In the process of taking stock after years and years of fruitless search, I came across a box of papers from the time I was seeking to gain a teaching or lecturing position in higher education. Among those papers were presentations and talks I gave to the unemployed in 2010/11, tips on how to tailor CVs for specific jobs, how to prepare for job interviews, how to focus a job search, and extended talks concerning how to think outside of the box, reinvent yourself, present your best image to the world and so on. Also among those papers were the records I kept of my own job search. The photograph is of just three sheets out of very many listing the jobs I went for. I also have booklets of these jobs. The unemployed were kept busy detailing their fruitless searches, all of them daily reminders of the pointlessness of their existence. You learn that you are not merely voiceless but worthless. You have all the time in the world, but none of it is your own.
I learned to keep meticulous records not merely to meet the requirements of the 'actively seeking work' clause, but to arm myself with verifiable facts in meeting accusations then being levelled against the unemployed that they were limiting the job searches within specific ranges. It never stopped the charge being made. I rebutted it with solid irrefutable evidence. Not that it mattered. It seemed to be a requirement of the job that you deliver the stock charges against the unemployed, whether those on the receiving end were guilty or not. But my meticulous records were important – with them I exposed the whole game for the pathetic deceit it was. I never limited my job search. At the same time, I was at Little World in Silkhouse Court Liverpool to brush up my classroom skills in preparation for my return to the academic world. And, who knows, if that fell through, for beginning a career for myself in a training and employment agency. The possibilities for this were discussed. I had all manner of qualifications, including teaching certificates which enabled me to teach adults. I had recently qualified at St Helens College, and had TEFL and TESOL qualifications too. So why not?
Below is a talk I gave at Silkhouse Court, Tithebarn Street, Liverpool in 2011, in which I blew any chance of becoming a part of the 'welfare to work' employment industry. I thought it was a charade from top to bottom. And there came a point when I had to say so, regardless of consequences.
This was a talk to the long term unemployed with a view to having them identify barriers to employment and what it would take on their part to overcome them. I was here with a view to sharpening up my own teaching skills, giving talks, presenting papers, and taking classes. I had a place on the MA Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at Liverpool Hope University and was seeking teaching hours in various universities in order to finalize that degree.
Nothing I said in this talk came as news to the people in the room. The value of this talk, and others given in this same institution, lay in the mutual recognition and camaraderie between people who were in the same boat. We were really talking to one another, knowing that there would be at least some people in the world listening sympathetically to our plight. These were the people who had come to learn that they counted for nothing and had no voice It didn't matter what they said, it didn't matter that they were right and those making the policies and decisions were wrong. There were the people who raise concerns and sound alarms as to injustices and iniquities of the world, only to be ignored. Because they are the powerless trying to speak truths to power. Power being what it is can afford to close its eyes and ears and harden the heart. I was one of these people, and it is as such that I identify today. I post this in light of defences that are currently being launched on the part of the lickspittles of power to the effect that it is a myth that those 'left behind' by the globalization that has been foisted upon us in recent decades have been ignored. It is not a myth. I can say this clearly. Characters like Clare Foges, who I criticize in a previous post, like to think they have done so much for the people. They are the same people who thought they were doing so much for the unemployed when I was at Silkhouse court. There are still good jobs to be had, and people will get them. The problem will always be what to do with the ones who miss out. We all knew A4e was a scam then, yet another of those cosmetic exercises from government, designed to push people into low paid, low quality work as cheap labour. And make a miserable life on meagre benefits even more miserable. It saves government the trouble of devising and implementing an industrial strategy. The problem was never with the unemployed, with some 'entitlement' culture, but with an economic system that failed to develop and use the talents and efforts of the people to the full and reward them for their effort. I'll continue to argue this, and demand from our erstwhile revolutionaries constructive models of alternative economic systems and social and political institutions. That's the only way we will ever get rid of this monstrous capital system that is unravelling the conditions of social and ecological health and well-being. Just as bad theories limp on until they are replaced by better theories, so bad systems will continue until they are replaced by better systems. We are in a phase of prefiguration and institution building.
As for A4e, all those who had experience of it knew it was fraudulent in all respects. Even the people working for the company. But who listens to the poor and the powerless? I'll put this here to give voice to the voiceless. These are the people shamed into silence through their being identified as losers, shirkers, and scroungers. There is no shame. I have been concerned from first to last with a collective political response on the part of citizens to a capitalist order that has taken the world beyond human comprehension and control.
I'll put this out as a snapshot of just some of the things I've spent my years doing. I'm taking stock of my current situation, which is looking precarious to say the least. I love the accusations that climate deniers have made over the years with respect to the climate change "gravy train." If only! I've been living off scraps for decades, campaigning to avert ecological catastrophe for free. In terms of health and wealth, it has done me immense damage. But I'd say it's done my soul a power of good all the same.
I'm looking at the years stretching out behind me. On paper they look like years of achievement. One day I shall reveal my full story. For the writing has, in effect, been a substitute world, a creative space I have used as a refuge to make up for the fact I could never find the place in the 'real world' that my hard work and intellect had more than earned. I doubt that people would believe the decades of struggle, poverty, and isolation I have suffered to get to wherever it is I am today. It looks like scant reward to me. But there are people among the ignored, left behind, and overlooked who know at least part of the truth. Only I know the whole truth. It was to those people I gave this talk, as one of them. I turned the brief I was given right around, defending the integrity and affirming the ability and character of those who were being admonished to make the changes in character to become fit for work. Change the monstrous, inhuman, uncaring, sociopathic system, I say!
