Does our attitude to work change how employers see the workplace?

 This may or may not be true (there is a deal of rose-colouring going on in some looks back at old time blue collar work) but it is still an important question posed by sociologist, Tim Strangleman:

But we also ask critical questions as to why, not so long ago, ordinary working-class people could enjoy conditions at work that gave them dignity, confidence, and hope that their lives were getting better, decade by decade, and that the children’s lives would be better still. It poses questions for all of us as workers, as voters, stock holders, and citizens: why is treating workers well seen as a cost on the balance sheet to be controlled rather than the right thing to do?

Some will point to the declining influence of trade unions (and their accompanying descent into political muck-raking rather than serving their members), others will say that we no longer have any 'jobs for life' and are obsessed with the idea of career as an endless progression rather than work as a noble, uplifting means to sustain ourselves and our communities.

"I've never done one job for three years. This is the first time I've done this and I feel it's time for me to move on to different challenges,"

I guess it's easy for a rich and successful actor like Peter Capaldi to say this but it signals that staying in a job - not a progression, not a career, just a job - for any length of time represents some sort of failure. There's also a sort of assumption that the only route to fulfilment is through a career. Having a great allotment, breeding champion racing pigeons or playing club cricket let alone raising a decent, caring family no longer rank up there with being, as the reluctant cannibal's dad achieved, "chief assistant to the assistant chief".

This isn't to belittle ambition or to push aside the importance of that dignity, confidence and hope but to ask about the order of carts and horses: does the decline of 'treating workers well' result from the sense of disloyalty and the view that work is a means of a career end not a purposeful thing in and of itself? Or, to push into this further, is the 'human resources' department with its annual appraisals, personal development plans and centralised personnel management the reason senior managements no longer consider worker benefits and the work environment as a source of corporate pride. Here's Strangleman talking about Guinness's brewery at Park Royal in London:

Along with earning decent wages and good pensions when they were relatively rare features of blue-collar life in the UK, Park Royal workers also had access to a range of sports facilities and cultural activities onsite, subsidised by the company itself. On top of that, Guinness had hired Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the premier architect of the day, to design the buildings. The grounds were laid out by some of the top contemporary landscape gardeners, who planted hundreds of different tree species and thousands of shrubs. All this not because the company had too, but because they felt it was the right thing to do, because they wanted to.

I'm sure there are employers with this enlightened outlook (Naked Wines have a slide) but there has been a systemisation of worker relations, the domination of rules and an HR-driven obsession with progression. The idea that we should treat a workforce like a community has gone and that managements should invest in that community, for all that not every employer was like Guinness, has long gone replaced with that stifling centralised HR bureaucracy we have all grown to love along with a wholly utilitarian relationship between the individual and their work.

....

A story of jobs (and why immigration is important)

We went to Harrogate yesterday afternoon. The sun was shining, it's a nice drive and we like the town. We'd nothing planned beyond a mooch followed by some food and drink. So this is what we did - window shopping (plus some actual impulse purchasing of a funky lamp that clamps onto a shelf) and then an Italian.

Harrogate has been undergoing what I'm sure the Council calls regeneration. At the top of the town centre by the railway there's a new Everyman cinema (interestingly about 100 yards from the existing Odeon) and, as happens these days, a collection of mid-market chain restaurants - CAU (who sell lumps of meat Argentinian-style), Byron Burger, Pizza Express, an Italian I forget the name of and a similarly unmemorable chain bistro. The cinema was having it's invitation only pre-opening shindig - the full opening is on Friday.

We'd originally planned to go to the Yorkshire Meatball Company for its advertised craft ales and artisan meatballs - what's not to like! But on arrival at said restaurant there's a big sign in the window (well actually quite a small sign) saying it's closed for September because the arrival of all these new chain restaurants has led to a staff shortage. Here's a little more from the Yorkshire Meatball Company's website:

Unfortunately, coinciding with the development of our retail products, the huge influx of chain restaurants into Harrogate – most notably those within the new Everyman Cinema development – has not gone un-noticed, as brands more commonly found in larger cities and retail parks now focus on regional expansion. Whilst we always welcome healthy competition, the recent openings have brought with them an unprecedented demand for hospitality staff, particularly kitchen staff, at a time when there is already a known national shortage of skilled chefs. This presents an incredibly challenging recruitment environment for small independents like us. Unfortunately, as a result we’ve had to say a sad goodbye to some; losing a number of our key staff in a relatively short period.

