Reality check
Jeremy Clarke
Laborare est orare — to work is to pray. It’s true! For two decades I experienced grace via muddy holes and the back of a dustcart, but since becoming a journalist I seem to have fallen outside of it. Whether it is because journalism isn’t strictly work, or, if it is, one is praying to Satan, I can’t quite tell. So when I heard that Gate Gourmet was recruiting a few hundred temporary workers, via an employment agency in Uxbridge High Street, I went along as a penitent. Three months’ low-paid, mindlessly repetitive, exhausting factory scab work is just what I need. It would be a very necessary reality check. (I’m so spoiled I now fondly imagine that all manufactured goods are created and appear in the shops by magic.) Sustained verbal abuse by pickets on arrival and departure can only be bracing for the soul. Five quid an hour would concentrate the mind wonderfully on the more important things of life. And sheer lack of free time would surely temper the increasingly compulsive nature of my most vicious habit. (I’ve tried wearing boxing gloves in bed, but it’s useless.) I had to tell a few lies, naturally. The biggest one to the newspaper editor who alerted me to the recruitment drive, expecting me to desert my post after only one day and write an article exposing Gate Gourmet’s shortcomings. On the contrary, Gate Gourmet sounded to me like a company I’d be proud to work for. ‘Dedication is not to be found in any management training manual,’ says the company Mission Statement, ‘but it is in our employees’ blood.’ Strewth. And listen to this about the company values: ‘We communicate in a very open way and promote inspiring team work. We treat our colleagues, customers and suppliers with respect and dignity.’ You can’t help feeling sorry for a company as beneficent and united as that. Sacking hundreds of workers by megaphone at lunchtime like that must have felt like cutting off its own right arm at the shoulder.
I’d forgotten, though, just how much time, effort and money is involved in applying for a low-paid-sector job. My old car broke down on the motorway in torrential rain and I had to join a vehicle recovery service and buy a new battery. I was soaked to the skin for a second time waiting in the queue outside the employment agency.
Though drenched, the queue was an orderly one, and composed of welldressed, cheerful, polite young people, mostly of Asian origin, possibly the majority of them undercover journalists. Other applicants, perhaps recently arrived from abroad, for whom queuing was such an alien concept they couldn’t fathom the general principle even when confronted by such a near-perfect example, came and hovered uncertainly close to the front. These were determinedly excluded from the queue and after a while went away looking hurt and embarrassed.
This queue was for a youth standing in the shelter of the doorway. (Behind him, seen through the glass door, the interior of the employment agency looked like the Black Hole of Calcutta.) This chap’s job was to filter out anybody without a valid passport, issue poorly photocopied application forms and direct the rest to the public library along the street to fill them out.
Returning to my car to feed the meter, I found I was six minutes late and had received a parking ticket for £80. I returned to the employment agency with my form and was told to come back after two o’clock with two passport-sized photos. These cost £3.50 — I looked like I’d been dead in the water for a week — at a booth in Woolworths.
After two o’clock I was admitted on to the agency premises for the first time. There were so many people inside I could push open the door only about six inches, but it was just enough. For half an hour I was immovably wedged behind a pair of enormous, surprisingly solid African buttocks bursting out of a pair of denim jeans. Available space then became even more constricted and I had to squeeze back through the door to get some air and go and feed the meter again. Between the agency and my car I was caught in another sharp downpour. I arrived as the traffic warden was in the act of writing out a second parking ticket.
But, hey, by five o’clock I was a Gate Gourmet employee. Ahead of me was that deliciously happy time between getting a job and actually starting it. I didn’t know what I was going to be doing, but I did know I was going to be paid £5.95 per hour for it and be reconnected with the Almighty. It was a shame I’d have to work for a week and a half to earn what I’d spent going for the interview, though.
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