It was August 2020 and I was back in my family home in Sydney. Prior to that I’d been living in Manchester, doing my PhD in autobiographical women’s literary theory. I am aware that my chosen area of focus could be read as a hubristic exercise in solipsism (and maybe it is), but mostly I just wanted to be paid to read books by women for three years, so sue me.
Manchester is a cold, dark, wonderful place, but the pandemic made it hell for me. I didn’t have a support network, there was no vaccine in sight, the university was closed and I was sharing a small home with a hypochondriac. It feels like “don’t move in with a hypochondriac during a global pandemic” is part of a joke setup but, unfortunately, that joke was my life. So I packed my bags, got on a few planes to Sydney, and did the two weeks of mandatory quarantine in a government-commandeered hotel. I asked my friend who once spent a few years in jail how he recommended I pass the time. He told me to be unconscious as much as possible, so mostly I just drank wine and took sleeping pills, occasionally checking in on the progress of the building site I could see from my window. Eventually, 14 days of confinement passed and then there I was, back in the southern hemisphere, living in the country I had chosen to leave.
The best part of doing an English PhD is the pub after a day’s work, drinking and talking with other PhD students who have also spent the last seven hours silently battering their heads against discourse. In Sydney, I did not have this. Day after day, I would sit at the desk I had grown up at and I would work away at my thesis, reading journal articles about feminist hermeneutics and feeling very, very lonely.
Something had to change. I needed a place where I was needed – a place I could go and serve a purpose and remember I was a human being with a body and not just a brain. I got a job as a casual retail assistant at a bookstore. I sold products to people and I shelved those products and I cleaned window displays and I counted cash at the end of the day. And you know what? That retail job saved my life.
Retail work gets a bad rap and for fair reasons. The hours are precarious, it’s usually minimum wage, the jobs are often tedious and customers are, contrary to popular belief, often wrong.
According to the most recent Australian census, “retail assistant” is the top recorded occupation in the nation. It’s also one of the lowest paid and it is extremely female-skewed. In the UK, the retail sector is the largest private-sector employer and the stats are similar on low wage and gender. Working retail can suck: the poverty, the sexism, the daily condescension from customers… none of these things are good.
I remember one time I was working as a sales assistant at a clothing retailer and I gave a confused customer directions to the bathroom. I tried to verbally empathise with her predicament by noting that the location of the toilets was “discombobulating”. She asked me how I knew that word. A friend of mine who works at a high-end boutique told me that she often knocks over piles of clothes, just so she can refold them for something to do. My first job was at a bar frequented by a lot of older men – without fail, they would order “a black, a blonde and oh – a beer.” I had to smile politely.
And yet. The camaraderie and solidarity I established with my fellow workers over the two years I worked at the bookshop was the stuff of life. There, on the shop floor, we were each other’s confidantes, we were comrades in arms, we were good to each other. Without the tiered corporate hierarchy of office work always looming, telling us that we needed to compete to aim for promotions and without the neoliberal pretence that our jobs were somehow crucial to the formation of our innermost selves, we saw each other as fellow fighters in the capitalist trenches. We were able to ridicule systems that presented jobs as rewards. We had fun.
My colleagues were mostly students, like me, working so they could afford rent while they pursued further education. At 27, I was almost a store elder, regaling the youths with my tales of dial-up and trucker caps. My colleagues became my friends and we learned from each other.
Standing behind the counter is like inhabiting a performative, liminal space. You can adopt different personas depending on your mood, or on the vibe of the customer you’re serving. I could be charming, I could be dense, I could be deadpan, depending on what I thought each customer deserved. There is power in service.
One customer requested a book about “effectively managing staff”. I grabbed a nearby copy of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and said, dumbly, “Sorry, is this what you meant?” If people were polite, I would elaborately wrap their purchases; if they were rude, I would conveniently forget to tell them that we offered free gift-wrapping. One time, a woman came to the counter half-crying. She had two young children pulling at her trousers and she asked for a novel recommendation. My colleague and I looked at each other: we knew what to do. My colleague got out some stickers and entertained the kids, while I pranced around the bookstore collecting all the funniest novels I knew. I will never forget that woman’s look of relief while I talked her through the plots and she had a moment to think about what she wanted. Working retail can be like psychology: you find out what people need by reading between the lines.
My colleagues and I became like a hive-mind. We knew each other’s areas of speciality in terms of book recommendations. Whenever anyone asked for a sci-fi rec, I’d direct them to Darcy. You want self-improvement lit? Best chat to Tahlia. We also knew what was going on in each other’s personal lives and so we’d toggle tasks depending on everyone’s emotional and physical capacity that day. Carolina’s been ill, so how about she plastic-wraps art books out back where there’s a chair? Leona’s hungover: it’s shelving for now. I know that, hypothetically, mutual care can exist in any work environment, but I’ve never experienced it as much as I have on the shop floor.
