POLITICS
The indelicacies of the unemployment debate
FERDINAND MOUNT
This autumn again, unemployment is the issue. Everyone says so. Why is there not a great debate about it? After a decade of large-scale unemployment, politicians still seem to talk about the subject in a vague, glancing sort of way — quite unlike the crude but direct manner they wade into other topics, such as law and order or Libya. 'Fighting' unemployment seems to be like wrestling with a duvet.
Mr Kinnock at the TUC last week said that Labour's way to recovery 'means jobs that need to be done by people who need to do them for a nation that needs those jobs to be done'. Pure kinnocchiesco: alliteration, repetition, whuffle. Later on, he descended to a little detail and made it clear that he was particularly referring to the Labour Party's plans to restore axed jobs in the nationalised industries. For example, British Rail would be expected to restore at least half the 28,000 jobs that have gone since 1980, 'in order to earn its subsidy from the taxpayers'. After all, as Mr Kinnock said, 'What is so efficient about cancelling trains because of staff shortages? Where is the efficiency of in- adequate carriage cleaning, or unnecessari- ly prolonged track maintenance?'
Now most of us rather like the sound of this sort of thing and indeed of Mr Kin- nock's other examples: reviving bus routes and sub-post offices that have been closed. Not an absolutely huge contribution to the problem perhaps; say, 20,000 jobs in all (few bus routes have actually been cancel- led and each sub-post office produces only a couple of jobs). Still, not to be sneezed at. However, we must look a little closer.
The bulk of the jobs that have dis- appeared in British Rail were in adminis- tration and signalling. Mr Kinnock does not suggest that armies of clerks should replace the computers, nor that the signal- boxes of our youth should be put back in full working order. Nor does he suggest the re-employment of the thousands of men made redundant in the manufacturing nationalised industries or in the coal mines. `We are not advocates of over-manning,' he hastens to add. This attractive notion of re-employing people must be confined to the public services.
Now on the railways, especially in the South-East, there are already considerable staff shortages — of cleaners, guards, booking clerks, enquiry clerks — the very people whom we would like to see more of. At minimum earnings of £114 a week in the London area, the job is simply not attrac- tive enough. Thus even to 'restore' the modest few thousand jobs that Mr Kinnock has in mind, the rates of pay would have to be raised noticeably. And so would the subsidy from the taxpayer.
Mr Kinnock shies away from adding to `jobs that need to be done' the unpalatable rider 'at a wage that the employer can afford'. Indeed, he has given a blessing to the installation of a national minimum wage, supported by the re-establishment of `legislation aimed directly at protecting terms and conditions of the low-paid' such as those laid down by Wages Coun- cils. If these measures have any effect at all, it must be to reduce the number of jobs on offer. So, of course, must other parts of Labour's policy, such as the end of Amer- ican nuclear bases and the standstill on the development of nuclear power.
But this is not all that the Labour Party knows and dare not say. For it is riddled with a deep and ineradicable snobbery about the nature of respectable employ- ment. There are 'jobs that need to be done' — which are almost by definition in the public sector. Then there are 'hi-tech jobs', which might at a pinch be in the private sector. But there are not enough; they cannot by themselves provide the million jobs that the Labour Party seeks. Hun- dreds of thousands of those must come, not even from the low-tech sector, but from the `no-tech sector', as Mr Nigel Lawson once called it (and was treated with nigh- universal disdain for his pains), from the Mickey-Mouse jobs, the dead-end jobs, the cowboy employers and all the odds and sods whom Mr Keith Waterhouse has embraced with the term 'disorganised labour'.
In the world of organised labour, these people, millions of them, have been tradi- tionally abused with Soviet-style rhetoric as semi-criminals, anti-social elements, non-persons. 'Casualised and contractual- ised' were the two adjectives most scorn- fully spat out at the TUC last week. If, as Sir Henry Maine taught us, the history of the modern world is the story of contract replacing status, the trade unions wish it wasn't.
Yet it is people who take advantage of such opportunities, • however precarious and ill-paid, who have helped to bring unemployment down so rapidly in the United States and who, in the back-street sweatshops of Tokyo, underpin the Japanese achievement.
But obviously the TUC is not the place to recommend a flood of disorganised labour. So where are the million jobs to come from, since British Rail and the Health Service and even the building in- dustry (now increasingly mechanised) can- not reach half-way to the target? Well, according to Roy Hattersley's speech in the Budget debate, the answer is in the scheme for a 'job guarantee' for the long-term unemployed, as recommended by the Select Committee on Employment, which would take 750,000 people off the register over three years (at a cost of £3.3 billion, they say — I think something of the sort could be done more cheaply). But the bulk of those Government-organised jobs — on the Community Programme, for example — are precisely the sort of thing the TUC dislikes: below the proposed national mini- mum wage of £80–£100 a week, and tending in general to depress wage levels for unskilled manual labour and thus to encourage employment.
So the cheap-labour aspects of Mr Kin- nock's solution (the realistic aspects) had to remain hidden in order not to affront the dignity of organised labour. This dignity is a nourishing myth whose rituals of solidar- ity, organisation and 'industrial action' have consoled generations for the perform- ance of dull, repetitive or unpleasant work. The masonic rites of old-established unions such as the boilermakers are quasi- religious relics of the union's origins as a secret society. All this is now disappearing, as trade unions are forced to behave more like mere capitalist companies and have to bid for recognition from employers and for membership among the hostile, sceptical, mobile new generation.
Recent books such as Mr David Howell's Blind Victory and Professor Charles Handy's The Future of Work de- scribe the shape of the future and the delightful choices it offers (between part- time and full-time work, between home work and office work and so on). Yet even they cannot get round the abiding truth that work is often boring, even if we must not say so, and that a large number of jobs can never hope to offer a glittering career or to be brilliantly paid. No wonder politi- cians find unemployment a rather tricky subject.
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