“Greggs [location], [supervisor] speaking.”
“Hi, it’s me, [deadname]”
I am calling because our online rotas only tell us what hours we’re working, not where. I was in another shop all last week, so hadn’t been able to check where my upcoming shifts were.
“Are you able to work on Wednesday?”
I pause for half a second. I need the hours (they’ve got us down to our contracts, and mine is only for 8 hours per week - I need a lot more to make my bills) but I also have nothing in and need to go shopping. I wonder what Universal Credit will say if they, somehow, find out I’m turning down extra shifts.
“No, sorry I can’t.”
After we’ve both hung up, I go back upstairs. The reason Greggs hire you on contracts smaller than the hours they need you for is so they can say they have no zero hours contracts. Everything else is technically “extra”. Of course when shops have to cut back on hours, those of us on the smallest contracts get screwed. I hate my miserable racist co-workers anyway, so I’m glad to be out of that place as much as possible - except that I need the money and where else is there to go, in the second year of the plague?
I go back upstairs, and I check twitter. I’m trying to give it up but I haven’t socialised in months and need the contact, however fleeting, with the outside world. The outside world announces yet another consultation. I close twitter and pick up a book. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. A city remade by Public Moral Squads and Walt Disney, cleaning out the subaltern economies and pleasures of the hustlers and the porn theatres into empty lots and tourist traps.
I’m lucky. I have some money set aside so I’m not going under any time soon. I have a job, even a job I hate. It doesn’t help that I’m not out at work but the customers know I’m a woman anyway. Misogyny without ‘validation’. I’m not sure if its something about me or the implicit feminisation of a depersonalised labourer who functions to serve you food, or perhaps both. If the latter, you could go as far as to say that transmisogyny is the product of a system that increasingly demands womanhood of labour and yet cannot admit womanhood to labour, a product of the increasing precarity of neoliberal capitalism, of the dispossession necessary to sustain this seemingly endless empire. The growing service industry of the West is simultaneous with mass land grabbing and lumpenisation across the Third World, and gentrification across urban centres in the North, capital driving ceaselessly from neo-colony to internal colony to border camp. These are not the only ways gender gets made, but why would I tell you about that? So you can sell it?
I am lucky to have a job. I’m capable of working more too, so Universal Credit are a ball-ache, but manageable. But it’s not just me, we’re all going through it at the minute. My friends at other shops are down to basically no hours, or else they’ve got too many, facing a public with increasingly few vents for their frustration with the plague but the depersonalised server providing their sausage roll. I have other friends who can’t work, whether because of disabilities or borders. Others who have no place of their own to live.
I barely think of the consultation. I can barely think of it because by now, years into the British ruling class’ backlash to even superficial gains for trans people, its hard to register each new assault outside of the general wave of global counter-revolutionary terror. The world-historical implications of gender-neutral bathroom policy may not be felt today, maybe not by everyone tomorrow, but they will be felt. A public that is increasingly private and a private that is increasingly absent are united in the figure of the cop who patrols the line between the two, capital’s debt-collector. I barely think of it because I am too busy trying to keep myself and my friends afloat. I barely think of it because I am tired. Perhaps this is just what being in your twenties is like, but more likely it isn’t.
I am tired of shifts and consultations. I am tired of the plague. We are tired of everything other than a war, and a peace, of total dis-possession.