Overcoming Barriers
(Please provide written answers to the following by 6th September)
Various sources are reporting that there are jobs available for people who want them.
Which sources? Identify those sources so that we can check the validity of their claims. I’m quite good at checking sources. Who are these employers? Ropy employers undercutting health and safety who want a pliant workforce? Employers who mess around with work patterns and hours? I've come across many of those, and I know many of you here have too. I worked at Kingdom Security. I had to field phone calls from a security guard who claimed he hadn't been paid for work he had done. The bosses told me that he didn't turn up for work. The guard kept ringing, and I was the one who had to keep fobbing him off. He was adamant that he had turned up for work. I persisted in my questions. I was then told he had turned up in the wrong place at the wrong time. So he had turned up after all. Nothing in this episode rang true, other than the story the guard told me. I put two and two together, and listened to people who had experience of the security industry. It became clear to me that it was quite common for guards to be deliberately sent to the “wrong” place, do the security job as required, only for employers to withhold payment on account of not turning up for work as, where, and when required. I have similar experiences in distribution.
Claims like 'various sources' saying jobs are available for those who want them is merely code for saying that people who are unemployed are unemployed by choice – they don't have work because they don't want to work. That's you people. But before I make that accusation, I want to see these sources and these jobs. Every day you all do job searches. You have to as a condition of receiving benefit. You are all required to apply for x number of jobs a week. Do you get those jobs?
We have heard stories about how difficult it is to recruit hospital porters. We need immigrant labour to do the jobs that the British are unable and unwilling to do. That's what we are being told. Did anyone see the recent Panorama show which portrayed the unemployed as a bunch of idle incompetents that couldn’t even tie their own laces? It was a good propaganda piece for the Labour government as it seeks to hide its economic failures by blaming the victims. It seems that there remain areas of this country that, for some reason, are immune to Labour's economic miracle. Just as they were immune to the Thatcherite economic miracle. It can't be anything to do with failures of policy or ideology, of course. So it must be down to the sheer bloody mindedness and fecklessness of the people themselves. Odd how regions once characterized by a solid work ethic have become so work shy and lazy.
This is a lesson learned from the Thatcher governments. If you choose to use mass unemployment as a political weapon and a tool of economic management/threat/discipline, then of course the work ethic that is passed through the generations comes to be lost. That tradition of work in working class communities, whole cultures and histories passed on by power of example, was systematically uprooted and destroyed. We can analyse the causes of that destruction. There are, of course, structural changes and global shifts underway in the economic base of society. But the Thatcher government undoubtedly engineered mass unemployment and used it to impose 'economic discipline.' That is, unemployment was used to threaten those in work to moderate their employment demands, show gratitude for even having a job, and carry on working at the coalface without complaint or demand.
If there is unemployment, then it is the fault of the unemployed. There is no structural cause of unemployment, only personal. To quote the words of poet John Milton, those who pluck out the eyes of the people condemn them for their blindness.
I went looking for jobs as a hospital porter. I know many of you here have done that too. Just out of interest to see how easy it was to land one of these thousands of jobs that are available. Guess what? I couldn’t find that many portering jobs at all. And I never got a response for the ones I applied for. Anyone here have any better luck? I thought not. To prove the point I’ve applied for another one. Here's the details. I'll invite you to apply too. Then let's see what happens.
I think we know.
So we can give short shrift to this 'various sources' say there are plenty of jobs available.
Everyone here is required to conduct a job search, identify available jobs and apply for them. I think everyone here has not only worked before but have held down good jobs over a period of time. There is no shortage of motivation, qualification, and ambition here. So where are the jobs?
In analysing the question further we start to identify the subtext. The insidious claim is not that the unemployed, the people who are unemployed in this room, are workshy as such but are shy of certain kinds of work... In other words, you can forget your skills, your qualifications, your experience, your ambitions, your expectations and scale everything you have ever trained for and worked for down to rock bottom and accept whatever work is available on whatever terms you are given. You heard the manager yourself the other day. When she said she would clean toilets if she had to, she meant that that's what you should do. Well, someone has to – even engineers, computer programmers, mathematicians, all of you. It's the point I was making the other day with respect to designing a CV to catch an employers eye. Having been told to “dumb down” the CV, I pointed out that this is a dangerous route that is being opened up. First, people will “dumb down” their identities on paper; finally, they will just be dumb in real life. If dumb is all that prevailing society wants, then why not just be dumb? We start by playing dumb, we end by being dumb.
(Identify barriers to employment)
This is a loaded question if ever I saw one. If you identify barriers, then you risk being accused of erecting barriers. Not all barriers can be overcome. If you don't identify barriers, then you need to explain why you are still unemployed. It's just an official version of the old refrain 'get a job!' That'll work in areas subject to deindustrialization.
