A Grateful Nation
It’s certainly easier to take criticism and absorb advice if it comes from someone who knows what they’re talking about, someone whose knowledge of the subject under discussion inspires respect for their opinion. On the odd unfortunate occasion when I’ve been exposed to Simon Cowell passing judgement, I’ve wondered if the wannabe about to burst into tears ever thinks – ‘But this twat gave us Robson and Jerome! And bloody Westlife!’ Similarly, being lectured as to what constitutes Hard Work by graduates of a cosseted conveyor belt that has precluded them ever having to choose between cutting down on beer or the kids’ new gear, as someone once said, is not an experience that generates gratitude.
We’ve heard a great deal of talk lately (from certain quarters) of job creation, sold to those who will be encouraged to participate in it by those who are exempt from it. The nature of the jobs in question is not specified, but it’s pretty safe to say they probably won’t be in the Beverly Hills branch of the gynaecology industry. Ours is not to reason why or to play Oliver Twist and ask for more. We should be grateful for what we are given and be indebted to our saviours for being spared the fate of the state scrounger.
At the height of the Miners’ Strike of 1984/5, my seventeen-year-old self used to wonder why the miners fought so passionately for a job that nobody in their right mind would surely want to endure day-in and day-out. The only living creature that should spend that amount of time underground is a mole. Putting aside the input of self-aggrandising union leaders or agent provocateurs, the same could be said of those working in all the other old industries that were in terminal decline at that time and who also ended up striking in a final futile throw of the dice to reverse the inevitable.
When I was about eleven, there was a foundry opposite the school I attended, and my form teacher once took the whole class across the road to be given a guided tour; we had to don goggles to protect our precious little eyes, and were then escorted through a location my memory evokes whenever I see Philip James de Loutherbourg’s ‘Coalbrookdale by Night’. The heat was akin to the interior of a greenhouse housing tropical plants; the noise was like a dinosaur’s claws scraping down a giant blackboard; the smell was a sickly metallic aroma that one could taste in the manner of a tongue tickling a filling. It was horrible. I remember us standing beside a vat of what looked like lava and the teacher turned to me and said – ‘This is where you’ll end up if you don’t improve your maths.’ She was wrong; but the foundry itself was gone within five years, anyway.
I knew I’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming into that kind of environment on a daily basis, but I can now see a kind of logic to the endurance of the men who went there voluntarily. Those traditional industries were hard and demanded a lot of their workers, both physically and mentally; but when the whistle blew, the workforce emerged imbued with satisfaction that they had done a good day’s work and had genuinely earned every penny of their wage-packet. They worked hard and they partied hard. But they didn’t turn city centres into war-zones on a Friday and Saturday night, staggering around in pissed-up packs and urinating on war memorials. The menial work they did gave them something that the menial work their counterparts engage in today are not given. A sense of dignity, perhaps?
About twenty years ago, a friend of mine who was signing-on was forced to spend a week in some draughty old office block in the middle of an industrial estate, attending what was then known as a ‘Restart Course’. He told me many of the lost causes surrounding him there were casualties of the economic downturn, middle-aged ex-miners and steel-workers being taught how to write CVs and address envelopes. Trained in professions that had been rendered as redundant as that of a chimney-sweep, their prospects were terminally bleak as they were repeatedly reminded that doing any old shit was a superior option to the dole, despite the fact that doing any old shit is not a great spur to getting out of bed on a morning, let alone leaving its employee overflowing with fulfilment at the end of the working day. Most probably ended-up pushing trolleys around a supermarket car-park.
The tedious mantra of ‘Hard Working Families’ that has spewed forth from both Tory and Labour mouths over the past few months is an advertising slogan bereft of the small print hidden beneath the main message. I’ve no doubt the post of Prime Minister can make unimaginably stressful demands upon the resident of No.10; the fact that so many of them conclude their term in office as basket cases isn’t really surprising. But, lest we forget, they weren’t there by accident; they had a choice and they went for it. The Hard Working Families they eulogise don’t all have the luxury of choice. They get what they’re given and they’re supposed to be eternally thankful for that.
