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The Thatcher miracle has worked. Unemployment is falling, people are getting back to work, and everything is rosy in the garden. But I don't believe it.
The paltry fall in local unemployment statistics is constantly outstripped by redundancies as more and more local businesses close down. Good, once secure, jobs are lost while the few new jobs generated in the area often dwell in the realms of long hours and low pay. I recently encountered a vacancy for a packer offering 1 pound an hour for a 40 hour week. Such wages would be unacceptable in in the affluent South-East, but in the North the values of the workhouse and the mill master are starting to prevail. Things are getting better, I am told. I don't believe it. I have been struggling to find a job since being made redundant six months ago and it's damn near impossible. Not that unemployment is new to me. I secured my last job as a supervisor on Pennine Heritage's Countryside Taskforce in the autumn of 1987; previously I had been struggling to find a job for four years. At Pennine Heritage I had the chance to recover my self respect, get back to a normal lifestyle, and take the family on holiday, before I lost my job as a result of MSC funding being phased out to make way for Employment Training. Everybody thinks ET is a good idea except those who have the misfortune to be coerced onto it. The unemployed are not consulted about what they want. They are presented with a fait accompli designed to be more of benefit to employers than the unemployed. As the rest of society goes its merry way, the unemployed, like their paymasters, are forced to dwell in a world of 'stealth and total obscurity', Surplus to requirements, the poor, the defenceless, the inarticulate, and, in the eyes of some, 'the shiftless and bone idle' are the untouchables of the British caste system. I am one of those untouchables, part of that Government surplus which has no place in the structure of things, cut off from the rest of society because I have no adequate answer to the eternal opening gambit of 'what do you do for a living?' I am tarred with the brush and bound by the fetters of 'can't get a job'. Why not? I have asked that question many times and have never been able to come up with a simple answer. I am articulate, well educated (a one time student teacher). In my youth I worked as an actor/musician, appeared on radio and TV, and published a book of my songs. In the 80's I left all that to settle down and start a family, just in time to discover that jobs were no longer easy to come by. Moving from scheme to government scheme, I have been going round the system since 1979. In 1983, after being made redundant from a supervisory post which I lost as a result of YOPS being phased out for YTS (you see I’ve been here before), I began writing, to try to hang on to my self respect and give my life some sense of purpose. After an endless succession of rejection letters from would be employers and publishers alike, after raised hopes and bitter disappointments, I managed to secure both a publisher for one of my manuscripts and the job at Pennine Heritage. I might be forgiven for thinking that my boat had come in and at last my family would be able to live a normal life. |
Not so. On the dole once more, I can give my time to entertaining schoolkids or giving the odd lecture about my book, yet I cannot get a job sweeping the streets.
It's not for want of trying. With a wife and three young children at home, getting a job becomes an obsession. Failure is not disappointment, it is heartbreak. Week by week, the dole gets harder to live on and the family diet becomes increasingly basic, being an endless round of toast, jam, baked beans, sausages and chips, all those 'unhealthy foods' Edwina Currie says we shouldn't eat. It must be nice to have a choice. Income Support is barely enough to live on. Neither my wife nor I smoke or drink, and I shudder to think of the lifestyle of those who do. Our clothes come from jumble sales or from the generosity of grandparents who have to live on a pittance themselves, but are willing to put their grandchildren before their own comforts. Everything runs down on the dole. If the washer breaks down or the vacuum packs up it's either fix it yourself or dump it, there is no way you can afford a replacement, unless you wish to lower yourself to the level of taking a Social Fund loan, and all the aggravation which that entails. Things like home improvements are but a pipe dream. You have enough, with very careful management, to keep on top of the bills and to buy essentials, and that's it. There is no progression through life, no future, just stagnation and slow decay. Arguments increase within the household, along with bitterness, anger and recriminations. Relationships break down, marriages go on the rocks. Suicide is considered, and, in some cases, carried out. There is no money to plan holidays, to take the kids for a day at the seaside. School trips and outings become a financial embarrassment, and the children cannot understand why they cannot go with their classmates. Unemployment reaps a harvest of social division and domestic discord. You lose touch with friends and they with you. You cannot live up to their lifestyles and they cannot see why. The gulf between the employed and the jobless is a vast one; not only financially but in terms of understanding. Those who have never known long term unemployment can have no idea what it is like. The politician who signed on the dole for a month and said it 'wasn't bad' is beneath contempt. It would take two years for a man of his means to even notice his lifestyle was slipping. Such people have no knowledge of what it means to be a second class citizen who cannot get credit or legally supplement his income by working part-time. (Anything in excess of 4 pounds a week comes of benefit.) This hardly encourages the unemployed to seek part-time work, and job sharing is a joke to the very people it is supposed to help. There is no way, short of finding a full-time, well paid job that the unemployed can be significantly better off. Much of Employment Training is but free labour for employers masquerading as trainers, filling the gap left by the inadequacies of public sector education establishments, which are only inadequate because they have been deliberately underfunded in the first place. Starving, they have gone with the begging bowl to the mighty MSC, and now, completely under the control of government bureaucracy, Maggie has pulled |
the plug on them so the profiteers can move in. That education for all, which our forefathers struggled so hard to attain, is now cast upon the winds of exploitation and greed.
