Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bbc wm, birmingham, invisible work, night workers
In the last few weeks we’ve been in talks with BBC WM to have an audio piece we had prepared about invisible work in Birmingham broadcast on the station, and it’s now been uploaded on to the BBC WM website to be streamed on demand. The program is called Your Space and has recently moved from its Sunday night slot to an internet-only broadcast, as the BBC find that this attains a larger and more diverse audience than its original on-air slot.
You can listen to the show and view what the BBC had to say about our project on the Your Space part of the BBC West Midlands radio website here. Alternatively you can listen to the show by clicking this button:
You can even download it as a podcast in MP3 format on our page at Switchpod.
This audio is a culmination of all our research, interviews and has been our main drive for the reaslisation of this project. The radio piece was created from a series interviews conducted with night shift workers inluding casino croupier, rail maintenance worker, warehouse operator, a cleaner at the train station, a taxi driver and even roofer consigned to working at night for “public safety” in the main shopping areas, where there was deemed a risk to the public of falling masonry during the day (no such consideration for workers undertaking such tasks in the dark!).
The backing track was created especially for this piece by one of our collective, and has been edited with the dialogue to create a somewhat sinister industrial ambience, and in this 6 minute montage we challenge the listener with a scenario of what life would look like without all the preparation that has taken place overnight by night shift workers, as well as convey some of the injustice and hardship of such a thankless yet indispensable area of work.
Update 24/04/2008: In order to increase our potential audience, we have uploaded the audio along with a montage of the photographs we took for this project on YouTube and this can be viewed below:
Alison Bell from BBC News 24 in London – a night shift worker herself – took an interest in our project and kindly gathered some quotes from her colleagues working the same shift about their experiences of working nights:
“It’s like taking a flight to New York every day for four days in a
row.”
“Yes, and trying to make sure you take your brain and stomach with you.”
“It makes you realise that sleep is the most satisfying human need.”
“It’s puts you out of sync. It’s hard to sleep in the day, especially
before the first shift in a block. As for the effect on my social life -
what social life?”
“You get fatter cos you do no exercise and you have to eat to stay
awake.”
“Yes, and you eat bizarre things that you wouldn’t eat during the day,
just because it’s nighttime.”
“Bad things – sleep deprivation. It’s really hard to get quality sleep
at any time. Then on your days off you can’t readjust to sleeping at
night. Good things – we get paid more if we do night shifts. Also, it
gets you out of the rat race – rush hour commuting, busy
banks/shops/gyms – you can go and do all those things when it’s quiet.
But it’s unnatural – you’re denying yourself the normal normonal
activity.”
“I’m a parent – I have no social life anyway. Night shifts are
surprisingly compatible with childcare. But they do leave you braindead
and lacking in inspiration.”
“It gets you out of office politics – the managers don’t work
overnights!”
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: birmingham, birmingham night workers, invisible work, night work, night workers, wholesale markets
We’ve since been back to the markets, but this time we’ve focussed on the places that serve as a meeting place for those clocking off in the early hours of the morning. You might take your post-work pint for granted when work finishes at 5pm, but without the relentless dedication of the owners of these local cafés many night workers would have no place at all to grab a cuppa, have a bite to eat and chat with colleagues. The experience of working such anti-social hours seems to make the world into a sort of timeshare arrangement, where those that work nights get to experience their surroundings completely separately from those that live by a more typical timetable. This shared experience seems to create an odd sort of camaraderie among those clocking off in the early hours, and it is these cafés and diners that provide a venue for this much-deserved knees-up.
The third photograph is of the café that’s actually inside the wholesale markets, after dark.
The last photograph was taken inside the Moseley Street Café, which is actually opposite the Wholesale Markets. It’s like entering a time warp; i doubt it has changed at all in the last 30 years.
All photographs were taken with an old Lomo Smena 8M camera, with Kodak Elite Chrome slide film and then cross-processed.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: birmingham, invisible work, night work, night workers
This is the flyer that will be distributed to students and commuters. Feel free to print and distribute as you please.
[REVERSE]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: birmingham, cancer, night shift, night work, night workers
The link between night shift work and breast cancer has been published by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and is mentioned here in their research portfolio:
Center for Disease Control and Prevention 1
“Recent epidemiologic evidence suggests that occupational exposures to electromagnetic fields and light at night, from working night and/or rotating shifts, may increase female breast cancer risk“
They have also undertaken research and found links between night shift workundertaken by nurses and instances of miscarriages:
Centre for Disease Control and Prevention 2
“NIOSH researchers collaborated with the Harvard School of Public Health to send a supplemental questionnaire concerning potential occupational risk factors to a subset of the Nurses Health Study II cohort resulting in published work reporting an increased risk for miscarriage among nurses who worked night shift during their first trimester”
The Journal of the National Cancer Institute has also published findings that support an increased risk of colorectal cancer among night shift workers:
Working the “graveyard” shift increases risk of colorectal cancer
“Working night shifts can be hazardous to health. Women who work rotating night shifts face an increased risk of developing colorectal cancer, a new prospective observational study has found (Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2003;5:825-8).
