Jasmin's Rant

I’ve never done this before, but I believe it’s important and needs to be said. I’m creating a space for working-class people, especially those who grew up in low-income families and disadvantaged backgrounds. I hope you relate to this and feel less alone in your struggle. My hope is that a working-class community can find refuge or a feeling of warmth here, in our publication collective. This rant of sorts is coming from a place of wanting to be honest with my audience. And maybe by understanding the limits under which my work is produced for Silly Dogs and as an artist, you can relate it to your own work, whatever it is that you do.  I’m assuming most of you are artists and creatives, but to assume makes an ass out of you and me, and so I hope I’m wrong and there are all sorts of people reading this.

Diary entry from Monday, 29^th June 2025

I’m tired. I’ve been yelled at for getting orders wrong, screamed at down the phone for making you wait 10 extra fucking minutes for your food, and made fun of because I don’t know the names of cigarettes because I don’t like to fucking inhale shite if I can help it. The air we breathe is bad enough, and you’re standing in front of me with a smirk on your face like I’m some dumb bitch when you’re the fucking mug suckling on your fucking butt head. But fuck knows that if I didn’t have asthma, I’d fucking smoke to take off the edge of simply being alive, too. So I get it. People are tired, people are angry. It’s hot and you can see everyone’s working their sweaty bollocks off just to make ends meet. Where I live, most people work at the docks, in the factories, or in the Amazon warehouses. I know a guy who works at Amazon. He works with me at my other job, working mornings and nights like me, working like a dog till you drop.

My feet are swollen from being on my feet for 18 hours straight, from 5 am to 11 pm, over the past two days, working two 6-hour shifts. For context, my hours change every week, depending on my 4, 6 and 8-hour contracts, which means shit because I get sporadic overtime over the week. If you work in hospitality or retail, you know how fucking annoying it is that your weeks are not consistent, so you can’t plan ahead because you might be working that day. You have no life. You have no weekends, just a random day off during the week. When I first started working at my retail and hospitality jobs, I would be rota’d in for 6 days with one day off. In the end, I had to lie and say that I had another job so that I’d at least have consistent days off. They’re not days off, though; I work on those days too. Freelance and other odd jobs, as well as trying to keep up with my art practice. If you’re a working-class artist, you can say goodbye to making work consistently. It shouldn’t be the case that I have to work really unhealthy hours because my jobs don’t offer at least a solid 20 hours a week; it’s however many hours they give you. Which is costing me so much tax because tax is heavier if you’re working more than one job >:(

Present Jasmin

While working all my jobs, I have found it extremely difficult to find the energy to make work, like new zines and new prints for Silly Dogs Brunch Club. I was recovering from work, and I felt this increasing pressure to make work because I am falling behind, not keeping up with my friend and co-founder of Silly Dogs Brunch Club. I can feel the pressure building up in our little publication collective, not being able to attend zine fairs because I can’t afford the time off and not being able to make new stuff because I have no time. I’m tired. I wish I could put all my effort into my artwork; I would much rather have sleepless nights over my photography than pizza dough. But I work for free in Silly Dogs, and it is unsustainable for me as a working-class person to pursue this full-time with no financial backing. Wendy and I will soon share with you the realities of running a project and coming from different financial backgrounds, how we navigate this and make it work. Anyway, way back to my angry rant…

If I do not work, I have nothing but a homeless shelter to look forward to. No one seems to talk about how your upbringing in poverty directly impacts your opportunities. The sort of people I’m talking about are the kids that grew up on council estates, the kids that were abused, the kids whose parents were so fucking depressed they wasted all the money on alcohol and weed. I’m talking about the kids who had to look over their shoulder while walking down the street. I’m talking about the kids who didn’t even have a passport. The ones that had never left this fucking country, even just to have a break for a day. I’m talking about those who are living in overcrowded homes. Those who have to privately rent but are using their benefits to pay for it. Those who are entitled to council homes but can’t have one because they sold them all off and didn’t build any new ones. I’m talking about those kids who grew up with their parents being too busy for them, so they go out on the streets and get fucked on cider and develop bad habits from the age of 13. And now I’m sitting here like a mug with £80k+ debt, all because I was told a lie that if I went to university, I would have a good job, and I wouldn’t end up like my mum.

Having a degree these days means nothing; you have to have more. You have to have a master’s or some other certificate to prove you’re special in an oversaturated job market, where it really is about who you know and not what you know. Who do I know? I know old Bill down the road is a tradie and working his bollocks off to pay his pension. He’s old now, so he’s making more mistakes, and each time it’s more fatal. I know another old guy, he was doing work around a rich woman’s property, and he fell from the attic and cut his bowels open. He was up and working again a week later, with no recovery time because he had no money to allow him to rest. I know a woman down the high street who hires people on benefits under the radar, so they have some training to go into work without being sanctioned and having all their money taken from them.

