Work Is The Curse Of The Drinking Classes

According to a report in the Daily Mail a young graduate in museum studies is going to court to ask for a judicial review arising from her being obliged to undergo training whilst claiming benefits.

It is claimed that this is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and fundamentally questions the new regulations that mean unpaid training work for short periods can be enforced to ensure that the unemployed are gaining some form of experience and awareness of the world of work.

In fairness the claim that she was undertaking unpaid voluntary work related to her qualifications whilst seeking work is true. So another issue is whether this could be regarded as a substitute for the training recommended by the Job Centre.

The work was shelf stacking at Poundland. These are shops specialising in bargain offers. They are warm, if anything over heated, clean, provided with toilet facilities for staff and offer a wide variety of potential human contact on an everyday working basis. They are open for normal shop hours in the daytime.

It sure as hell beats unloading the Grimsby Fish train at 2 a.m. in five below with a light dusting of snow coming down. After you have finished that then you might have a short break before the Paper Train arrives at 4.30 to 5.00 a.m.

Then, you, together with a lot of other sweaty foul mouthed men from vans have between half an hour to an hour to unload all the days press and magazines for a large city and get them on the road. A stint cleaning the outside of trains at the carriage sheds by the canal was almost light relief.

But I was glad of the money, not being eligible for benefits because for two years I had been off work doing a sort of forced labour. Although “National Service” this did not count for national insurance and in any case someone going on to higher education had no chance of any benefits at all.

Back at the Job Centre they have to weigh up just what chance a person has of finding a job in the field they are qualified for. In many areas of higher education because of the numbers graduating against the jobs available there will be many who never will.

So people may have to be pointed in other directions and to work which they can do and which could provide contacts, leads and experience that would enable them to vary and widen their field of choice. Added to that is life experience, always invaluable in a difficult world.

I am sure the retail sector could benefit from entrants who have decent levels of education and the ability to progress to more demanding and senior work in time. One way of finding out if they really want work or not is to take them to see how they do in the real world of the present rather than the distant past.

But these days our graduates do not expect to start at the bottom. If the courts find that this offends their “human rights” then heaven help us all. So who will do these jobs and for what pay?

Where Are The Jobs Coming From?

As the economic and other uncertainties increase and the politics become more confused the parties will be retreating to old arguments and forms of debate. One central issue that will be dominating the slanging matches will be how many jobs and who are they for?

In order for people to have jobs they have to be put on offer by people looking for staff to employ. They have to look at what is going on in their firm or organisation and work out what to do and who is to do it.

Clearly the kind of decisions they come to nowadays are different from those in my working life and the kind of jobs and their conditions of service are becoming more and more unrelated to those of the past, especially in the private sector.

The town where I live has many ordinary shops that have gone out of business, incidentally depriving us of any locally sourced produce. They have become agencies for part time or temporary employment or contracted jobs with clear limits.

In addition to those are a number of more specialist and other agencies that do not have shop fronts but work out of offices, also largely staffed by people on temporary contracts.

It is clear that for many companies and organisations, notably those of middling or smaller sizes, it is no longer an option to do your own staffing or personnel work. Large companies may be able to afford the sizeable Human Resources staff to control and manage this and contain what has to be done but even they are exercising far more discretion in the type of job contract they offer.

Why has this begun to happen and why has it become much more imperative for any employer to be very careful and watch their step in putting anyone on the payroll for any reason? Just look at the recent legislation pushed through by the previous government as part of its scorched earth policy.

All these new laws and the rest are big, very complicated and add huge costs and other burdens to the business of taking on and managing staff. Moreover, they were not “joined up” and a great deal was left to future regulations or decisions of a variety of bodies who have no duty to be either consistent within those laws or with other laws that bear on the situation.

The costs of all this are now beginning to impact not only on recruitment but on almost all the costs that fall on consumers and taxpayers. What part it plays in inflation, reducing real incomes and creating obstacles to progress is not known but has certainly made life far more difficult for those at the bottom of the heap.

Here is my listing, make of it what you will:

Employment Act 2008, in force April 2009.

This built on and extended a range of past laws, regulations, case law and EU Directives from the past. It increased the rights of employees and added new responsibilities and requirements on employers.

It has meant stringent control over how employees must be dealt with. To this is added the new Social Security Regulations of 2011. One feature is that now maternity leave can run to a year and paternity leave for up to six months.

There is also added items for sick leave, time off, variation of hours, overtime etc. It is now very difficult to dismiss an employee without substantial reasons despite any “probation”. Also, the Conditions of Service will limit an employee’s work schedule within strictly defined limits which cannot be exceeded.

