I was a doorman for about 5 years. I started in 2018, and worked on the door off and on until late last year. It was never my only gig - I also worked construction, admin, gardening, removals and office security at the same time. I wrote about the experience of working through the pandemic for Notes back in 2020¹ but I ended up with more questions than answers. The government had thrown money at the self-employed and I could carry on working cash in hand, so I did alright. The politics I saw taking place around me were a heterogeneous combination of support for BLM and broader anti-racism spliced with COVID conspiracies and a defence of the cash economy. Four years on, I felt like it was important to share the daily reality of work and the voices of the people I worked alongside. I interviewed two of my old coworkers to try and get a sense of what was common across our experiences, and what (if any) political lessons might be learned from an inquiry into our work and life.

One of the interviewees was a mate who worked on the same door as me, at a club in Brighton, just off the seafront. We used to get the bus to work together. We’ll call him Marcus. The other one was an older guy who had worked in the industry for about 40 years, so he could see how everything had changed over time. We’ll call him Steve. In what follows, I want to tell you their stories, think about how they overlap with mine, and try to draw some conclusion about what it’s like to work in security - and why we have to organise alongside security staff as a matter of urgency.

Marcus’ story

Marcus often started his working day by smoking a joint at the bus stop at about 9.30pm. We worked in a door team of 6 or 7 people, so you could afford to be a bit relaxed in the early hours of the night. Strangely enough, being stoned didn’t really stop you dealing with violent situations if you had to. We would chat shit on the bus together as we rode into town, catching up with each other, complaining about the world, and offering each other advice and counsel.

We would get to the club at about 9.50pm. We would get radio’d up and meet the rest of the team who would arrive in dribs and drabs. We were always instructed to have at least two doormen on the front door before the doors were open (the owner would get very upset if we opened the venue with one doorman). We would then get the barriers out, and if it was a busy night, build a smoking area on the street out of fencing.

As the club did not have a dedicated smoking area, people would smoke in the street outside, and sometimes drift towards the flats on the opposite side of the street. This led to complaints from tenants to the council about noise, so we had to construct a smoking area out of fences, to keep the smokers away from the flats opposite. This also had the added benefit of making it easier to keep an eye on the customers.

The first half hour of the shift was very quiet customers wise. The way that club works is there’s an upstairs bar area with acoustic music that’s open till about 11.30pm, and a downstairs club area with a live band open from 10pm, with the live band starting at 11.30pm. The upstairs was sometimes busy, sometimes quiet, and had a separate entrance to the club area. Whoever drew the short straw would have to man the bar area door (often while the head door, who had been there since 7, went to get a burger), whilst everyone else got to stand on the club door entrance and have a laugh. We’d share jokes, make fun of each other, talk about combat sports, how our respective exercise regimes were going, complain about injuries, talk about girls. If someone hadn’t been in the night before we’d update them on anything serious or funny (mostly funny) that had happened the previous night.

Depending on the night, customers would usually start arriving from about 11pm. In previous years, we’d had student deals with very cheap drinks till 11:30pm, leading to a huge queue early on, and then a mass exodus once the deals had ended (£2 shots, £4 doubles), but these stopped in early 2023. When customers arrived there was an element of code switching to a greater or lesser extent among the team. Some would stay in banter mode, some would put their ‘game face’ on, some stayed in between. Marcus always liked to ask slightly weird questions to test people’s vibes. If someone got upset because you’d asked them a slightly off the wall question then it was usually a sign that they were going to be a pain in the ass later in the night.

Most of the time the work was quiet. You might circulate downstairs and do some internal security inside the venue. That was nice, because you could watch the band and chat with the bar staff. But you always remembered that things could escalate quickly - you’d go weeks without anything, then suddenly have 3 fights in the venue in one night. It wasn’t unusual to get your nose broken or have a bottle thrown at you. You didn’t feel very supported by the cops when that happened. A few months before our interview Marcus had spent 45 minutes restraining a man who had attacked a woman in the venue, waiting for the cops to arrive.

