Jobs for the taking
George Gale
The 19-year-old daughter of a friend of mine was complaining about how difficult it was for young people like her to get jobs. She had been expensively and ill-educated. As far as I could tell, she had no particular skill, but could do a bit of typing and could Operate a simple switchboard. I do not suppose her spelling was sound, and I would not myself trust her to put a piece of dictation into decent English. I was not exactly surprised that she should find it difficult to get a job, for she seemed to me to be pretty unemployable and I could see no evident and good reason why anyone would be willing to pay for her services. However, talking with her it emerged that her difficulty in getting a job had more to do with her OW n fastidiousness than with that of Prospective employers. She complained bitterly that she had been offered nothing better than £87 a week in London EC4. She regarded £87 a week as an insult and EC4 as beyond the pale, and did not respond well to m y remonstrances that £87 a week seemed quite good to me for her, and that EC4, being the Fleet Street and St Paul's area of the City, was not only not beyond the pale but was indeed not entirely unglamorous as postal districts go. Questioning her further, trying in particular to find out why she wanted a job at all, since she seemed to prefer being idle, she said: 'I need a job. I've only got until the end of August to save up for my fare to Peru.' Peru? 'I want to join my boy-friend there for a holiday.'
At this point I gave up all effort at Maintaining intelligent, polite, or indeed any, conversation with her. She no doubt wrote me off at the same time as a typical thoughtless middle-aged man who could not possibly have an idea of how difficult things were these days for teenage girls looking for good jobs. She reminded me of another girl a couple of years older who had done a photographic course at the London College of Printing and had twice narrowly avoided being kicked out for not reaching or maintaining the required standards of an institution which, to judge from her, had a very low standard to begin with. She was surprised that, having failed her courses, she was not immediately snapped up by the BBC or ITV as a camera-girl, or a producer, or, failing all else, as a journalist: The demand for her services being insufficient here, she went to the United States. She has just telephoned from Seattle to say that she now thinks her future lies in tape, but that because she has not the right qualification in Physics for the fussy Americans, she now Proposes to return here to resume her career. A third girl of my acquaintance, blessed with a wealthy step-father and a mother who edits a glossy magazine, wants to be a journalist but not to the extent of doing two or three years in the provinces: that would mean working, and in Plymouth!
I picked up in a train a give-away magazine called Ms London, obviously aimed at young metropolitan misses. Its classified advertisement columns (which presumably pay for the magazine) offered expensive beauty treatments; parties in clubs and on riverboats; holidays in the Greek islands, Disneyworld, Hong Kong, the Bahamas; and all manner of jobs for temps, typists, clerks, nurses, sales assistants, street interviewers pages and pages of jobs. I quote from one page, picked genuinely at random: 'Audio typist. Oxford Circus. £102 per week'; 'Legal Audio Secretary. Temp Go Perm £6500-ish' ; 'Legal Secretary £6300 Legal Experience Not Essential'; 'Get into advertising £83 a week +'; 'Travel Opportunity. Typist/Office junior (aged 16-18) with a knowledge of skiing. Salary £3000 to start plus perks'; 'Person Friday £5000/ Bonus . . . train on word processor. Age 18 plus'; and so on. A small space is taken up with: 'Staff problems. Don't Panic. Ring 01. . As I write, a young man has just started cleaning the windows outside. For over a year we have berm looking for windowcleaners; yesterday the word flashed around that two had arrived, as miraculously as manna from heaven. On television I saw a chimney-sweep, retiring, regret the fact that none of his children were following him in his trade, which is booming because of the return to open fires: 'It's a good business, a good living', he said, tut they want none of it.' Who has not felt great delight and pride in finding a plumber, an electrician , a carpenter, a decorator good at his trade? Who has not experienced great difficulty in getting odd, unskilled jobs done? Which housewife does not protect her char jealously from her neighbours?
