It wouldn’t have been in our nature to ask for anything, to even expect anything. That’s not who we were. The agreement was set in place on day one: we’d turn up, do a bit of graft, and head home. Then, every week, fortnight or month, we’d get a few pound in the bank, a sort of reward for our loyalty, for not blowing the place up.
nything else was, quite literally, a bonus. At Christmas we’d half-hope for something nice, a couple of extra zeroes in the pay packet, a pat on the back and a gruff “well done”, but if it didn’t come we’d say nothing. If someone gave us a gift, an actual present, it’d send us into a spiral; “what are they up to? They must be planning redundancies. And at Christmas and all. They’re some shower.”
But that was before. That was when we were the meek little Irish, the book-smart, well-educated eejits who thought we weren’t worth a jot, that our years of sacrifice and dedication were the least we could do after they being so good to us. That highly-qualified, multi-skilled, servile gom is on the way out though, a relic of the past, a time when we kept our mouths shut and heads down lest we drew attention to ourselves.
Now we want everything. We’ve grown up, developed a backbone and come to realise that, actually, we’re just as good as the lad beside us.
A perfect storm of Brexit, Covid-19, working from home, inflation, and a generational housing crisis has propelled us, the worker bees, to the top table, sat us in the comfiest of chairs, with sultry maidens, hunky Adonis, feeding us grapes as, one-by-one, we dismiss our suitors like the scum that they are. Well, that’s probably how it is in the Google offices - minus the gendered stereotypes because, you know, equality.
Yet even the little guys, even the put-upon journalists of this world, are receiving occasional treats now; surprise hampers, house plants, fancy chocolate, fancier crisps. Indeed, one company which supplies corporate gifts for firms across the country has reported a 25 per cent increase in business since 2019 as employers seek to sweeten the deal and remind staff that they are valued, treasured, and loved, yes, loved.
The pandemic has done more for the plight of the worker than decades of unionisation. The penny has dropped. People realise they have skills, they have experience and they don’t have to put up with anyone’s shit. Even those without skills or experience have got in on it, haughtily demanding fair working environments and assigned rotas.
Now not only do we want to have our cake and eat it, we want to have a second, back-up, cake, some of them fancy cupcakes, and another cake when all that cake is gone. And if we don’t get it, if there’s even a bit of icing missing, we’ll go somewhere else, where the cake is plentiful and we get our own maiden with extra grapes.
And if anyone even mentions the word greed, if an exasperated employer has the temerity to suggest our demands are excessive, we’ll just point out the window and remind them there’s tubes of toothpaste selling for €4 and mammies and daddies considering swapping their children for a sup of diesel.
Alas, this won’t continue, this can’t continue. It’s like that six-month period in your mid-twenties when, for reasons unknown, you became irresistible to members of the opposite sex, when you only had to breathe in someone’s direction to have them nibbling the ear off you, when you had pheromones like crack cocaine and a swagger to match.
Any minute now the natural order will be restored. We’ll go back to being our repugnant selves; unwanted, unloved, unnoticed. If we’re lucky we won’t have pissed too many people off, will still have some semblance of a job to go with all the jewellery, tablets and televisions we’ve hawked off prospective employers.
Because if we don’t, if we find ourselves without a seat when the music stops, we’ll have to revert back to the very worst version of ourselves; the meely-mawly Paddy who goes cap in hand, door to door, begging for a start, for an opportunity to make right his wrongs.
By all means scout around, eat whatever grapes you’re given, cake is thrust before you, but be careful, you’re going to meet all those people on the way back down.
