I was watching the 2017 documentary “My Generation” featuring Michael Caine, assisted by several other '60s-era celebrities, like Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull, Twiggy, Donovan, etc.
It’s actually really nicely done and gives me a kind of nostalgia for an era long before my time. The music and the styles are quite excellent.
Anyway, near the beginning, Caine is talking about how in the post-war period, he and other working class Britons were ready to throw off the shackles of the class system, aided by a quality government-provided education and health care system.
On Amazon Prime Video, at about 00:07:25, there’s a clip of an outrageously mustachioed gentlemen in a suit standing in front of a modernist backdrop who is lecturing about discipline. I can’t entirely tell whether this was sincere or satire, but he says this:
It’s this phrase “at the work bin” I’m interested in. I’ve never heard it before. I assume it means something equivalent to “at the workplace.” Is anyone familiar with this phrase? Was it once commonly understood? Is it still used? What’s its origin? What is the metaphorical “bin” here?
Hmm, I’ve heard a similar expression from my co-workers in India. I’ll ask how it’s going (in text over chat), and pretty often the answer is “Not much, our bin just started.” I’ve always just assumed bin was slang for workday or something similar.
In this case, there’s no accent since it’s in text. But there’s at least one group that seems to still refer to their work as their “bin”.
Near Delhi, so fairly far north. I’m not certain of their native language.
To clarify, I’m not hearing them say this. They are typing “Our bin just started” and I am reading it in chat. Din would be an odd typo to make repeatedly without correcting it, it seems.
In my English, I would use the words “manual labor” to mean “physical work” rather than “working with their hands”.
I guess I’d think of bench work as skilled or at worst semi-skilled labour.
In context, I’d think the gentleman was appealing for pride in the workplace, and making an unconscious (but fully visible) class distinction between bench workers and manual laborers – who are aren’t expected to have any discipline.
One of the guys I lived with in the 1980’s had recently worked as a gardener in London. He said that one of the points about working as a gardener in London was that there was no minimum standard of behavior required. You didn’t have to worry about social rules or getting it wrong. Because you could be lying dead drunk in a gutter in your own piss, and nobody would think the worse of you: you were a gardener.
I would think “work bench” signifies a skilled trade: cabinetmaker, shoemaker, jeweler, etc. As opposed to some mutt on an assembly line, screwing caps onto toothpaste tubes.
Come on, can’t you picture the array of fussy little tools hanging above that “work bench?”