What trip to Northern Irish fishing village taught me about working values: Bird Lovegod

You might sail from the harbour at midnight, spend three hours getting to the fishing grounds, cast the nets out, spend three hours waiting for them to be pulled back in, and from there on the job consists of sorting prawns and pulling their heads off whilst the process is repeated three or four times before returning to harbour, unloading, going home for a few hours sleep, then doing it all over again.

It’s a hard business and the cost of fuel, the insurance, the maintenance of the boats and the overheads are real. Yet the prices of prawn and fish are high while the previous fuel hikes knocked some of the boats out of business, so now supply is down whilst demand is up and business is good.

So, what do you suppose a fisherman earns, a basic deck guy, whose main job is to stay awake and prepare prawns? From what I can understand, it’s somewhere upwards of £1,000 a week. And yet there’s so few local people willing to do it the skipper has a team of four from Ghana.

Can it really be necessary to bring people from Ghana to Northern Ireland to do a job that pays such good wages?

I wonder, has the work ethic of Britain been eroded to a nub, washed away like the sands after the storm, and if so, what has replaced it, and what caused this decline?

Clearly Covid might be part of this phenomenon. Everyone got used to not going to work for months and months, and there was plenty of free money washing around, furlough, grants and loans. Millions of people were paid not to work, and that’s a hard habit to get out of.

On top of that, we all went through a not so subtle process of evaluating life. Remember when a running scoreboard was broadcast across all media showing how many people had died that day? All day, every day.

It seems twisted and bizarrely dystopian, but it was real, and having that daily data thrust upon us for a year has, like a prolonged near death experience, caused a collective rethink of the value and meaning of life. A rethink that hasn’t come up with a new and positive answer, but has concluded the previous answer was wrong.

With hindsight, if you wanted to degenerate a working culture and work ethic it seems the optimum way to do it is to make everyone sit at home, whilst being paid, and require them to watch TV for six hours a day mostly focussing on the inevitability of death.

After a year, release them, and see how keen they are to run back to the office, or start careers, or do hard graft jobs, or even care about working beyond the minimum required to survive.

I don’t feel I’m excluded from these generalisations. Life is short, its grip tenuous, and vast waves of change can and do crash upon our small vessels and send us to the deep.

Perhaps it isn’t a bad thing, this change of attitude. Perhaps it’s a resetting of balance, a correction, perhaps the pendulum had swung too far, perhaps hard working for years and decades and a lifetime isn’t what we are designed for after all.

Perhaps we need this recess, this break, this slowdown and step back to consider the more meaningful aspects of human existence as we fall through time.

Recess, even if it means recession, may actually be what we need.

Bird Lovegod is MD of Ethical Much