Recniitment
A Dickens of a life
Douglas Curtis
Britain is facing a recruitment crisis in its service industries, Postal workers, teachers, policemen, railwaymen, civil servants, hospital workers, municipal busmen, probation officers, social workers, and now prison officers have all protested about their pay and working conditions. Acute staff shortage, coupled with .increased consumer demand, means more overtime working but higher taxation ensures that workers' net gains are marginal. Service industries also require their workers to be on duty when oftlera are still abed or watehing 'the telly, .a fact which makes many of them feel that their services should be more highly valued. Because their demands have been consistently ignored, men and women are leaving occupations they have worked at all their lives, and in most areas recruitment to provide for replacements and expansion of services has fallen to near record The Government's pay pause, well-intentiOned though it may be, has made the situation worse instead of better in some cases, and low-paid workers everywhere are describing their starting rates as "absolutely ludicrous." The latest group to take industrial action,. prison officers, are members of a normally moderate and cooperativestaff association.But they are currently operating a workto-rule ban on excessive overtime Working, and their general secretary, Ken Daniel, has threatened that a refusal by the Pay Board to recognise the anomalous position of our members would set the 'service alight."
Ken Daniel's 13,000 members— some 20 per cent below established requirements — have to work in a hostile environment with obsolete equipment and buildings which are not subject to Building and Factory Act regulations and control. They receive starting pay of £24.60 for a fortyhour week, rising to £32.84 over nine years, and a free house or rent allowance. In 1959 they signed an agreement with the Prison Department limiting compulsory overtime in any given week to fourteen hours a man. That agreement has been consistently broken. Staff shortages and a rising prison population have caused many officers to work a sixty-five or seventy hour week. In London, where the staff shortage is most acute, some officers at Wandsworth have been compelled to work up to forty-five hours overtime week after week.
The mood of anger and frustration building up in the prison service is reminiscent of the feelings expressed by other workers whose job is to care for the sick and elderly, teach our children, provide local government services, deal with society's problem cases, and operate our transport and communications system. Bus drivers working a split-shift system that extends from early morning to late evening resent the fact that building workers can earn up to three times as much for an eight hour day. Teachers complain that former pupils who take up production work can surpass their own earnings within two or three years of leaving school, and social workers whose training requires a university degree followed by a year or two of post-graduate study are often receiving less pay than, say, an untrained domestic appliance salesman. It seems we place less value on buses than we do on bricks, more on GECs than we do on GCEs, and less on devotion to the community than we do on dishwashers for tl-e minority. All of which raises the urgent question of whether or not we have our values in proper perspective.
Obviously something must be done, and done soon, if we are to avoid being delivered into the world and taught, served, treated for our ailments, imprisoned and buried by a new generation of computer-controlled robots. As automated industry reduces the need for manpower in primary and secondary industries, we must somehow attract people back to the idea that providing a public service need not be a dickens of a life.
Obstetric equipment may ease the pain of childbirth but it is still the midwives who encourage the mothers and slap the new-born complaining life. George may whisk us on our computer-controlled path across the skies but, for those of us who remain innocent of the mysteries of modern aviation, it is still the human pilot in whom we place our confidence. Programmed-learning systems may be able to augment the efforts of overburdened teachers but I fancy most kids would prefer a warm-blooded human to a robot television eye. My journey on the London Underground would never be the same without the coloured ticket-collector who occasionally° gives me a smile and calls me "luv,' and when I stay at a hotel I do not want My nightcap dispensed by a machine programmed to cater for the 'average taste.
In Central London, where scarcity of accommodation, high rents, and the infrequency of public transport during non-peak periods, makes it difficult for low-paid workers to live near their jobs, the transport undertaking has come up with an imaginative solution to their recruitment problem. They propose to improve pay scales, offer unlimited free travel to workers and their families, and to employ women in jobs which have previously been the exclu sive preserve of men. The undertaking's recruitment problems have been so great that even the unions, normally opposed to the idea of women driving buses and trains, have given the proposals their tacit support. If the proposals are adopted they may help to solve the immediate problem but their implementation will mean an even higher financial deficit for London Transport. That means central Government, through the beleaguered taxpayer, is being asked to increase its subsidy to London commuters.
I have no objection, in principle, to subsidising public ser vices like transport and others, especially if it provides workers with a living wage. The trouble is that the existing proposals will not do that. London property values, rents and prices have rocketed in recent years to beyond the level where they are amenable to minor tinkering with the pay scales of the low-paid workers. 1 am also in favour of widening the scope of women's employment, but free travel is of little use to people living out of town when insufficient buses and trains are running to bring them to work and take them 'home at night.
Another objection to the London Transport proposals, and others like them, is that they are piecemeal solutions and discriminate too randomly between one place and another.
Every large city has recruitment problems similar, at least in character if not intensity, to those of London. Here in Cambridge the new Adenbrookes Hospital, built at enormous expense by well-paid labour, is forced to operate well below full capacity because of a shortage of nurses, nursing au xiliaries and domestic staff. Consumer demand for public services everywhere is outstripping supply and the main cause is a shortage of staff.
One solution which might bring supply. and demand into
equilibrium would be a full-pricing policy. But that would only exacerbate the existing disparities between the haves and the have nots, and we have gone too far along the Welfare State road to turn back now. Nor do temporary local subsidies offer any hope of a long-term solution to what is es sentially a national problem. If we plug one hole in the dyke pressure will build up and break through elsewhere.
What is needed is some form of national control over house prices and rents in the private sector, with preference being given, if necessary, to essential public service workers. Low-paid workers, most of whom are in the public service sector anyway, must be given more pay coupled' with greater tax concessions and improved pensions. In our workorientated, thaterial-minded society, money and status are the only inducements we can offer. We daily demand more and better services, but if we are not willing to pay the piper we should not ask to call the tune. The choice is between an imperfect but human melody or an electronic symphony of perfect robot symmetry. Even journalists are not immune from the efferts of making it. Watch this space! Next week's article may be written by a computer programmed to predict the individual reader's literary taste without provoking thought or arousing controversy.
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