We publish these reflections as an additional online-only article in issue #23. This inquiry was the product of a conversation that occurred just after we had sent this issue to print, between an editor and their friend who previously worked for several years as a carpenter. He discusses the nature of construction work, changes in the labour process within carpentry, and the forms of workers’ power that currently exist in the industry.

When people find out that I used to work as a carpenter, they often tell me that they’re jealous, that they wish they did a ‘real job’ like that. I stare at them quizzically: “do you work in the abstract?”

I think it’s pretty silly phraseology, but it does conjure up a certain image: men wearing hard hats, hammer in hand climbing up and down a scaffold, sweat dripping from their brows. From a radical perspective, this masculinist vision of the construction worker seems to embody the classical imaginary of the proletarian subject, and Marx’s critical economic categories are easy to see materialised in the tactility of the construction process. Yet, in Britain at least, the building industry has been stubbornly resistant to that presumed corollary of industrialisation - organisation. This is despite the fact that construction remains far and away the most dangerous profession in the UK, with 51 direct fatalities last year alone.¹ The innumerable number of others who have indirectly had their lives shortened through the ‘social murder’ of the work doesn’t bear thinking about.

There have been cursory moments of militancy, a highlight being the 1972 Building Workers’ Strike, in which over 200,000 workers at more than 7,000 sites across the country downed tools and stopped work, supported by waves of flying pickets.² Initially successful, securing a pay increase and health and safety improvements, the victory however proved short lived. Twenty-four of the strikers were arrested, with six jailed and sixteen receiving suspended sentences for a variety of offences including conspiracy to intimidate, affray, and unlawful assembly. Although some resistance persisted, notably the Building Workers Action Group, a support group created in the wake of the arrests with an association to East London Big Flame,³ this again proved short lived. A multi-pronged attack on the industry with collusion from the government, business, and the police followed, resulting in the blacklisting of thousands of organisers,⁴ widespread privatisation and the mass uptake of self-employment within the sector. Militancy has remained at incredibly low levels. There have been a few cursory glimmers of success, like the strike from housing maintenance workers in Manchester covered in Notes From Below, but this would seem to be an outlier.

Yet the sector is vital. Housing and its availability is one of the most politically pertinent questions of our generation, and any potential vision of a mass-transformation of society needs necessarily to account for it. Although pleasurable to indulge in, quixotic fantasies of Walter Segal style self-building programmes won’t cut it: communist architecture requires communist builders. But there is scant writing about construction from the left, and examples of inquiry into the sector are limited. There are a few examples of autobiography and life-writing from carpenters in America, replete with granular details surrounding the development of roof cutting techniques or examples of incredibly specific tool alterations, but little contemporary commentary on work conditions.⁵ What follows here is a cursory sketch of my experience within the sector, and a gesture towards workers’ inquiry as a way to apprehend seemingly opaque class activity.

Ask any builder and they’ll have a gruesome story or two to tell. There’s a perverse kind of joy in this amor fati, and in sharing these stories an awareness of the danger only a saw’s blade width away. My college lecturer once recalled watching a man get crushed in an incorrectly supported trench foundation, the weight of the earth squeezing the air out of his lungs as they all scrambled to try and claw him out, hands frantically digging at the earth. An ex-girlfriend’s grandfather remembered the time a worker took his hard hat off for a split second just to scratch his head, while simultaneously five floors above him someone just happened to drop a hammer. My first boss rolled a mini digger and severed all the muscles of his shoulder; and more than one colleague had a missing finger or two. I’ve been working on building sites off and on since I was a teenager, and have thankfully escaped any serious injury so far. I’ve worked a variety of jobs in the construction industry, mostly within carpentry. I spent a few years as a site carpenter working on residential construction, and a few more as a bench joiner for a number of different companies. During this period, I completed a three-year apprenticeship, earning the hallowed honour of an NVQ in ‘Wood Occupations’ in the process. As opposed to site carpenters, who travel from site to site taking their tools and equipment with them, bench joiners are workshop based, working with specialised free-standing machinery to manufacture bespoke items of joinery: mainly doors, windows and stairs, and increasingly kitchens and wardrobes, amongst a huge variety of other things. Think of those sliding sash windows in your HMO Victorian terrace that won’t open or close properly and let all the draft in - that was us, sorry.

