THE SOCIAL MOBILITY SCAM
When I worked in commercial restaurant management, back in the 1980s, we employed all sorts. This was London, the melting pot, a place where livings could be made, legitimate or otherwise. Sometimes, we didn’t enquire too rigorously into work permits, visas, and the like: if someone was prepared to spend their days with their heads stuck either in giant sinks stuffed full of greased-up kitchenware, or down the most recently blocked toilet, then good luck to them we’d say, and no questions asked.
One such was a guy we called Prince. He was from somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, was about as much as we knew, or cared to know. The legend had it that he was an actual Prince, back home, here to earn some money for his increasingly penurious tribe. Well, maybe. He didn’t speak a vast amount of English, but then my Swahili isn’t up to much either. He wasn’t the fastest, but he turned up, did what we asked, got paid for it, and went home.
Social mobility for this Prince had brought him to the steaming basements of Chelsea eateries; oh sure, financially, he’d moved up in the world. In other ways…
This isn’t about Prince or his ancestry, or his simultaneous social up-and-down swings, although there is, of course, a lot that can be said about the great colonial hangovers experienced in Africa and elsewhere. No, this is about a dishwasher, any dishwasher, who, to achieve anything in life, has to be aspirational, has to want to work his or her way up. That’s the deal, isn’t it?
Years later, I worked with a woman called Marie on petrol station nightshifts; I was working part-time, studying for a degree; Marie was putting food on the table. She was kind, hard-working, worldly-wise enough, with not the slightest interest in becoming ‘socially mobile’. She’d have welcomed the occasional pay rise, though; that I do know.
There are millions of Princes and Maries; it’s been my pleasure and privilege to work alongside a few over the years. This pandemic has shown us the real value of all this – people serving in shops, delivering groceries, takeaways, emptying the bins. The restaurant couldn’t have functioned without Prince. His work mattered. Is there any way we might perhaps create pay and conditions that reflect the importance of this kind of work? (Over to you, Mr Bezos?)