As well as being a self-employed writer, I’m now also a freelance usher at one of London’s most esteemed cultural hotspots. It’s not a bad gig – free entry to all the events when I’m not working, which is quite a lot of the time. Even though I need the money, I find it difficult to accept any more work than the minimum required to prevent myself from starving. That’s because we earn just above minimum wage, and while a lot of people’s answer to low wages is to work more hours, my attitude is to work less. That way, there are fewer hours in which I feel like I’m being taken for a ride.

The staff at the cultural place are mostly aspiring film makers and actors, which means I’m witnessing heartbreak and borderline mental illness every time I clock in. There’s one guy here, Tommy, who works an eighty hour week, stretching his life between a sandwich chain and the relative comfort of the cultural place. He’s selling himself to these jobs so he can buy a camera to make a film. And he’s developing a twitch.

Tommy laughs manically at the smallest things now. Just last week I speculated that maybe he was losing his mind a little because he was shaking his head and talking to himself in a Loony Toons voice as he poured some wine into a glass, but all he did was laugh hysterically, either in recognition or denial, I couldn’t tell. The only girls he dates now are customers, but because he works so much, all he does is invite his potential future wives to the cultural place to go see something on their own while he’s bartending.

On one of my many days off recently, I caught up with a former member of staff at Pret A Manger who was fired for forming a union. Andrej Stopa is a kind of steam-punk Braveheart turned union organiser from the Czech Republic. He was protesting outside the St Pancras station branch of Pret with a banner, a megaphone, a bandanna, a pair of Cyberdog trousers and a pair of aviator shades. But before being moved on by the police, Andrej and a small band of activists were demanding not just that Pret buck their ideas up and stop firing union organisers, but also that Andrej be reinstated.

“Pret A Manger! Reinstate Andrej!” they chanted. I couldn’t understand why Andrej, a finance student at London South Bank University, would want to go back there, so I asked him. And what he said made him seem selfless and kind of heroic.

“I want to keep organising the staff against the bad treatment,” he said. “I don’t care if they treat me so badly. But I really cannot stand when they also treat the other people as bad as they treated me. There were five of us, then our numbers started increasing, but after I was fired they intimidated the staff. So the activity is very low right now.”

One of the other founding members of the Pret union has since been hounded out. But Andrej says regardless of whether he gets his job back, his goal is to get Pret to pay the London living wage of 8.55 an hour to its all staff in the capital.

The living wage is a noble and essential cause. Being able to survive and feed your family, or even save up for a camera, without getting another soul sucking job, is no joke. But as this thunderous tract points out, it’s not as though low wages are the only blight of the contemporary workplace.

While I recommend reading the whole thing, in particular it highlights the alarming methods of control used by large companies in the catering and service sectors. In this instance, Pret, which is at the forefront of getting inside the heads of its staff. At Pret, and no doubt other multinational restaurant chains, not only are workers’ outer actions controlled by the company – the tasks they agree to do for their wages – so are their emotional responses to those tasks. So they don’t just have to make coffee and operate a till, they have to be super happy and enthused while they’re doing it. While I don’t like sweeping floors, I object more to being told to look happy while I’m doing it.

The theoretical term for this is ‘affective labour’, which was given a sickeningly positive reception when Pret was surveyed by a New York Times business correspondent last year. So for example, Pret’s worker bees are disciplined for not smiling enough, or for not creating the ‘Pret Buzz’. And it’s not just an individual worker who suffers, but the whole ‘team’ is penalised for one person failing to be sufficiently ecstatic.

While I admire people like Andrej, global capitalism has proven itself to be pretty much immune to trade unions. It’s just not a fair fight any more. It’s like a team of well-organised rat catchers armed with traps and mallets trying to stop a computer virus. They’re operating on totally different playing fields. One is old and slow, a bi-product of the mechanical age which gets around on foot, whose threats are physical, obstructive and primitive. The other is a complex, nebulous, shape-shifting entity with access to tax havens, devious lawyers, political lobbyists and unlimited reserves of cheap labour from around the world.

What makes this worse is that big trade unions are essentially political structures not unlike a lot of the companies they rile against, whose leaders earn ten times as much as their members. No wonder membership is declining. Besides their dwindling influence and the lack of unity in a global temporary workforce, big old unions just don’t appeal to people who grew up with Tony Blair as a Labour prime minister. Unions embody a 20th Century form of power which struggle see, let alone connect with the thing it’s trying to hit. Even if their interests are aligned, to the young worker toiling in a sandwich chain, big unions are as antiquated and removed from their experience as coal mines and steelworks. Which is why I’m so encouraged by Andrej’s campaign, even if he’s on a hiding to nothing.

Just before I joined, there were rumblings of forming a union at the cultural place, to demand better pay. Again, the London living wage was mooted. While you expect a company like Pret to act like a plantation owner, you’d think there would be more enthusiasm for the living wage in a firm whose director of operations is regularly seen swanning around in a Ken Loach t-shirt. But my friends at the cultural place were just as afraid of losing their jobs to actually form a union as the Prey guys, so they settled for a 20p an hour pay rise from head office, which means we’re still earning less than the guys who serve sandwiches.

