A thoughtful look at how we can provide jobs for the soon-to-be 3 1/4 million unemployed. It’s a nightmare. But Warner here goes to the essential.
Christina
TELEGRAPH 18.7.09
A catastrophe that could scar a generation
Only a business-friendly Britain can provide jobs for the young, says Jeremy Warner
Few images better evoke the misery of unemployment than the food queues of the Great Depression - the strain is there for all to see on the faces of these once proud men, stripped of their dignity and self-esteem, as they stand in line for whatever pittance charity or the state was prepared to give.
Figures released this week by Britain's Office for National Statistics are a potent reminder that the curse of mass joblessness is upon us once more. Unemployment is rising at the fastest rate since records began, with the most vulnerable - the low paid, the unskilled and the young - the hardest hit. The economy may have stopped contracting but nobody expects the damage to employment to be similarly contained.
Joblessness will continue to rise at a frightening clip for at least another year and won't reach its peak until it has passed the three million mark, or more than one in 10 of the workforce. As the historian Thomas Carlyle observed: "A man willing to work but unable to find work is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun."
A social catastrophe is in the making that threatens to scar an entire generation. One of the most worrying aspects of the latest labour market statistics is the continued rise in youth unemployment. More than 30 per cent of 16-17-year-olds not in full?time education or training are now unemployed, and 17.2 per cent of 19-24-year-olds. Habits and mindsets acquired at these ages stay with you for life. A lost generation of the unskilled and untrained is being poured cruelly on to our streets.
Immediate prospects for easing the problem are not good. The Government seems to be doing some of the right things, with a series of initiatives to ensure that the newly unemployed are swiftly back in work. Both employers and employees have also proved more adaptable and flexible than in previous recessions, with many agreeing to reduced working time and/or wage cuts as an alternative to mass redundancies.
But none of this will solve the problem. Mass unemployment during the Thirties was only finally ended by re-militarisation and a world war. After the misery of the Seventies, it was the consumer, housing, financial services and inward investment booms of the Thatcher years that provided the cure, then more of the same following the recession of the early Nineties. The dotcom bust was countered with an explosion of credit and public spending.
None of these routes back to full employment appear open to Britain today. Where are the jobs of the future going to come from, and how can policy-makers ensure they are created? The Government rests its hopes on the shift to a low-carbon economy, the digital revolution, and infrastructure renewal, particularly in energy and transport, where many projects will be privately financed and therefore not subject to constraints on public spending. Britain's strengths in the creative industries, a revival in financial services, and a renaissance in high value-added manufacturing are also repeatedly cited. We shouldn't mock: all these sectors ought to be important areas of job creation, but it may be years before they deliver as hoped.
In the meantime, many will be forced to fall back on self-reliance and "micro-employment". This is the "odd jobs" economy epitomised by "white van man", from plumbing to gardening, and at the other end of the spectrum from personal training to pedicures. Again, self-help is only part of the answer. More extreme solutions, such as the reintroduction of some form of national service for the young, may eventually become necessary.
Yet assuming it doesn't come to that, it is fairly obvious what needs to be done - though apparently not to the Government. Britain must be made a conducive place to do business once more. Britain starts with lots of advantages in attracting the international investment, expertise and inventiveness it needs to recreate jobs and prosperity, but too many negatives have been allowed to develop during the long boom. Labour and capital have never been more mobile. Nobody has to be here any longer.
Quite a bit of the now vast panoply of employment legislation and protections - which according to the CBI has added some £70 billion to business costs in the past 10 years alone, enough to provide 215,000 jobs on average earnings - needs to be swept away. [Tell that to the EU who are responsible for most of it -cs] Much of this stuff is just a luxury of the boom and in a downturn only creates a form of apartheid between the haves and the have nots. Life inside the protected fortress of those who have jobs goes on largely as before, but the cost of maintaining these privileges excludes the rest.
The same is true of the corporate tax system, which has become a counterproductive mess whose only contribution to job creation is the ever-growing number of accountants employed in avoiding it. A new contract between the interests of state and business needs to be established to stem the growing exodus of international companies and attract new ones.
As for education, suffice it to say that surveys show growing employer dissatisfaction even with basic standards of literacy and numeracy among school and university leavers, let alone anything as necessary for the modern world as language skills, self-discipline and a can-do attitude to work
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