This piqued our interest and, as we continued our wandering around town we began to notice, in window after window, signs saying that there were jobs available. It was pretty clear that, right now, Harrogate is suffering a shortage of retail, waiting and cooking staff. And it struck me that, for all of Harrogate's attractions, it's an expensive place to live if all you've got is the sort of wage you'll get for most of these jobs. In other places ready access by public transport makes it relatively easy to travel a little distance but Harrogate lacks the public transport links that would make it possible to commute. Plus the bus company isn't going to put on a bus just so some workers can travel from Keighley or Harrogate for a job in a restaurant.

Now I'm sure that the situation in Harrogate will settle down, that I'll get my meatballs and craft beer, and most (if not all) of the chain restaurants will thrive on the back of that vibrant cinema crowd. But this situation rather reminds me of Cullingworth's chicken slaughterhouse (the food has to come from somewhere) and its workers.

When we first moved to Cullingworth in 1989, the chicken factory no longer employed many people from the village or indeed from surrounding communities. This was simply because most folk had better paying and less gory employment so didn't need work killing spent hens. So the company imported workers in a minibus - it used to stop just down from our house. These workers came from Doncaster recruited courtesy of an agency there who were willing to sign up the workers and arrange their transport to and from Cullingworth.

Some while later, when I next encountered the workforce of the factory it came as a result of a visit to a house on Lees Moor, about a mile from the village, who had a problem with an overloading and polluting septic tank. This tank served two houses, that of the couple who'd contacted me and another which was rented out. It was the tenants who had (inadvertently I hasten to add) caused the problem with the septic tank. These tenants were eight or ten Romanian women who were employed to kill those spent hens at the chicken slaughterhouse.

And what is the first thing ten women who've been killing chickens for eight hours do when they get home? Have a shower - a long and thorough shower. The septic tank was designed for the regular sort of use from one farm family and simply couldn't take the strain. I can't remember the solution we came up with to resolve the problem but all this tells us that the factory was no longer ferrying workers to and from Doncaster but was, instead, putting up workers from Eastern Europe in rented property nearby. Today, things have moved on with the (still mostly East European) workforce now coming in to work by car and bus from Bradford or Keighley.

It may indeed be the case that Harrogate's hospitality and retail staff shortage will disappear - or at least get under control allowing everywhere to open - but the story of the Yorkshire Meatball Company and the job vacancy signs in shop windows suggests that, as the UK's job market continues to tighten, it will become more and more of a problem. In one respect this will be good news for staff as it will tend to push up wages but there's obviously a limit to that as those costs end up on the price of food thereby risking fewer customers.

Even in Bradford, which may be a fabulous place but isn't a tourism mecca, local business people tell me there's a problem with recruiting good hospitality staff. This isn't because folk are sitting around doing nothing but rather because the sort of people who might in times past have chosen a hospitality job are now getting jobs with 9-5 hours in sales, marketing and financial services. And, just as is the case with killing chickens (and for that matter building houses, cleaning toilets and picking fruit), without immigrant labour these businesses struggle to fill the jobs they produce.

It is for this reason that the sort of UKIP (and sadly Tory right) policy of 'points-based immigration' is a daft idea. Here's Raedwald:

Agriculture and horticulture is utterly dependent on EU migrant labour to get strawberries into our dessert bowls and vegetables to the freezer plant. There have been harvest labour schemes long pre-dating freedom of movement from the new accession states.

None of these would get in under a points system. Nor would young European Erasmus students spending a year in 'intern' type jobs in our hotels and restaurants. Nor would the French Mauritian delivery driver who delivers French goods in London from 'French Click' with care, passion and pleasure.

To agriculture and horticulture we can add hospitality, retail, construction and facilities management - without immigration these things just don't happen. With a points-based system based on "high level skills" these unskilled workers who are essential to our economy simply aren't available. This has nothing to do with whether we're in the EU or even with what that malign body calls free movement. Rather it's about our economy and tells us that if someone arrives in Harrogate or Cullingworth with a job to go to, it doesn't matter whether they're from Keighley or Karachi, Basingstoke or Bucharest they should be allowed to go and do that job.