There’s nothing any of us can do about the lack of an industrial policy in Britain. We can vote for a government committed to implementing an industrial strategy via an appropriate policy framework. That's the very thing the country has been lacking since .. well, ever. I wrote at length on it when I was on the masters programme at Keele University. Some good it did me. Governments have sold out to the private forces of the global economy. We just take the hit. And here, the unemployed are being 'encouraged' to internalize problems that are very much external, blaming themselves for failures that lie elsewhere. And we are supposed to express shock or sympathy when we here of the incidence of depression and suicide among the unemployed! That internalization is quite deliberate, and is intended to have the victims of the system on the back-foot, becoming passive and isolated, silent, instead of joining together to ask some very pertinent political questions and demand answers of those in power. Or those who claim to be in power, but are mere agents of the system.
I'm here looking for a way into lecturing in Higher Education. These talks are giving me experience of organizing materials and running classes. I have a place on the MA Learning and Teaching in HE at Liverpool Hope University. We shall see where that leads. It is dependent on securing a minimum number of teaching hours in higher education. So I have been in touch with my old contacts to see if they have anything for me.
Martyn Nightingale at John Moores University has just written to me. He was one of my first tutors back in 1985. He tells me that I have a ‘very impressive CV.' He’s looking at the academic side. I was one of his star pupils and he’s impressed. OK, I'm boasting. But he did like it when I livened up one of his seminars when, among vague talk of the state as securing the good, I made the bold statement that the state is based on force. That allowed discussion to move into class and class relations. Dangerous stuff. Not the kind of questions that are likely to impress employers. Martyn tells me that the Politics and History departments at Liverpool JMU have been axed. Heavens! Those were two of my old subjects! Not needed. He’s impressed with my qualifications. They would have been enough to land a position a couple of decades ago. But not now. He can’t offer me a job. He’s making enquiries to try to get me in as a ‘guest lecturer.' They had Nigella Lawson as guest speaker at Leeds Metropolitan. They’re going to have to make do with me at Liverpool John Moores.
But let's make an attempt to answer this question of barriers. Because you have to. You will be subject to sanctions if you don't. So I'll help you out as best I can.
There are two aspects to this question of barriers: barriers within and barriers without.
I have said a fair bit about the barriers without. These are not really what the employment authorities want you to focus on. To them, any such focus is merely an excuse to avoid taking personal responsibility for what you can do to make yourselves employable. External barriers cannot be changed at the individual level and require political solutions. As individuals we cannot change the objective force of a supra-individual world. Unless we join together in a political movement or cause, all that we are able to change is ourselves. And that's where this loaded question wants us to focus. As though the inner and the outer could ever be so divorced! We have to change ourselves instead of taking a political interest in changing the world. Of course, we can engage in politics in our spare time. Here, your time, like your mind, body, and soul, belongs to 'the system.'
That said, I have no hesitation in affirming the necessity of politics. If that upsets folk in the building, then so be it. I'm looking for a job involving teaching critical thinking, so I'll not play dumb in my practice here. We all know the truth, so there's no point denying it. Collectively, if we can draw all the help and mutual support that can be found in the world, bonding in solidarity, creating ties and extending loyalties that will not break, then we can change the world and change ourselves in the process. There’s a world still to win.
Are we not entitled to ask about the nature of the British economic system?
We know what Germany produces, Italy, Japan, but what does Britain actually do? Sells snake oil and counts money. Fantasy Island.
But we are allowed to raise this issue only as citizens, not as clients of the state. The unemployed are allowed no political voice.
These questions have opened up a little route into politics and you’d better watch out should I come to take it up.
Am I getting some funny looks behind me? OK, I'd better stay off politics. For a wee while, at least. It's a political world we live in, folks ... the awkward nature of truth in a world such as this... I know, I know ... I'm supposed to challenging people to come out of their comfort zones. The truth can be most unsettling to the comfortably numb.
So let's keep to the brief.
I’m not going to say anything about industrial strategy, policies and policy frameworks, capital formation, quantity and quality of investment, R&D, sectoral banking, production design, apprenticeships, skills and training, company law etc. All of these things are beyond our power as individuals. Like the economy itself and the way it distributes employment opportunities – it is all beyond our control as individuals.
As individuals we are all confronted with supra-individual forces, ‘the playthings of alien powers’ in the words of Marx.
But there it is. We are not allowed to harp on about these external barriers, the most important barriers of all standing in the way of each and everyone of us here getting a decent job. No. We have to focus on internal barriers, our own failings standing in the way of getting a job. Just don't let the system con you into thinking that you are unemployed through a fault of your own. That's the line being peddled to the public at large. And you are all rounded up and institutionalized here to be made an example of before that public.
It's rubbish, a self-serving, protective myth designed to preserve the system from political controversy and challenge. I know it's rubbish, you know it's rubbish. But we will not be allowed to tell the world outside that it is rubbish. We are here to set an example to the working public, and have an example made of us.
I’m pretty sure that when it comes to identifying barriers all of us here can easily identify the objective barriers.
We can’t get the job we want because that job doesn’t exist in sufficient numbers.
So why not get another type of job? That's the obvious moral of the lesson I am expected to deliver here. OK. I'll deliver it then. You all had certain kinds of jobs before. Let's emphasize that no one here is work shy, feckless, unskilled, uneducated. The very opposite. Your problem is that your achievements and abilities have led you to expect jobs that are in very short supply in the economy we have. You've overreached yourself. I could turn that claim round and ask why the economic system we have is so dumb it expects us to play at being dummies to fit in. But I won't. I'll play the game. ‘Various sources’ report that jobs exist. They do. I’ve gone for them. You've gone for them. Those jobs seem to keep going to others. On paper, you lot, as engineers, solicitors, teachers, project managers, financiers are not merely overqualified – you are threats to the authority of the people charged with the job of interviewing and hiring you. Been there, seen it, been on the receiving end of it. I had a very strained relationship with the manager of PC World where I worked with the Tech Guys. I had a way of not jumping to his commands as the others did that unnerved him. So there's an internal barrier of my own. I guess I'm just one of those 'masterless men' who so worried the architects of the Industrial Revolution.
