#FollowTheMoney 🧵 44/n but also: #Redundancy has made me think deeply (of course!) about the role of money in personal decision making. I may be wrong but it feels like this is something we don’t talk about much, and yet it is is so central to everything! I DO want to talk about it, even if I have nothing insightful to say actually. Just a few observations.
1. Money was at core of my decisions around redundancy. I have two teenage children and a high mortgage.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 45/n
I could not go for lovely 0.5 offered, or for tribunal; I had to opt for enhanced redundancy. If had chosen tribunal route i would have probably been able to keep my job as the 12 who did (who were able to do so due to different financial circumstances) were all reinstalled in an even lovelier deal btw management and union. (The 64 of us eho accepted enhanced redundancy by deadline did not know this would happen).
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 46/n
2. Money is now also so core to all my decision-making in how to spend my time, what jobs to go for - and balancing the need for money with wanting to do good, environmental work, and things I enjoy and am good at. It is quite strange, I gave a lecture at SOAS in Feb this year on “Doing Work You Believe in and be paid for it”, on the very day the Goldsmiths mass redundancies were announced (will see if I can upload recording here)
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 47/n
This was a combination of two papers: one on unpaid Eastbourne climate activism, one on sustainability professionals in the palm oil sector. It is very strange that I gave that lecture and wrote that paper - this is me now! I am out here in the wilderness, having to make a living, and yes, doing consultancy work. Which, of course, as I am rapidly learning, does not have to mean “selling out “ - my current work for the RSPB is really rewarding.
https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/4717/
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 48/n here also a link to the other paper on Eastbourne climate activism, i’ve shared it before but doing so again as it has a brief section on what kind of work is rewarded by high salaries, and what isn’t. I still feel this is an incredibly important topic and not really talked about enough in #ClimateAction circles. Maybe we can talk about it more together here?
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 49/n Anyway, just to end for today: a huge, HUGE shout out ❤️ to everyone on here who works “freelance”, going from one projec to another (more on “projects” and projectification later - so important in itself). I am now realising the immense privilege of a secure job (not secure in my case, as it turned out), where you don’t have to think about where your money will come from in 6 months or whatever. It is a fundamentally different state of being. Everything now existential.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 50/n Today adding this excellent video by @RichardJMurphy on how “the City” is not our “Jewel in the Crown”, as Rachel Reeves put it, but a parasite extracting huge amounts of money for self-enrichment. It does not add any value to the economy.
So important to see the City for what it is.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 51/n Richard’s video has spurred me on to do a few posts now on #PrivateEquity. Long overdue here, because private equity is at the heart of how our world works!
(Just to state again: i am not an expert, just someone who is trying to make sense of our world by #FollowingTheMoney, in an eclectic 🧵)
To start with basics: what is private equity? I like this clear definition by Justin Robertson
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563460903288270
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 52/n
The amount of wealth and assets held by private equity is vast. The biggest private equity firm of all is of course #BlackRock, founded by Larry Fink in 1988. Here is a lovely Statistica chart showing how its “assets under management” grew from $1.31 trillion (i mean, not bad) to $10.41 trillion in 2024. Bloomberg predicts they will hit $15 trillion in a few years
https://www.statista.com/statistics/891292/assets-under-management-blackrock/
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 53/n I have to go now but over the next few days just want to talk about what this means: it means that so much of the world around us - restaurants, care homes, appartment blocks, student accommodation, etc etc, is all owned by private equity; that there is no escape.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 54/n
This article is hard to stomach for all those of us currently looking for work, and not finding anything suitable, or anything at all. But it’s good that at least rising #unemployment is recognised now.
My own #redundancy last year and subsequent struggles have made me so alert to all these wider structural changes; I am really scared that this may be just the beginning. Terrible combination of AI and money going only to the rich