I’ve learnt that in order to succeed, I must get on my hands and knees and plead. I’ve learnt that if I want to make my life a little easier in the workplace, I just have to smile at men, laugh at their jokes and validate them, which goes for both customers and colleagues. They’ll let me choose my hours, my days, and give me less grief at work. It’s the exact reason why I haven’t let slip that I’m a lesbian, because I get treated differently when men know they don’t have a chance. That when I laugh at his joke, I’m just laughing at a joke and not stroking his fucking ego. Oh, and FYI, 9x out of 10 I don’t find your joke funny, I think you’re a misogynist with no critical thinking skills past what you can see beyond your nose.

People ask me, ‘Well, why aren’t you applying for benefits?’ Oh yeah, free money? I’ve lived on that shit since I was born. You have no fucking clue what it’s like living on the breadline when you tell me to just go on fucking benefits. It’s no joke, and it’s not easy. There’s a reason why so many people get stuck on benefits and fuck me, I’m not letting that happen to me if I can help it. I WENT TO FUCKING UNIVERSITY, I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RELY ON GOVERNMENT FUNDS WHEN I HAVE A FUCKING DEGREE. ‘I Daniel Blake’ is a good film to watch to educate yourself on how the benefits system can really fuck over vulnerable people, it’s not a true reflection but it’s based off a true story and somewhere to start for sure.

I’m not about to give you a run-down of my entire working-class background, but I think it is important to show people where I come from, because there might be someone out there like me who needs to know they aren’t alone. I feel alone in that, sometimes, where it feels like no one truly understands. I have no capital, I have no dad to give me money to help pay for bills, my mum is too broke herself to help out, I have no savings, I have no safety net. If I do not work, I will fall into debt. In fact, that’s exactly what happened when I was studying at university. Thankfully my university and my maintenance loan pulled me out of it – still skint, but not in debt (excluding student debt obvs). Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to me had I not had the luxury of a student loan and my University’s hardship fund. Also going into debt with a job is completely different to going into debt without a job. I have been in debt without a job twice now, and it’s scary. As opposed to when I had a job, it’s a little handy to pay stuff off slowly.

What I think is that if your parents are wealthy enough to pay your tuition fees and pay for your accommodation during and after your studies, that’s not your fault, just as much as it isn’t my fault that I grew up poor. If I were in your position, I would be the same, and you never know how good you have it until it’s taken away from you or unless you’ve experienced it yourself. In that sense, I am lucky, because I know how much fucking better I have it now as opposed to when I was a kid. What pisses me off to the high heavens is when people don’t acknowledge their privilege and keep their nose up in the air, all the while they’re not watching out for all the shit they’re stepping in on the floor. That’s as if I, ignoring the fact that I’m broke for a minute, did not acknowledge the fact that I have the privilege of at least having a degree and somewhere to sleep at night. It should not be the middle class against the working class; it should be both classes fighting to exist comfortably in an economy that is serving the super-rich, letting them take all our resources, leaving us and our kids with nothing. In the UK, we’ve seen it obliterate the working-class, and they’re going to take out the middle class next to keep funding billionaires' lifestyles.

How is this affecting my work?

As a working-class person, my work is slower. And I actually don’t think that’s a bad thing. When I’m at work, behind the till, when it’s not busy, I’m thinking, mulling over ideas, daydreaming, making work in my head. My work is thought out for longer and made over a longer period of time. I’m done with making lots of work really quickly, just to get something out there, believing that I am lazy for not making work. No, my work has to be well thought out and well made, which means it takes longer, and that’s ok. I have to keep reminding myself that my value in Silly Dogs Brunch Club is not how much I make, but what I make, and I have just as equal a stake in it. The quality of my work and the rate at which it is being produced are just the product of my circumstances; I really don’t think it’s a bad thing. It’s just annoying, I so want to pour myself into it, but it’s slow and drawn out. And don’t get me wrong, I like to work jobs like Co-op, but there is something seriously wrong with this country and its wealth distribution. And I guess this all plays in part to this overconsumption, hustle culture of produce, produce, produce and sell. It’s a shame because some really great stuff can be produced over longer periods if we were allowed the time to do it.

If you weren’t already at a disadvantage from having the piss taken out of you for working like a mug for scraps, it makes it 10x worse when you come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Disabilities, ethnic minorities, domestic abuse, age, drug and alcohol abuse, location, LGBTQ+, are all things that can really make life as a working-class person harder. Inequality becomes more pronounced in those who don’t have the bank of Mum and Dad, who don’t own property, have no savings and no disposable income. Further exposed depending on their neighbourhoods and access to green space. But this deserves much more unpicking than a quick glossing over in a rant.

There’s too much to say and my writing becomes messy. That’s why I need all your help; I need your voices. That’s why I’m announcing an open call. It’s going to be for the working-class, anyone who’s got something to say about their experience, I want to hear it, I want to eternalise it in a publication. Anyone who is making work despite being working-class, I want to see it, I want to document it. You’re not alone, I see you, and I will use my privilege of being in a publication collective to print your voices and let them echo in every copy. To be working-class and make work is to protest, so let’s make work. Creative Workers will unite.