EMPLOYMENT 1 (Mini-articles) Index

The students of the 1990s are applying for less demanding options after watching their parents being sacked or "redeployed" in mid-career within large companies. Modern graduates assume that they will have to make their way in small companies, perhaps doing jobs that were beneath their true capabilities.

This is the first post-war generation with a sizeable proportion of parents who have been made redundant in corporate restructuring, and it is undoubtedly creating a mood of caution and despair. There is a far greater degree of consciousness among this generation of unemployment, of recession. It is a national phenomenon, and it is a new experience.

In times of recession, large companies usually see an increase in the number of applications for graduate trainee schemes and they can usually count on choosing better graduates. Recently, they've been raising the standards of their selection procedures. However, to their dismay, firms such as Shell, Marks & Spencer and ICI are discovering that the number of applications is dropping. They are suffering from their own pragmatism and they are beginning to realise that effects of rationalisation are now being visited on the next generation.

Jack Daniels is the Director of Edinburgh University's Career Service, written March 1995

Is work an economic necessity, or a social necessity, or both? The question is important and I was reminded of this during a recent visit to Bombay when I encountered the system that delivers lunch to the city's office workers.

Every morning at the main railway termini from about 11.30 onwards, men, carrying long wooden trays on their heads, extricate themselves from the railway carriages of incoming trains. Each tray contains about 30 round tins or dabbahs each containing the lunch of an office worker. The tins are handled by dabbawallahs, men whose job it is to collect the lunch tins from the office workers' wives at their suburban homes, bring in the lunches, then collect the empty tins and repeat the process in reverse. Each tin has some small marks, symbols and numbers, identifying where the owner can be found. The dabbawallahs are expert at sorting and distributing them. Some estimates reckomn that as many as 100,000 lunches are delivered in this way in Bombay every day. Why?

The economic answer is that labour is cheap, and the delivered lunches are cheaper than outside restaurant meals. But sandwiches or snacks would be even cheaper. Also, why don't the office workers take their own tins home with them afterwards and thus save money? So cost is not the reason for this Bombay custom. The real answer is that the arrival of the dabbas every lunchtime becomes a social occasion when employees have one of their rare opportunities to break off from work completely, sit around a table and talk to one another. In their tins there might also be messages from their wives and families. Meanwhile the dabbawallahs hang around, aware of the importance of the ceremonial, but also grateful that the custom gives them a few rupees every day for their families. Otherwise, if strict economics prevailed, they would be begging in the streets.

From the Financial Times, 21 June 1995

Robots have not yet had anywhere near the same impact on employment in manufacturing industry as general automation and rationalisation. The first industrial robot was used by Ford in a die-casting foundry in the 60s but robots didn't start appearing in serious numbers until the 80s. Even then, they were very expensive and often cumbersome because of inadequate software programming. In fact, they were used too freqeuntly to be truly economical and, between 1990 and 1993,, sales dropped steeply from about 80,000 robots a year down to about 50,000 when recession-hit industrial customers cut back sharply on their investments.

However, there are now strong signs that global sales are due to take off again as a consequence of much cheaper and more specialised robots with dramatic improvements in functionality and flexibility. Last year, sales rose to 67,000 units and confident projections are being made of the order of 15 to 20 per cent growth for many years to come. The new breed of robot is no longer confined to the large manufacturer, half of current sales now going to small and medium-sized firms producing everything from shopping trolleys, to valves, to furniture and door handles. They are also standing at the door of a wider swathe of industries that have never used robots before. Among these are the food, beverage and confectionery industries, packaging and palletising, motorcycles, television tubes, electric tools, lawnmowers and refrigerator and other white goods manufacturers. They will also be increasingly used for delicate manual tasks on small assembly lines.

The day is not far off when we will see the final integration of robots into automation and assembly operations, and the first truly workerless factories. Who will buy their products then?

Newsletter, Job society, June 1995

There is sometimes ambiguity about the phrase "globalisation of employment". Does it mean workers or does it mean jobs? A recent article in Daedelus by Vincent Cable compares the migration of workers in earlier generations and today and points out that, proportionately, it was much greater in the past. He points out that in the period between 1880 and 1913 between 600,000 and 1,500,000 Europeans crossed the Atlantic every year in search of work and a new life in North and South America.

