I am the facilities manager at a barristers’ chambers located in Temple, London. It is a relatively new chambers, formed after 2000. There are roughly 50 barristers (also called members), who do work which can broadly be called commercial. It involves a lot of property, landlord & tenant, and insolvency disputes. Since we are new-ish and specialised, barristers are incentivised to join by our low tenancy rent rates. These are the proportion of barristers’ earnings which are taken by chambers, following the same logic (or otherwise) as the Laffer Curve.¹ There are currently 14 members of staff, of which eight are clerks, five are marketing and admin, and one receptionist.

This is my first full-time facilities management job after doing bits and pieces in music venues while at university and a few related small stewarding gigs at festivals. Day to day in my role, I can be doing all sorts of things: repairs, maintenance, surveying, IT support, clearing out the basement, plumbing, roofing, or organising supplies. When there is nothing pressing in the building (and sometimes when there is) I will help out with marketing, updating things on the website or social media, and other such guff. Marketing in chambers means marketing for chambers, but also for the individual barristers as and when requested. It’s a weird balancing act that often puts different interests in conflict with one another.

I’m grateful for the variety of tasks I get - I would struggle to do the same thing day in and day out - but I find myself coming to the end of the day struggling to recall what I actually achieved, having spent so long running around putting out fires. I also think that while it is mentally stimulating to be solving so many problems, my brain feels supercharged to the point where it struggles with remembering the smell of flowers or the faces of loved ones. More than managing facilities, the dominant feeling I get is that my job is to help the barristers occupying it with any problem they might have. Again, this can be satisfying at times; but at other times I find myself thinking that I am literally just a facilitator of their lives, and it’s a struggle to feel fulfilled by that.

Of course this inquiry isn’t just about me or my job, but about my workplace overall. I think that the feeling of facilitating others’ lives is a common one across the workforce here. The idea of a chambers as a workplace is of a deeply opaque and archaic institution, one which I think no one outside of the industry understands. I had no idea that barristers were self-employed until I saw the job offer and looked into it. I found it even harder to understand how they can then have staff working for them. It is all a little contradictory and contrived, and I think these contradictions run through all levels of the class composition here.

The technical composition of chambers

The most notable thing about our technical composition is that, since all the barristers are self-employed, they actually outnumber staff by about four to one. There isn’t a large pool of exploited staff but instead, a pretty small one, which I think is quite unique and maybe gives things a less obviously exploitative appearance. The staff are basically split into two categories, the first of which is clerks, who manage the practice of the barristers by speaking to solicitors and the courts. Clerking tends to be something you grind away at for a long time to rise the ranks. At my chambers, there are broadly three tiers of clerks in terms of seniority: seniors, who are between 40 and 50, the middles who are around 30, and juniors who are 18-21. It is a really interesting job (I say, probably because I don’t do it), requiring good communication and people skills. They need the ability to compromise and be practical, often over the phone with opponents, and the patience to deal with barristers through all their quirks and temper tantrums. Conversely, I’ve never seen any of our clerks properly blow a fuse in over a year of working here, and they have had every right to do so at times.

The rest of the staff is made up of broadly administrative roles. There are a few marketers, a receptionist, an accountant, and myself the facilities manager. These roles generally have a quicker turnover and as a result, attract a fair few temp workers. The division of labour is fairly unclear. For example, facilities and governance/accounts used to be combined, meaning the person working that role was constantly overspread and struggled to prioritise some of the longer-term building work, but now isn’t. Problems and tasks will come up, raised by the barristers, and we have to work out who needs to solve them.

Lastly, it is worth discussing the barristers since outside of their practice they operate the board-level positions on a voluntary basis as well. There is a head of chambers, a secretary (deputising the head), a treasurer, and officers for IT, diversity, complaints, staff liaison, and other things. Since these are purely voluntary, there are some who do get involved and are enjoyable to work with, whereas others who you wouldn’t know were the officers unless you made it your job to find out. These positions are not part of their job. So whenever they are busy with their practice, it is a guarantee that they will relegate these responsibilities, which can be an issue when something pressing happens.

