I'm Alright, Jack

Do you ever catch yourself in that 'Mortal Kombat' bounce? Rocking from foot to foot, fists up, ready to go at a moments notice. Always ready for the worst, always ready for the drudgery of people being predictably terrible. I can't remember the last time I wasn't in this mode.

 I'm moving out of the first place I've lived at alone, downsizing my rent to live in the sticks. My landlords, a diplomat and his glamorous wife, are proud owners of an enormous classic car collection and fans of cutting off our water because they're installing a private plunge pool. They've told me times are tough so have decided to hold my security deposit ransom. In return, I'm reporting them for tax evasion and plan on fleeing in the night in their vintage Porsche. Now is not the time to take anything lying down.

In 2013, I’d started feeding tidbits of office drama to reporters who I knew had an axe to grind with VICE. It was at first for my own morbid satisfaction. I've been treated badly so let's tell a reporter about who can't keep their dick in their pants and which people lost their jobs due to "scaling down" the week after they installed Dyson Airblades. I was hiding in the cinema room hard-snitching over the phone when one of my managers trotted in and I confidently shooed him away. Am I a sociopath? Perhaps. But I remember it clearly because it was the year when things had started to change fast. Morale was collapsing and it’d become exceptionally frustrating working there.

It began with this dramatic lurch towards hard news in an attempt to clean up their image. Everyone from the old era was relegated to village idiots and reprimanded for not having the training they’d never provided. Instead, respected journalists were parachuted in, the kind of journalists who only do cocaine at awards ceremonies instead of, like, on a Wednesday. It made me nauseous watching bosses ingratiate themselves to them. These are people who’d hired interns according to tit size now reporting on women’s rights or the intricacies of Venezuelan politics like they had a clue.

The official launch of the news channel opened up a sinkhole in that it was a hastily and badly planned pet project that haemorrhaged money. And so began this descent into the state fraternising with the church to plug the hole. A progressive new women’s vertical! Sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. A culture platform! Sponsored by Heineken. A branded content mill! Bankrolled by Philip Morris and you have to sign a non-disclosure to write for them. It was weird and it was duplicitous. I know that we’re in the belly of this beast now but to be caught in the riptide of hoping you could do interesting stuff without needing a vape pen sponsor was sad. The small joy of working on compelling things but for bad pay vanished. Not only did everything become compromised by keeping the corporate overlords happy but only management was seeing the financial spoils. Our salaries, even the news reporters, stagnated.

Everything started to become too slick. It went from work parties being 5 am pub lock-ins to Craig David doing a polite performance of “Fill Me In”, from drunk cash bonuses to a gift bag with branded socks and jellybeans. I know the era before has been parodied and rightly ripped to shreds, tainted with how problematic it all was, but there were moments of brilliance. If someone had told eighteen-year-old me they would jump the shark as hard as they did I would’ve squared up.

Still, the cultural cache of working there was a powerful, albeit lame, factor in clinging onto your job. If only because most had gone too far in cultivating a lifestyle that was untenable anywhere else. But then Disney came and then Rupert Murdoch and what felt like a hundred other branded channels. Any morsel of credibility was fast slipping away.

What had started as dissatisfied rumblings of organising a union were in full swing in both New York and London when staff were invited to peculiar media training sessions. I found the woman doing them disarming as she took an interest in what I was working on and, by that point, I was so starved of career affection that I was clucking for direction. I learnt how I shouldn’t mouth curse words or smile awkwardly when I’m asked something contentious. That wasn’t the strange part, though. The strange part was, out of nowhere, being given instructions on how to field questions about Murdoch. She chirpily affirmed, “You can be honest because they don’t have any say in editorial, correct?” In my head, I was muttering “nottruenottruenottrue” but I was impressed by the stones of it all. Are you even going to put any sweetener in this Kool-Aid we have to drink? I smiled awkwardly. 

By the time there were a handful of people regularly coming to the unionising meetings I wanted blood. I was frothing at the mouth for action; a strike, a picket line, bottles of urine volleyed into management’s offices. Give me extremes or give me death! The reality was a lot slower and unsatisfying. Getting any momentum meant getting more people on side and, to my horror, yelling was not effective. Having to work not only in a team but covertly was a steep learning curve for someone as rabid as I was feeling. Like a toddler in a perpetual temper tantrum having to learn not to indulge their rage.

I want to be clear at this point that I'm not trying to nurture a martyr complex. I know how it must sound grandstanding about the torment of wanting to radicalise a publication which once covered the progress of literal turds in a jar. But it was on principle. It's a failing on our part how trade unions just kind of faded from the consciousness of a generation. They work and they hold those who would otherwise refuse to care accountable. An industry that's supposed to be the public mouthpiece should reflect us and it never has.

I understand the fear of losing your income as well as respecting that most people want a quiet life, a corner sofa and savings, and so they should. But at the time I was rattled by who was resistant to what I felt was a no-brainer. I went for lunch with a colleague to woo them into signing up, thinking it’d be easy as their professional persona revolved around being this cringe nouveau-Communist. So I was quietly incandescent when they scoffed, “How would it help me?”

It wasn’t what I thought was selfishness that bothered me. It was a selfishness while leveraging an image of advocacy, of announcing you’re a Good Person while staying firmly in the remit of protecting your own interests. It summed up so much of the direction the industry, not only the company, was shamelessly stomping in: outwardly hand-wringing liberals in the streets, complete bastards to their staff in the sheets. An ‘I’m alright, Jack’ mentality at its most egregious.

More people did join until there was enough to have a big meeting, with leaflets and a microphone and everything. Discounting the river of misery that was to follow it’s probably the proudest I’ve felt in my professional life. Like, euphoria levels through the roof, want to hug everyone pride. It'd been a sage lesson in curbing what I like to think of as an activism ego. That enacting change is often a quiet, slow and disheartening build before it erupts and is reliant on numbers, not one person loudly announcing they give a shit. 

By the time enough staff had signed up for representatives from the official trade union to physically get into the office, I was in a “totally unrelated” disciplinary. Given their suggestions of wearing pins or getting union mugs made, and not going with my bottles of piss idea, I wasn’t convinced they could handle how vindictive the company was.

The hearings would drag on for so long that they started to hire rooms outside of the office because our presence was distracting. Which the Karen from Human Resources pained to point out cost them money each time. The worst of my behaviour for almost six years, everything that could be used to humiliate, was recounted in technicolour by senior bosses taking it in turns to get a kidney punch in. During an adjournment, I went outside for some air (read: cigarette) and perhaps one of the most senior sneeringly asked if I was going to cry. The reps, however, never blinked, never judged and I was grateful. 

In the very first hearing, my union representative was offered a drink, given a glass of water and we sat there silently waiting as she took the longest, most leisurely gulps. Then placed the glass down carefully and launched into the deftest jugular attack on the management I will ever have the privilege of witnessing. I was stunned. 

I’d been resigned to walking away so I didn’t have to do the hearings. But after that, I thought, even if we lose we should go down fucking swinging. So we did.