One regular commentator on here once wrote eloquently of his spell entombed in a call-centre, an eye-opening account of desperate thirty-somethings blackmailed into making-do and twenty-something drones who had never known any different. With the exception of the odd Little Hitler such workplaces produce, it’s doubtful that anyone departed those premises at clocking-off time feeling as though the previous eight hours had contributed to their self-esteem and had provided their existence with much in the way of worth. The solution to this dilemma was to get so blitzed that all memories of it were erased or to embark upon endless bed-hopping devoid of any meaning bar base animalistic gratification in order to try and feel something. And I suspect that one dispiriting example of the modern workplace is far-from unique.
Because the alternative has been depicted as beyond the pale for any self-respecting human being, many members of the country’s so-called unskilled workforce have been encouraged to accept the premise that mental stimulation or physical fulfilment do not have to be necessary or obligatory elements of earning a living; to merely clock on and clock off are enough. What happens in the hours in between can be as soul-destroying and numbing as being a flesh-and-blood chair for Eric Pickles to sit on all day, but at least there’s a carrot manifested as the minimum wage and David Cameron can pat you on the head for being a good boy or a good girl. It helps balance the books, even if it doesn’t solve the spiralling drug and drink problems plaguing that workforce when they are released from captivity at the weekend.
‘Factory Fodder’ was once the phrase used to describe the destinies of the Easter Leavers, those who exited school without sitting summer exams. I don’t know what the equivalent would be today. ‘Service Industry Fodder’ doesn’t have quite the same catchy ring to it. Besides, one doesn’t have to be an Easter Leaver to qualify for that title these days. The supermarket shelf-stackers of the nation have a string of degrees up their sleeves, ones they were told would save them from the frozen food aisle.
Starting at the bottom is no bad thing, as long as there’s something higher up to aim for. Part-time drudgery is no bad thing, as long as circumstances don’t render it permanent. Limitations should be acknowledged but not enforced. But to presume money in the bank at the end of the month is enough to provide heavenly bread is a measure of the contempt in which the workforce are held by those who expect the kind of gratitude that, like respect, should be earned.
Petunia Winegum
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May 14, 2015 at 9:15 am -
Strange how answering the phone in a call centre and stacking tins of beans is viewed as a capitalist drudgery akin to slavery, yet arranging the files at the Town Hall and wiping old people’s arses is viewed as a a God-like socialist vocation. I suspect your old teacher was spot on across the generations. If you don’t improve your maths, this is where you’ll end up. She possibly didn’t realise her warning from history could apply to an entire nation just as as well as to her class of 72…. or however huge classes had become during the season of the Thatcher Witch.
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May 14, 2015 at 9:44 am -
This is one of the few areas where I took issue with Margaret Thatcher. She was extremely keen on “the service industry”. The problem being that by nature most humans are creative, and therefore, derive much more satisfaction from manufacturing or production work. Sadly, for no doubt quite complex reasons, those sorts of jobs are now in short supply in the UK economy.
My old gran used to say that we’d all end up opening doors for each other (obviously back in the days when stores still had doormen). She also used to question the wisdom of higher education on such a large scale. She maintained that we would still need people to drive buses, empty dustbins and dig ditches – would people with university degrees be happy doing those jobs? As it turns out in many cases they are doing those jobs, but are they happy? I think not, but as Thomas Carlyle said “all work is noble” – was he right?. After all, there are many everyday jobs undertaken that most of us don’t even think about, but if nobody did them we would soon notice. Often some of the most “menial tasks” are very important and grossly undervalued.
There again when individuals like Wayne Rooney can “earn” £300,000 per week for kicking a ball what’s the problem?
