I’m not sure if I shall ever work again. Although some extra cash would come in handy, it’s not what motivates me. In fact, extra cash has never motivated me, which is probably just as well since I never had more cash than I needed. But I digress. I’m not sure I shall ever work again, I’m not sure I want to.
I’ve done 39 years in the civil service, five and a half in the charity/caring sector and a few months for supermarkets. I think that’s enough for anyone, unless you are a workaholic. I am only a workaholic in the sense that every time I think about work I get drunk! Baboom tish! Yet still there is something niggling away at me. I’d like to do some work that involves helping people, on my terms, in my own way. Having worked for others in that charity sector setting I was only once allowed to do that, thanks to a brilliant manager at the British Red Cross who left only to replaced by the worst manager I’d ever had the misfortune to work for.
Having worked in the civil service, especially during my final 20-odd years, I realised who and what a good manager was. Of course, you had to follow rules and regulations, but you were also allowed, indeed encouraged by the very best managers, to be more creative, to be handed more responsibility and control. I had terrible limitations when it came to the paperwork side – not ideal for the civil service, it must be said – but thanks to my levels of commitment and hard work, aided and abetted by excellent managers, I got by. Even the managers I didn’t think were all that good I now realise, having experienced terrible bosses in the latter stages of my professional post civil service life, were far better than I realised.
I didn’t expect post civil service managers to be particularly good, certainly not in the third sector, so I was not disappointed to find they weren’t particularly good. In fact, many were particularly bad, their idea of management being ‘this is what you do’ and that’s it. Some would say this is what you do in the safe knowledge that they probably wouldn’t do it very well themselves, but if you pay peanuts you tend to attract monkeys. As a fellow primate, I fitted in very well.
I discovered, as I closed in on my dotage, that I was far better than I ever suspected at connecting with people, getting to understand their lives and their problems and helping to come up with solutions to make them better. Certainly, my first job at the British Red Cross ticked all the right boxes and I was happier than I had ever been, visiting and working with lonely and isolated people in rural areas. That all came to a grinding halt when I found myself bullied and abused by Red Cross managers and I left to do another job in the charity care sector. Although I had little by way of opportunity to develop my skills or use my own creativity, I still felt I was making a positive difference to people’s lives but unfortunately, one day right out of the blue, my role changed and I was told to wipe people’s arses for a living. I know someone has to do it and it was buried deep in my contract, but it was never going to be me. Which brings me back to today.
I’m not sure if I shall ever work again, but it won’t stop me looking. I want to do stuff to help people, without having to provide – how shall we say? – personal care. Some people can do that stuff, I can’t. And I think I can make a real positive difference to people’s lives. The thing is that there are very few of this type of job that pay money. Most such vacancies are voluntary. Which is to say society does not deem them important enough jobs to pay people to do them. And for as long as there are wonderful volunteers happy to help others out of the kindness of their hearts, then why bother to make them paid roles? I say that without a hint of irony or anything else. I worry that the volunteering part of the care sector closely resembles David Cameron’s disastrous Big Society, which was aimed at getting people to do things for nothing instead of paying them (this is not how it was presented but it is how it would have worked).
Eventually, if I haven’t fallen to pieces myself by the time I retire, I may well do some voluntary unpaid work, but then again I might not. Perhaps five and a half years helping people on or near the minimum wage – and far less than the minimum wage when judges on net terms – has been my contribution to a better society.
