Afterwards, one of the staff team was talking about their
son who was soon to leave school but had been told by the JobCentre that there
was no suitable work for a 16 year-old until he went to college apart, perhaps from
an ‘apprenticeship’ at £2.06 per hour at a high street shop. We suspected it was an ‘apprenticeship’
because it would pay less than the national minimum wage for a 16 year-old.
Whatever one makes of some of the controversy surrounding
those who were ‘training’ to be security guards at the Jubilee celebrations and
found themselves sleeping under London Bridge and then expected to sleep the
following night at a campsite in the pouring rain, I am forced to wonder about
some of our attitudes to those who are unemployed and possibly comparatively
young (though probably not 16). Some of
these people were not paid at all and one wonders what chance they have of
landing jobs at the Olympics for which this was supposed to be a trial.
Our staff team were reflecting on when we left school, and
compared with the experience of many young people today, we found it relatively
easy to get jobs. One person said they
had a choice of five jobs and the general feeling seemed to be that it wasn’t
the problem for us that it is for many today.
We were also aware that many people today who are in work are working
ever harder because of cutbacks and redundancies and because they feel they
have to in order to be seen to be committed by their employer. Again, one of us spoke about their son who
had worked for 30 hours with hardly a break in order to get a job done.
At the other end of the age scale some of us look at retirement
disappearing off into the distance along with our pensions, or a rather
uncertain future of eking out what jobs we can in what a few years ago was
dignified with the name of portfolio employment.
Our economy is in a very different place to when those of
us who are older started work, both in terms of there being fewer jobs that can
be done with limited qualifications but also because the post-war boom fuelled by
reconstruction and beyond ended a long time ago. Not only are we in a cyclical downturn (the
bust that followed the boom that was supposed to last forever) but Britain is well
and truly into a different phase of its place in the world. Economically, our position is decliningrelative to many countries and it is a real question whether we can maintain over
the longer-term growth in living standards.
As people we seem to be in danger of slipping into the territory of
Acts 5, where Ananias and his wife kept back some of the proceeds of the
property they held, and as we read, it did not benefit them because they lost
their lives. In a situation where work
and the rewards of work are not shared out very evenly (let alone equally) we
too often blame or demonise those without work rather than asking the deeper
question about the overall amount of work available and whether some have too
much of it, and are hanging onto it, whilst others go without. Some have got out of the habit of work (or
never had the chance to learn it) but some of the indolence may be due to there
being little real prospect of them finding meaningful work.
This is difficult and challenging territory, and would
that we could take the inevitable politics out of it, but whilst we may question
aspects of the various schemes that seek to fix the symptoms by finding some
kind of ‘training’ and work experience for those outside the system, we also need
to ask about the backdrop to the wider employment situation where the real problem
is insufficient work to go round and a mal-distribution of that work. I suspect the many vested interests would
make it fiendishly difficult to find a way of sharing out the available work
more equitably, not least because the corollary of that is if hours worked went
down for some so that others had work then that means income would also have to
go down for some in order for others to have a share. Could we be Barnabas or would we be Ananias?
My thanks to colleagues in my parish team and also in the Faith at Work in Worcestershire Team who shared in discussion about these ideas.
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