A man on the BBC suggests cutting benefits and starving people into going to work. I’m impressed.
It’s Lord Digby Jones, a “plain speaking captain of industry”, talking to a group of “NEETs” — young people not in employment, education or training. The whole episode of Panorama is on iPlayer.
Or on your local airwaves:
An opening clip is of Digby Jones asking the NEETs, “what do I as a taxpayer pay you every week?”
Having watched the programme which features four young lads, it seems fairly clear to me that the two who really want to work are now working, and the two who don’t seem so sure about the idea are not. I think the former would be working anyway without the government “new deal” scheme, and the latter are only discouraged by job-seekers allowance and, in one case, incapacity benefit for being depressed.
I wonder if it is a coincidence that the two out of work are posh, and the other two are not. The programme also features a young Polish man who came to the UK to work for minimum wage and now owns the business that he used to work in. He says he finds it hard to employ British people, in part because their expectations are too high.
The programme concludes with one of the posh, out of work boys’ parents arguing that the government should force their son to work for his benefits. At least then he’d be forced to get out of bed and his life would have structure. This is what in the USA is called workfare. Lord Digby Jones seems to think this is a good idea, too. I doubt it would do any good. The work would either be useless or it would displace real workers. The unmotivated son would not be motivated by doing useless work he didn’t see the point of. He’s far more likely to be motivated by the family that would have to look after him if he didn’t get welfare payments at all.
I’m also left with the impression that the notion of “employers”, “employees” and “jobs” is part of the problem. You must get a job. If I don’t have a job I have no self esteem. And so on. In a society with more petty capitalism, where you didn’t need a degree in red tape to start a small business, there might be more places for people to fit in, and more small businesses able to employ young, inexperienced workers as apprentices. Not just to “get a job”, but to be able to start out on their own.
It’s not about getting a job, it’s about making your way in the world by doing things for people so that they do things for you, like cogs in a machine. Minimum wages, welfare and employment law are just glue that gunks up the mechanism.
Hello Rob – followed the link from Bishop Hill and stuck around. I agree with you about non-jobs: people like Digby Jones never seem to think about who is going to have to employ people who are being made to work against their will. The logic leads inevitably to the gulag on one hand, or chaos and sabotage on the other.
You are giving Lord Jones too much credit calling him a captain of industry, as he is nothing of the kind, but is actually a career trade association man. These are some of the most useless and puffed-up people you will ever meet, as they have typically never done a real job but use their political skill to hijack the agenda of the businesses they purport to represent. The trade groupings often make the mistake of over-hyping the role, inflating the title from secretary to chief executive, in the hope that they will attract a stronger person for the job, but all they get is a bigger ego and a “divide and rule” approach to the businesses they are supposed to be serving. So it’s no surprise that he thinks in terms of seductive concepts rather than real street-level consequences, as he has no experience of how people actually do real work.
Thanks for the comment, David. Bishop Hill is linking here? That explains the recent flurry of comments. I think I was quoting the BBC with “captain of industry”, although I know nothing about the man so your insight is interesting.