Most bench joiners are employed within larger companies - the overheads are simply too large to set up alone. Modern joinery shops nowadays have literally hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment, everything from industrial drum sanders to fully equipped spray-painting booths. We used to joke that we were actually factory workers – and that’s not far from the truth, especially in the larger workshops. Joinery shops are essentially small-scale factories, but with some fundamental differences mostly owing to the complexity of the labour involved. As opposed to a traditional factory organised on Fordist lines, where workers are chained to one particular station and the item under construction moves independently through the different stations almost at its own will, traditional joiners are responsible for every aspect of production and move with the work. This involves a quite staggering level of technical skill and knowledge which takes years to learn, and is why apprenticeships as a form of ‘on the job’ training are still prominent. Even on finishing my apprenticeship I still had huge amounts to learn; and it’s not generally until at least 5 years of experience that a tradesman might be considered ‘time served’, or fully trained. Until very recently, this labour process has remained remarkably unchanged since the early 20th century. As I write this, I’m sat thumbing through my copy of George Ellis’ Modern Practical Joinery published in 1908, and it’s quite shocking how similar the machinery and labour process is to today, albeit with modern machines having (slightly) more safety features. This is, however, beginning to change. Increasing governmental regulation on the security requirements of doors and windows, called part Q in the industry, is requiring the ever-broadening sophistication of joinery manufacture. Wooden windows and doors are becoming more like their PVC and aluminium counterparts, requiring the implementation of very complex ‘system’ manufacturing processes, aided by ever more automated and technically complex machines. In this vision of manufacture, the material wood itself is merely incidental to the process, it’s treated almost as though it were plastic or steel, with little regard for its natural properties: where and how it moves and swells and how this will affect the long-term utility of the item. In Ellis’ book I mentioned earlier, it’s striking just how much attention was paid to the material reality of the timber, large sections are given over to timber choice and grading, or for instance which ‘sawn’ sections to use for which part of the window. This knowledge is largely absent from contemporary teaching. Both because the luxury of choice has disappeared – there simply isn’t enough good quality timber to be picky - and because of technological innovation. New timber technology, particularly a product called Accoya, in which incredibly quickly grown radiata pine is effectively pickled (a chemical process called acetylation), is proving to be hugely dimensionally stable, rendering long held traditions of manufacture evolved over literally hundreds of years of using natural wood largely redundant. Similarly, modern ‘system’ manufacture processes and the widespread influx of CNC machinery is slowly replacing traditional methods of construction. It’s too early to tell what the effect of this form of real subsumption will do for the labour process, but I’m inclined to think it’ll result in a widespread de-skilling of the labour force.⁶ When boiled down to its essentials, joinery is primarily anchored on the knowledge of how to join discrete pieces of wood together so they won’t fall apart under stress and long-term weather exposure – but if modern glues and manufacturing technologies are rendering this knowledge largely obsolete, it’s difficult to imagine what will happen to the labour force whose livelihood depends on the secrecy of this knowledge, a knowledge handed down through apprenticeships. My intention here is not to make a paean for some kind of anti-civilisation or technology worldview - far from it, nor a kind of normative claim about the value of traditional building techniques, but merely to problematise the notion of the ‘neutral’ technological innovation of capitalism that can be harnessed to build a new society. Master’s tools, master’s house etc…

The apprenticeship process itself was brutal at times for me. In writing this article I dug out an old pay slip from my first year and laughed as I read my wage. I started on £3.50 an hour – apprentice minimum wage at the time. For a full working week, I’d earn about £150. The site I was working on was 40 minutes from my house and factoring in petrol, insurance and vehicle wear and tear I doubt I was even breaking even. If I hadn’t been living at home, there was simply no way I could’ve trained. Naturally, this creates a pretty ludicrous situation where an entire industry is circumscribed to a tiny portion of potential people, and almost entirely forecloses the trades to anyone who doesn’t start straight from school. Unless some form of external funding for apprentices is instituted it’s difficult to imagine a remedy for this situation. Construction apprentices spend 4 days a week working with the firm they work for, and during term time 1 day a week in college. This is called the day release system. In practice, college was pretty useless for learning anything job related. Both the machinery and manufacturing techniques were all quite outdated, and the theory was even more useless. What it did prove useful for however was forging links between apprentices who otherwise would never have met, in what can be quite an isolating time period. More than anything college became a way of sharing experiences of the work: comparing bosses, workshops, tools, pay and conditions. We would frequently try and persuade each other to ask for pay rises or insist that people’s companies had to pay for X or Y protective equipment. Some of us even joined each other’s companies if they proved to be good. But regrettably, our organisation never went further than this informal style of solidarity and help. There was scant reference to any professional organisations available for us to join, let alone any mention of a union. We were, and remain, incredibly atomised.