This is a much greater proportion of the population than the volumes of migration today from poor to rich countries. China and India, which were large exporters of people in the past, are no longer so even though the difference in living standards between rich and poor countries is so much greater today than a century ago. Although the numbers of illegal immigrants from South America and China and entering North America, and "asylum seekers" entering Germany, seem quite large as numbers go, they are still only a small fraction of the recipient working population. This is because governments in the last decade or two have strengthened, not weakened, restrictions on labour movements, particularly against the unskilled and unqualified. Only those with plenty of capital or with useful professional qualifications retain the same degree of relatively free movement as most people had a century ago.

However, the millions of jobs that are being displaced every year from industrial countries in the West and being replanted in the low wage countries of South-East Asia are, if anything, proportionately just as high, if not higher, than the mass migrations of workers in the last century.

Newsletter, Job Society, June 1995

In America, a Harris survey carried out just before the 1990 recession found that the average person had 37% less leisure time than in 1973. If you took commuting into account, the organisation found that the average working week had lengthened from just under 41 hours to nearly 47.

In the UK, the Henley Centre has made similar enquiries, studying changes in the availability and pressures on our time. It found that, between 1985 and 1993, essential commitments (work, travel, household chores and other unavoidable tasks) rose on average more than 3 per cent for men (to 71 hours a week) and 4.5 per cent for women (to 86 hours a week). Breaking these figures down, it found that, over the same period, full-time working females experienced a 10 per cent loss of free time; full-time working males more than 4 per cent and unemployed males 3.5 per cent.

Even retired women felt a 2 per cent loss of time. It could take forever to explain all this, but the most immediate reasons are the structural changes that modernising capitalism requires. With sharp rises in the numbers living alone, and particularly single parents, old domestic "economies of scale" are shrinking in shopping, child care and housework. And, as the collectively financed power-houses of health and social services withdraw long-term support for the growing numbers of old, sick and disabled people, these responsibilities fall on relatives and friends. The celebrated tax cuts have, in part, been paid for with deductions from people's time.

From an article by Brian Deer in The Sunday Times, 11 December 1994

Jobs, jobs, jobs. Lots of them. That is what Canada has been creating over the past 20 years and at a faster rate than any other industrialized nation. Every successive government has trumpeted our job creation achievements over the past two decades. With that kind of record, the economy should bein great shape and the budget should be nicely "on side." Of course, one look outside the gross job statistics confirms that things aren't quite adding up that way. Slowly, the trumpeting about jobs hasgiven way to alarm-bell ringing as another issue looms inexorably above the horizon. The deficit.

That is now the main pre-occupation of government. But how was it possible to create jobs at thefastest rate in all industrialdom for a generation and build the highest per capita net debt at the same time? A debt so massive and a deficit so lopsided even modest reduction targets have drawn the doomsday commitment of "come hell or highwater" through the pursed lips of Canada's finance minister.

In short, we have been creating jobs on a mass level in the categories which are a net drain on the treasury. If this trend continues, it will make a balanced budget impossible. Aging has been fearfully described as a trend that will lead to massive deficits. In fact, it will be more a shift of spending than an unstoppable hemorrhage. The cheap labor trend, by comparison, has a net impact many times the magnitude of that of aging and it is all negative.The simple fact is, if this labor force shift continues, deficits will grow and a large percentage of the "untouchable" social programs we now have in place will cease to exist in any form.

From an article in The Financial Post, April 29, 1995

Besides redundancies, increases in part-time employment and term-contracts, there is yet another development which has been gathering pace in the UK economy. In the past few years, there has been a significant increase in profit-related pay schemes.

Surveys suggest that about 50 per cent of companies have cash or share-based profit-sharing schemes, compared with 20 per cent some ten years ago. However, not a great deal is yet known about the numbers of workers, nor how big their profit-related payments are. The Inland Revenue provides figures for tax-exempt profit-related pay schemes but these do not give the full picture because some schemes are not registered for tax exemption. In the cases that are known, however, the proportion of private-sector employees covered by tax-exempt schemes has more than doubled to 16 per cent in just four years. Last year's payout was about ś2.5 billion, equivalent to 0.8 per cent of the UK wages bill.

