The Working Man’s Blues (Still on the Payroll—Just Not Ours)
“You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” From Sixteen Tons. Written in 1946. Not retired since.
We like to think the song is over. The pits closed, the mills gone. Hard hats swapped for lanyards. Work made safer, cleaner, better paid. Progress, measured and reported.
Except some of the lyrics still scan.
“I’ve been working on the railroad, all the live-long day” — Working on the Railroad. Today it might be a warehouse shift, a care round, a delivery route. The work is still physical. The hours still long. The difference is you might be managed by an app rather than a foreman. No whistle. Just a notification.
“Down in New Orleans… need a steady job” — Baby Please Don’t Go. The steady job is the part that aged badly. Zero-hours contracts. Agency work. Rotas that arrive late and change often. Flexibility, we call it. Usually one way.
“They call it stormy Monday… but Tuesday’s just as bad” — Stormy Monday. The grind is not a bad day. It’s the pattern: low pay, limited prospects, little security. The UK’s minimum wage has risen, but it is not always a living wage. Union membership has fallen to around a quarter of the workforce—and much lower in the private sector. The collective voice is quieter.
Public services used to make a point of being different. Local authorities saw themselves as model employers—setting standards on pay, conditions and voice. Then came outsourcing. The workforce fragmented. The employment relationship lengthened into supply chains. The work didn’t disappear; it moved.
We didn’t eliminate the lowest standards. We relocated them—and wrote a contract to say they weren’t ours.
That matters. Because councils still shape large parts of the labour market—just indirectly. Adult social care is the clearest example: essential work, often low paid, frequently insecure, and largely delivered by people who are not on the council payroll but are very much in the system.
The question is no longer “are we a good employer?” but “what do our contracts create?”
Trade unions were built for a workplace you could point at. This one is harder to find. The boss is dispersed. Responsibility is shared, which can mean it is also diluted.
None of this is universal. Many providers do the right thing. But where margins are tight and oversight is distant, the line between low pay, insecurity and exploitation can blur—especially for those with the least bargaining power.
So how far have we travelled?
Far enough to change the language. Not always far enough to change the experience.
If councils want to reclaim their role as model employers, it won’t be through the payroll alone. It will be through procurement: paying a realistic price for care, setting clear expectations on pay and conditions, using social value clauses that mean something, and managing contracts with the same seriousness as services.
The music changed. The standard has to follow.