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Ban everything, ban it now. For the children.

Back in early 1970s South London, I used to drag my self from bed, throw on clothes and some breakfast down my gullet, get on my bike and cycle to Elmers End News. Where, as generations of children before me had done, I picked up a bag of newspapers and shoved them through a load of doors. As it happens the round I did took me back over the railway bridge and past the cricket club (holding my nose at the stench from the paint factory and tannery) almost to home. I then got into my school uniform and cycled to school in SE19.

There was nothing unusual about all this, it was what loads of other children did. For sure there were some who had other jobs - milk rounds, serving in shops, washing cars at the garage, helping on a market stall. But children worked. In my case it was simple - once I was 13 and could get a paper round there was no more pocket money (as an aside my last pocket money amount was 12p).

Apparently all this wasn't a useful exercise in self-organising and an introduction to work but an offence to my rights:

Turning to newspaper delivery rounds, it said that “allowing children to work before school begins in the morning is, in principle, contrary” to the charter, because it puts at risk their “attendance, receptiveness and homework”.

This 'charter' is the European Social Charter (and before you all get anti-EU on me, this was signed by the UK in 1961 long before we joined that awful organisation) and it has apparently been captured by the 'wrap children in cotton wool' school of thinking along with the deranged idea that making children do anything is some sort of imposition rather than an education.

We live in a world where parents are told that just beyond their sight is a terrible dark place filled with stranger danger, with poisonous plants, with trees that might be climbed, with bicycles ridden dangerously without brakes down steep hills. The idea that an eight year old could safely walk half a mile to a bus stop, get on a bus across town and walk another few hundred yards to school - on his own (or with his nine-year-old sister) would horrify both our fussy authorities and most modern parents. Yet that is what I did every day of school - as did many other children.

And the idea that it infringes a teenager's rights to do an hour's work before school (so as to get a little money for the teenager to spend on sweets, comics, games, trips and records) is such manifest nonsense it makes one wonder what sort of weird old world the people who sit on the European Committee on Social Rights inhabit. I do know, however, that what we see is people who respond to everything they dislike with proposals for a ban, for restrictions, for controls. Instead of an exciting world for children to explore, these people see a world from which children must be protected. Until that day, after the hangover has passed from the 18th birthday party (although our social rights fascists almost certainly disapprove of drinking), when blinking and naive the fully fledged grown up is thrown into that big ole world to make his or her own way.

We damage children more by 'protecting' them, restricting their play, limiting their chances to learn about work and managing their social interactions to the extent that they become stultified, the very antithesis of fun. Everywhere we go there are signs designed to close off the world from children - don't climb trees, don't go on the grass, don't play ball games, don't run, don't sing, don't cross, don't do this, don't do the other. There are no signs that say please play here, have fun, take a risk or two, swim, run, laugh and dance.

Instead we see people who behave like the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - corralling children into a dull, purposeful programme of approved activities monitored by the agents of those authorities. Much of the effort here is dedicated to creating obedient little unchallenging conformists. And what we create are a bunch of snowflakes who demand safe spaces, who cry at criticism and who would rather ban free speech than accept that some people are unpleasant or rude. Disagreement is dealt with not through a handshake and "we'll talk about this again" but by one or other party running off to cuddle a teddy bear while listening to calming whale sounds.

"Ban everything, ban it now - for the children" is one of the most corrupting approaches to social policy ever. It creates weak-willed, dependent people who believe they've some sort of right never to be challenged, never to be upset and certainly never to be offended. And it is used - again and again - to control both the transition to being a grown up and to stop grown up people from doing things of which the controlling authorities disapprove. Don't drink - for the sake of the children. Don't smoke - the children, you know. Don't eat fat, salt or sugary foods - think what you're doing to the children.

None of this protects children. All it does is reinforce again the process of creating supine, subservient masses who, in the manner of Huxley's 'Brave New World', gladly accept authoritarianism - "for the good of the children".

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Robots and the successors to Captain Swing....