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May 14, 2015 at 10:35 am -
* My old gran used to say that we’d all end up opening doors for each other *
Fantastic…Another strange aspect though is that White Van man is widely derided by our “nice” socialist betters, as an oafish (likely rapacious) “Loadza Money” scumbag. The lower orders without a proper education should of course stick to opening doors for their betters or doing a worthwhile job like mopping hospital corridors. As Whitevan Man cuts me up and forces me to brake sharply, I always salute these modern inheritors of the great British Privateer ethic and think that the old saying was right. “Those who can. Get a white van”.
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May 14, 2015 at 1:41 pm -
My old gran use to say, everybody needs groceries and coffins.
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May 14, 2015 at 7:34 pm -
You know what? I honestly do drive a white van. It’s a Suzuki Carryvan. I bought it because it was very cheap and, as former mobile engineer, I was very used to driving vans. It’s a very useful and practical vehicle. I sincerely hope I drive with due and careful consideration for other road users.
I must thank you Moor for supplying me with that brilliant motto – “Those who can. Get a white van”, I’m loving it!
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May 14, 2015 at 9:56 pm -
I hope you have suitable “No Smoking” stickers in your workplace and enforce the rules strictly so that you do not suffer passive smoking by passively inhaling the smoke from the cigarettes you are in fact smoking yourself. That’s the sort of law that makes one proud of being part of the nation that gave the world the first effective Bill of Rights back in 1215.
Anyhow, you cut me up all you like; you’ve got a job to do and money to make, and I’m just ambling along consuming the planet’s resources for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of doing so…
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May 14, 2015 at 11:30 pm -
I was just curious – do these vans ever come in any other colours?
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May 15, 2015 at 12:45 pm -
My old gran used to say, “they can’t run you over,” just as she draged us across a road bereft of a zebra/pelican crossing.
Obviously my gran wasn’t in the same league as some people here’s….
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May 14, 2015 at 10:06 am -
One big problem is the ‘public’ sector.
It costs too much; does things that most people would rather they didn’t; and it burdens the private sector to the point of strangling.
Will the public have any say on how far the socialist unions can treat the PUBLIC sector as their own private sinecure, with pay hikes from the public purse?
If the pinkos in these public sector unions believe in sharing, then they should vote for all public sector jobs to be made part-time, with a 20 hour week maximum. That would generate over 5 million new part-time positions, sufficient to offer gainful employment to ALL the unemployed, whilst not adding to the public’s financial burden. And the spare part-time positions not filled, can be made redundant, as a real public saving.
But then that would upset the feminists and sodomites, who make up most of the PUBLIC sector workforce, since most of the long term unemployed are men… boo hissss. And you wouldn’t want heterosexual families to make a spontaneous comeback; Marx would turn in his mausoleum.
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May 14, 2015 at 10:11 am -
“If the pinkos in these public sector unions believe in sharing, then they should vote for all public sector jobs to be made part-time, with a 20 hour week maximum. That would generate over 5 million new part-time positions, sufficient to offer gainful employment to ALL the unemployed, whilst not adding to the public’s financial burden. And the spare part-time positions not filled, can be made redundant, as a real public saving.”
Interesting idea – but will those 20 hours a week be enough to pay the rent or will those workers – including the extra 5 million new workers you postulate – have to claim housing benefit and tax credits and/or income support to be able to get by?
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May 14, 2015 at 10:22 am -
Yep…. because it will be more than JSA, and if men can manage that, then so can socialists.
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May 14, 2015 at 10:29 am -
You do realise that if you claim JSA, you also claim Housing Benefit? Council Tax Benefit/ Free prescriptions? Etc…
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May 14, 2015 at 10:37 am -
Yep… typical cost of all benefits for single man on JSA is about £8,250 p.a.
Typical salary for Assistant Officer in the Public sector is about £18k gross. If they do part-time at £9k p.a., then they keep most of that as take home. Plus, the hourly rate could be bumped up, considering the savings from redundant positions.
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May 15, 2015 at 12:47 pm -
The 70s & 80s called – they want their prejudiced misconceptions back.
