In praise of … Beyond Caring

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/15/in-praise-of-beyond-caring-zero-hours-contract

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Three women pitch up for a job. They mostly wear smart clothes and ingratiating smiles, but it makes no difference. No one shakes their hands or even looks them in the eye. The supervisor offers everyone coffee, without mentioning that they must pay for it. The women will come to this factory at night to clean, on zero-hours contracts. Some hurried training follows. But what they’re really being inducted into is an entire way of life: marginal, insecure, cut loose from the usual bonds of family and friends and workmates.

So begins Beyond Caring, a remarkable play at the National Theatre about life on zero-hours. Some of the details it shows will be familiar to readers of this paper: the text messages bearing instructions on when you’ll be working and when you’ll get paid. And anyone who’s done a crap job will recognise the depicted futility of doing drudge-work that has no purpose or endpoint. But the play also illustrates something quite new going on at the bottom of the labour market.

As a student and after, in the late 90s, I did a few crap jobs – one at a factory so bad the lady at the jobcentre advised me not to sign off. (Imagine that happening now.) Though I was treated as shabbily as warned, managers talked to us; we got breaks; and, after telling us how useless we were, the full-timers would cover for our mistakes. We were at the bottom of the pecking order, but we were still on it.

The outsourced, temporary workforce gets no such parity. They can’t count on the usual workplace rights and niceties, of places to hang your coats or eat lunch. Compounding the economic apartheid is the fact that, in London at least, they are usually black or Latin American, going almost unacknowledged by the largely white permanent staff. “We call ourselves the Invisibles,” an Ecuadorian outsourced cleaner once told me.

Beyond Caring charts the emotional and psychic consequences of sinking normal human relationships into an acid bath. The workers hardly talk to each other. Indeed, they can barely bring themselves to acknowledge one another. Any attempts to be nice – to bring in lunch for the ill woman otherwise subsisting on biscuits – are clumsy or embarrassed. The sound audience members get most used to hearing is the silence of a sentence trailing off, abandoned by its speaker.

There is no tub-thumping polemic, no bellowed instructions on what to think.Before starting the script, its writer and director, Alexander Zeldin, filled in as a night cleaner for a bank. He and the cast talked to workers on zero-hours contracts in “private, intimate conversations”. “I wanted to describe as intensely as possible how these fragilised people live their lives,” he says.

Perhaps inadvertently, he also highlights something else: how poorly the theatre and the arts more broadly have handled the crisis. Nearly a decade on from the collapse of Northern Rock, the stories offered – of a ghost workforce on temp contracts, a capital whose homes are now a globally traded financial asset, of a nation disintegrating under the weight of its own regional inequality, of a big-business elite on the take and a political class unable to define the problems, let alone tackle them – deserve to be told by our dramatists and novelists.

But with a few exceptions, such as John Lanchester’s Capital, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and Lucy Prebble’s Enron, artists have failed to rise to the task. Where they have tried to, in plays such as Roaring Trade or The Power of Yes or the TV dramas about bankers, the stories have been cute tales about men on the verge of a systemic breakdown. Bravo, Beyond Caring, for putting down the microscope and picking up the widescreen lens.