If we refuse to change ourselves to get the jobs that exist then we are erecting barriers.
And those barriers do exist. I think if you are unemployed for any length of time you reach a point where you have seen and heard it all before. Or you think you have. Bad experiences set up a cycle of negative expectations. You start to think the worst, and start to convey something of that attitude at interviews. You start to form a negative character. The fact that you don’t get the job only serves to confirm your own worst fears and prejudices. You didn’t get the job and you knew you wouldn’t get it. In no time this negative character trait impacts on your job search. Your search becomes mechanical. To be fair, the system, with its insistence on keeping a job search record, invites that mechanical approach. Searching for a job becomes a job in itself. Here, you clock on at 9am and clock off at 4-30pm. It is designed to get you used to working hours. The implication is that you are unemployed because you lack the work ethic. I know that most of you here have held down some pretty high powered jobs. Working hours are no mystery to people here. This is an obvious nonsense that you just have to put up with and ignore. Unfortunately, at the same time, you can't help but realize that there are members of the public who think that turning up for work on time and staying to the end of a full working day is somehow a novel experience to you. And that thought irritates. It nags away at you night and day. That's what schemes like this do to you. They are designed to break down your nerve, get you to disassemble your character, and allow the system to rebuild it in its own dumb image. That's the way it goes. You come here as civil engineers and estate agents and musicians, you leave as toilet cleaners and call centre operatives. Needs must.
So I think the real question behind this question of barriers is not what we do in order to get the job we want, it’s what we don’t do in order not to get the job we don’t want. The jobs we want don't exist, not in the same numbers as those who want them. And the jobs we don't want do exist, although not quite in the exaggerated numbers that 'various sources' claim they exist in. The jobs we want don’t exist; the jobs that do exist are the ones that we don’t want. That’s really the implication of the question. That's the harsh truth I am being inveigled into stating to you. That’s why it’s a loaded question. I'm not sure I'm supposed to expose it as a loaded question, though! Bang goes my future prospects in working for the company! I'm not addressing dummies. You all know the truth, and would skewer anyone flanneling that truth in five seconds flat. I don't have the nerve to try it on. I don't have the inclination, either.
But let's continue to play the game and identify another barrier: the comfort zone. That’s what it’s called. You have to come out of your comfort zone. I love how smart, well qualified, high achieving people are told that they live in a comfort zone by people who … I'll just say haven't extended themselves to the same extent, merely given in to become time servers of the system. To those who throw the phrase 'comfort zone' around so casually I simply say – you see the years of hard work, the diligence in study and training, the high intelligence it takes to reach this level of education and achievement, and put yourself to the test. You do it! You see how comfortable it is! The people who throw this one around are not even close.
Carrying on, I'll look at other aspects of this question of a 'comfort zone.' This is not a case of sticking stubbornly to a line of work one is used to or expects. It's often a psychic need, a question of mental health and well-being in a hostile environment. I think people who are unemployed for any length of time need that comfort zone. It’s the only security and stability they can find, a kind of normalizing experience that protects mind, body and soul in an often isolated, miserable, and peripatetic existence. There are dangers, of course. That comfort zone can become a protective shell that hardens on the back and, in time, comes to crush all life within. The process is so slow you don’t notice it happening. It’s normalized. It's your life now, a slow suffocation.
This is not a confessional by the way. I just like to introduce a little angst into proceedings.
I'll stick to my past, my 'comfort zone.' Let's see how comfortable it is.
Can I tell you when philosophy really clicked with me? It was when I read Bertrand Russell discussing Plato’s theory of ‘idea’ or ‘form’. Here Plato explains that, whenever a number of individuals have a common name, they have also a common "idea" or "form." For instance, though there are many pens, there is only one "idea" or "form" of a pen. Just as a reflection of a pen in a mirror is only apparent and not "real," so the various particular pens are unreal, being only copies of the "idea," which is the one real pen, and is made by God. Of this one pen, made by God, there can be knowledge, but in respect of the many pens made by carpenters there can be only opinion. The philosopher, as such, will be interested only in the one ideal pen, not in the many pens found in the sensible world. He will have a certain indifference to ordinary mundane affairs: "how can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?" Those who are capable of becoming a philosopher will be distinguished by a naturally harmonious mind. Such a one shall be educated into a philosopher and a guardian. The ‘music of the spheres’? Was Plato influenced by Pythagoras? Have I had a bang on the head? Have I come off script? Have I lost the job? Thinking too much is quite a barrier to gainful employment. You are not paid to think.
Let me address this question of expectations. I was actually warned as my period in research finished that once you’ve studied philosophy the world and the people in it will never look the same ever again. I was warned, too, that a number of people engaging in PhD research are prone to depression having completed their thesis; having been so high, they come to be brought back within the realm of the mundane. A French writer whose name I can't remember said that 90% of everything is rubbish. And, boy, you notice it after philosophy! I don’t want to know about alfalfa sprouts or how to sonic the hedgehog or whatever it is. [reference to subjects that had hogged conversation earlier in the day, bringing laughs all round]
(As a person who is regularly looking at the availability of employment discuss this statement.