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May 14, 2015 at 4:17 pm -
Hear, hear!
Chopping the public sector, both state and local, by two thirds would improve the efficiency by at least 200%. It is so top heavy that there is no way that anyone in it can make a decision on their own using common sense.
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May 14, 2015 at 10:42 am -
Bear in mind that the ‘service sector’ doesn’t just include call centres it includes professional services such as architects. I know someone with a masters working in a call centre, not my idea of fun.
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May 14, 2015 at 10:54 am -
I have a friend who is very bright, who for one reason or another landed in a Call Centre. They actually like it after a fashin; the people they work with are funny and friendly and they have a laugh when they can. Having a laugh is tough because every second of their workday is monitored by the unblinking eye of… the Monitor… but they say the thing that actually makes the work truly intolerable at times is not the finicky supervisors or the Production Line time-management… it is the callers – their marvellous fellow-men who phone them up to rant and shout at them about what a crap job they are doing and how they are a useless piece of shit. Power to the people.
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May 14, 2015 at 10:42 am -
Great Granddad Dwarf -having survived certain ‘a bit nasty’ [sic] jaunts to exotic (to a boy from Norfolk in 1914) places like Paschendale and Ypres before he really needed to start shaving (I think they stood him on 2 soapboxes) was a veritable font of Wise Sayings. As a Young Dwarf I was treated to “a good Craftsmen never blames his tools”, “never a borrower nor a lender be” , “Fire is a good servant but a bad master” and, my personal favourite, “You don’t look at the mantel when you’re poking the fireplace”.
One day he solemnly informed me “The World doesn’t owe you a living , Young Dwarf”. Precocious, obnoxious Dwarflette that I was ,and with a fairly good grounding in Theological HairSplittingology thanks to compulsory Sunday School & Bible Club visits my entire childhood, I retorted “Which , by the same token, Grandfather, means I don’t owe no one jack shit neither!” Of course, I didn’t actually say the word ‘shit’ nor use a double negative but that was the tone of my reply.
So any menial job I took -and there were many- I was always painfully aware that I was putting coke up someone else’s kids’ noses, putting someone else’s kids through college, paying for someone else to keep his mistress in a style she felt she deserved.
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May 14, 2015 at 11:10 am -
Sharply observed, Petunia. There is a well known adage from way back when: What’s the difference between a British miner and an American miner?
A British miner says: I’m proud to be a miner, and I have worked hard all my life. I want my son to ne a miner.
An American miner says: I am proud to be a miner and I have worked hard all my life. I want my son to be a mining engineer/surgeon/economist (insert career of choice).
I too have some experience of the Yorkshire mining communities and the realities of growing up in a working class town. On the plus side: a certain basic community cohesion, tribal loyalty, and so forth. On the minus side: an ingrained lack of willingness to change, to grow, to adapt, to explore, to see enhanced aspects of life. An enforced grimness, and what I would call an ideological rejection of another concept we have heard a lot about lately: “aspiration”, whether personally in terms of growth intellectually, culturally or economically. It is an attitude of almost wilful defiance, but it has proved the wilful defiance of a dinosaur facing the onrushing comet that will wipe out the species forever.
There is, however, something which bugs me about this phrase “hard working families”. It is almost as if there is an assumption that hard work is good for its own sake. It is not. Sometimes in my real life day job I appear to be working “hard” but I am not. I am doing what I enjoy (sometimes) and it is not hard work at all, any more than it was “hard work” to play in those enjoyable 5 a side football matches I used to participate in back in the 90’s, even though I was crap. It was effort, but enjoyable effort. It seems to me that politicians glorify hard work because it is assumed to be productive (not necessarily so) and if people are “working hard” they don’t have time or energy to express themselves, question, think, and be different. Here we have a theory of “social control” of the masses which dates back to the industrial revolution, and religious and political aspects of it. I commend a reading of “How to be Idle”, published by “the Idler” magazine people, which is really quite a deep historical and philosophical work.-
May 14, 2015 at 11:53 am -
Remember, if ‘work’ was so good, the rich would have kept it for themselves.
