Come rain or shine, there’s a man on the Isle of Wight who’s always hard at work outside. In a place where the weather is often an excuse, this is unusual in itself. As in so many other parts of this country, the chances of tradesmen and labourers turning up when they say they will here are modest at best. At the first hint of precipitation or the wind whipping up, whole days are shruggingly written off.
What makes this reliable worker even more remarkable is that he’s in his 80s, and shows no sign whatsoever of slowing down. Moreover, though his work is very physical (he builds and repairs fencing, which is big business in windy places), he is still in hot demand. Indeed, despite his advanced years, he says that he has more customers than he can manage, which is why he routinely pitches up early and finishes late.
That everyone wants to hire this fellow is no surprise, because he is so far ahead of the competition. As Sir Keir Starmer ponders how to persuade some of the 9.5 million economically inactive people of employment age in Britain to take up work, he would do well to consider how many millions more who officially have paid positions are actually doing an honest day’s work.
With a sinking heart, I recently observed two young men who were being paid good money for a semi-skilled outdoor job provide no more than a third of a day’s labour each. Sure, after languidly pitching up at around 10am, they were physically present, but they literally spent more time sitting or even lying down twiddling their thumbs (or their phones) than they did doing what they had been hired to do. Hours were whiled away just hanging out in their van.
Both were young, fit and more than capable of hard graft. They simply did not seem to feel any obligation to bother. Nor did they make any attempt to hide or excuse their idleness. While they were flopping around, the octogenarian will have barely paused from his toil to sip from a Thermos.
This snapshot of contrasting generational attitudes to work illustrates a profound cultural change. Born in the 1940s, when the welfare state was in its infancy and Nye Bevan had yet to found the NHS, the octogenarian grew up in an age when hard work was widely valued in and of itself.
For the post-war generations, there was precious little prospect of getting “something for nothing”, a harsh reality that persisted well into the 1980s.
Proud working-class people were also considerably less snobby about doing the kind of jobs that Millennials and Gen Z sniff at today.
Regrettably, these days many fit and healthy benefits’ claimants exhibit a bewildering sense of superiority about certain types of work (such as social care and fruit-picking), an attitude enabled by the absence of conditionality attached to their handouts, as well as the almost unlimited supply of willing foreign workers.
As for professionals and others in white-collar jobs, previous generations knew that, if they did a half-baked job, or failed to show up, they would quickly be fired. Crucially, there was no towering architecture of employee rights and employer responsibilities to protect the workshy.
All this is completely alien to Millennials and Gen Z, who too often seem to prioritise “work-life balance” and “wellness” over building careers, a mindset reinforced by the mainstreaming of “working from home”. The young workmen I observed wasting time at their boss’s expense were putting on the ultimate display of so-called quiet quitting, in which employees are physically present but mentally disengaged, doing the bare minimum to avoid getting fired.
Earlier this week, figures released by the Office for National Statistics exposed the scale of this country’s worklessness crisis, with inactivity spiralling since the pandemic. Collective indolence is fuelling the immigration disaster. Since the eve of the Covid crisis, more than a million overseas workers have arrived on these shores to take up roles that British workers consider beneath them.
An LSE study mapping the actual hours worked in the UK labour market underlines the generational behavioural differences. Since the pandemic, Baby Boomers, defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, are the only group not to have scaled back their hours of work.
Ministerial attention is now likely to focus on tweaking the tax and benefits system to “make work pay.” As work and pensions secretary between 2010 and 2016, Iain Duncan Smith made heroic efforts to this end but ultimately failed.
If recent negotiations with the train drivers’ union Aslef are indicative, Labour’s Liz Kendall will be even less successful. Her government’s failure to insist on an end to so-called Spanish practices – including the right to restart one’s lunch break if spoken to by a manager, in return for awarding drivers a bumper pay rise –hardly inspires confidence.
Either way, adjustments to the welfare system will be far more successful if accompanied by a transformation in social attitudes towards relying on other people’s money.
Doubtless the old social shame associated with being “on the dole” was sad for those who genuinely had no choice, but it was not intrinsically unhealthy.
Pride and peer pressure acted as a spur to finding work that was recognised as rewarding in ways that were not limited to the size of the pay cheque.
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