Employment Training is really about the convenient laundering of unemployment statistics and exploitation of unemployed labour for benefit plus 10 pounds. People are coerced onto it with threats of loss of benefit. It is the thin end of a wedge which will lead to the shadow of the workhouse and the labour camp. The unemployed live in a prison without bars.
So go out! Get a job or some training! I've already done so. I have secured certificates in business computing, drystone walling, and first aid. None of these monkey metal qualifications has helped me get a job. Because 'getting a job is a job in itself', I have a phone, a typewriter, an immaculate computer generated CV (constantly updated), and a regular supply of newspapers from every town in the region. In six months I have applied for nearly 40 jobs. I have had four interviews. I am still unemployed. On 90 per cent of application forms, I am insulted and embarrassed by being asked for details of my present job, the implication being that if you are not leaving a job to go to theirs, you are not worthy of consideration. This prejudice of employers in favour of the already employed explains why when jobs are advertised in hundreds, unemployment statistics only fall in tens. The unemployed aren't getting the jobs, only schemes. The employed are going round and round in circles chasing after each other's jobs. The unemployed can't get a look in because, in the eyes of employers, unemployed equals unemployable. Employers have it all their own way. They can draw the best staff from their competitors and man the bottom line with conscript labour from the dole queues. No one objects in communities which are desperate for job creation at any price. Being a teacher or a doctor is a career. Being an assembly line operative is a job you do for the acquisition of money. It's amazing how many employers and people in authority do not seem to know the difference. Recently I was refused a job as a proof reader on a newspaper on the grounds that someone of my experience and background would find this work boring and unfulfilling. I was annoyed, as this would be employer obviously had no understanding of the priorities of people on the dole, who I am sure would be more than willing to be unfulfilled for 170 pounds a week! What the unemployed need is not a job at any price but any job at a good price. I am nearly 40 which, as far as the jobs market is concerned, makes me a job seeking geriatric. Jobs and courses I apply for frequently have an upper age limit of 30. This is commonplace in a market where employers seek 'qualified and experienced staff' under the age of 25. If I were black, or a woman, I could cry discrimination. Not that that makes much difference either. Qualifications are another catch. If I apply for a simple job I have to play down my standard of education, because would be employers seem to think that if anybody with brains applies for a job that doesn't need any, there must be something wrong somewhere. Conversely, if I apply |
for a position that does require a good standard of education, I usually lose out to some young, upwardly mobile offcomer who possesses that magic guarantee of supreme ability, the university degree. Being a published author should help, especially in applying for jobs connected with publishing, libraries, tourism. Unfortunately it doesn't.
Not hard to see why some people turn to crime, antisocial behaviour and political extremism. On all sides the unemployed are beset and brainwashed by a consumer society in which they are not allowed to consume, the world of the employed and the employer. Short of living in a tent on Rockall, there is no escape from it. Read the papers, watch the TV, everywhere you are bombarded with the evidences and trappings of other people's successes. Our media drugs us, training us like Pavlov's dogs to derive our wish fulfillment from a passive voyeurism of the antics of the rich and famous. You sit and watch and read. No input is required from you. For the unemployed there is no place beyond the fortnightly signing on at the end of a shambling queue and occasional harassment from a system which offers all the chances without any of the incentives. The whole system is designed to exclude the unemployed as undesirables. It debases, wastes, and breeds resentment and discontent. Lives are blasted and talent is flushed down the drain. I cry in the wilderness to that formless destiny that decrees that I should drink of this bitter cup, and wonder what I have done that I and my family should be denied the simple dignity of living a normal life. The only reply I hear are the boasts of a proud and power drunk woman who tells me that she has improved the quality of my life. People will criticise me, and shoot holes in my arguments, they will accuse me of being subjective. Perhaps they should remember it is easy to be objective when you have a job, and that their vaunted lack of bias is, like that elusive fulfillment, a luxury not available to the unemployed. JIM JARRATT Guardian 6th April 1989 |