives, for people who are of the left to be bold. Because so many of the people I spent my time with had genuinely quite left-wing economic views. But to get there you’d first have to get them on side with the political stuff and give them a sense that you are genuinely going to fight for it. That this wasn’t just pie in the sky. That is something that so far, the radical right has done better in terms of its willingness to take on what is seen as a political class that just protects itself.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Is there a sense that things could change? But the actors that there are — the political actors — are not going to deliver it? Or is it even more fundamental than that? Is it that nothing is going to change ever?

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

I found people struggled to imagine change. And people seemed tired of politics, and suspicious of it. But inherent in that complaint against politicians is a sense that it might be different if we had a different political system. That if we didn’t have elected representatives that just looked out for themselves, as was the view of so many of the people I spent my time with, that maybe things could be different. Even if it wouldn’t necessarily be an overnight transformation, you would at least have somebody who maybe recognised you as an equal. Someone who saw you not just as an entity to be milked for a vote, but someone who recognised you as a fellow human, who was willing to level with you, who was willing to set aside narrow party political interests in favour of a commitment to the people who had elected them.  

And so, when I ask people about what sort of change they might like to see, it was often about politics being local, and people being involved in the community, having a genuine stake in the community. This is beyond just, “Oh, I was born here. And I went to have a glitzy career. And now I’ve come back.” But very much about like, “I shop locally. I have conversations locally. I’m approachable. And I’m involved. I care. I have a stake.” That was a very clear desire. As well as a desire for politicians who had worked “real” jobs, which came up a lot. And there was a sense that things might be different if politicians were in touch with quote-on-quote the real world.  

This is something that other ethnographers have picked up on a lot. For example, Insa Koch has also written about how there’s this widely shared conceptualisation of the world where you’ve got the community on the one side, and you’ve got politics on the other, and they don’t overlap. So instead of an older system, where politics is very much embedded in the community — that wasn’t true everywhere, but it was true in Mansfield and true in Corby as well — instead, you’ve got the sense that, there’s the community, and that’s what normal people belong to. They have regular lives. They struggle with the things we all struggle with: they struggle with bills; they struggle with a [school] place for their disabled child; they struggle with getting back on their feet financially after a separation; they struggle with the normal people things. And on the other hand, you’ve got politicians. They’re in a totally different realm. Their values are defined as almost the opposite of the values of the community. So, if the community is all about hard work and honesty, and generosity towards one another, politicians are the opposite. They are lazy, they are dishonest, and they only care about themselves. So, in a way, politicians come to function almost as a foil for what people would like to believe is sort of the best of their community.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

There are a couple of points to make here. One is the — I suppose what we might call the problem of politicians not really helping themselves, and things becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. And there’s another thought I had while you were saying this, which is — and this is not about kind of a post-industrial place you’re talking about – but it put me in mind of the video clip from 2017, when the election was announced. There’s this woman —  Brenda from Bristol — and she says, “Another one? Another one?”. Saying, “I’m sick of this.” From that you can see this strong sense politics being something which is always an imposition into real life. Into the real life of the community. And it seems like — and of course the kind of examples you’re talking about are different because they draw on this particular moral order which comes from these historic forms of work. But it seems that that general sentiment that politics is being done by other people. Done elsewhere. We don’t really want to think about what they’re doing. It’s probably not very good. And sometimes it encroaches into our lives when it’s not just sort of generally making them worse. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that sense of politics as an imposition.

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

It’s at best an imposition and at worst humiliating. That’s something that lots of people overlook because lots of commentators have gone to university. They think politics is fun. They like engaging with political debates. They like having these conversations. And that stems from a particular disposition where you are exercising a particular political faculty that is in some way pleasurable. And that is also me. I enjoy talking about politics. But you cannot miss — in ethnographic work like mine — that for so many people, it is the opposite entirely. Politics is either something to be ignored, something that has no bearing on their lives, or for very many people something that is actively humiliating. It is people who want — in the words of one of my interviewees — who want to keep you under their thumb. It’s about domination. It’s about powerlessness. It’s about being told that you don’t understand.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How did nostalgia appear in your fieldwork? And how should the left respond to nostalgia, because a politics that says, “Ok, we can and should get mining back”, just seems necessarily inadequate. That not’s going to quite work.

