Young Men, Un(der)employment, and the Honda Layoffs in Swindon

The looming Honda layoffs were felt keenly by the three men at the heart of this chapter and by the other young men who were interviewed who were looking for work in Swindon. This was evident in their perception that they faced higher competition for laboring jobs due to the influx of a supply of more experienced workers looking for work.

All three participants were at pains to construct themselves as hardworking and motivated. Sam, who identifies as White English, was 20 when first interviewed. He had recently secured a council housing flat after a living in hostels since being thrown out of his mother's home. His story was complicated by severe family conflict and breakdown, a past problem with drug abuse, a current problem with gambling, and a minor history of run-ins with the law, although since the age of 18 he had avoided any serious offenses. Sam considered himself to have had a hard time at school, “I just fell in with the wrong crowd,” and was excluded due to an incident involving arson, although he managed to complete his GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education examinations taken at age 16) in a college program after leaving school. After surviving a serious drug overdose, he began to rebuild a new life for himself. He is now considered the most successful in terms of his employment status, among a group of three friends who all took part in the research and who had known each other since school.

At the time of the first interview with Sam, he had been working a series of short­term contracts through temp agencies, some of these posts lasting as little as 2 days. By the second interview, Sam had completed a 4-month stint secured through a temp agency at a subsidiary of Honda. However, hearing of the looming Honda layoffs, Sam managed to line up an assessment interview at a warehouse through another agency. He then quit his temporary job at the Honda subsidiary, in hopes that the new warehouse job would have a higher chance of becoming more secure. As he described it, it was a gamble, and he would have preferred to stay on at the production plant, but in light of the troubles facing Honda, he was concerned that as a temporary employee, he would probably be among the first to be let go:

Like, I like the job, I’d love to stay for as long as they wanted me, but I knew that temps go first, I’ve seen it before, they give you about an hour’s notice, just before you’re about to leave, I’ve seen the people, It’s happened before, they’ve left, gone out the door, and the temp agency rings up and says, that’s it, no job for you today. And they don’t ring you for a couple of months. That’s just the way it goes, so.

In the end, he was not kept on at the warehouse job and found himself once again out of work. By the final interview, Sam had recently started training for a sales job for a bank, a job that he perceived as white collar although it remained insecure and was mediated through an agency. His hope was that he could prove himself employable and for the post to become permanent.

Sam’s narrative reveals how he both reproduces but also rejects the judgments inflicted on working-class young men like him. He echoes, for example, the repre­sentation of English workers by hiring agencies as lacking motivation. “English people, we sit at home on the internet and do fuck all.” He offers an especially negative representation of men: “no respect for themselves, females, and just really no respect for anyone in general.” Yet, his own employment trajectory over the course of the year in and out of precarious work suggests otherwise.

I never missed a day, I was never caught talking or slacking, I was just, I was always working. I never complained when we got overtime, like it was always just the case that I would be there from the start to the end and I was just keep working. I guess I switch my brain off when I’m over there. I turn it back on when I get home.

Sam's narrative also shows how the quality of the work available to him rarely leads him to income security. He recounts how while receiving Jobseeker's Allow­ance (JSA) he had been obliged to carry out a work experience placement in a retail outlet, which had led to a job offer. However, the contract he was offered was a “zero-hour contract.” A zero-hour contract is one which does not guarantee the worker a minimum number of hours per week (Willis 2014). Estimates based on analysis of the 2014 Labour Force Survey data suggest that there are as many 2.7 million zero-hour contracts in Britain (Willis 2014). Youth, women, and seniors are disproportionately affected, and it was found that 36% of people aged 18-24 are on such contracts (Willis 2014). Sam was forced to refuse such a contract, not out of a lack of work ethic but because it did not give him the financial stability to know that he would be able pay his rent and bills. For Sam, it was safer to remain on benefits:

I didn't sign it because I knew exactly what it was and I know that if I worked one week or not the other, or worked a dodgy amount of hours, I'd still have to sign on, try and get benefits, it can mess up everything really, getting a zero hour contract. They're the sort of contracts you want if you're living at home with your parents, you don't have any bills to pay and stuff like that.

Sam's predicament vis-a-vis the uncertainties of the labor market helps illustrate some of the mechanisms by which the proliferation of short-term work serves as a barrier rather than a stepping-stone to a more stable livelihood for working-class youth (MacDonald 2009). Longitudinal studies confirm that prospects are worsen­ing for young people who already face class disadvantage, particularly those with low levels of educational credentials (Buchholz et al. 2009; Edwards and Weller 2010; MacDonald 2009).

Alfie's narrative also illustrates some of the quandaries that young people may face in trying to secure their economic survival and well-being in the context of the shortage of stable employment. He also identifies as White English and grew up in a small township located on the outskirts of Swindon. He was raised by his mother, a worker in the printing industry, and his stepfather who has a physical disability and is employed as a laborer by Honda. Alfie, who described himself as a quiet student who was never excluded from school (the fate of several respondents), completed his schooling at the age of 17, with a Level 2 college training in car mechanics. He explained how securing work as a car mechanic was very competitive and required you to stand out in relation to the other applicants. While he had worked hard on his CV and dropped off copies to numerous garages, he had only ever managed to secure one interview, and he did not get the job. Securing work as a car mechanic remains his long-term work-related aspiration, but he has been forced to look for alternatives in the meantime.

