Non-Stop Inertia

Ivor Southwood has worked as a mental health nurse and studied literature and media. He has also done various temporary jobs and is interested in the culture of precarious work. He lives in Hove, UK.

Ivor Southwood has incisively tapped into the emotional landscape of the always-available, always-looking-for-work world of precarious labour - and passionately found a way to navigate around and beyond the incessant stupefaction. Writing, from the inside, about the monotonous unpredictability of intermittent work, the privatisation of welfare and its often absurdly punishing routines, an intimately managed emotional labour that is as exhausting as it is pointless, and covering theories of the spread of contingent work in an accessible way, Southwood has accomplished something extraordinary. Non-Stop Intertia registers the tragedy and the farce, elicits anger and laughter and, finally, shows that while it might not always be possible to withdraw one's labour by going on strike, it might be necessary to withhold the emotional connection that is demanded in the exchange. Non-Stop Inertia's witty riposte, in short, is to behave as the robot that we are expected to be, as a way beyond being treated as if one is. A beautiful book. (Angela Mitropoulos, Queen Mary, University of London, author of Precari-Us?)