when is a job not a "real" job

Via Bhatnagar I stumbled across Kerry O'Connor's blog Doing It Right.

Of course it is rightwing and of course I don't agree with most of her posts (if any). I'm sure she won't find much that ticks her boxes here either.

But one thing did jump out at me which got my goat a bit. In her post about how socialists raise her blood pressure she says the following:

"...blood pressure is high because these people are morons who have never has a REAL job (a job in a union is not a job - it is biding time). Therefore, they have no perspective in life apart from the narrow manhole that they look out from."

Now I have a union job, my third union job in fact. As you might expect, I know rather a lot of unionists (even some I disagree with strongly in the arena of politics). And there are very very very few who I consider are "biding time".

I'm not quite sure what Kerry means by this - I would dearly like to know. What are we waiting for? My guess is that Kerry thinks we are all hanging on to become Labour MPs. It's worth noting that there are 100s of unionists around (and that's just the paid ones, there are many many more unpaid union activists who are members). They have divergent political views, from each other, from their unions, and definitely from the Labour Party.

Unionists are like any other workers - some embrace their job and work hard at it. A few coast.

Of all the groups of political types I have met in my short years of activism the ones who are most deserving of the label "biding time" are in fact student politicians. In fact the very nature of being a student involves a large amount of time spent biding, waiting to become what you are learning about. Nothing shameful in that, but I really do think perhaps Kerry should be careful where she throws her "not a real job" stones...