I Just Can't Stand It

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Sundae

There's a complex set of morals in the East End, and stealing from your employer is (was) simply a perk of the job.

I don't think that's specific to the East End ye know. It's a survival of a much older arrangement between employer and employee and there are/were remnants of it in many traditional working class communities. Though it probably survived in a more defined way in London. The balance between money wages and in kind entitlements was a site of contention between employers and employees from the 18th century on. And within working class communities that sense of entitlement along the margins never really went away.

Personally, I think it has a small survival in the way we view taking home odd bits of office equipment (pens, paper, a holepunch etc), or the way many people who work in the NHS somehow acquire bits of bedding or kitchen towels with the NHS logo on them :P

It's something I've been looking at in relation to eighteenth-century conceptions of crime and criminality. A lot of the cases of theft in both civil and military cases hang on this sense of entitlement to chips and other perks.