This little-noticed revolution in the UK labour market, while it is yet quite small, is likely to grow and have very beneficial effects on the domestic economy--at least while manufacturing is going through a mild boom and to those who presently have jobs. The other side of the coin is that profit-related pay also ensures that workers increasingly share the risks of downturns in the business cycle in the same way as part-time employees and short-term contractors. In other words, the labour market is becoming more flexible than ever before.

Newsletter, Job Society, June 1995

Survival Strategies: 1. Get as well educated as you can. If there is to be a meritocracy, you may as well be in on it. One school-leaver in three now goes on to some kind of college. Increasingly, employers, at all but the most modest levels, will need a very good story if you turn up, asking for a job, without a degree of some sort;

2. Be wary of hard and fast predictions about where the best new jobs will be. In particular, pay no attention to what government sources say. The most fashionable advice is likely to produce an over-supply in the trades and professions it advocates. The odds are that you'd do better, as well as being happier, to follow your own inclinations. Do what you want to do;

3. Try and get in on the ground floor, and help start something up. You'll learn more about the new ways of work than you ever did in formal education. If the business goes well, you'll rise with it. (If it doesn't, you can go off and try something else.);

4. Beware of being trapped in the middle levels of a job. Try to acquire skills, and an openness of mind, that can be taken with you, and re-applied elsewhere. It's tricky game, because no one can run anything properly without understanding it and without commitment. But if that's the only thing you understand, you're sunk if the finger of change points, and it's you that's out.

From an article by Paul Barker, in Independent on Sunday, 26 Mar 1995

The Economic Policy Review of the New York Federal Bank shows the changing pattern of demand for jobs. For 40 years between 1940 and 1980, the demand for skills rose steadily with those skills. But between 1980 and 1990 something changed. Demand for the bottom 80 per cent of skills fell, while demand for the top 10 per cent of skills shot up. Demand for the very highest levels of skills rose most of all.

One result was that, while earnings of people with a university degree continued to rise during the 1980s, the earnings of people who had only graduated from US high school (roughly equivalent to our sixth form) tended to fall. However, even the real earnings of university graduates seem to have fallen since 1990. Thus, it may not be enough to have a first degree: perhaps you also need to have a higher degree or some professional qualification if you want to enjoy a real increase in your living standards.

If this trend is sustained and US experience is followed elsewhere in the industrial world, it has disturbing implications for the rest of us. One could reasonably expect to improve the general skill levels in any developed country by putting more resources into training, and of course that should be done. But if the sharpest rise in demand is for the top 1 per cent or 2 per cent in skill terms, most of us will have to accept that we will not_over the next generation_get much richer. We cannot all be brain surgeons or pop stars.

From an article by Hamish McRae in the Independent on Sunday 26 Feb 1995

Most of the major intersections of Windhoek, Namibia have day laborers waiting on each corner. These men wait six days a week hoping employers will stop and offer them work. They often go as long as two or three weeks without any employment. When they do work, payment averages $4 -$6 US for a full day's work. What can be done for them? All men we spoke with had limited education. None of the men had received any technical training before leaving school, and nothing since. They were picking up few skills from their current jobs. As one interviewee put it: "Everything I do is different and only for a few hours, so what can I learn?".

These men are essentially isolated from the community around them. All of them had come to Windhoek from rural areas along the Angolan border. They speak Oshivambo and a smattering of Afrikaans, but no English. They are cut off from most of the usual public information sources since TV news is in English and they can't possibly afford N$1.50 for a newspaper. Their only source of news in Oshivambo is the radio since it is cheap.

Coming to Windhoek with little education, few professional skills, and no social contacts it is no wonder that these men have few job opportunities. They don't have the warmth and support of their own families and communities. They have no connections to the land around them. The extent of their isolation is beyond anything that is bearable and cries out for our help.

