INTERVIEW: New Ken Loach film looks closely at new workforce issues in 21st century
Photo: Sorry We Missed You, starring Kris Hitchen, is directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty. Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist Films / Provided by Film Forum press site with permission.
In Sorry We Missed You, the new film directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty, the characters of Ricky and Abby are at a crossroads. They have a vehicle to their name, which Abby uses as a traveling nurse, but they are unable to make it to the end of the month with their mounting bills and other economic pressures. So the married couple decide to ditch the car for a new van, this way Ricky can become a courier — something akin to an Amazon delivery person.
Although there are some positives to Ricky’s new self-employment, the negatives begin to build up and prove suffocating. He has so many deadlines to meet — deadlines that are near impossible to achieve — that he has no time left for family, friends, self-care or life.
Sorry Missed You is the latest collaboration between Loach and Laverty, who have been working together for approximately 25 years. Their last project together was 2016’s I, Daniel Blake, and they first started working side by side in 1996 on Carla’s Song. The intervening years have produced a series of socially conscious films that document some of the economic, social and political realities of the new century.
“Me and Ken have been working together now for about 25 years,” Laverty said in a recent phone interview. “We’ve been working very closely hand in hand for a long, long time. The film we did before this was I, Daniel Blake. It came here a couple years ago. … When we were doing some research for that one and visiting food banks where people don’t have enough money to get to the end of the month, we noticed that it wasn’t just the unemployed and the people without jobs but the working poor who couldn’t get to the end of the month. It really made us look into the whole notion and the growing world of precarious work.”
Laverty was fascinated — and rightly concerned — that the workforce had changed so swiftly in recent years, and not for the better. In the old days, people would work eight-hour shifts, receive their requisite breaks and have a proper contract. Now many people are working on a daily or hourly basis, much like Ricky and Abby in the film. This leaves few hours for one’s necessary personal life.
“You get two hours in the morning and three hours at lunchtime and then three or four hours in the evening for the tuck-ins and the meals and the medicines,” the writer said. “So people’s life and work life were spread out over the whole day. They weren’t getting paid in between the hours, [and they were] having to pay their own traveling expenses, and just how people have been squeezed and how much pressure was put on them to make 15-minute visits, etc.”
This eventually led Loach and Laverty to look at drivers and couriers, and in particular the new contracts that many people in the industry were signing. At first, Ricky believes he is going to be set for life with his new delivery role. He’s a burgeoning entrepreneur, a warrior of the road, but quickly those initial dreams are dashed.
These contracts “talk about on-boarding and not being hired,” he said. “They talk about you don’t get paid a salary, you don’t get paid a wage, you get paid a fee. You don’t work for us, you work with us. It’s all this bogus language and a false narrative, and what it does is these corporations then transfer all risk from the corporation to the driver because they don’t get holiday pay, they don’t get sickness benefits. If something happens to their van, they pay for it. It’s a very seductive model because people have the illusion of freedom, but all risk is transferred to them. So there’s teams of psychologists and teams of lawyers who have designed these contracts, and people believe it because they think they’re going to end up with more money.”
Laverty admitted that some drivers and couriers do quite well, especially those who are fit and young. If they receive a good route and don’t have any bad luck, there can be a lot of money made. However, he spent a substantial amount of time with numerous drivers, and there’s a negative aspect to the industry as well.
“I went out to car parks to speak to them,” Laverty said. “I persuaded some of them to let me come with them because they are very vulnerable, and their work is very precarious. They can just lose their job like that, so I was very careful to make sure they’re OK. But it’s by being with them you see what they’re like at the end of 12 hours driving. You see the grayness in their eyes. You see this machine ticking and bleeping the whole day long, monitoring where you are, putting you under pressure and just measuring every single moment of your day, and you realize just what an effect it has on a human being. Doing all that detailed research was very, very important and really bled into the screenplay.”
Laverty made no qualms about it: to him, modern-day capitalism is a master of disguise. People don’t realize that when they purchase an article of clothing, it may be the result of what amounts to slave labor in Bangladesh, as one example. He doesn’t think people look behind that article of clothing and see the pressures placed on the individual who manufactured it.
“I think we need to have civic curiosity,” Laverty said. “We’re not just consumers are we. We’re neighbors, we’re friends, we’re family members of these drivers. There’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these drivers all over the country, people working in warehouses. These people are fathers, they’re brothers, they’re sisters, they’re uncles and aunts. So this idea that we’re all just designated as consumers is a great misconception, I think, and I think the great thing about film is you can actually spend time with people. You can be in their shoes, and you can help an audience see that.”
Laverty’s hope is that Sorry We Missed You, which is currently running at the Film Forum in New York City, will raise some important questions for the audience. He wants the crowd to make connections to the real world and start inspecting their own practices, and perhaps consider how they might contribute to the problem as well.
“I think it raises really, really big questions,” Laverty said. “It was very interesting because some of the drivers I met a way back when I wrote the screenplay, there was one young lad I spent a lot of time with. I spent time with him, and I saw the high-energy drinks he was taking during the day. No time to eat, pissing in a bottle, all these types of stuff. Anyway, I invited him to come and see the film 18 months later, and I was told by his friends that he was having mental health problems. I’m not surprised. If I had that job, doing that job six days a week, on the run for that length of time, under that amount of monitoring and surveillance, and just physically exhausted, I know I would have problems. It really makes me wonder what we’re doing to many of these workers, and I’m sure information will come out about it in due time.”
In the meantime, society has films like Sorry We Missed You.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Sorry We Missed You, directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty, is currently playing New York City’s Film Forum. Click here for more information and tickets.