Researchers led by Dr Eva Schernhammer of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Applied Cancer Research in Vienna, Austria, uncovered this link by following 78 586 women nurses who were enrolled in a longitudinal epidemiological study known as the nurses health study”
Further reading:
Keeping the ‘grave’ out of ‘graveyard shift’
Cheating sleep can prove costly
Graveyard shift linked to cancer risk
Night Shift Work May Heighten Risk for Cancer
Night Shift Work May Cause Cancer
BBC News | HEALTH | Night shifts ‘increase breast cancer risk’
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Add new tag, birmingham behind the scenes, commute, commuters, night shift, night work, night workers
You put on your shoes ready to leave the house to the soundtrack of yours kids whining that the milkman’s not been, as they poke fussily at their milk-less bowls of dry cornflakes. The post’s not come arrived either, even though you paid extra for special delivery on that online purchase. This is the scenario that greets you as you hurriedly pull on your coat, as you hastily slam the door behind you. You are however relieved to find that your taxi is waiting at the kerb to whisk you to the certainty of your workplace away from the uncertainty of home.
What you see in front of you is not your usual smooth, shiny black cab but an unrecognisably grey filthy one. Instead of automatically reaching out for the handle, it takes some time for you to navigate around the muck to successfully open the door, and even then you end up with a palm full of gunk. Recognising the disgust in your eyes as you climb into the cab, the taxi driver explains that the steam cleaners were closed last night so he couldn’t get the taxi cleaned.
Pulling into the train station, you are relieved to finally be able to leave the stale-smelling cab, unfortunately taking with you the odours of last nights cigarettes, beer and food that have been successful in permeating the fabric of your suit and lingering in your hair. However, the relief is short-lived, for as you take a step out of the taxi you land a foot in a semi-eaten kebab, partially-digested even, by the looks of things. Your expectation of clean morning streets has fallen short, as you scan a littered pavement as far as the eye can see.
The station forecourt isn’t much better as you have to wade though the obstacle course of fast-food debris. Looks like the cleaners haven’t been in either. Nevertheless, you conquer this warzone of discarded hamburger shrapnel, burger cartons and used tickets and emerge triumphant, but severely ketchup splattered at the other side of the forecourt. Looking like Wurzel Gummage, or a Dickensian street urchin is unlikely to do you any favours at the board room meeting, but nevertheless you try your best to brush yourself down.
Things aren’t looking up at the newsstand and they’re although their usually crammed, today there’s not even a single paper. Nothing to read on the train then. Irritated you get on the escalator and head for the platform. A voice on the tannoy tells those standing at the platform that all train services have been cancelled and they will be replaced with bus service. You panic, and run towards the pick-up point. Over the surging crowd in front of you, you can’t see how full the bus is getting though the thick coat of dirt on the bus windows, will you even manage to get on at all? If you do will you miss your stop? You surrender to the fact that you are indeed going to be late for the office and head for your usual take-away coffee and breakfast baguette. You can see the café bar shutters down, a commotion of morning commuters expressing discontent at the disruption at their normal morning ritual of coffee and breakfast. You overhear that the no-one could get their deliveries done because no-one had anticipated that big freeze last night whilst everyone was sleeping. And you ask yourself…so where were the gritters…?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: birmingham, birmingham behind the scenes, cancer, health, night shift, night work, night workers
In our everyday routine travel to work we may never consider what has taken place to enable what we have come to expect as day workers.
Do any of us really consider the hard work and preparation that has taken place overnight whilst we are sleeping?
Just so that our milk is delivered, our taxi is clean, newspapers produced and distributed in time to fill news stands, that the station is free of litter and ingredients for our breakfasts have completed their journeys from suppliers to café kitchens and post arrives - sorted - at our desks for 9am to the possible detriment to health of these night workers.
“Birmingham Behind The Scenes” explores whether we workers are aware of how important the night worker role is in today’s society, whether there is a strong camaraderie among the different workers, and what extent they feel appreciated by the millions of us who rely on them each day.
We hope to celebrate these unsung heroes, inspire a new recognition, a greater appreciation of this secret club, and remove the mystique from this army of invisible workers.
