> So let me see if I have this right: I point out how union contracts protect
> workers, and your reaction is--"thank god I'm a temp worker"? Wha---?!
Yeah, that's right - death to the unions, their bureaucratic ways really interfere with my hard-on for laissez-faire capitalism...
Of course not. My point is that the workers you refer to are lucky to have contracts that do not include the 'all other duties' weasle words. In my experiences as an employee of both public sector bodies, private companies and the bizarre hinterland of PPP that lies between them the 'any other duties clause' is not just common, it's universal. I was a 'shit worker', as is virtually everyone else that I know.
Now I'm a freelance (journalist) but I'm not stupid enough to think that I'm anything other than a temp, replaceable at a moment's notice and I do get a good laugh out of my colleagues when they describe their hand-to-mouth existence as a 'business'. However, in being supposedly self-employed I do enjoy a degree of autonomy which is something that is of real value to me. If there were any way to increase it to the level of autonomy enjoyed by professionals (there isn't) I would be very happy. Becoming freelnce has been a graduation to something like para-professional staus and for all of the problems associated with it (people not paying, writing crap that promulgates my masters' views etc.) the ability to structure my own working environment and time is a benefit that most workers will never enjoy, whether working a loom in the nineteenth century of tapping out crap on a PC today. Certainly not my parter - she earns minimum wage selling books in a shop where the owner was able to take a €250,000 drop in income this year in order to open a new shop.
I say thank god I can, to a degree, do as I please. I can tell an editor to get lost and it won't be the end of me, at least not until I've done it enough to get a reputation as a flaky, workshy bastard. Try doing that in a normal job and see what happens.
So my point is that in your position despite any pressures, targets and other nonsense that is forced on you, I would guess that you enjoy a consdierable degree more autonomy than other workers. Perhaps not as much as you'd like, or in fact as much as you deserve, but more than the any administrative assistant, secretary, production line worker, 'general operative', kitchen porter, sales assistant, call centre operator, farm hand, computer programmer or whatever. Your comparison to academic staff is not really all that illustrative - we know that they enjoy far more autonomy than most. I'm groping around in my head for something about how one actuallhy defines a profession but I'm drunk and tired and I have to get up early tomorrow.
Toodle pip, Jason.
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