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May 14, 2015 at 12:39 pm -
Quite. They do like to delegate it, don’t they?
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May 14, 2015 at 11:18 am -
Petunia Winegum’s article is a great read, but let me take issue with a couple of points.
Add to the general unpleasantness of deep coal mining, the ever-present risk of injury, death or industrial disease, there’s something that many men derive satisfaction from in working together in physical labour, and spending part of their leisure in manly camaraderie. One treads carefully eulogising about such things in case someone misreads this for a fanciful homoerotic content that I do not intend, but equally many women like the company of other women to follow their preferred kinds of pursuits. For coal miners in the immediate postwar period for about three decades their occupation was made more palatable by the relatively high industrial wage scales, the fact that mostly they lived in cheaper parts of the community and the vast free dole of coal they received as a perk. (OK, let’s exempt the Kent coalfield, because there they were in the outer reaches of the stockbroker belt).
My friend sitting alongside me as I write is fulminating about that Labour mythology about Thatcher. Sure, she presided over nearly the end, but we all know the industry was in terminal decline, peak coal having been before the First World War. Two factors helped kill off UK coal (above and beyond union militancy): post war mechanisation, which meant that lots of rock was extracted along with the coal, and that waste had to be put somewhere; together with the Aberfan Disaster of 21st October 1966 which demonstrated that if you put it in the wrong place and in the wrong way, you were going to be well and truly fecked. The costs incumbent on doing it right, and rectifying the past proved a burden that broke the pit pony’s back. Ocean transport got cheaper, and soon it was less expensive to import the stuff from half a world away.
My advisory friend is a retired University Professor from an civil engineering sub-discipline, but he notes that prior to graduating he had laboured in factories, delivered milk (and sex, he brags, although it’s probably a lie), did traffic surveys and picked fruit. He pointed out to me that none of these menial jobs turned out to be as dirty or as hard as investigating sites for construction, nor indeed as running field courses for students. Few, if any, graduates in vocational disciplines lack jobs, although he is scathing about the uselessness of some studies, he states that education is a fine thing, so that surely an educated shelf stacker is better than an ignorant one.
I was glad that Dwarf added some notes about the trenches, as if one enlarged the armed forces to wartime levels via conscription, and switched or built factories to make things that at best have a handful of uses before being destroyed (e.g. bullets and shells – fired once, or perhaps not at all) or aircraft with an average life of a handful of missions, etc. then we might have full employment and burgeoning factories. Moreover, other trades than coal mining could be successfully handed down from father to son through the generations, like roaming around foreign countries armed to the teeth and murdering anyone you came across you didn’t like much.
Another advantage might be that it would take peoples’ minds off the national debt!
As for hard working families, for Sky Fairy’s sake don’t go off on one that people extoll the virtues of ‘hard work’, rather that one does it because one has to, and having had to, one is more pissed off than one need be to discover that some idle bastards up the road who have done feck all for anybody get paid more, just as a bribe for them to vote Labour. -
May 14, 2015 at 12:15 pm -
Didn’t visit a foundry but, growing up around the near-death textile industry, I frequently went into the mills (e.g. delivering newspapers for the bosses) and the environment within was indeed a form of Hell on earth – the constant clattering noise, the pungent smells, the heat in many processes and the brain-dead drone-look borne by most of the operatives acted as a powerful incentive to do something different.
And yet, my first job as a junior clerk in large office involved spending hour after hour, day after day, filing and unfiling issue & return notes in numerical order, many thousands of them – a truly brain-deadening experience. Only difference from the mill was that the environment was temperate and quiet and I wore a suit. (But hardly overpaid, starting at £350 a year in fact – I had an evening job at a petrol station for many years as a supplement.) But clerking was just a starter-job, I stuck it, in due course I progressed, I shifted direction as the world changed, ending my employed career as a senior manager in IT with all the trappings.