Marcus had been working on the door since 2012, but he finally gave up in 2023. After COVID the customers had just become so much harder to deal with; people forgot how to behave. You needed two or three hours after every shift just to decompress. It all became too much and was not worth the money.

When we chatted Marcus had just gone to work for a small industrial company instead. He sits in a security office all day for £13 an hour. The hourly rate isn’t as good as it was on the door. Plus with a PAYE gig you can’t skimp on tax, so even if the gross pay is basically the same it has to get a 20% haircut from HMRC. But at least working days means he can do longer shifts without getting so exhausted and so out of sync with the rest of the world. And it gives him time to enjoy his hobbies; playing the cajon, working out, and getting stoned.

His mortgage just went through the roof with interest rate rises and now he’s decided he’s not doing any more nighttime work it’s harder to make ends meet. He’s always done personal training as another job, but now people don’t have the money to pay for sessions. Before the cost of living crisis he shopped at Sainsburys, now he shops at Aldi. It’s hardly a sob story, but that’s the reality of staying afloat in a permanent cost of living crisis.

Marcus wants change, but he doesn’t like any politicians. If he could, he’d make them give more money to the NHS and spend less on the police, welfare, and adult social care. He used to work as a security guard in the hospital every now and then, and he saw how bad it was getting, even a few years ago. He thinks that most of the people receiving welfare are scroungers. He’s a second generation migrant from Africa, but he gets upset about how ‘woke’ some people are - they see words as violence when really they’re just words; only violence is violence. He says that working as a bouncer has made him a bit of a misanthrope. He sees people at their worst, as coked up assholes that stink of sweat and petrol. His partner has a positive view of people, but he can’t manage that any more.

Despite this misanthropic front, he is still incredibly kind, polite, and friendly, even with people he’d ostensibly have a problem with. Marcus really wasn’t your standard doorman. There is a disconnect between what he says he believes, and how he acts around people.

Steve’s story

For a while, Steve ran his own security company during the mid 2000’s. He’d worked his way up from door supervisor to head doorman and then got the cash together to get started as an agency, but it all fell apart after a while. The venues don’t want to pay enough to cover the agency’s costs, and the prices for services keep on falling as more and more people enter the industry. He went back to being an ordinary doorman, working four nights a week for a club on the seafront as well as working a full time door to door sales job during the week, and picking up the odd security shift at the football. Now he hates the city he works in, hates the SIA that licences security workers, hates the cops that fail to show up when you need help. He’s scared of the violence he sees around him, and acutely aware of the lack of support. Even if you’re PAYE there’s barely any support for injuries at work, and so everyone feels vulnerable. Back in the 90s bouncers used to run from one venue to another to support each other, but nowadays that’s not allowed because of insurance. To be blunt, he also feels vulnerable because he’s older. It’s hard to be relaxed about getting into scraps with coked up customers who don’t feel pain when you’re in your late 50s.

Whereas door staff used to have total control of who went in or out of a venue, now managers are trying to dictate to them. They ask the door staff to fill the venue above capacity, or tell them to let in people who they don’t feel comfortable with. They watch the CCTV to check up on their staff. Each year they reduce the number of bouncers on the door closer to the statutory minimum of 1 per 75 customers, always expecting us to do the same work with less support.

In the early 90s security companies introduced Mobile Support Units (MSUs). These were basically bouncers in a car, who would drive around the city and go to whenever a venue needed backup. As their number expanded, they became one of the ways venues could justify having fewer staff on the door. When once you’d have maybe one or two MSU’s, you’ll now have a dozen driving around on a night.

