One thing I think is missing from discussions like this is the long shadow of deindustrialisation and the collapse of apprenticeship culture.
We often talk about bad jobs as if the problem is only low wages, long hours, or poor management. But Britain also dismantled huge parts of the economy that once gave materially-minded people meaningful roles in society.
Not everyone experiences the world primarily through abstract or academic work. Many people think through doing, making, repairing, adjusting, observing. Historically those people became engineers, machinists, builders, mechanics, framebuilders, toolmakers and skilled tradespeople through apprenticeships and workshop culture.
Now many of those pathways barely exist, especially for young working-class people. So a lot of practical intelligence is either redirected into low-status work or written off altogether.
The old workshops didn’t just produce bicycles or machinery. They produced judgement, confidence, responsibility, and belonging. People learned by participating in real work alongside skilled adults.
I think we need a much bigger reckoning with what deindustrialisation actually destroyed culturally and psychologically, not just economically.
This is key, and yet I struggle with how labor should be organized. Should it be by industry? Salary? It seems to me that a focus on shifting taxes on to capital (especially land) in order to tax labor as little as possible might help create a long-lasting political coalition
Really nice piece Paddy. It also makes me think about the way this entire system is propped up by our flawed social welfare. Rather than just ensuring people are paid living wages, we effectively underwrite these sub-subsistence jobs that exploit their employees through the provisioning of Universal Credit in particular. So the employer gets away with paying the employee less than they need to live, and for more than 2 and a half million people that translates to the government ensuring they can continue to live.
Instead we could target those funds into ensuring people's freedom to get out of those kinds of jobs, strengthening union rights, and introduce legislation at eradicating the kind of exploitative employment that has a CEO and shareholders raking in millions while the average worker needs help beyond their salary just to survive.
The answer is to ensure that the lowest perceived value jobs as a full time endeavour pay the equivalent of £1,000 per month rent, + £1000 per month bills and fun. If that becomes the minimum wage (which only pays £24kpa, £1800pcm at £12ph) so be it.
For full time workers, unless there are special dependencies, no benefits should be required and all should pay tax to contribute and belong to wider society.
What about poor companies who might struggle with the effect of the lowest boats rising on this tide of government compulsion?
1) have a look at their salary bands incl senior managers and CEO’s. Are they fair? Level it out a bit.
2) if salaries are otherwise fairly distributed, maybe the companies performs an essential social and economic purposes and itself should apply for benefits, not the workers.
Any benefits paid go into the pot for salary payments and are open to DWP audit. Just like any other claimant.
80,000 hours is a life. When that life is organised around someone else's capital accumulation, with no voice, no stake, and a CEO earning 100x your wage while calling himself a stakeholder That's Temporal Theft at industrial scale, not disengagement. The hours aren't just long. They're extractive. And CSR language is precisely how that extraction gets aestheticised into something that looks like care.The worker director point is the sharpest thing in this piece. Accountability lives closest to the people who can't afford to be wrong.
The union movement in the UK has been entirely subverted by Cultural Marxism... and this has been entirely intentional since the 1950's..
Not real Marxism, of course, but the Western Marxism developed by the US Foundations and later the CIA, ably assisted by our own 'intelligence services'... The Fabians are implicated too. And God knows how many dastardly Think Tanks and NGO's..
Workers rights and pay struggles all diverted into intersectionality and the CSR/ECG/DEI scams that are as you say all just neo-liberal globalist ploys that will simply accelerate monopoly capitalism.. And we all know where that ends up and it's fast approaching..
These Compatible Left shills leading the unions need replacing with people who believe in the class struggle..because it's getting very very late...
I am disillusioned by a federal care taker, the welfare state has become an abusive partner (husbandry for slaughter) or parent (patriarchy for punishment) or sibling (big brother for surveillence). It's frustrating that each of those terms are gendered, but the familiar metaphor is practical in terms of proximity.
The only government that can he held accountable is the one your can file complaints in person and be heard and actions taken.
The state structure was built by elites for elites. Same with multinationals or large corporations.
My view is that only companies built on collective interests, local, artisanal, governed not by charisma or ego, but practical implications that represent the workers (not uniom elites), will bring forth favorable conditions for human flourishing.
The power is inherent to the structure, so the managerial hiearchy top down governance needs to be abandoned.
50% of employment is already in small and medium sized businesses. The narrarive of a stable big company job is dead, so we must enter the era of collective entreprenuership. Perhaps, also abandon that elitist term.
Lets build businesses to support one another, where our skills are directed autonomously to help others and be compensated fairly, and we don't need to tithe the empire, but instead contribute directly to the commons.
One thing I think is missing from discussions like this is the long shadow of deindustrialisation and the collapse of apprenticeship culture.