From an Internet article by Bill Wresch which first appeared in CPSR-Global List on 10 June 1995

The new working life of the middle class is not that which provided this century's cultural underpinnings. Galsworthy, Ibsen, Thomas Mann and Sinclair Lewis would be hard put to find a suitable archetypal figure for this age. But he exists. Today's new 'middle-class' man lives from hand to mouth, finding casual work where he can, unprotected by any trade union, randomly supported by social welfare nets. The contemporary archetype is the redundant executive. He is a bourgeois journeyman who is sinking back into a kind of near-literacy. But he has tools which ensure, almost, that it hardly matters. He can grunt out his messages on a fax machine, a computer will spellcheck his more egregious errors. He does not aim to become a 'gentleman' and would be embarrassed to be so called. Self-improvement comes in scavenging for opportunities and bolting on new technical skills.

He sets himself up as a 'consultant', working on a casual basis for the company that laid him off and finding scraps of work elsewhere. He is the contemporary counterpart of the farm labourer, expelled from his tied cottage, but hiring himself out to his former employer at harvest time. He has no vocation, he is 'multi-skilled'. He is the middle class odd-job man, the golf club proletarian. Like his ex-company, he has become 'delayered'.

James Morgan, Economics Correspondent, BBC World Service, 15 January 1995

The latest official government unemployment statistics based on figures from the Benefit Offices do not tell the whole story and suspicions remain that the figures are being massaged. People are said to be too young, too sick or too busy being trained to count as unemployed.

The quarterly Labour Force Survey, based on wide-scale personal surveys and uncontaminated by government interference, presents a much fuller picture of the jobs market than the crude unemployment data. The latest one published this week, takes us to the autumn of 1994. In this period of economic growth, it shows that over the past year the number of jobs has increased by 375,000. But the number of men employed full-time by companies rose by only 87,000.

The other jobs were part-time, went to women or involved self-employment. And 71,000 people took second jobs. Statisticians would like to make it the key guide to the state of the jobs market, displacing the usual monthly count but the government resists that.

But even the massaged figures will not be able to disguise the situation for much longer because an overall growth in the available workforce, tougher rules for invalidity benefits and a fall in the number of people staying on in higher education is now taking place. And then, too, what will happen in "normal" times or in a recession-- even a mild one?

From an article by Anne Segall in the Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1995

World-wide unemployment has reached its highest level since the depression of the 1930s, with more than an estimated 800 million people either without work or under-employed. After years of wishful forecasts and false starts, the new computer and communications technologies are finally making their long-anticipated impact on the workplace and the economy, throwing the world community into the grip of a third great industrial revolution.

In the agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors, machines are quickly replacing human labour and promise an economy or near-automated production by the mid-decades of the 21st century. The wholesale substitution of machines for workers is going to force every nation to rethink the role of human beings in the social process. Redefining opportunities for millions of people in a society absent of mass formal employment is likely to be the single most pressing social issue of the coming century.

New employment opportunities are likely only in the knowledge-based sector made up of a small ‚lite and they will be faced by hundreds of millions of eliminated workers who have little hope and even fewer prospects for meaningful employment.

A new third sector of 'social community employment' will have to emerge and will become the global norm in due course.

From The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin, 1994

Modern decision-makers no longers talk about unemployment in the way that economists and politicians did in previous generations, such as Keynes and Beveridge. They no longer see it as a threat to civilisation, the very tolerance of which is uncivilised and indefensible on moral grounds.

Instead, discussion of the problem tends to focus purely on economics. Governments should tackle unemployment, it is said, not just because it is unpleasant but also because it is a waste of resources which damages competitiveness, cuts tax revenues and causes crime.

In the UK, the Labour Party traditionally based its appeal for action on unemployment on voters' altruism. It now combines this with an appeal based on economic rigour. The party argues that much can be achieved to stop the waste caused by unemployment through implementing relatively inexpensive supply-side reforms. Such arguments are based on the economic fantasy that unemployment can be cut without raising public expenditure by investing in the labour force, instead of simply spending public money on benefits.

But the long term unemployed are often those with the least marketable skills; training them to make them more productive would be expensive. There is no evidence that any country would greatly increase its GDP or tax revenue simply by ensuring that jobs were found for all.

If a government of whatever persuasion is to succeed in cutting unemployment permanently, it will have to construct a moral--rather than an economic--case for tackling the problem. If it fails to do this, it will be unable to persuade people to foot the bill, whether in lower wages or higher taxes.