The difference I detect now is that those opportunities to progress are far fewer, management chains are shorter, so there’s much more competition at each step, meaning most ‘workers’ never get the chance to climb that greasy pole. Add to that the masses of university leavers who have been conned into believing that their worthless paper qualification will somehow guarantee them all mega-bucks on Day 1, when they may have been better advised to spend 3 years and no debt practicing the phrase “Would you like fries with that ?”.
But however the employment scene has changed, I still take the view that working for your money is a better situation that expecting someone else to provide. It may be low-paid, it may be unreliable, it may be inconvenient, but selling your services to the highest bidder does engender an element of self-respect and independence which perpetually sucking on the teat of society never can.
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May 15, 2015 at 1:25 pm -
I think part of the problem is that a certain level of education is prerequisite to pass through what opportunities there are. I started 22 years in the NHS at a very basic clerical level, armed with little more than a single low-grade A-level pass and an only slightly larger than average clutch of A-C O-levels and grade 1 CSEs (the only ones worth mentioning, and then only just). I quickly progressed to supervisory roles, but the big change was when I was effectively headhunted almost solely on the grounds that the senior person responsible was aware that I was one of the people in the organisation who knew how to use a PC who wasn’t doing so in their work. I thus ended up working in a field I never expected or would have chosen before it was offered to me, and it carried me through the remainder of those 22 years, even though that entailed several forced employer changes (there may have been an assumed “job for life” status once, but it vanished many years ago). And yet even in the last decade of doing that specific type of work, it was becoming common that a degree – if not a “relevant degree” – was seen as an absolute requirment for the level I was working at. In recent years it’s become a common prerequisite even for level lowers.
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May 14, 2015 at 12:47 pm -
I still take the view that working for your money is a better situation that expecting someone else to provide
I’m torn. The Koreshianesque, cowering in his bunker+ensuite harem awaiting The End Of Days , Xian nut job part of me still feels that as a True Believer I have a godly DUTY to Bleed The Beast .
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May 14, 2015 at 12:56 pm -
Sign of the times that I initially thought I had read Kardashianesque… what a bummer.
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May 14, 2015 at 1:44 pm -
To me the biggest change since when I was a student (the 1970s, since you ask) is that jobs on minimum wage are now seemingly the norm. The minimum wage has by stealth become the de facto maximum.
Back in the day, you were typically hired as holiday relief for a relatively unskilled person (someone doing a job that you could quickly be trained for), and you were paid the same weekly rate as him or her. I spent my university vacations as an unskilled labourer, a milkman, a furniture delivery man and similar, all jobs that paid enough for someone to support a family on their earnings. And given that a vacation’s cumulative earnings were often less than the annual tax-free allowance, a student’s net pay after tax was in many cases higher than that of the people we were relieving.
You took it all for granted at the time, along with your free, grant-supported university place, but my goodness, how things have changed financially for the worse for the current generation of youngsters.
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May 14, 2015 at 3:12 pm -
True on both counts. I worked in a rural canning factory in my summer breaks and it didn’t strike me or in fact my co workers as at all unfair that I was going to blow my wage – same as their starting wage – plus my overtime – on non essentials while being fed and housed by the state as a university student. One thing which changed the picture a bit was that all of them lived in pretty well constructed council houses with gardens which usually were well cultivated. They had were far more free and easy in their lifestyles than my middle class family and I was expected, even at 17 or 18 to be more respectable and harder working. That was the quid pro quo and it not be easy to say who had the happier life, looking back now.
On the minimum wage issue I am just astounded at how no one seriously considers why we have to top up almost every so called profitable large company in this country by subsidising its wage bill with in work benefits. A billionaire retailer avoids tax by using zero hours contracts. The rest of us pay more in tax. If the workers didn’t get the top up the market in even cheap trainers or food would collapse. He benefits twice from his hand out. we concentrate all our energies on forcing people to work for them while kicking this particular can down the road. Would all our medium to large scale businesses fail if they had to pay a living wage to at least a largish proportion of their workers? If so god help us if we leave the EU.