Steve used to work on the MSUs sometimes because it’s extra cash, another pound or two per hour. But it’s not a fun shift, because the nature of the MSU means it’s guaranteed that you go from kick off to kick off. Some of the MSUs dress like special forces and go steaming into every situation. The MSUs weren’t intended to replace coppers, but in reality that’s what they’ve done. They don’t have blue lights and they can get stuck dealing with one incident when something happens somewhere else. There are 12-14 vehicles on a Saturday night for the whole of the city, from Hove to Kemptown, and they act as a kind of 4th emergency service. Often they have to help young, inexperienced bouncers who have been overly aggressive, inflamed a situation or don’t have great spoken English.

Now because of the MSUs the cops think they can just do policing by rapid response. Whereas they used to have 25 officers on the main drinking streets and a camera monitor patched into the bouncer radio network monitoring CCTV, now they just have two cars doing the whole city on a Saturday night with no walking patrols. But each arrest takes a car out of action for an hour, so if they have to make a few arrests in short order they have to start calling in the armed police from Lewes to cover them, just for standard pub brawls. At 3.30am the police just go home, even if people are still coming out of venues and fighting in the takeaways. It’s not like it used to be. The loss of camaraderie and police support intensified the feelings of physical vulnerability associated with the job.

Steve has a clear idea of what he wants to change: he wants the industry to become more professionalised. Wages should be about 30% higher and increase with seniority. Newer door staff should have to do training on the job with experienced hands, and the training provided by the licensing authority should reflect what the job actually looks like on the ground - not what a group of ‘experts’ who haven’t worked a door in years think it should be like. The ideal situation for him would be large numbers of well trained doormen, on £15-20 per hour, receiving constant top up training, with adequate support from a well funded and cooperative police force. This dream isn’t his alone. There are plenty of voices, from academics to the SIA and businesses, that supposedly support professionalisation. The problem is, nobody in the industry wants to pay the higher wages that would go with it.

Nick’s story

I’d been considering leaving the door for a while, but the final push was when the main venue I worked at began paying via bank transfer instead of in cash. Payment via cash at £15 per hour felt just about worthwhile. I hadn’t paid income tax in years which made up for the low wages and shit hours. Overnight losing 20% of your income when self assessment came round would have been too much to bear financially.² Some other people on the team just said they wouldn’t declare it, some wanted to be paid through a monzo account. This, coupled with a big slow down in the housing market leading to far fewer removals jobs (which went from 2 or 3 a week to 1 every fortnight) meant if I kept up this working arrangement I would have been struggling financially.

I honestly felt elated when I quit the door. The late nights coupled with early mornings of manual labour was taking its toll on my body, and the irregular hours took their toll on my mind. When I started it was in part because I lost my job along with 2 months wages and desperately needed the money. True, I found the regularity of the 9/5 tiresome and boring. But after five years of mixing and matching different gigs I wanted some semblance of routine.

I was also pushed to move on by a sense that I wasn’t ‘fulfilling my potential.’ I have a masters degree, and I felt a little voice in my head telling me that I ‘could be doing more’ that I ‘should’ be making use of my education.³ Lots of my friends work in the movement or in professional jobs. Now I’ve stopped working on the door, I’ve got a position as a receptionist with a part time gig working for a left wing NGO. I’ve got a chance to climb the ladder in the long term, but week to week I’m not earning as much as I did back when removals were booming, I was at the club most nights, and cash was king.

The price of disorganisation

It’s funny how work changes your mindset. I’ve read Marx, I understand how the ruling ideas of society are the ideas of the ruling class - but all the same, I found that working for myself kept on pushing me towards a kind of wheeler dealer ideology of self-reliance. I found ‘hustle’ ideology comforting, as a kind of self-justification for my working and living conditions. If you’re working 15 hours a day, going to bed at 4am and getting up at 7am, you need a good story to tell yourself as to why you’re doing it. Without that story, the reality is a lot more painful. And so I bought into the individualism that goes with the territory. One of the side effects of that way of thinking about the world is that it convinces everyone that they have no recourse to collective action. The idea of organising seems crazy, even if your everyday work process is defined by the close cooperation of a group of people towards a common goal.