Consider
The types of employment that are available
The location of these jobs
Part Time / Full Time / Seasonal Nature of the jobs
The skill sets necessary for these jobs)
Let's look at the profile of the economy and consider the split between a core of high skilled, well paid and protected jobs and an increasing periphery of casual, part time, contract work, agency work.
Back in the seventies there was a theory of segmented labour markets. We can now refer to a more general trend towards the MacDonaldisation of employment. These jobs are characterized by a lack of control, creativity and initiative at work. Be passive, unthinking automotans and you'll be fine. 'Do you want fries with that?'
I think this point applies particularly to Merseyside. There are no graduate jobs in St Helens. Everyone I went to school with got out years ago. My best friend xxxxx is in New Zealand. He emigrated in 1990. I’ve never seen him since 1998. Same with other school friends. They all left the area, a few left the country. In other words, they saw their economics prospects as lousy and, rather than change themselves into dummies, left.
What kind quantity and level of jobs do you believe are available within the Merseyside area and how does this impact on your search for employment?
Low skill, low wage jobs that reinforce the low productivity, low growth profile of the economy. Lack of industrial strategy and policy and lack of regional and spatial development. I'm presuming that people are still concerned with the profile of the economy and character of the country. They ought to be. If you want decent public services, you have to pay for them – and that presumes a healthy and productive economy that is able to generate the resources to support them.
Of course, that's not our brief. I am supposed to have you identify what jobs are available and encourage you to volunteer for them. I'm only half joking. The pay for some of these is so low it almost looks like volunteering.
Food and recreation, entertainment and culture. Tourism.
What skills are required?
Communication skills, people skills, they call them soft skills, relational skills, networking, empathy. These are seen as feminine attributes. So we have some commentators referring to the recession as a ‘mancession’ since it has affected men far more than women. Women are doing fine. I'm thinking of the stoning scene from The Life of Brian: “are there any women here today?” Oh, the boys outnumber the girls by a mile. In fact, look behind me and see how many women are in charge running this place. My days may well be numbered. Good thing too, less of these endless talks, then ...
I shall carry on while I can, hoping the powers that be can empathize.
This isn’t so much a skills set as a mind set. The older you get, the more difficult it becomes to acquire new skills. You get used to doing certain things, and certain ways of doing them. You need to adapt! Be flexible! Be prepared to change! From what to what is less clear. There are engineers here. Does this society have no need of engineers? If it does, how are we train engineers, yet have people prepared to change direction at the drop of a hat.
The digitalization of culture seems to be changing notions of time and space. Quicker, artificial time is coming to prevail over natural rhythms. It should come as no surprise that stress and depression are on the rise. I have a book Dancing in the Streets which charts the rise of depression with the rise of capitalism; capitalism is a system built on scarcity, not just material scarcity but a psychic scarcity. It's effects are mental and spiritual.
It’s not that difficult to identify the skills required for the jobs that are available. The hard part is acquiring those skills, knowing which in this ever changing world which are the skills to acquire. We do seem to be talking more about character traits than anything else.
I had a job that, on the job description, demanded ‘a high level of computer literacy.' I walked into the job with an ease that should have told me to be suspicious. There was nothing 'high level' about this job at all. I did nothing but answer the phone and tap details in on a database. I'd never used a phone system in my life. Come to think of it, I barely bother to answer the phone as a matter of routine. And yet I was thrown straight in, no training, sat at my desk to see lights flashing everywhere. I had bells ringing in my head when I got home. I was doing that job with someone who had a Masters degree in Computer Science, would you believe. I received a job application from someone who wanted to work the doors as a security guard. He also had a Masters in Computer Science.
Is this the future?
If this is the future, then what does that say about the kind of economy we have? What does it say about the way that 'the economy' has come to acquire priority over our concern with who we are and how we live our lives? And what kind of future, if any, is in store for a society that is incapable of steering itself in the right direction?
So if people are to be asked to dumb down their CV, the question is begged, why does anyone need to strive to achieve anything in order to put a decent CV together in the first place? If the jobs available are casual, routine, lacking in creativity and initiative and control, then why not just give in and become a place-sitting, time-serving, conformist, mediocrity and dullard?
I make no claims here about management, you understand.
There was an article in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago which said that despite the claims made for the digital revolution enabling greater autonomy and creativity at work, even professions like teaching and law are now being drawn into the MacDonaldisation of work. I think it referred a Digital Taylorism, the old time and motion tyranny in new electronic form.
If you want my view we are well on the way to a social Taylorism, a society of automatons barcoded and routinised in gated communities with electronic access only. Automorons.
So what we are talking about here is flesh and blood people, you and I, being made and remade to fit the work in a bloodless, soulless world, not the work to fit the people.
‘Without regard for persons’ was a phrase that social theorist Max Weber used to capture the characterless, soulless routinisation of life and labour subject to the organisational imperatives of capitalist modernity. Weber envisaged a future of human beings living in an iron cage of ‘mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance’. ‘This nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."