BBC Radio 4, 22 June 1995

The number of countries where workers' rights were violated rose to 98 last year, the highest total so far recorded, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. The Brussels-based organisation represents trade unions around the world. It sannual survey provides the most comprehensive estimate of abuses of labour standards. It estimates that last year 528 workers were murdered in 17 countries as a result of trade union activities, while a further 1,983 were injured and 4,353 arrested or detained. However, the number of workers dismissed because of involvement in trade unions fell to 66,029 last year from 76,044 in 1993.

The largest number of killings of trade unionists took place in Algeria, where more than 300 dies, followed by Colombia, with at least 178 violent deaths. The confederation believes that among other worst offenders against workers' rights last year were China, Cuba, Sudan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Dominica and Honduras. But the report said that there had been a marked improvement in South Africa, Haiti and Chile.

Mr Bill Jordan said that while the number of repressive dictatorships had declined in 1994, a new trend had emerged where power was being transferred increasingly to "uncontrolled free market forces and large financial trusts that control them, often with the collaboratin of local political leaders."

From an article in the Financial Times, 14 June 1995

Does society any longer have a role for young men? Once, they were wooed by employers and young women alike; the apprenticeship at work went alongside courtship at evenings and week-ends, leading, often simultaneously, to skilled employment and marriage.

"Now", says the Archbishop of York, Dr John Hapgood, "men's work is in decline and an increasing number feel that they have no particular stake in society and, by and large, they are regarded by women as not worth marrying. They are are on the fringes of society."

The "underclass" man--portrayed as unemployable, drug-taking, semi-criminal, sexually promiscuous and amoral--has been familiar for some years in the US. The idea has now crossed the Atlantic. The problem is attributed largely to the decline of traditional manual work and skills in mining, shipbuilding, steel and engineering.

But is that all there is to it? The crisis of men may not be confined to council estates and decayed industrial areas. There is a growing evidence that middle-class young men, too, find it more difficult to establish their role in society. Women graduates now find it easier to get jobs than their male counterparts. Six months after graduation, 46 per cent of them have permanent employment against 42 per cent of men--a difference all the more remarkable when it is considered that few women take engineering and technology courses, for which jobs are the most plentiful.

From an article by Simon Midgley and Barrie Clement in Indpendent on Sunday, 12 March 1995

Many of us have suspected for many years that the official unemployment figures released by advanced nations in recent years have underestimated the true situation by a long chalk. Governments have hacked away at them by various statistical methods for years in order to show that unemployment is not as bad as their critics make out and in order to persuade us that their economic policies are working better than they actually are. (That is, if they can be said to have any sort of significantl economic control.)

The latest review by the OECD, Employment Outlook, is at last coming clean on the matter because it says that, in many advanced countries, the official unemployment figures are not at all reliable. Indeed, in some cases, the official unemployment figures represent only half of those who truly want a job. In most cases, the official figures measure the number of people who register that they are without a job, say that they are actively looking for one, and pronounce themselves available to start work at a moment's notice. But this number misses out two other categories of workless, or at least, workshort, people. One group are the "discouraged workers" -- those who would like to work and have tried to find a job for long periods but have finally given up and don't bother to register at all. The other group are the "involuntary part-timers" -- those who can only find a part-time job but would really like to work full-time. When these are added in, the picture in many advanced countries changes substantially. In the OECD countries as a whole, the figures of 34 million officially unemployed changes to 53 million when 4 million discouraged workers and 15 million involuntary part-timers are included. Thus, the figures are understating the true position by well over 50 per cent.

However, because most of the "discouraged workers" have been jobless for over three years, the OECD report reckons that these "new true" figures actually overstate the situation because, even if jobs were thrust under their noses, they would still not be recruited because their skills had become rusty, their confidence damaged or they had become deeply alientated. Thus, presumably, they are not really unemployed after all and governments can still carry on trimming their figures.

A real measure of unemployment would be to subtract the number of jobs (in full-time equivalents) from the number of employable people in the population, but governments would never do this because, I suspect, the resultant figure would be even higher than the "new true" figures recently arrived at but immediately abandoned, it would seem.

Job Society Newsletter July 1995