A lot of the time, this individual hustle aims to offset the effects of social decline. Older doormen tell stories of what the industry used to be like in the 00s, when the hospitality industry was booming. The night time economy had become a growth model for cities as opening hours got extended. Binge drinking brought huge amounts of demand into pubs and clubs, and some of that cash ended up in bouncers’ pockets. Back then you could work six nights a week on great money. Doors were well-staffed, everyone felt safer, and the SIA was only just finding its feet as an enforcement body so you could get away with a lot more. They talk about the sense of camaraderie being so much stronger.

Nowadays, anyone with eyes can see the industry is going downhill. Local authorities are closing venues to make way for expensive city centre flats to attract richer residents. A lot of venues are being forced to close due to noise complaints from these new residents, and the model of city centre binge drinking has gone into decline. There are fewer clubs and fewer customers. They spend less on a night out than they used to, and so the clubs don’t open as much. The club I worked at has gone down to four nights a week, and isn’t busy for most of them. Doors are increasingly understaffed, so they feel more dangerous, and we all know that the police aren’t going to get there in time to back us up.

Individual routes out of the industry and up the ladder have come to be rationalised as the best way to respond to this change. The cultural and subjective barriers to collective action mean that most people pursue individual social mobility, just like Marcus and Steve have done. Marcus got a different security job, Steve started up his own firm - in both cases, they were looking for ways out. But in both cases, these solutions, frankly, suck: Marcus gets paid badly and is seeing his living standards suffer; the company Steve set up failed and he ended up back at the bottom of the hierarchy. In light of these failures, there are a lot of reactionary ideas circulating that give these men a chance to blame someone else, someone weaker than them.

This opportunity to exert power over others for our own satisfaction isn’t a new thing for us: it’s a feeling we have at work all the time. The job can require and instil a level of petty vindictiveness. In every interaction you have with a customer, you have power. In the majority of lairy situations, you come out on top. Those experiences can be attractive for all the wrong reasons. Just like how the precarity of self employment shapes your thoughts about work, so the experience of the job can shape your politics. It can be intimidating work, and so the politics that bouncers express are often comfortable with the everyday realities of social violence. It can be precarious work, constantly exposed to different variations in pay and conditions that you’re expected to navigate as an individual, and so the politics are often a patchwork of different ideas drawn from all over the place.

Alongside that power, you can find a sense of close knit, predominantly male camaraderie on a door team. That gets reinforced by confrontations with groups of people that the dominant discourse primes you to dismiss as ‘scum.’ Your daily job becomes you and your mates being confronted by the homeless, drug addicts, (mostly Albanian) drug dealers, travellers. You hear the knife crime on the radio. Every horrible idea spouted in the right wing press has its own grains of truth in what you see everyday. The pain of your individual failure to escape or move up the ladder can be masked by the feeling of exerting power over other people, of being an agent of order in an era of decline. The feelings of fear that emerge from the exposure to violence you face in the job and the precarity of your working and living circumstances can manifest in a sense of being part of the thin line holding back social decay. For many people, it’s easy to slip into a Travis Bickle mentality: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

But the direction of travel doesn’t only go in one direction. The job cuts across all racial and ethnic lines and disproportionately employs black and brown people. Often as a white British guy I was in the minority on the door. But it’s not only racially diverse, there’s also a huge diversity in class backgrounds and positions. You might be working on a team with a migrant who’s working 60 hours a week security in Sainsburys and then another guy who’s a self employed electrician who’s just using the job to make a bit of extra cash and as an excuse to get away from the wife on the weekends. Despite all these differences, your bonds with your team can be really strong. There is a deep sense of solidarity born out of working in a potentially high stress and violent environment. You have to have each others’ backs.