Organisation on the workshop floor continued on similarly informal lines. This isn’t to say however that it didn’t exist, but that it took almost subterranean forms – what might be termed ‘invisible organisation’.⁷ Construction has the benefit of being rather transparent to those inside it. We knew for instance what an hour of our labour was being charged out to the customer, as opposed to what we were getting paid. We knew, or could reliably work out, the pricing of the items we were making, or the job we were doing, and how long it took us to do it. We knew our current ‘lead time’ – or how busy we were in the upcoming months. Many of us had worked at other local companies, and knew precisely how much other carpenters or other trades were being paid and charged out at. We also knew, from anecdotal experience of going to college, how few other tradesmen there were and how hard it was to find any to employ. For instance, of the five people in my year who got the full college qualification, only one is still in the industry and we were on the only training programme run in the county. The numbers are staggeringly small. All of this together resulted in a spectral form of power we were able to yield, entirely invisible to the bosses, and, I might add, to ourselves.

This isn’t meant to paint some utopian picture of job sites entirely run by the workers who acted as they pleased. Quite the opposite – our gains were small, but they did exist. We ran, for instance, informal slowdowns. We all worked together to ensure that none of us worked faster than we had to. If one of us was finishing a job particularly quickly, it wasn’t uncommon to hear someone tell them to slow down, that they were making us look bad, and if the bosses knew we could do it that quick then they’d expect more from us. We’d frequently over-estimate how long things would take too, giving us more breathing time to take it slow and relax a little. We all openly discussed salaries and wondered how to level this knowledge against our bosses when asking for pay rises. We consistently eked out minutes on break times. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I would constantly steal small bits of timber and other materials here and there for weekend projects, or use the machines for my own personal use. None of this is anything new, or anything particularly interesting, and similar things have happened everywhere I’ve worked - not just construction. But I think there is a grain of theoretical importance here, one that homes in on the core insight of workers’ inquiry. Inquiry, in its positionality inside the labour process allows for an explication of worker autonomy that would be missed by traditional sociological or historical labour analysis which privilege the actions of class organs – precisely because that autonomy is not class consciously articulated through any traditionally organised form. We were explicitly resisting exploitation, providing solidarity and help to each other, and making our working life a little better, but doing so completely outside of the bounds of any conscious articulation of worker power. Organisation for us was entirely unmediated, even by any concrete subjectivity of class⁸ - it was instead a merely rational reaction to the conditions of our labouring. It’s common parlance in contemporary leftist circles to decry the lack of current worker organisation, citing declining union rates or strike actions, and this is, of course, a huge problem. But it isn’t enough to shackle worker autonomy entirely to the forms of organisation apotheosised in the Twentieth Century. Without getting bogged down in Theorie Communiste style critiques of programmatism,⁹ there is, I think, a pertinent utility in forms of investigation which can broaden the scope of what’s considered organisation. And these investigations could help to create new avenues of struggle, rather than continuing to flog the dead horse of orthodox unionism, particularly in industries as fragmented as construction.

Let me end this short reflection with a little anecdote. I remember one quiet afternoon on site, just me and a colleague working, everyone else must’ve been on different jobs or running errands. My colleague happened to be the most militant of all of us, constantly threatening to leave, asking about pay, and working out how much they were making the company. Typically we’d have the radio blaring, and every hour the news would rattle on. This particular day there’d been a story about sewage getting pumped into rivers, and, as I’d just started to read Marx and had an answer to everything, I’d loudly exclaimed that it was capitalism’s fault. My militant colleague turned to me with a blank expression, ‘…what’s that?’ he said.