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May 14, 2015 at 4:18 pm -
Both the minimum wage and in-work benefits have corrupted the market-place between employer and employees – both a ‘false-floor’ and a hidden subsidy effect apply. If they didn’t exist, we would get a true picture of the market-value relationship – however the downside is that, in areas of very high unemployment, there would be a downward auction for staff, recruiting whoever would work for the least amount, and that’s not good politics and just your bad luck geographically.
It’s not a party political issue, both ruling parties use both those mechanisms to satisfy their objectives, but it’s still a level of state interference in what should really be very natural market-place. But, as ever, be careful what you wish for. -
May 14, 2015 at 4:33 pm -
Whoever introduced the minimum wage had to know that it would become the de-facto maximum for unskilled work. Once you have that the employer only has to offer that on a take it or leave it basis, it also becomes the starting point for negotiation on pay for more skilled work. Lets face it, no employer is going to pay more than they have to especially when the government starts dictating what has to be paid out to workers.
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May 15, 2015 at 6:46 am -
ivan, what you say is so obviously true, that those who oppose its logic, are either stupid, or insane. Yet those who propose Grubberment interference with the free-market, invariably fail to see that this interference is the cause of problems, rather than any solution.
It never ceases to astonish me, that those on the left are happy with the concept of the evolution of life, yet cannot comprehend the notion of evolution of the economy. The economy is more important than life in their mindset of control freakery, therefore has to be designed by a committee of omniscient socialists!?
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May 15, 2015 at 8:40 am -
True what you say about control freakery and the political left. They’re even trying to control the climate, these days. Climate isn’t taking any notice, though.
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May 15, 2015 at 8:59 am -
THE CLIMATE IS INSANE!!!
Vote for the straitjacket party… taxing you for the air plants breath.
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May 15, 2015 at 1:38 pm -
The only real problem with the minimum wage is that it is so low enough that so many workers qualify for in-work benefits. It’s the same as the relentless driving up of the personal tax allowance, supposedly as a measure to give low-paid workers a meainingful increase in teh amount of money they take home, while to most of the rest of us it’s a nice little bonus, but buttons relatively speaking. The last increase – from £10,000 to £10,600 – obviously equates to a mere £120 a year less tax. Maybe it would be better than those workers on the cusp of the personal allowance were paid more by the employers in the first place?
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May 17, 2015 at 8:00 am -
Suffolk Girl: Your analysis is quite right. We do it this way because we are so unproductive as a nation.
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May 14, 2015 at 2:29 pm -
Petunia – sounds like the Cr0wn Foundary in Northanpton… I did several vac job stints there – probably cost me more in destroyed clothing, than I earned. a real vison of hell it was. I also packed soap, killed chickens, served tea, assembled packing crates, drove a forklift, dug trenches, dleivered post, laid tarmac and memorably once acted as a living marker for a helicopter crop sprayer (get sprayed, move 10 paces, wait, repeat ad nauseam) etc etc . All of which taught me valuable lessons ; a) getting on with a whole range of people; b) there are many many things worse in life you can do than work hard at your studies to become a well paid professional…
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May 14, 2015 at 6:18 pm -
When I did OU in the seventies they were arguing and discussing immigration, poverty, unemployment and control of the masses. A lot of it was leftie orientated, as it was the second year of Harold Wilson’s brain child when I started. The subjects that exercise minds are still in full flood, especially immigration. Communism was a grave concern then, Putin lurks now but there have been other bogey men IRA, AQ, and now ISIS to haunt us. The more life experiences change the more they stay the same! Recently we had a visit out of the blue after 48 years, from a man who retired as a captain of industry. Early school leaver with no qualifications. A humble sales job. Then steady promotion. Turned into a company rescuer. Late to Harvard business school. Now retired, but non exec on several company boards. How does ordinary man acheive such heights without all the expensive flim flam we have developed these days? We know several men who were a success with no real early educational efforts whatever. Just competent at their jobs. One is in his sixties, self employed, and still taking exams! Ordinary mortals have to settle for ordinary jobs. Get made redundant. Get no salary rises. We can’t all be winners. Fewer losers would be better to aim at. I got my degree in 1982 after 7-8 years hard slog. Was it worth it….I don’t really know.