Having made an impressivemixfor us last year, the ever-adventurous electronica producer Brassica is back with his new kaleidoscopic 'Temple Fortune' EP on London-based label Civil Music. The quirky lo-fi video for the cosmic single 'Modern Magic', as premiered on Dazed, is atiny budget affair featuring Joe Ryan of Fair Ohs on the drums (as heard in the original track), with a little cameo from Brassica at the end. Here we speak to Brassica about the making of the retro video, and his nods to Jesus Christ Superstar and bad shows at Butlins...

Dazed Digital: How did the idea for the video come about and have you worked with Joe from Fair Ohs before?
Brassica: The video features a longtime friend Joe Ryan, who now plays in Fair Ohs. He played the actual drum parts within the song, so when I met with video maker Phil Whitby, he suggested creating something based around a drum tuition video. As a big fan of 80s VHS musician's tutorials like 'Star Licks Master Series', my mind kinda exploded. Phil and I conversed extensively on ways to elaborate on the theme. The result is a video which explores the blurring of memory, persona, time and space through an essentially ancient musical instrument.

DD: Can you tell us a little about the track?
Brassica: The track is a nod towards (particularly 70s) musical theatre and the kind of music you might expect to hear in War of Worlds or Jesus Christ Superstar. There's a certain magic in sitting slightly too close to a live theatre band that I really dig, whether an expensive West End show or a bad pantomime at Butlins.

DD: What's the story behind the new EP?
Brassica: Modern Magic is one of four tracks from the Temple Fortune EP. The EP is a small selection of music created over a year or so of writing, plus an old banger for good measure.

Capracara's version of Lydden Circuit is a monument. Jonny has an individual approach to making club records that's as warm and sincere as his personality. This is why I asked him to provide the voiceover for the video - it sets a friendly tone for the video in a way I dreamt of.

William S. Burroughs is cemented in the popular imagination as the archetypal literary outlaw, the third part of a holy trinity of Beats; father to Ginsberg’s son and Kerouac’s ghost. Novels including Junkie, Queer and Naked Lunch pioneered a new and uniquely American literary form, shamanistic and paranoid, sanctifying the outsider. But Burroughs’ experiments in form and creative process extended beyond writing into film, sound and the visual arts, and he spent much of his later years in Kansas making paintings. A selection of those works can be seen in All out of time and into space at October Gallery, London.

In advance of the opening I caught up with Kathelin Gray, founder of the Theater of all Possibilities and a close friend of Burroughs, to talk about the man, his paintings, and how the mythology surrounding the most American of artists might impede our appreciation of his work.

Burroughs is best known here as a writer, so I wonder if you could expand on the relationship between his literary and painterly practice.

Burroughs had associated with artists through the forties and fifties, the era of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. He was very influenced by process art, recombinant art, by art that incorporated incorporating text into paintings, and he was always concerned with the relationship between word and image. Burroughs thought in images, in symbols, and that’s visible in both his writing and his painting.

How influential was Brion Gysin on Burroughs’ work as a visual artist?

Gysin and Burroughs began to collaborate in Paris in 1959, when they were living together in the Beat Hotel. Gysin had steeped himself in the cabbalistic traditions of North Africa and his work drew heavily on ritual and magic; that influenced Burroughs, who was more scientific in his approach. Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut up too – he realised one day, when he was cutting through newspaper with an Exacto knife, that the strips could be recombined and the word sequences re-examined.

What was so attractive about the cut up technique to Burroughs?

He saw it as a means of undermining the power structures that govern the behaviour of the populous. Burroughs was constantly trying to get at the way that things are programmed beneath the surface. The cut-up technique was one of the tools by which he did this, but not the only one.

What were the other tools, the other processes? With respect to the paintings I’m thinking of those abstract compositions creating by taking a shotgun to a can of spray paint…

Well I think Burroughs and Gysin met [auto-destructive artist] Gustav Metzger at one of his early lectures at Cambridge. Metzger was fed up with the commodification of art and was trying to get back to the act, the essence of what’s done by the artist in the moment of creation. That was another influence.

But Burroughs didn’t start painting until late in his life?

Burroughs really began painting in 1987, in Kansas, the year after Gysin died. Burroughs was devastated by Gysin’s death – he was the only man he ever truly respected as a man and an artist. You know, Burroughs only really started writing after he killed his wife Joan [in a drunken and famously ill-advised game of William Tell], and I think that taking up painting represented another way of working through trauma.

What of the way that Burroughs is perceived now?

I’m really not keen on the Burroughs stereotype of him with the needle in his arm and the three-piece suit, because that’s not what he was.

You don’t think he deliberately cultivated that iconography?

He cultivated the iconography but not the stereotype. I wouldn’t say that he resented the stereotype – it’s just that it’s counterproductive when it comes to understanding his work.

He was always keen to dissociate himself from the Beat Generation, which hasn’t stopped him being lumped in with them by posterity. How did he consider his work, and that of Gysin, to be different from that of Kerouac, Ginsberg or Gregory Corso?

He was a close friend with Ginsberg, particularly, but he wasn’t like the Beats – he wasn’t a Buddhist, he wasn’t Zen, he didn’t like jazz, he wasn’t cool. Burroughs’ work was about deconstructing the hypnotic effect on human nature of the corporate world, the military-industrial complex, and the military-educational complex. He was extremely concerned by the ecological devastation of the planet, by terrorism, by the militarisation of society, and he deeply wanted to create tools that would allow the individual to think for themselves. That drove everything that he did.

Benjamin Eastham