In one sense, a lot of the barristers share the precarity which a lot of us as workers experience. But in another, the success of chambers (particularly as we are constantly growing) and the nature of the job mean they are paid a lot more for their time, have their own private workspaces, and choose their own hours. And when it comes to things like maternity and menopause policy, where we have solid coverage in place for barristers and essentially nothing for staff, the distinction becomes even more clear. Overall, the reality is that the barristers exist in a different class from the staff on the ground floor, and people who’ve worked at other chambers tell me that this is the way it is across the industry.

The social composition of chambers

In terms of social class, the clerks tend to be from working class backgrounds and are hired through word of mouth. There are clerks at other chambers who have a degree in clerking, but none here. Through working at it for long periods of time, the massive amounts of experience they’ve built up is clearly more valuable than a degree. Most of them commute from Essex and are almost all male. It’s a very ‘matey’ atmosphere, which can verge on laddish. I wouldn’t say it’s toxic, particularly when you hear about how bad it used to be in that respect. As a male, I’m confident that the worst parts of it probably affect me a great deal less than they do non-male members of staff. The top end of clerks are paid fairly well, which is obviously a justified reward for devoting their lives to the profession for decades, and this incentive is clearly in the sights of those lower down the chain. It’s what they are working towards. Outside of their salary, clerks get a bonus based on the surplus at the end of the year, so their interests are quite neatly and exploitatively tied to how much money they can make for the barristers. When I speak to them, it’s clear that they view their salaries (outside of salary review) as fixed and non-negotiable; so the best they can fight for is a bigger bonus.

The marketers and the other areas I mention are where there tend to be more graduates, from more of a middle-class background, and more females. I am the only male non-clerking staff member in chambers. There is also far less of a sense of a ladder to be climbed. As I mentioned, the turnover is much more frequent, and someone in my position doesn’t have any further rungs to climb. There is no one above me in my role, and no one below. These staff sit adjacent to the main clerks’ room, which is the hub of the business. There is a sense in which we are outside of the main event, the actual nitty-gritty of legal practice. Although we all like and respect one another, I think the separation of staff into these two areas is an obstacle for building solidarity within chambers.

Finally, the barristers are exclusively degree-holders and mostly privately educated. They are mostly male as well, similar to the clerks’ composition. And again, like the clerks, the idea of a ladder to climb in the profession is central to it. Chambers aim to have barristers across all levels of seniority to offer different options to clients, as well as to instil the idea that you can progress all the way to the top. The relationship between clerks and barristers is a really interesting (and classically Marxist) symbiotic one; they cannot exist without each other. Again however, the fact that there are more barristers than clerks obscures the exploitative nature of this relationship when it comes to the profits generated from clerking labour, which allow the very low tenant fee and thus for barristers to make money far exceeding what staff are rewarded with.

I think one of the most important factors in our social composition is that as a newish chambers, we present ourselves as friendly, open, and unpretentious. For the most part I would say this is true. We do a lot of social events, put on lunches, and the vast majority of people I work with are (most of the time) pleasant and considerate. Once more, the problem with this is that it serves to cover up the economic facts, which are common enough; the success of the business is not shared fairly among the people who contribute to it. I am raising this in the context of Ed Emery’s call to, in the midst of class war, ‘respond in the language of war’. What I took from this is not to murder my boss, or threaten to, but rather the importance of recognising exploitative relations as exploitative, no matter the kindness and politeness which decorate them. Call a spade a spade. Some in chambers have referred to it (and who doesn’t with a small business) as a family - but after laundering one too many sets of smelly barrister collars, the love just isn’t quite there for me.