At the first interview with Alfie, when he was 19, he had left his family home and was renting a room in a flat. He was juggling multiple minimal hour contracts in an attempt to cobble together an income on which he could survive. He was working on a contract of 8 h a week at a hardware store. In order to boost his hours, he also attempted to secure additional work through temp agencies - this in itself was not a straightforward task and involved printing out 20 CVs and dropping them off in person to the various agencies in town. Through this process he eventually managed to get hired on a zero-hour contract in refuse collection for the city council.

Five months later, Alfie's temporary job with the council was discontinued. He explained that he considered himself lucky to have been kept on 5 months, as many others hired at the same time as him did not last that long. He was looking for another job and described in detail the numerous CVs he had dropped off, saying “desperate times, desperate measures.” He had decided not to try to find work through employment agencies, expressing frustration with the lack of security: “you can be the best person working in there but they'll still let you go - it's cheaper for them.” Furthermore, he had found that agencies did not have much work available as a consequence of Honda's announcement of layoffs, coupled with the fact that a large retail store in Swindon had also recently gone bankrupt. He explained how he felt that he and his stepfather were “kinda in the same boat.” His stepfather, as an employee of Honda, was waiting to find out if he would hold on to his job and, furthermore, had already experienced redundancy three times previously and so understood Alfie's plight.

By the third interview, after a further 5 months, Alfie had just secured a full-time job as a sales advisor in a retail outlet. He explained how he had seen the job advertised on a website, applied for it online, not heard anything back, and therefore had dropped into the shop in person to deliver his CV. He says that he normally visits a prospective employer three to four times to look for work because he believes persistence pays off.

Alfie clearly emphasizes his motivation, aspiration, and hardworking nature in his narrative. Yet, he feels he has to work hard to ensure that he is perceived as embodying these characteristics by prospective employers.

The third example is from the narrative told by Michael who moved to Swindon from Goa, India, about 10 years earlier when he was 11, and thus had undertaken his secondary schooling in the UK. His parents had moved the family to the UK in the hope of expanding the range of educational options for their two sons. His father currently worked as a forklift driver and his mother in production for a subsidiary of Honda. At the time of the initial interview, Michael was living with his family and had been struggling to secure work after having received disappointing A-level results. (A levels are British school examinations taken at the end of secondary school, usually aged 18, and are a key route to university.) He explained how he found that he was at a disadvantage for work in the retail sector, where he thinks women are at an advantage and also, for manual labor, where he argued that older men with bigger builds win out:

I think if you want to have people at the tills, I think they'd rather hire girls for that because I think they're just more approachable and I think...better character for the store than like having old men or something.... Yes, but for more manual jobs then obviously we're men, but obviously they'll be choosing older men who are like more built I guess, so I kind of fit none of them!

By the time of the second interview 4 months later, Michael had managed to secure a job with a 6 h a week contract at a household appliances and electronics retail store. The employer had staff work 39 h, enough to not have to pay overtime, during the busy Christmas season months. With the recession, a similar chain closed down, and the employees from that business sought work at Michael's place of employment. These workers were hired as they had extensive experience in relevant areas, and so Michael lost his additional hours, partly due to the influx of the new workers but also because of the end of the Christmas season.

This low-paid, limited-hour retail job is not what Michael wants to be doing. His long-term aspiration was to work as an engineer, and he had hoped for an appren­ticeship with a subsidiary of Honda. His family's financial situation has been relatively stable over the past 10 years, although his parents were anxious about the potential effects of the Honda decision. However, finding the job at the retail outlet had been a benefit for him as it made him less reliant on his parents for financial support. Thus, for Michael, this part-time job was acceptable in the short term, and while he remained aware of its precariousness, he also talked about how it allowed him to save money little by little - money that he hoped to use to buy a house one day. Being able to live with his parents was an important part of the reason why he was able to accept a minimal hour contract.

What Michael really aspired to was an engineering apprenticeship. He was anxiously waiting to find out if the apprenticeship schemes at a subsidiary of Honda, for which he had applied, were still going to be running in light of the layoffs.

I pretty much just call up every day to find out if they have got any news about the apprenticeship. They don't really know anything. I was one of the more higher achieving ones [in school], so if they are still going through with it, I should get it, but that's if it still goes through.

Yet, while Michael describes himself as “one of the high achieving ones,” he wrestles with the racialized negative associations he sees are attached to Goans in Swindon. In a manner that resonates with Alfie's distancing and differentiation from certain forms of “hard” working-class masculinities, Michael describes how he tended to distance himself from other Goans in Swindon.

I’ve tried to avoid the Goan community since I've been a kid, since I've moved here to be honest. Cause they just kept themselves as a bad crowd, to be fair. They, there's always been kids that tend to get caught with the police and everything. I've never thought of myself as a Goan person- well, I am a Goan person, but as part of a Goan community, just because I always tried to avoid being friends just with Goan people when, after secondary school...

The example of Michael is used to illustrate the different ways in which the young working-class young men grappled with the symbolic violence of the classed, gendered, and also racialized/ethnicized constructions of their value. What might be described as “structural violence,” the violence exerted by the retraction of economic opportunity and lack of the availability of decent work, intersects with the construction of working-class young men as divided into the dualistic categories of strivers or skivers or the deserving and undeserving poor. This process is complicated by contradictory processes of racialization, in which certain bodies are constructed as more docile and amenable workers suitable for “lumpen labor,” as we found was the case for Indians (and Goans) in Swindon. Yet, these stereotypes coexisted with negative representations of the Goans in Swindon as associated with troublemaking and criminality.

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