Paid, domestic, and emotional work in the precariat: Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You

ABSTRACT

Sorry We Missed You, directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty, focuses on precarious work in modern Britain and its effects on a working-class nuclear family. Both Ricky (Kris Hitchen), the father, and Abby (Debbie Honeywood), the mother, work gruelling jobs that arguably situate them within the precariat. However, Loach and Laverty also draw attention to the gendered differences between Ricky’s and Abby’s situations. Drawing on the works of both Guy Standing and Arlie Russell Hochschild, we analyse Abby’s three domains of work as represented in the film: her paid work, which is precarious in similar ways to her husband’s; her domestic work, where she undertakes disproportionate care for their children; and her emotional work, which is required both at home and in her employment. In our analysis, we contend that Loach and Laverty do emphasise the ways Abby’s experience of precarious work is different due to being a woman and mother, however, the film’s ending deprioritises Abby’s struggles.

KEYWORDS:

• Precariat
• second shift
• emotional labour
• precarious work
• Ken Loach

Acknowledgments

Ms Goodall was able to view the film for free through participation in Melbourne International Film Festival’s 2019 Critics Campus program. Thanks to Georgia Keam for providing feedback on an early draft. Thank-you also to the two anonymous peer-reviewers for their extremely helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship [FT160100115 2017-2020], awarded to Kay Cook.

Notes on contributors

Zoë Goodall

Zoë Goodall is a Research Associate in the Centre for Urban Transitions at Swinburne University of Technology. Her main research focus is social policy, particularly in relation to housing, welfare, families and post-separation parenting. Zoë also has an interest in film studies, is a published film critic, and in 2019 was selected to participate in Melbourne International Film Festival’s Critics Campus program. E-mail: [email protected]

Kay Cook

Kay Cook is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Swinburne University. Her work explores how new and developing social policies such as welfare-to-work, child support, and child care policies, transform relationships between individuals, families, and the state. Her work seeks to make the personal impact of these policies explicit in order to provide tangible evidence to policy makers to affect more humanistic reform. Her research has contributed to the development of the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2010 General Social Survey, the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into Family Violence and Commonwealth Law, and the Parliamentary Inquiry into the Child Support Program. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Family Studies from 2012-2018 and is a current Co-Director of the International Network of Child Support Scholars. E-mail: [email protected]