Temping vs Unpaid Work

A screen across from me holds the words "KEEP TRYING" for a fleeting moment as a headline is zoomed in on. I suppose that is what I will do.

This week I am working unpaid for the my local paper. Being a fortunate person means I have enough savings to survive for a while during this recession. There's always an optimistic view. I try to see it this way and push out the other glaring headlines:

Graduates told: 'work at KFC'
Women hit hard by downturn

I promised myself once that I would not be taken for a ride and be a long-term intern. That I would not effectively pay to work. I used to say if I was good enough in my chosen career, then work would come my way.

Things look different now I have chosen to pursue a career in journalism and now that we are in the clutches of a recession.

On the best online resource for local-news jobs today there are no vacancies for junior reporters. A colleague of mine tells me there used to be fifteen at a time a few years ago when he was first applying.

Things wouldn't be so much better for me in a temping job, which is my other option. Working for free means no-one can complain when I have to go to the dentist, or need the morning off to let in the washing-machine repair man.

You can not get sacked for taking a day off, or having an off day, when you are working for free. When you are on a rolling contract in a temporary position this is more than possible, as I know from bitter experience.

Working unpaid in journalism builds my skills rather than chanelling me into a career I do not enjoy. I will keep telling myself this and keep trying. Hopefully I will get a job offer before lack of money forces me into another line of work.

Manchester

No sooner have I re-activated my London blog than I go off to Manchester. I expect to visit a few different cities soon, and have had this little idea for a while about verbatim snapshots, so head to my new blog and try it on for size:


http://verbritain.blogspot.com/

2008 in a nutshell

My last offerings to this blog were as a disorientated returnee from afar one year ago. Here's a re-cap of 2008 in London as I experienced it:

The English language industry was booming and corrupt as ever. Lots of schools, lots of jobs, lots of tired looking Columbian, Chinese, Mongolian, Brazilian and Mexican students coming into my classes from early cleaning shifts or leaving to go to long supermarket shifts, car washing, waitering etc. I rarely met anyone getting paid as much as minimum wage or working as little as the home office insists foreign students are permitted to.

I myself worked cash in hand as a night-club photographer to supplement my meager teaching income. I also took on more teaching jobs than were strictly healthy, back-to backing different schools across central London, working from 9am to 8.30pm with my breaks devoted to commuting between schools or planning my next lesson.

Around April I noticed an odd phenomenon, which was that the bank manager really really wanted me to start investing in high risk stocks and shares. He promised "aggressive competitive rates of return" or something of the like. I decided not to put my money on the line, expecting I'd get sick of working and do something else and probably need my money available and not tied up in all sorts of risk.

Around the same time, all the people I knew working in finance started getting a bit jumpy about their jobs, and some got redundancy with gardening leave. Sounds like heaven: three months full pay as long as you don't sell on trade secrets.

They didn't give me gardening leave from my last teaching job. They barely gave me notice. I had eventually dropped the other schools I had been working for to do morning shifts at one, with the promise of more hours to come. I found myself teaching German in the afternoons at the same school. They seemed upset that I was working across two departments. After six months of having my two-week contract constantly renewed, suddenly one day it wasn't going to be renewed.

I continued to get odd bits of German teaching work with the same school, but my main source of income came to an abrupt halt. This coming just as I moved out of my rent-free accommodation, and into a shared flat in South London.

Then BBC Radio Africa gave me a call following an application I barely remembered having put in a few months previous, and I did a week's work experience with a call in show.

2008 was a year of continuing progress for Angola, who had continued Chinese investment in the oil industry, leading to building of infrastructure such as hospitals and schools. However, there is still a shortage of doctors and teachers.

Then a week in photographic for my local paper, which was followed by paid photographic work which I did along side a course in newspaper journalism.

Lehman Brothers collapsed. I had never heard of Lehman Brothers, but was happy I hadn't decided to invest my money on the stock market.

Five months of learning what makes news. Then blissful unemployment. One week in. Anything could happen.

For a more current slice of current journalism in London, go to http://sethkin.blogspot.com/
http://www.boozythursdays.blogspot.com/

London Calling

Sept 2006 - Feb 2008 I was in Berlin. I got homesick. I'm back.



I arrived on Monday 4th February and slept pretty much the whole day. I applied for jobs on Tuesday, went to interviews on Wednesday, signed my contract on Friday and started work as a part-time English as a Foreign Language teacher on the following Monday.

Over the first two weeks I ate all the *great* cuisine I'd missed while I was away. Cheap sliced bread, spaghetti hoops on toast, marmite on toast, cheddar cheese on toast, matzos, shortbread, oatcakes, peanut butter on toast, cadbury's cream eggs, weetabix, shreddies, readybrek, grapenuts. I guess many of these things were available somewhere in Berlin, but the German classyness must have rubbed off on me when I was there.

Alongside that I began settling in to the life that's here for me. I live with my brother, who is currently involved in making short films for the internet. Consequently I came home from teaching the other day to find a Scotsman (with an extrodinarily Italian sounding name) in my kitchen editing a three minute gangster short with another guy I know from an (almost) straight to DVD film we'd once worked on together.

By the by we got talking and I found myself taking still photos for an R&B artist, Sheya, the following Saturday.

Still from 'Dream Come True' video by Sheya, photo by N. Christie

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I'm still a bit disorientated to be in London. Things are pretty easy. There are jobs aplenty. I can live indefinitely in a flat no-one is going to evict me from. I suddenly own an awful lot of things; books, CDs, childhood relics. I have a ready made social network of city-slicking Cambridge grads, and Cambridge itself not far away packed with even more old friends.

Before I came home for good, I made a couple of visits to the UK. Firstly to the village I grew up in:

Stubbington, photo by N. Christie

I'd not been back for two years, and had grown somewhat aprehensive of the place I spent my troublesome and bored adolescence. It was surprisingly untraumatic yet still mundane.

And then to London, where I knew I'd be moving too. So I was pretty well prepared by the time I got back. Still, I felt like a time traveller when I visited the i-store and saw all the new technology that seems not to have quite hit Friedrichshain yet. And like a foreigner whenever people mention things that have been in the UK media of late.