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

I think there’s a complex role for nostalgia. It is more complex than some make it out to be. Because it hasn’t been forgotten locally what mining also did to people. I spoke to people who had lost limbs. Who had lost family members. Whose lungs were still fucked up from it. And in that sense, it’s less dewy-eyed than it’s sometimes made out to be. So many of the ex-miners I interviewed talked about their parents and their fathers especially saying, “Whatever you do, don’t go down the pit. That’s the work I had. That’s the life I’ve lived. And I do not want that for you.”  

By the 70s and 80s, the salaries are just so good compared to other options locally that lots of them did end up down the mine. But people aren’t naive about it. And in Mansfield especially, that is also made more complex by the legacy of the miners’ strike. Where lots and lots of Mansfield miners continued working throughout. Which has made that nostalgia — that memory — really fraught. A geographer called Jay Emery has written really beautifully about that. But that said, while people know much better than city dwellers about how bad the industry could be and how loud the machines could be in the factories. And how tough it was to be a steelworker. And the unholy noise. And the mess. And the filth. At the same time, there was a sense that solidarity and connectedness had been lost. That a certain pride in work had been lost.  

I remember sitting at the football club in Mansfield. I was there with a bunch of guys, most of whom had been miners. And they were boisterous, they were telling jokes, they were making jokes about who had worked hard and who had been lazy underground. “Oh, the electricians. Who were always taking naps.” And they were joking about, and then the conversation fell quiet. And then one of them said, “I’d go back tomorrow if I could.” So that’s a sort of complex answer to say, yes, it is complex. There are people who say they would go back tomorrow. There’s a widespread sense that life used to be better for the entire community during the high point of industry.  

For the left, I’m also very sceptical of writers, especially writers who are not from these communities who are trafficking in hardhat nostalgia. In part because I don’t think it’ll get us anywhere. But also because I think it flattens the nostalgia. It flattens it into just like memories of an industry gone. Whereas if you want to get at the values that people really hold dear, those ideas about what work means and what it means to be a good person with a strong work ethic, it’s about thinking about how we reconstitute that in the industries that are there now: in the care homes, in the distribution centres. How do we make those places where you could feel a sense of solidarity and autonomy in the way that some of the textile workers felt? And some of the miners felt? And a good start would be to say that employers shouldn’t be allowed to fire people for chatting to their colleagues. People should be able to feel a sense of autonomy over the spaces that they work in. They should have security and the ability to organise within those spaces. And people and workers should be empowered to the point where they can once again win the leisure spaces and the civic amenities that made these towns come alive. And from there on, you can start building out a coalition which might be able to fight for particular forms of manufacturing to return. I think there’s an argument for manufacturing certain goods locally. Winning that argument and building that coalition has to start not from a very flattened idea of what people are nostalgic for and instead think about how to recreate forms of togetherness, and solidarity, and autonomy in what is there now.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

I’m wondering about the way that gender and race and migration figure in these histories. If we consider how gender and race are (re)made and used in these labour markets as well. And are useful to them in different ways, and how that’s shifted, especially with the move from manufacturing to care and logistics. Does considering these histories tell us anything about how we should understand race and gender, and the labour market as raced and gendered?

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

When I went into the archive, I found these write-ups of Corby steel workers who’d been made redundant with the closure, who complained that all there was left now locally was “women’s jobs”. And that’s sort of jarring to read now, because there was a sort of disdain for women’s jobs; they were lower paid, they didn’t come with the same political might. They didn’t come with the same place in the imaginary of work. And to some extent, that’s only intensified with the prominence of care jobs locally.  