Equality Act 2010, in force October 2010

This Act imposes a wide range of conditions on employment in terms of gender, race, diversity and other aspects of relationships. Also, it limits greatly the conditions that can be applied to appointing people to jobs or to their treatment in work.

The full impact of this Act and the regulations that will be issued will be seen in the coming months and years. What it does mean that employing people cannot be subject to a wide range of requirements common in the past.

Health and Safety Act, 1974 and EU Directive 89/331EEC 1989

Under these laws there have been a large number of Directives and Regulations issued each year by the Health and Safety Executive which have the force of law. Old ones can be amended at any time as well as new ones issued.

All these, which have been increasing in number, directly affect what an employee can do in a number of areas of work and how they do it. Failure to understand those in the past has been a serious cause of misunderstandings and difficulty.

Disability Discrimination Act 2010

This brings together earlier law and EU Directives together with regulations and has a major impact on employment. Both in appointing and providing for staff there are now substantial requirements on employers.

Should an employee become disabled, either physically or mentally, whether in the course of their work or for other reasons the employer will be expected to make proper provision for them to do the job.

Also, as some disabilities may lead to occasional periods of treatment or sickness the employer will have to allow for this in the conditions of service and employment.

Human Rights Act 2010

This follows the Human Rights Act of 1998, enforced in October 2000 with the added law of 2004. It puts into effect a wider range of requirements and treatment of persons that directly affect employment issues. The full scale of this will take some time to emerge.
Comment

Given all this, many firms and organisations could now spend far more time and effort in simply managing and providing for their employees than on the services or production or other functions that they are supposed to be providing.

Once you gave jobs for people to do something to earn their money. Now our government sees jobs not as a means of production but as the end in itself regardless of what is supposed to be produced.

So what is happening to real economic growth?

Comparisons Are Odious

The first problem in making comparisons is can the things you are comparing be judged in terms of one another? This brings in the basis for comparisons as well as a lot of other considerations. At the moment there is a debate about which groups have lost out in the last decades and who have done well.

The trouble is how far can you compare, say, how the average office functions in 2011 with that of 1981 or for that matter 1951? Whilst the office of 1951 was recognisable in many ways in that of 1981 there have been major changes. Nowadays 1951 would seem almost closer to the Medieval than to that of 2011.

Says he bashing away at a computer with in house printer and instant mailing facilities linked internationally. But lurking away is a 1950’s Imperial Good Companion portable typewriter next to a filing cabinet with hard copy in abundance just for the record. Old habits die hard.

Given the substantial changes in the structure of the economy as a whole as well as the other changes within the industry, the commerce and the public sector the result has been an economy with different people doing different tasks in different ways. The computer may be a gift but carries its own curse.

Moreover, the moral basis of much of the economic activity has changed. Modern management theory scorns many of the preconceptions of 1981 or 1951. This has led to some of the recent debacles and will lead to more. What is striking now is the absence of much moral context to our present machinery of government.

Also the age structure of the population has changed and within that the age at which many start work is now older than it was in the past. Whilst they spend more time in education the downside is that many are bereft of experience of many of the practical aspects of life. Urbanisation of the population has increased the scope of the disconnections.

In the high street there are very few shops left now from 1951 that are remotely the same and this is almost true of 1981. One recent development is the major expansion in the number of employment agencies. There are now more of them in my town centre than there are banks. The windows tell their own story.

The jobs are all private sector. In one window with thirty jobs, presumably the more attractive ones on offer all the jobs were in the service sector and only one paid more than £20,000 p.a., most rather less. There were no labouring jobs and it seems that manual work of this kind and in much of construction has gone off the radar of the ordinary jobs market.

That one paid a salary which might rate a mortgage on the cheapest properties in town at a squeeze. The majority would be hard put to rent a small local flat. Running a car would make a major hole in the budget.

None carried pension plans and it was clear that there was no question of a “job for life” or indeed much employment protection given the likely nature of the contracts. How you compare this with say in 1951 a reliable factory job with an established firm I do not know and it is still very different from 1981.

What I do not like is the prevailing fear and defensive attitudes of people in the workplace, the uncertainty and the need to compete personally, to deceive and to betray. We may not have earned much at the bottom end of the ladder in the 1950’s but often we managed to laugh and “teamwork” was real and not a formula for controlling dissent or a box to be ticked for the CV for the next job move.

Rather than casting our minds back to a distant and alien past the question should be how should incomes be distributed in a society that is very new and within which we expect a good deal of public provision paid for by taxation.

The answer at present is that nobody has the answers.