Sex is nature’s last gasp, claimed Weber somewhere I always quote this, despite never quite having been able to track the quote down. I'm sure it was Weber. Anyhow. If he didn't say it, I'll claim it for myself, although it's truth would be recognized by any biologist, I'd guess. Well, I think we can say that the last gasp has almost been gasped. Take a look at the painting in The Walker [Art Gallery, Liverpool], The Last Man by John Martin. 'Mad Martin' he was called. He seems quite a reasonable man to me. Too reasonable, in fact. The last man is always portrayed as being alone in the universe, with there being no one else left alive. Wrong! The last man will be alone amongst millions, maybe billions of false, cowed, domesticated, routinized, beaten and dehumanized human beings.
I get the impression that we are being invited, or ordered, to become one of them. You are being inveigled into doing it to yourself.
On account of life, to give up the reasons for living.
What is life, what is living? According to what standard? Life and its flourishing? 'The economy' and its endless expansion?
Anyone read Juvenal? He could come in handy when it comes to developing a skills set that makes you employable, I'm sure.
Rather than let your virtue be betray’d;
Virtue, the noblest cause for which you’re made.
–Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal), Satura viii, 79-84 (ca. 100 CE)
(J. Dryden transl. 1692)
If that seems a bit too pompous, then give them the Latin: propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. Which may be translated as “do not forsake the reasons for living in the interest of staying alive.”
My old colleague with the masters in computer science, with whom I worked on databases, he’s had two heart attacks, split with his girlfriend and last time I knew of him was in court pleading not to be thrown out of his flat. He’s employed, but is he not also beaten in some way? Given up on life and its potentials, his own potentials?
That's one lesson I want you to take home with you today and never forget in the years to come.
So you have to be careful about expectations They can be too low as well as too high. There’s nothing worse than taking advice to adjust your sights low only to still fall short when it comes to landing a job. If you’re going to fail, fail by your own efforts. ‘I tried, at least I did that’.
It’s the inversion of subject and object for those who like a little Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. The thing, the job, has come to acquire an existential significance whilst the real subject, flesh and blood persons like you and I, have become appendages and functionaries of the thing. We are subject to an alienative economic system which subjects each and all to thingification.
It is not power that corrupts, it is the lack of power. You are being subject to a process of being beaten down and broken down, to be remade for 'the economy,' because you lack the power to resist the brow-beaters.
Identifying the types of employment available and the skills sets is not the difficult part.
I’ve gone for all kinds of clerical, admin, data input, library and information services jobs. They are there. And the skills involved in all these jobs sets are quite similar.
The hard part is fitting yourself to what is available. And in persuading those who make the decisions as to who gets the jobs and who doesn't that you do indeed fit the job. If you don’t fit yourself to the job, you are erecting barriers. If you do fit yourself to the job, you get the job but lose your identity, who you are, your life. And I'm not even sure that it convinces those making the decisions when it comes to hiring folk.
‘It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, but for Tescos.' I knew someone who worked for Tescos. He loved it. I met him on a web design course. I thought I was getting skills for a new job. He was doing it for a bit of enjoyment. You'll not get a job with this, he told me, it's just a bit of fun. I wish I had listened before shelling out nearly £4,000 on a web design management course that seems to cover everything and go on forever, but only at the surface level. Comprehensive but shallow. So I’ve applied for a job at Tescos to see what happens. I sent a CV, they sent me a form. I sent the form, they asked me to apply online. I applied online, they said they’d be in touch when they had a suitable vacancy. I'm getting the impression that I don’t quite fit their requirements. Whatever they are.
As an individual what areas are realistically commutable within your travelling distance to work please identify these.
Before Christmas I was offered the post of IT Tutor at The Bridge in Sefton. It was only a few hours and required going on a teaching course. It required too much commitment for too little reward, so I turned the job down to focus on my real strengths. Hoping that someone out there would not only recognize those strengths but want them, for something. This job involved two train journeys and either a bus journey or a very long walk. I’ve had an interview at Lymme library, a bit outside of Warrington. It's murder to get to by public transport. I don’t see why Preston, Liverpool, Warrington, Widnes etc isn’t possible. On paper. Plenty depends on times. And whether the trains show. I can imagine a lot of stress involved in the commute.
As a philosopher, I'm interested in discussing the precise meaning of 'realistically.' What is reality? What do we know? And how do we know it? OK sorry! I'll leave the philosophy lectures for another day, when you can book your day off.
So I’m setting my goals high again. If you try you may fail. If you don’t try, you will certainly fail.
I’m not hearing much good advice. The jobcentre seems to think I’m breaking the availability for work rule by applying for just one type of job. Not so. I’m falling short through applying for too many jobs of too many kinds. They are all here in the records I keep.
You need to focus.
Go on Google and find Lawrence Wilde, a professor, and find him talking about his lecture tour of the universities. He’s talking about Aristotelianism and the need for a recovery of a moral aspect to the global and social justice debate. You’ll hear him saying he got the idea when he visited the Manchester Politics Workshop. It was dominated by Marxists who denied that morality could be creative or autonomous. With one exception. That’s me he’s talking about.
GA Cohen, Chichele professor of social and political philosophy at Oxford, is another interesting figure from my past. He was a Marxist philosopher. By 2000, when he wrote If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (based on the Gifford lectures he gave at Edinburgh University in 1996), Cohen no longer believed socialism to be inevitable and considered politics a matter of personal moral engagement. He described himself as having moved from historical materialism to a belief that what is needed to bring about equality are changes in individual attitudes and choices – a position, he said, so near to Christianity that it would have shocked his younger self.