I worry about what could happen to door supervisors in this unfolding crisis. The base units of the English Defence League were often the building company and the various friendship circles that make up a football firm. These were cells of 2 to 10 guys with fairly high levels of trust and solidarity between each other who were often used to doing physical work together and taking instructions from a boss/Capo figure. Door teams could fit that mould. As the potential for workplace conflict increases in hospitality and in wider society, with more and more social breakdown occurring, security workers could be mobilised to defend private property and the interests of its owners against workers, organisers and desperate people. The securitisation of an increasingly unstable and unequal society requires people willing to enforce it. These are the people who will be called upon to do that, and they’re vulnerable to being convinced to do it because they cleave right on a lot of social issues and have no sense of a possible collective alternative.

But that rightward ideological tendency doesn’t mean that door teams get along well with the police. Context is everything, and different venues and doormen have different relationships with the police. MSU in particular have a closer working relationship with the police and so develop higher levels of trust and cooperation. For my own experience and the door team I became part of, we were not viewed by the police as being on their ‘side’. We were separate, not colleagues. We were spoken to by them in the same way that they would speak to any other member of the public. There was a level of mistrust. Particularly when they came in to do a venue sweep and check everything was in order, there was a sense of tension between the police and the door team; you are made to feel just as much as a potential suspect as anyone else.

The times I did call the police (for example, when we had someone restrained), when they arrived, they would position themselves in the role as an intermediary, standing above the conflict rather than immediately coming down on the side of the doorman; I was interviewed and made a statement just like everyone else. My first head door refused to even engage with the police when they came to the venue due to the fact they’d nicked him once after a fight with a customer. He always got one of the other door staff to do the talking when they turned up.

That complexity is part of what convinces me that there is another potential for security workers in the hospitality industry. I don’t think doormen are likely to organise themselves as things stand right now, but they could be drawn into a coalition of hospitality workers that is led by other groups.

The social composition of bar and door staff is pretty different. We tend to have different genders, education levels, and cultural references. We live in different places and with different groups of people. And there’s obviously a difference in our political composition. At our club, me and Marcus saw the bar staff as a transient workforce. They were usually in their late teens or early 20s, predominantly British, and quite diverse ethnically. Most of them were students, and they almost entirely changed over year-on-year. Supervisors would stay for a bit longer, but the only constants were the bar managers. There was sometimes a parental type relationship between older door staff and bar staff. The younger door staff often ended up doing a lot of playful flirting. Most of the time, we got on really well. For my part, I tried to treat the bar staff as equals and get on well with them; I wanted them to trust me and for me to trust them. We were after all working in a common environment and towards a common goal (a safe and event-free night). I was in constant communication with the bar staff, wanting to know how they were feeling, if they felt threatened and so on. I also tried to help them out; a lot of being a doorman is just observation, you can pick up a few glasses and take them to the bar whilst you’re doing that. I helped them out with the bins at the end of the night (the bins had to be done before any of the door team could go home).

The relationship wasn’t always that smooth, though. Sometimes (and this might be unique to my venue) there was some discord based upon disagreements between the bar manager and head door. This then led to a sense of the door team being pitted against the bar team ‘they are trying to tell us how to do our jobs… they are interfering with us.’ The bar staff would also sometimes inflame situations, leading to resentment from the door team; we’re the ones who are going to get hit and attacked if it kicks off, and you’re acting in a way that makes kicking off more likely. The door team often viewed the bar staff as essentially silly little girls who don’t really know anything about the world, but also treated them with a lot of affection as people who we must protect.⁴ There are a lot of contradictions here, but they are contradictions we have to work through.

It seems inevitable that the next decade will see reactionary street movements recruiting from fractions located in and around the working class. If we want to make that process more difficult for them, we have to organise collective ways to respond to life getting harder and harder. Men like Marcus and Steve need to see that their future lies with the working class. When bar workers organise, they need to pull bouncers to their side. Breaking down the culture of individualism, neutralising reactionary ideas, building cooperation into solidarity - all of that could be achieved as part of a bigger industry-wide coalition that can build connections over the divides in our social composition.