We didn’t realise how many bills you have to pay … and once money is involved, you know, the meetings used to be quite vitriolic sometimes because decisions had to be made that not everyone had liked … We’re trying to work with consensus. And, you know, not tread on people’s toes. It’s hard. It’s really hard. There used to be awful arguments sometimes at meetings, because not everybody agreed with all sorts of things … I’m sure all the compromises we made weren’t right, but you can never regret what you’ve done. You’ve got to learn from it and not do it again. And that’s anarchism, though, isn’t it? Dave Gropper But obviously there was no money at that time. There was absolutely no money. So, what the deal was, was that you got the equivalent of your dole to work X amount of hours, I think it was 30 something hours, but there was no money to pay you. And then you got your housing benefit, and you didn’t get hassled off the dole. That was the whole point. You were signed off, but you were... because you were working, but you actually only earned the equivalent of your dole, but there was no money to pay you. So basically, you know what we had to do was drink it. Heather Allan This is one thing that’s always pissed me off about the club. They never pay people properly ... you should be paying a bar steward properly and paying someone to run the place properly. Who’s accountable? Because people in the 90s and the 2000s were running up bar tabs. They weren’t paid in money. They were paid in beer, and so you basically had alcoholics working a bar running up big bar tabs and then having to be you know what? I mean, it’s not very good, is it? Russ Snell I would quite like them to run like, you know, a regular thing, and that’s what they said. They always used to do that in the past. But because all of the resources limitations and stuff, it is not happening, which is understandable … I would quite like to do it. But because I need to make some living I cannot just do it there voluntarily, and also they cannot pay. So it is not really happening. Penny Moe
PART ONE: A PLACE OF RESISTANCE
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