The Work that is no Longer There

My father worked at Ashcroft's, a factory that made small metal parts for washing machines. He did the same job for thirty years. He knew the men on his line. He knew the foreman. He came home tired, and smelling of oil, and he knew the washing machines in half the kitchens on our street contained something he had touched.

Ashcroft's is not there anymore. The building is still there. It is storage units now. You can rent one for forty pounds a month and keep the things you do not have room for. Some of the men my father worked with lived long enough to see the storage units go up. Most did not.

The work my father did moved to a factory in a country I have never been to. For a while, the children of Ashcroft's workers found other things — office work, call centres, a big distribution warehouse that opened on the edge of town. Those jobs paid more, and the work was easier, and everyone agreed this was progress.

Now something is happening to those jobs too. The call centre closed last year. The warehouse is being retooled, they say, because a machine can move the boxes faster. The office work is being done, more and more, by machines that write letters better than most people can.

The machines doing this work are new. They are not the machines my father would have recognised. They do not stamp metal or lift things. They read, and write, and decide, and respond. They are being built, quietly, while everyone is arguing about other things. We will come back to them near the end of the walk. For now, only this: the work they are taking is the work most people had assumed would always need a human being.

I watch the young people in my town and I see something I do not know how to describe. Many of them have finished their school. Some have been to a university. Few of them have work my father would have called work.

Some do things online. Some make videos. Some deliver food on electric bicycles. Some do not work at all, and the state pays them enough to keep the lights on. None of this is what my father would have called a job.

A few of them are doing extraordinary things. Making music. Writing. Building small businesses that did not exist before. A small number of them, quietly, are creating a kind of renaissance.

But for most, work does not supply what work used to supply. It does not supply the place to go every morning. It does not supply the men on the line. It does not supply the feeling of being needed by the town.

We are learning, slowly and painfully, that work was never only about money. Work was about having a place. Money was part of it. Money was not the whole of it.

What happens when the money can come without the work? What happens when the state can feed you, but the town has no use for you?

We are finding out.