It made me think.
(Consider both the current environment and also your own circumstances, what do you feel are the barriers which you need to overcome in order to gain employment?)
Well, it depends on the job.
Let's take library and information services. I must have something like 6-8,000 books back home. I rather like books. I never really wanted to teach or lecture. I can present papers, but presenting research, reporting back from the frontiers of knowledge is not the same thing as teaching. So books, libraries. Except that when I have gone for library jobs I have been told that libraries are about “much more than books.” “You need all these IT skills...” I was told this so often that I got the impression that the ECDL [European Computer Driving Licence] that seemed to be insisted on as the passport into library employment was akin to a Harvard degree. If you read some of the job requirements for libraries they’ll insist on the ECDL or a commitment to gain it in one or two years. From that I got the impression that the ECDL must be an incredibly difficult qualification to obtain. So I enrolled at Learn Direct at the local library. I did it in eight weeks. Six weeks really. I wasn’t on the Internet so I had to go to the library and physically write down all the commands, going home to memorize them, then return to the library in a couple of days to take the exam. I had an exam every three or four days, gaining a 95% average. I proceeded to obtain all of the Advanced ECDL certificates too. I'm good! I'm motivated! I'm ambitious! I have a work ethic! I'm a high achiever! New Clait, Unit E for IT Users. Everyone here has much higher qualifications than these. So why on earth are we here?
Whatever was needed, I did it. I had an interview at Newton le Willows library. They told me to try academic libraries. I had an interview at one of the University of Liverpool libraries, Sydney Jones or Cohen, one or the other, I forget now. It’s the one just up Mount Pleasant. And they also told me to try and get back into the academic world. In other words, I had done everything I could to come out of my academic 'comfort zone' and fit the profile of the jobs available in the 'real' economy, only to be told to go back. The people in charge of giving out the jobs took the decision that, no matter what I had done, I didn't fit, or I wouldn't, over time, fit.
So there it is, a question for those who insist on a focus on internal barriers. I broke all those barriers down, retrained, only to fail on account of others' expectations. How do I change those? Work for nothing for a period of ten years? Volunteer?
So I have come back to the academic world. Only to find that I am trying to get back in when funds, jobs, and even entire departments are being cut. I need the teaching qualification. I have secured a place on the MA Learning and Teaching in HE but cannot finalise the degree without securing the requisite number of teaching hours. So here I am, kind of practising. I shall be testing later to see what you have all learned. It's a very educational experience. It's taught me a lesson. Don’t get the qualification, I don’t get the lecturing job. Don’t get the lecturing hours, can’t get on the course, don’t get the qualification. Oh, and it’ll cost £3-4k.
I wonder how far away we are from a situation in which we have to pay the employer to give us a job. In fact, aren't these government schemes doing something similar? Taxpayers' money being used to give free labour to employers with the government as the intermediary? Forget capitalism as a private economy, we have a public economy, public money being used to support private ends.
Having identified these barriers can you think of any methods by which you can overcome them.
Well I have my own ideas. But I consult widely. Use your contacts. So I’ve used them to come up with solutions. My contacts came up with all the problems and predicaments I identified above. More barriers, I'm afraid.
I need time and money and hours. I need to prepare papers to present, I need to publish, and I need to teach/lecture, get back in. That’s not just me saying that. I’ve asked any number of contacts in the academic world what I need to do. Professors, deans, doctors etc. I have a long list of responses here. Anyone who thinks I am erecting barriers should take it up with them, the people who work in these fields. I'm presuming that they would know.
All these 'solutions' fall foul of the rules set by the employment authorities. You see there isn’t just the ‘actively seeking work’ clause now. There is the ‘availability for work’. You can’t limit your options. You are required to go for a range of jobs, all of which we are told are available. You all have to keep a list of the variety of jobs that you go for. I'm a historian by training. I keep good records. Data entry, data input, data maintenance, clerical, admin etc. I have endless lists. I take them to employment interviews. It's a game. All involved know it. I put in all that time and effort for a measly few interviews. Everyone here has done the same. To be constantly met with charges of being feckless work-shy scroungers and parasites. At what point do people start to internalize the anger and succumb to hopelessness? That's the real experience of unemployment, the sense of having no future, the belief that no matter what you do, you have no future. It's that loss of options and possibilities, the feeling that nothing will ever change. You need a comfort zone to numb the pain and misery.
I was interviewed at Wingate Medical Centre for the job of Data Clerk at a handsome £6-60 an hour.
I have a cousin who is a Doctor of Medicine. Unknown to me, she had just started as Registrar at Wingate when I turned up for the interview. I withdrew the application. ‘We were wondering why you were interested anyway’ said the Practice Manager, Xxxx Xxxxxxx. In other words, I was massively overqualified and should have had no trouble finding gainful employment elsewhere. Like everyone here. Try it.
So let’s have a look at that availability for work clause, apply for jobs that are available just because they are available. All boxes ticked. If you go for too many targets you fail to hit any. Like a young bear trying to catch his first fish, you pounce at everything and catch nothing. The world is forever running away from your grasp.
If you wish to hold a group discussion about these topics please do so but do not forget to provide reasoned written answers.