We often talk about bad jobs as if the problem is only low wages, long hours, or poor management. But Britain also dismantled huge parts of the economy that once gave materially-minded people meaningful roles in society.
Not everyone experiences the world primarily through abstract or academic work. Many people think through doing, making, repairing, adjusting, observing. Historically those people became engineers, machinists, builders, mechanics, framebuilders, toolmakers and skilled tradespeople through apprenticeships and workshop culture.
Now many of those pathways barely exist, especially for young working-class people. So a lot of practical intelligence is either redirected into low-status work or written off altogether.
The old workshops didn’t just produce bicycles or machinery. They produced judgement, confidence, responsibility, and belonging. People learned by participating in real work alongside skilled adults.
I think we need a much bigger reckoning with what deindustrialisation actually destroyed culturally and psychologically, not just economically.
“She left me roses by the stairs.
Surprises let me know she cares” :-)
This is key, and yet I struggle with how labor should be organized. Should it be by industry? Salary? It seems to me that a focus on shifting taxes on to capital (especially land) in order to tax labor as little as possible might help create a long-lasting political coalition
Lol, beat me to it with the lyric reference! you get the prize.
Really nice piece Paddy. It also makes me think about the way this entire system is propped up by our flawed social welfare. Rather than just ensuring people are paid living wages, we effectively underwrite these sub-subsistence jobs that exploit their employees through the provisioning of Universal Credit in particular. So the employer gets away with paying the employee less than they need to live, and for more than 2 and a half million people that translates to the government ensuring they can continue to live.
Instead we could target those funds into ensuring people's freedom to get out of those kinds of jobs, strengthening union rights, and introduce legislation at eradicating the kind of exploitative employment that has a CEO and shareholders raking in millions while the average worker needs help beyond their salary just to survive.
The answer is to ensure that the lowest perceived value jobs as a full time endeavour pay the equivalent of £1,000 per month rent, + £1000 per month bills and fun. If that becomes the minimum wage (which only pays £24kpa, £1800pcm at £12ph) so be it.
For full time workers, unless there are special dependencies, no benefits should be required and all should pay tax to contribute and belong to wider society.
What about poor companies who might struggle with the effect of the lowest boats rising on this tide of government compulsion?
1) have a look at their salary bands incl senior managers and CEO’s. Are they fair? Level it out a bit.
2) if salaries are otherwise fairly distributed, maybe the companies performs an essential social and economic purposes and itself should apply for benefits, not the workers.
Any benefits paid go into the pot for salary payments and are open to DWP audit. Just like any other claimant.
80,000 hours is a life. When that life is organised around someone else's capital accumulation, with no voice, no stake, and a CEO earning 100x your wage while calling himself a stakeholder That's Temporal Theft at industrial scale, not disengagement. The hours aren't just long. They're extractive. And CSR language is precisely how that extraction gets aestheticised into something that looks like care.The worker director point is the sharpest thing in this piece. Accountability lives closest to the people who can't afford to be wrong.
The union movement in the UK has been entirely subverted by Cultural Marxism... and this has been entirely intentional since the 1950's..
Not real Marxism, of course, but the Western Marxism developed by the US Foundations and later the CIA, ably assisted by our own 'intelligence services'... The Fabians are implicated too. And God knows how many dastardly Think Tanks and NGO's..
Workers rights and pay struggles all diverted into intersectionality and the CSR/ECG/DEI scams that are as you say all just neo-liberal globalist ploys that will simply accelerate monopoly capitalism.. And we all know where that ends up and it's fast approaching..
These Compatible Left shills leading the unions need replacing with people who believe in the class struggle..because it's getting very very late...
Say it ain't so?
Turn the lights off, carry me home.
I am disillusioned by a federal care taker, the welfare state has become an abusive partner (husbandry for slaughter) or parent (patriarchy for punishment) or sibling (big brother for surveillence). It's frustrating that each of those terms are gendered, but the familiar metaphor is practical in terms of proximity.
The only government that can he held accountable is the one your can file complaints in person and be heard and actions taken.
The state structure was built by elites for elites. Same with multinationals or large corporations.
My view is that only companies built on collective interests, local, artisanal, governed not by charisma or ego, but practical implications that represent the workers (not uniom elites), will bring forth favorable conditions for human flourishing.
The power is inherent to the structure, so the managerial hiearchy top down governance needs to be abandoned.
50% of employment is already in small and medium sized businesses. The narrarive of a stable big company job is dead, so we must enter the era of collective entreprenuership. Perhaps, also abandon that elitist term.
Lets build businesses to support one another, where our skills are directed autonomously to help others and be compensated fairly, and we don't need to tithe the empire, but instead contribute directly to the commons.