Thus: when I listen to youngsters, look around me, consider my own direct experience, I find it very surprising to be told constantly that it is impossible for many young people to get jobs, that unemployment is now worse than it has ever been since the worst days of the inter-war slump, that we are in a very deep recession. I observe busy pubs, shops full of tempting goods, English holiday resorts complaining because too many people are holidaying abroad.
Nothing really adds up. I do not dispute the unemployment figures. I know perfectly well that matters are worse in the north-east and the north-west than they are in the south-east. But the shops were full in Warrington, travel agents were booming in Corby, Newcastle looked a prosperous place when I recently passed through. I see that it is difficult for men in a particular trade to train for a new one, that it is hard for people who have lived all their lives in one area to contemplate uprooting themselves to live elsewhere, that those who enjoy the benefits of council housing will be reluctant to move without taking their benefit with them, that those who have brought their houses in areas of cheap housing cannot afford to move to areas of expensive housing. I understand all this; and the figures are in front of me. And I hear the youths of Brixton and Toxteth saying, endlessly, like a dirge, 'There are no jobs for us; there is no hope.' But it strikes me that they are giving up hope very easily, that some of them enjoy doing so, that none of them find it a terrible hardship to do so, that work might be harder.
John Fryer in last week's Sunday Times, reporting on the Youth Opportunities Programme, tells us that it has taken since 24 April for the Manpower Services Commission to authorise finance for a minibus to take jobless teenagers from Basildon town centre to the Ford engineering and test centre at Dunton five miles away. At Dunton 64 YOP places are available, and only 23 young people have got there 'mainly by hitching lifts': Dunton is not accessible by public transport. The story of the minibus is told to illustrate the difficulties of launching 'a handful of young people on one training course'. In the Lake District during the war, I bicycled up and down hilly (and in winter very cold) roads to Penrith from Yanwath and back each day: three miles or so each way. This Sunday I biked the same distance for a couple of pints. The subsidised minibus charges the trainees £2.35 a week fares. They could buy bikes on hire purchase for half of that. Or they could walk, like people used to do, to get to work. 'There is nothing particularly remarkable,' writes Mr Fryer, 'about the Basildon minibus.' That's the trouble. It should be remarkable that it should ever have been thought necessary in the first place, that it should ever have been considered a problem, getting young people five miles from Basildon to Dunton to learn a trade. British Rail has 1,500 places available under its YOP scheme and expects to fill only half of them — and this at a time of youth without hope. Mr Fryer quotes Sir Peter Parker: some youngsters 'cannot even get out of bed at the crack of midday.' BR is unable to attract trainees to learn about booking office and station work. The opportunity exists. The young do not take it up.
The trouble — or at any rate a very considerable part of it — is that our youngsters, middle-class and working class alike, are thoroughly spoiled. Teresa Gorman tells us in the Daily Telegraph that starting rates of pay for youngsters in Britain now average over 60 per cent of the adult wage 'while in Germany they are 21 per cent and there are 140,000 vacancies'. She also tells us that in America two black economists have pointed out that 'before minimum wage laws were introduced in 1948 unemployment among young people, black and white, was not a problem'. Now, minimum wage rates make many youngsters, especially black ones, unemployable before they start.
The trouble with our youngsters, white and black, rich and poor is, as Miss Gorman writes, that 'we have inflated their expectations and by supporting them in their idleness we have allowed them to be too choosy'. Yes, indeed. We have even allowed them to choose permanent idleness, and this is what very many of them are doing, then blaming us for the 'hopelessness' of their predicament. The Government's latest scheme is to give employers a £15 a week grant to employ youngsters, provided they do not pay them more than £40 a week. A better way would be to abolish all minimum wages, all wages councils, all trade union restrictions on the employment of youngsters under the age of, say, 20 and at the same time remove these youngsters from the unemployment register — as Miss Gorman says, 'declare the under-20s a "free-enterprise zone": Those not working would receive pocket-money, not the dole. The welfare system should encourage them to find work and learn skills, not encourage them to laze around all day and get up to mischief all night. They would soon enough seek employment at almost any price to escape the thralldom of pocket-money and parental authority. Like we did, who never dreamed of holidaying in Peru.
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