Two brief examples

First, an example of the culture of communication in chambers. As facilities manager, I am constantly informing people of things going on in the buildings, and don’t really need any responses back. However, in my other guise as a marketer, it is often essential to get confirmation from members on things. We are ignored like the plague. It is a pretty laughable situation which reaches an extreme where we have to condense things into a newsletter to help barristers - whose main skill is the ability to deal with large amounts of written information. We send these emails out into the void, but when a barrister phones me, or comes down to my desk with eyes like I’ve just murdered their firstborn, I have no choice but to engage. The whole idea of an ‘open-door’ policy is entirely one way. Second, recently we had an ‘Annual’ Meeting’ (the annual is in quote marks as it was the first in probably north of ten years) which took place on a Saturday morning in chambers. It was essentially a chance for everyone to discuss strategy. I had scheduled health & safety (H&S) checks on the Saturday which the meeting took place on, and simultaneously organised the day’s unfashionable logistics, from seating, IT setup, to where we went afterwards for drinks.

During the meeting I was in and out supervising the H&S surveyance, and was also asked to go downstairs to put a barrister’s phone on charge. I stood outside the room leaning in as all the seats were taken. I had set out spares assuming barristers would attend, despite having not told me they would, but I still managed to underestimate how many would simply rock up unannounced. I could handle all of this as fairly standard, but I was separately pretty upset by a barrister who I’d barely spoken to during my time in chambers. For context, I do not ever work from home, but he does most of the time. After the meeting, he came up to me while drunk to ask what it was exactly I actually did, and repeatedly and aggressively insinuated that I was essentially stealing a living. Eventually I walked away, but the idea stuck with me that the barristers who don’t engage genuinely have no idea of the work that staff put in. Subsequently they have no respect for it, and no desire to honour it with fair conditions. That was disheartening, and a good eye-opener for what the friendly principles of chambers are covering up.

Gift giving

One of the most eye-opening episodes I experienced which demonstrates how our familial culture is an obstacle to improving conditions was the Christmas gift-giving. This is a tradition through most, if not all, chambers. It is a good symbol to my mind of the barrister-clerk relationship in all its unspoken condescension. Simply put, the tradition is that at Christmas, barristers thank clerks (and other staff) for their hard work by presenting them with an expensive bottle of alcohol, often champagne. Other than a few of the most senior members, who went for very generously bourgeois John Lewis gift cards, I (and all other staff members) received around 15 bottles of champagne, gin, whiskey and wine. 90% of it is still sitting in my room, either ageing or just gathering dust.

It’s difficult, but should be totally acceptable, to react ‘ungratefully’ to this tradition. While it’s obviously generally better to receive a free commodity than not, the options available upon receiving the gifts are pretty limited. Either drink unhealthy amounts of alcohol, re-gift it, or buy something delightfully tasteful from John Lewis - something which I had no intention of doing until I received the gift cards.² Of course, when receiving these gifts we thank the giver, but once the ordeal was nearly over, I did also attempt to mention a few times to colleagues how strange I found the whole practice. I drink, and so could in one sense consider myself one of the lucky ones. But there is a far deeper point about surplus value here: if a barrister is freely willing and able to spend at least a thousand pounds on luxury gifts at the end of the year, it seems pretty obvious to my mind that staff could easily be paid a better wage. This is a simple socialist tenet. In a better world, charity’s reliance on private goodwill and all the inefficiencies of it would be abolished.

My attempts to bring this up were met with pushback in the sense that the gifts were given an emotional edge. It was supposedly ‘nice’, or ‘considerate’, to be given something in person as opposed to a higher number on a payslip. That is despite one of the more tech-savvy barristers sending an email with a spreadsheet in which to put your name next to which type of booze you’d want. When I started here, I set out trying to be frugal with chambers’ money, thinking it would reflect well on my performance. However, when upgrading the toilet seats to a more luxurious standard gets discussed more than staff salaries, eventually you just give up on that. I do see that my scepticism of chambers’ niceness has a bit of cold materialism to it, so I wonder what better ways the argument for better base conditions can be made. Of course, it’s nicer to receive a heartfelt gift from a loved one than it is a tenner, but in the workplace the situation is inverted; an employer obscuring the exploitative nature of their relationship through the trappings of family is a con. One which I imagine occurs in workplaces across industries and all over the world.