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May 14, 2015 at 6:28 pm -
I once worked in a factory assembling and soldering printed circuit boards for TV sets. I really enjoyed it, found ways to do it faster by arranging the resistors in a better way. It required no thought and I could do the job automatically and day dream all day. Of course I might have felt different if that was to be my whole life but it was easy, fairly well paid and we had a good laugh.
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May 14, 2015 at 6:29 pm -
For some reason the notification tick didn’t work so trying again.m
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May 14, 2015 at 6:46 pm -
Interesting comments.
May I offer a couple of real life observations. This week I have conducted interviews with seven young-ish (late twenties/early thirties) people in East Anglia (it is my job).
All, when asked ‘on a scale of 1-10, how happy are you?’
All said ’10’.
‘How happy were you yesterday?’
’10’ again.
All worked in the ‘service’ industry – hotels, fast food or cleaning. Three had degrees, Horticulture, Management, Tourism………that sort of stuff. A group of three shared a house. Their combined income of £50k more than enough to pay rent, council tax, junk food, mobile phones, ipads, fags and copious amounts of high octane lager.
Two Turks, one Sri-Lankan and five Poles. None claimed any form of benefit.
Make of that what you will.
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May 14, 2015 at 7:54 pm -
None of them understood English?
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May 14, 2015 at 8:30 pm -
people in East Anglia (it is my job).
and I’m sure you have all our sympathies. Mind you, if you had been interviewing ‘real’, heathen, Norfolk Yoofs the only point of convergence in the answers would have been the hi-octane lager or simply ‘bear’ or ‘bair’ as it is known here…’ee’ being one of several vowel digraphs that never made it to Norfolk after the Norman Conquest (Personally I’m sure that the norfolk “KommPOOH’er ” is a Saxon ‘ü’ in a badly fitting Wicker Man disguise).
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May 14, 2015 at 9:30 pm -
These furriners were a pleasure to be with. I would be happy for any of them to be dating my children.
Five households were selected at random. The only household which did not co-operate was Brit. Door slammed and ‘Fuck off whoever you are’.
But he forgets, I know where he lives.
And revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
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May 14, 2015 at 9:30 pm -
And presumably they were working all hours and planning to go back home with their well-gotten loot eventually?
It’s easy to earn enough not to have to claim benefits if you’re single, not too fussed about having a social life and prepared to work 70 hours a week, for just a few months. -
May 15, 2015 at 9:20 am -
I’m guessing it was the five Poles who were responsible for the “hi-octane” lager, but I think you’ll find Tyskie is bog-standard Continental beer at around 5%. The brewers make especially pissy lager for the British who insist on their Carlsberg probably not being the best lager in the world.
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May 14, 2015 at 11:54 pm -
It’s a difficult one to solve this low pay thing. It’s not just the benefits, it’s the need to provide housing too. Makes my blood boil when the local supermarket expansion is hailed for the new jobs it brings. Either people car share from the lower cost housing of the South coast equivalent of Soweto, or more social housing needed locally. Not provided by the employer as in the old days of Cadbury & their like.
One other facet of the service sector; I used to get very wound up with the incessant Harrieting on R4 about how women wanted to do interesting & fulfilling jobs, not be trapped in menial work. So do most men matey!
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May 15, 2015 at 1:20 am -
“…so many of them conclude their term in office as basket cases…”
A fair few of them started their term in office as such…
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