My PhD thesis was entitled “Rational Freedom.” I've been very reasonable in this presentation. I've identified reasons of various kinds, relating to barriers within and without. You are being asked to be reasoned with respect to internal barriers, so don't let my tendency to wander off into politics from time to time distract you from your orders and obligations. The people here know the score. It's not their concern. And, in their view, it's not yours, as unemployed people in receipt of benefit, either.
I have brought along Jeremy Seabrook's book from the 1980s, A World Still to Win. He wrote this book during a decade of deliberately engineered and maintained mass unemployment. We live with the consequences of those times. We are still living in those times. I was struck by this passage:
‘It seems that the purpose of the poor now is more nakedly ideological: their purpose is to be poor. Not to produce, but simply to serve as a contrast, a defining edge for wealth and success, and a warning and example to the rest.’
That's the game we are playing here. Countless welfare ‘reforms’ since have confirmed the fundamental truth of that observation. And there are people making money out of misery at all levels.
I’d like to close with a quote from a book. This is called Genuinely Seeking Work and it is by a group of Merseyside academics.
One is Sam Davies. Sam taught me when he was a postgraduate student. He’s now Professor at John Moores. He's made it! It can be done. Martyn Nightingale is another, my old Politics tutor. I made reference to Martyn earlier. Another is the indefatigable Ron Noon. He was once my referee, describing me as a ‘range rider’, ‘very popular with fellow students and staff .. Peter won’t let anyone down’. You can’t get everything right! I wasn’t that popular. Fine fellow, Ron. He would come to feel badly let down had I ducked the inherently political aspects of this question. I was well educated. And I don't intend letting anyone down now, least of all myself.
So I’ll end by quoting from the final page of the book concerning the Genuinely Seeking Work clause:
“Sixty years on …with the same meanness of spirit … that condition has been seen to rise again. [as] The ‘actively seeking employment’ clause
How many letters or telephone calls per week will be required? How many newspapers adverts will claimants be expected to scan? What allowances will be made … for the hopelessness that results from months of fruitless job hunting?
Now it is telephone calls rather than the wearing out of leather soles in the soul-destroying search for work, but so many have been there before.
One final thought springs to mind – the sheer waste and futility of it all. As the Macmillan Committee asked in 1931:
'If we can do what we are doing with nearly a quarter of our industrial resources idle, what might we not do if they were all employed?'
In 1992 the question is still waiting to be answered.”
Nearly two decades later, we still await an answer.
Evidently, it is not a question that is of much concern to the rich and powerful, nor to those who have managed to find positions that allow them to survive in the dog-eat-dog world that has been made in the image of money and power.
Well worth reading, including the legal threat in the comments section, and the response
In terms of financial fraud, I only know what was exposed in a court of law Which was bad enough.
What I do know for sure is that unemployed people who needed help, advice, and support were threatened, bullied, intimidated, and made to feel as though their problems were entirely of their own making, that they were idle and stupid, that their views were of no account and that their lives were utterly worthless. I saw people in very fragile mental states, not to mention severe financial hardship, driven to the brink of nervous breakdown, having to support each other to survive the regime which was imposing a ruthless work discipline on them. I heard one guy in these classes openly denounce the organisation as 'fascist.' My little rebellion here, and in other places, was actually very modest compared to what the members of the group actually thought.
[Additional
A collage of the qualifications I had when 'actively seeking work,' and failing miserably to land even a half-decent job. I wasn't lacking in motivation, work ethic, or education. The final straw came when I was told that I would be considered a threat to those in positions of authority at work, and that I needed to "dumb" my CV down. Even worse, in a talk, I was asked to address this issue of making CVs "relevant" to the available jobs. Some time before this I was asked by my cousin, a teacher, to address the local school where she worked on the theme of motivation. I was going to tell the entire school assembly to be cautious - because I've been "had." She didn't put me on.
I never did take my place on the MA in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at Liverpool Hope University. And I never did gain a teaching or lecturing post. I couldn't even get a job in a library, for all of my knowledge of books and computers. I should write a post giving a blow by blow account of all my interviews for library jobs. I think I hold the distinction for having been interviewed in every town and city in Merseyside and Cheshire. Oh, Wigan too, lest I forget. How could I forget, that was a particularly disastrous interview. I had been interviewed very many times and failed to get the job. So I decided on a new approach. Instead of a smart suit and briefcase, which made me look smart but maybe a little overbearing, I decided on smart-casual I looked at these libraries and how people were dressed. They were not the stuffy places of old. So when I was invited for interview at Wigan Library, down Library Street, (which made it easy to find), I decided I would be casual, but still smart. I walked in with a heavy leather jacket draped across my shoulders like a cape. No tie, no briefcase, no notes, no nerves. Only to find that Wigan Library clearly observes a strict dress code. It was the best dressed library I had ever come across, strict collar and tie. I swaggered in like Al Pacino. The sharp intake of breath when I entered the room was palpable. One woman refused to make eye contact the entire time, even when asking me questions. I think I worried, excited, intimidated, and repelled the panel in equal measure. I knew even as the interview was underway that I wasn't going to get the job. I did give a talk at Little World on how to prepare for a job interview. I still have it here. It may be of use to someone, I should post it. “Experience is the name we give to our mistakes,” said Oscar Wilde. I am very experienced.