However, what really dominated the discourse around gift-giving this year was not what I have mentioned about surplus value, but instead the reaction (mainly from senior clerks) to the Bar Council’s recommendations on gifting policies.³ These recommendations seem to date to 2019/20, but at our meeting were talked about as if they were hot off the press, which gives a good insight into how rarely chambers-wide communication actually takes place. Here is the first paragraph of the page-long recommendations on gift-giving to staff:

Giving the occasional gift to your clerk, for instance at Christmas or on their birthday, is a longstanding tradition at the bar. However, it is important that any gift is proportionate and of modest value. The need for restraint is to ensure that it does not result in any advantage or perceived advantage to the giver in terms of allocation of work or access to work opportunities.

Within our meeting this was brought up (by barristers) with the understandable priority of helping/protecting the interests of barristers at the most junior end, who are unfamiliar with the tradition, less intimate with the staff, and most importantly earning less - so more likely to wince at the idea of forking out for 14 bottles of Dom Pérignon. They might fear that not buying a clerk an expensive bottle would lead to them being consciously or unconsciously overlooked for briefs coming in. Like 99% of what was discussed in that meeting, very little concrete policy change came about as a result of these discussions. However, I do think that they probably led more barristers to not give gifts when Christmas came around.

Most noticeably, the senior clerks in particular were furious about the discussions and viewed it as an insult to the hard work they put in over the course of the year. I have a lot of respect for them and think they are brilliant at their jobs, so I think it is more my lack of experience compared to them which lets me see things in a way they don’t. In one sense, they were absolutely right; it is insulting to them to suggest that after undergoing Fair Allocation of Work training (and after maintaining professional relationships for however many years), not receiving a bottle of booze would lead them to start a personal vendetta. But in another sense, I think that once again the whole culture of gift-giving obscures their position as workers, on whose labour the profits of chambers are generated. As with other instances of this ‘familial’ culture, seemingly benevolent traditions and practices are an effective way of hiding the fact that our small, personal chambers is a capitalist profit-seeking enterprise - just in a more subtle way than at a corporate, global firm.

Everything about the technical and social composition of my chambers is, while on paper a fairly decent setup, in practice an obstacle to workers’ organisation. The clerking ladder encourages them to get their heads down and work for the profits of the barristers, while the other staff are too isolated in their roles to share common ground. My attempts at discussing unionisation have been pretty fruitless. Some people pointed out that there is already an Institute of Barristers’ Clerks - which also allows membership for non-clerking legal staff such as me - but engagement with it is minimal. When the bonus incentive is so clearly laid out, many do not see the benefits of a union. And staff in general are reluctant to be demanding, particularly due to the personal and friendly feel of chambers.

As I write this, I am in the office on a Sunday for roofing which couldn’t happen during the week for fear of disturbing barristers. As I edit, it is now Saturday, and I am back in the same chair after testing emergency lights. Notes From Below’s ‘The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition’ mentions that ‘when workers are recovering from the experience of work they are a mystery. Having escaped their technical composition, they only factor into class composition analysis if they decide to act politically, rather than shopping, eating, relaxing, or sleeping.’ Most of my colleagues are probably doing one of the latter things, and I am lucky and grateful to have discovered this inquiry, because without it, I would be doing the same. Or, simply sitting here scrolling my phone as the clock winds down towards the start of another week. The political composition of my chambers is a mystery, and as a result we are completely unorganised. It’s far off right now, but the more legal workers can talk about their work, the more the composition of legal workplaces can be revealed - and the more opportunities for organisation can be created. The fantastc entries in this collection are a brilliant starting point for that.