ALL DAY LONG . By Joanna Biggs . ( Serpent ’ s Tail £14.99 ) Famously and memorably , the poet Philip Larkin asked : 'Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life ? ' He longed to be ' ... courageous enough / To shout Stuff your pension ! - but knew he never would . Coffee morning : Britain at work . The tyranny of the nine-to-five is about money ( of course ) , but also about moral worth : we work because we know we should 'pull our weight ' in society 's tug-of-war . On any morning , in any town or city all over the world , people stream into their places of work , some driven by a sense of vocation , some by resigned boredom , some by greed , some by need . Surely it is work , not love , which makes the world go round ? Joanna Biggs offers an excellent contribution to our knowledge of the world of work in all its variety - not through tedious sociological analysis ( thank goodness ) , but through the stories of real people she has interviewed all over the country . Reading this book reminds me how times have changed dramatically since my generation left school or college in the Sixties with no worries about finding a job . We were lucky . Joanna Biggs makes it bleakly clear that for many people today , 'the idea that good work brings a good life no longer holds ' . Biggs divides her workers in interesting categories , yoking disparate occupations in terms of their overall function . So the 'Making ' chapter gives us a potter , a shoemaker and ( yes ) a robot , which introduces us to its maintenance engineers . 'Serving ' includes a sex worker , two baristas , a call centre adviser and a political special adviser . Those 'Repairing ' are a rabbi , an Army major and a nurse , while those 'Leading ' are a company director , a stay-at-home mum ( inspired , that one ) and a hereditary lord . Biggs writes : ' I continuously heard that people loved their jobs , and sometimes this worried me ' The scope of the book is broad . We meet those who are selling , entertaining , thinking , caring - as well as a curious clutch of people Biggs lumps together under 'Starting ' : a goldsmith 's apprentice ( one of my favourites ) , a rebellious intern , an entrepreneur specialising in 'start-up ' technologies , an unemployed graduate . There 's also a 56-year-old man on Mandatory Work Activity , usually known as 'workfare ' - the Government initiative designed for those on Jobseeker 's Allowance , to help them 'gain a better understanding of the discipline and focus required for work ... while at the same time making a contribution to the community ' . Joanna Biggs clearly does not think very much of 'workfare ' : in fact , it 's clear she despises the scheme . Here , although of course anyone can see that the system is not perfect , I wish she had n't editorialised so overtly . I really wanted to hear more about what John thought of his life . A book which aims to give the reader much-needed insight into other people 's lives ( and it certainly does that ) seems to me to be spoilt by degenerating into a student newspaper leader : ' A citizen 's income set at the right level - £320 a week is the current estimate - would kill off the sort of unproductive and low-paid jobs that have proliferated since 2008 in the UK . ' At that point the author does not speculate what disastrous effects such indiscriminate largesse could have on the economy , with inevitable repercussions for the very men and women she has met . ALL DAY LONG By Joanna Biggs . In the Seventies I was a huge admirer of the work of America 's Studs Terkel and England 's Tony Parker , both oral historians who aimed to give insight into the lives of those with no voice , by using recorded interviews , carefully transcribed , with no questions included and no comment or judgment . It was a magnificent technique which catapulted the reader movingly ( and sometimes shockingly ) into the hearts and minds of prisoners , drifters , miners , people on a housing estate , and so on . You felt you got to know them without the author-interviewer standing in the way - although , of course , all interviews have to be edited . Joanna Biggs invokes Terkel : ' I 've often wondered what ( he ) would think of how we think about work now . ' Well , I reckon the great man would continue to record what he heard , without surprise , and without trying to fit life stories into a pre-conceived mould . In contrast , Biggs writes : ' I continuously heard that people loved their jobs , and sometimes this worried me : it felt as if work was becoming more insecure on one hand , and the work ethic increasingly revered on the other . ' At the end , she lays her cards on the table , confessing that as she listened to people 's stories , ' I most often wished for the way we work as a society to be organised more fairly and hoped for more resistance to the way it 's organised now . ' That 's the trouble with the workers , you see . They 've always been unpredictable individuals who may like or dislike their jobs but just get on with life , turning their backs on revolution .
Joanna regularly tells the stories of real people she has interviewedin the UK . She offers an excellent contribution to our understanding of the nature of work . Confesses she advocates for more transparency to the way work is done .