It was this solidarity that enabled my colleagues and me to step up and take action when we realised that some of us were being unfairly remunerated and that management was withholding shifts based on arbitrary favouritisms. We had an official store group chat overseen by management and we had another unofficial group chat consisting of only floor-workers: this one was for telling truths. We also invited ex-booksellers to join our discussions and from them we realised that management had been playing the same dirty tricks for some time.
Retail work is often conceptualised as temporary employment – it’s imagined to be what you do before you get a “real job”. This attitude means that commonly, mistreated casual retail workers will simply quit a bad workplace instead of endeavouring to fix it. This is understandable – the emotional toil and economic precarity one faces when one unionises as a casual worker is intense. But my colleagues and I were angry and determined: we decided that this fight was worth it.
Over beers and in whispered conversations at the counter, we decided to organise. We knew that our labour was powerful and without it the shop couldn’t function. With the help of the Retail and Fast Food Worker’s Union, we unionised the damn shop. Over a year and a half, we stood strong against worker lock-outs and the concerted hiring of scabs. Management would declare union members’ positions “redundant” and then hire non-union members to do the exact same work. Often, after talking with these new recruits and explaining our plight, they would see the light and join the union. On a few occasions, however, this did not happen, and for me, this was the part of the struggle that hurt the most. To see young people so brainwashed by some misguided notion of capitalist loyalty that they would undermine the efforts of their colleagues to build a fairer workplace for all – this stung.
But we did not give in. What we were doing was historic – we were the first retail workers in Australia (apart from meat workers) to undertake industrial action in 50 years. After a long battle, we won an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement – a document that, among other things, ensured job security for casual workers after a designated length of employment, refused junior wages and guaranteed a dollar more an hour than minimum wage. These might sound like small wins, but they were nothing short of groundbreaking. Since our industrial action, workers at two of Australia’s leading supermarket groups have followed suit. There is power in service, but there is also power in knowing your worth and knowing that how your worth is recognised is connected to how the worth of others is recognised. “We are all in this for everybody else,” became our catchphrase.
As of 2021 in Australia, only 12.5% of employees are members of trade unions. In the UK, as of 2022, it’s 22.3%. This figure is better, but it’s still pretty dire. I’m not a UK union specialist, but I can say that in Australia, at least, there is a general pessimism about the utility of unions. They’ve been hit by smear campaigns. They’re also associated, in the popular imagination, with a kind of aged macho masculinity that is unappealing to younger workers and women. This was not my experience of union work. In fact, one of the coolest parts of unionising was getting to know union members in other sectors. Our lives were totally different, but our values were the same. Some of our strongest allies were members of the maritime workers’ union and the construction workers’ union. They came to our rallies and we attended theirs. We were a bunch of nerdy queers screaming for dock workers’ rights. They were some of the most staunch-looking blokes I’ve ever met and they were demanding better pay for a bunch of queer twentysomething booksellers. It was iconic.
Doing this work and forming these bonds was emboldening. I saw my youngest colleague, Carolina, grow from girlhood into the most principled, confident young woman. She’s now the union rep for the store. My colleague Darcy is now doing an economics thesis about unions in Australia. My colleague Jimmy, who is also doing a PhD, suggested we write an academic paper about our union work, so that there was a record of our action for future generations: we called the paper Making Unions Hot Again and presented it at a cultural studies conference in Perth. And yes – it was very hot.
Now, instead of sitting at my desk when I returned home depleted and sad about the state of the world, I felt powerful and I felt hopeful. The sense of impotence the pandemic had cultivated in me was dissipating. Alongside my PhD, I’d also been writing a novel about a doomed love affair. As I wrote, I realised more and more that this novel was also a love letter to workers and to the bonds of friendship and mutual care that can grow even in the most dire of work environments.
I have worked retail jobs for many years and I think it’s likely that I will again. In an ideal world, artists would be fairly remunerated for their work and this hustle culture we currently inhabit would not be necessary. But the world is as it is – artists and writers are generally not paid what they deserve. And though it is not always the case, a shop can be a castle for an artist, or for anyone. A shop is a place where workers can love each other, create a community and give to it. It’s a place where mundane tasks can metamorphose into a sense of purpose. Every shop worker is making something.
To write, you have to know the world. Working in shops has taught me more about human nature than pretty much anything else. I think that care is paying attention, and shop work taught me that alongside habit forms care. I care about the world and the people in it much more after working in shops. The terrible truth is – I care a lot.
Green Dot by Madeleine Gray is published by Orion at £18.99. Buy it for £16.71 at guardianbookshop.com
