Identity and Consciousness — An Unstable Relationship?

Abstract

Kingsley left school at 14 and started work as an apprentice welder in a steel works in South Wales, where as he implies, union membership was defined in part by the closed shop and in part by a strong working class community and culture. He was nearly 60 and in many ways his work history embodies not only the social change, but also the political articulation of that change, which underpins the questions asked in this book. Later in life his wife had breast cancer and when they went out for a meal to celebrate her recovery she announced that she was leaving him because, as he recalled, ‘you’ve done everything in your life, I’ve done nothing, I want to go my own way’. As a consequence Kingsley had an emotional breakdown, but following his recovery was working as a community support worker in mental health for the social services department of a city council. He joined UNISON during the national one day strike over public sector pension provision and subsequently become a shop steward. His transition, from heavy manufacturing in a strong industrial working class community and overwhelmingly male working environment to the public service sector where he was now working with a predominantly female and racially mixed workforce in a large city, had raised a number of issues for him:

From the point of view of my age, with the job that I’m doing, I was made aware that sometimes I’d come across as perhaps racist or maybe unfair, because sayings that were common to me in my age group were perhaps offensive to a younger element or ‘minorities’ — is that the way of saying it? So I was on a fast learning curve to sort myself out. With my boss… we had a few things that went wrong… We were in the office one day and she said to one of my colleagues, ‘what did the brother call the other brother this morning?’; the colleague said ‘a faggot’, ‘faggot?’, she said, ‘what is a faggot?’ Without thinking about it I turned and said, ‘it’s slang, Australians use it, for poofters’. I was nearly frogmarched out the office — ‘you can’t say things like that’; I said ‘but that’s common’. Little things like that sort of brought it home to me, I can’t say this, the world is changing and you can’t say things like that. So that was the reason why I wanted to do this…

To say you’re brainwashed is wrong — it’s the environment that you work in and are brought up with and the beliefs.