Even though women’s jobs also went through their own deindustrialisation particularly with textiles. The textile factories I spend lots of time thinking about because they are such an interesting and overlooked story. In Mansfield, they catered mostly to Marks and Spencer, who still manufactured the vast majority of their knitwear in the UK by the start of the 1990s. And a decade later, it all starts to go very rapidly. It just totally guts the industry, and it guts this foothold that lots of women had in the labour market. One of the things I found interesting is the jobs in the textile factories, the unions, which were also led by women, were successful in negotiating child-friendly hours. Which meant that it was easier for women to do these jobs alongside also taking care of a child, or multiple children. And that’s a double-edged sword. Because on the one hand, it deepens the sense that this is women’s responsibility; it hardcodes it into the very structure of the job. If the mother is able to get school holidays off really easily and the father is not, you know? But at the same time, it was a godsend for so many of these women who had these caring responsibilities. And who were able to combine it with jobs where they found — for all the things that were wrong with them — they also found community and solidarity. Compare that to lots of the women working now that I interviewed who talked about being on insecure zero hours or agency contracts, and trying to find childcare, needing to find a place for their child, but they had to commit in advance to set days. Which meant that in the end, she couldn’t afford the work. These things are deeply, deeply gendered. Our memory of them is gendered in terms of which jobs still count as industrial jobs. How we respond now is gendered with this emphasis very much in the regeneration efforts rather than thinking about, for example, childcare provision, which would free so many parents and especially mothers to access a far wider range of jobs.  

As for race and migration, that’s another huge part of the story. Because on the one hand, locally, there’s a strong commitment to a sort of working-class universalism. That sense that — I remember one of my interviewees saying — “If you work the same job and you sweat the same sweat as me, I can only have respect for you.” This this was specifically in relation to working agency jobs alongside Slovenian and Slovakian co-workers. On the other hand, there’s deep histories of racism. We know that a lot of the socials and the welfares in the 70s would have “Powell for PM” posters up.  

There’s on the one hand a commitment to really universal values around work. On the other hand, in practice, who was considered part of this collective was heavily circumscribed by race and gender. And then all of that is supercharged when the logistics come in, because they’re brought in through this regeneration effort. Which I’ve talked about as these councils having to prove that they’re bringing in lots and lots of jobs for very little money. Very quickly, people find out locally that these are actually terrible jobs, that are very hard to combine with any caring responsibilities or any other commitments you might have in your life. And as a result, places like Sports Direct start to recruit really heavily from Eastern Europe, which inflames certain tensions. The response from some people locally was undeniably racist. And at the same time, we need to think about how this is a response to a particular political economy, a particular response to regeneration, which brings in some of these terrible companies which offer terrible working conditions. There was a local form of making fun of the racists where people would say, “Oh, and they’ll say they’re taking our jobs. But these people, they don’t even want a job. They’re just lazy. They’re just sitting on their arse.” That seemed to me really unhelpful, because it’s not about people proving that they want a job more than anybody else. It’s about there being good jobs to begin with. It’s about changing the political economy of it, and improving the position of workers to the point where it’s not people having to battle to show that their work ethic is better than somebody else’s.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

And, as you say, the jobs, any jobs approach, does just lead to the prevalence of really crap jobs. The last question is, what book or text should people about work in general or deindustrialisation?

[.cdw-name]Sacha Hilhorst[.cdw-name]

The first is a novel. A really strange novel that when I picked it up, I wasn’t sure I’d like. But I loved it. It’s Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything. It’s about Italy, just as tensions are flaring up around the factories. It’s really insightful on what it means to hate your job. I’ve rarely seen it described so viscerally. These southern Italian workers are travelling to the north to take up jobs in these auto factories, and Balestrini was there, he was very much an artist and intellectual, but he was talking to all of these workers as they were organising to take charge of factories, and as they were repudiating all the union structures. He channels all of their voices into this one very weird novel. That I thought was fantastic.  

I don’t know whether I can say that it’s about work per se, but I think he’s so insightful on everything — Stuart Hall — who is so good how different cultural and economic forces come together in a specific conjuncture. I’ve got so many favourite Stuart Hall texts: The Problem of Ideology or the 2013 preface to Policing the Crisis. But I think my favourite-favourite is Gramsci and Us. About what it means to be on the left, and to take a hard, clear look at the country and the world as it is, and to formulate a response that is in tune with people’s everyday experiences, and their moral and ideological commitments.