Skip to main content

Underpaid, under-worked, and over here


Paulina will be awarded her doctorate in July. In the UK from Poland for a holiday in Somerset, she’s bored sitting about in her family’s home so she’s signed up with an agency for some temporary work. I met her and Nora before a charity function where I’m waiting to interview some of the guests. Paulina’s PhD is in chemical engineering and she tells me there will be work for her, in some country, but maybe not in Poland where her fiancé is living. She is rueful, “Germany perhaps, but then I won’t see him.” She is resigned to living where she finds work, and missing her loved ones.

A guy dressed in kitchen wear comes out and says, “There are Russian jets in our air space, and they’ve got ships in our territorial waters, off Scotland .. and they won’t leave." When he gets no response from this cheery piece of news, he disappears back through the swing doors. The barmaid leans forward and yells into the room, to no-one in particular, “We’re going to war, and I don’t give a shit!” Two to three inches of black roots have grown out into her bleached blonde hair. When she gets no response, she shouts it again, with added emphasis, then turns back to her work, sliding glasses around the shelves.

Nora is an ex-break dancer and gymnast. Now 32 and invalided out of sports, she’s been working in logistics as an office manager at home in Hungary. Both Paulina and Nora speak several languages yet here they are, in a down-at-heel venue in Somerset waiting to start an evening’s work running about with plates. Nora wants to work in the UK for a while, yet all she has been offered since arriving two months ago is factory work, and catering jobs. “In the factory,” she tells me, “They were all Polish people, with poor English.” She is frustrated; wants to use her skills. Her brother is already here, working in Dorset. "If I get nothing in the next two months, I'll return to my capital city, but I prefer to be in the countryside," she says. The guests arrive and the girls are called away to the kitchen.

When I get home there is nothing on the evening news about any threat to Scotland. The local barmaid was wise not to give a shoot; somehow trusting that our diplomats would resolve the issue. However, in town the next morning, chatting to a local builder, when I mention Paulina’s and Nora’s talents being wasted in menial catering jobs when we could use their skills and training to boost UK businesses, he says, “That’s why I’m voting UKIP, because they’re taking jobs that local people could do.” Europeans are no threat; these minimum wage local jobs are humiliating and hard, but they take them anyway because they want to work. Keen, great attitude, adaptable: every employer’s dream? Apparently not. I’m not sure what any Russians may want to do just off Scotland; it’s a pity about our xenophobia; they’ll never be accepted.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. Dir Mike Leigh. 2008

Simple, retarded asthmatic gasps and giggles her way through this nonsensical film from Mike Leigh. 30 year old Poppy’s arrested development is masked by her carer who provides meals and stability. This form of care in the community works well so that Poppy is able to extend her adolescence in this flat-sharing arrangement by climbing into bed with her carer and exhibiting teenage tactile behaviour. Her flatmate is tolerant, even when getting no answers as to where Poppy has been and whether or not she’s ok. To Poppy’s credit she holds down a job. Inconceivably a primary school teacher, she is left in a position of responsibility with young children for long periods without supervision. However, classroom activities are restricted to making masks out of brown paper bags in case anyone thought primary school teaching involved real work. Leigh raises the possibility of serious subject matter when a boy begins to bully others. Without parental involvement, a Socia...
Post a Comment
Read more

ACCATONE! Dir Piers Paulo Pasolini. 1961

Accatone! (1961) is the first film by director Piers Paulo Pasolini and re-relased as part of a box set of his work. Accatone! features a pitiless, self-serving, manipulative young pimp living in the slums and rubble of Rome, whose lassitude is infectious. Images of his death recur throughout the film and he seems barely living. The exclamation mark in the title may be there to try and wake him up. Pasolini shot the film on the streets, using the people he found there rather than professional actors. The effect is a slow moving realism which casts the viewer as reluctant voyeur; it is impossible to gain any distance from the unrelenting sadism of hollow machismo. Seeing this film fifty years after it was made, the misogyny in this film is deeply disturbing; women are either Madonna, virgin or whore. Accatone says prostitution is ‘a mother’s situation’ which provides the mixed message that it’s selfless and necessary for survival, yet he and his friends view whores as trash; to...
Post a Comment
Read more

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 23

Hot Bodies The heat is intense today. My car is blue with a black interior and the sun on the metal is fierce and punishing. Even with the window open there is no relief. The sunroof has to stay closed because the ferocity of the burning sun is beyond bearing. I’m showing a friendly, chatty elderly couple round a bungalow in suburban bungalow-land where there is no sound but the churning of some piece of workman’s equipment nearby. I stay with the plot all round the house, answering questions, being helpful, making suggestions, until we come to the front bedroom and I turn to admire the view. Across the road are two workmen on the flat roof of a garage. One of them is facing us, wearing a baseball cap and bent slightly forward. All I can see is his perfect flat stomach; so flat that, as he bends, there are neat creases in the brown skin, as neat as pencil lines. He has not an ounce of fat covering his slim, naked upper body and trickles of sweat make tracks through the dirt on th...
Post a Comment
Read more