Sir, Your name is down amongst the Black hearts in the Black Book and this is to advise you and the like of you, who are Parson Justasses, to make your wills. Ye have been the Blackguard Enemies of the People on all occasions, Ye have not yet done as ye ought,.... Swing

We are told - by people far wiser and more knowing than me - that the future of employment is bleak:

Could the jobless recovery be signalling that technology has lead to the sort of abundance and productivity that leaves NAIRU — the unemployment rate below which inflation rises — with no choice but to recalibrate higher, if returns on capital investment are to be protected?

The point being made here is that the future of making stuff rests with robots not with people. And that means there won't be enough work for all the people. The result of this is a lot of frothing and excitement and calls for something to be done. And is accompanied by the emergence - blinking in the lights of the 21st Century - of Captain Swing from his nearly 200 year rest.

For men who smashed up the threshing machines under Swing's directions, just as for the followers of Ned Ludd, the objective was to constrain technology. By preventing its spread or by limiting its application (or as in the print industry by requiring more overlookers and operators than the machine required) we protect jobs and the livelihoods of workers.

The simple truth of technology is that, while technology improves productivity, causes prices to fall, demand to rise, more workers to be hired, and the economy to grow, there is a practical limit. If all the work is done by robots all the productivity gain serves no purpose since there is no work and no earnings - no-one to buy the things the robots make.

The central issue here isn't whether we have a job but rather whether we need to have a job. In simple terms, the people who own the robots don't need a job because the rents generated from that ownership would provide. The problem - if the argument about technology destroying all the jobs is correct - is with the people who don't own the robots (or at least not the robots that make all the stuff).

The modern day successors of Captain Swing think they've a great solution - let's either pay everyone a basic income with no strings or else fund a guarantee of a job. We have to assume that the money for this system (whichever is chosen) would come from taxing the robots - or rather the returns the robots generate for the people who own them.

The questions we have to ask are firstly, will there really be a wholesale destruction of jobs without new ones to replace them? And secondly would a basic income or job guarantee actually work? There is a third question - is it morally justified to pay people to do nothing - but this is a far bigger question and we'll leave it for now.

Apple reckoned recently that the app economy (just the iOS bit) has generated nearly 300,000 jobs in the USA alone:

The app revolution has added more than 291,250 iOS jobs to the U.S. economy since the introduction of iPhone in 2007

These are jobs that we hadn't thought of - for all the jobs destroyed by technology there are new ones created.  Izabella Kaminska may talk about the 'jobless recovery' but there's precious little evidence for it - other than in the sclerotic, over-regulated economies of Europe. It could be argued as forcefully that supply-side barriers to employment, the lack of need to work (especially among young people receiving benefits and contributions from the bank of mum and dad) and poor education are more of a problem than the rise of the robots. That government is more of a barrier to future job creation than robots.

A further factor in all this will be that - as has happened over the past decades - we'll see a further decline in average working hours. Back in Captain Swing's day the workers toiled for six days - probably for ten, even twelve hours, for wages far less than any basic income we might propose. And despite this the Captain and his mates smashed up the machines so the workers could carry on with back-breaking, life-shortening heavy manual labour.

Today, the average working day is under eight hours and people work just five days - our time working nears half that of those Captain Swing and Ned Ludd protected. And yet our incomes are immeasurably higher - even the wealthy owners of those threshing machines would be amazed at the life, the comforts that the poorest Englishman enjoys today. What is to suppose that this trend continues? That we work only 25 hours before enjoying the benefits of that work (and let's face it most people work because they want the money not because their work is such an exciting thing to do)?

It seems to me that the bounty of the robots' efforts will be more leisure time for all. And not some ridiculous idea that allowing anyone - at any time - to down tools and toddle off to live on their basic income. Get a good summer and no-one would be working (I appreciate that many of the believers in basic income also follow MMT - "magic money tree" - fantasies and the delusion that this doesn't matter). This indeed is rather the point of it all - we know that, given half a chance, people will swing the lead (you only need to look at sickness statistics in local government to understand this), so if we legitimise swinging the lead we'll just take advantage. As Flanders & Swann noted: "you can't change human nature."

This argument - 'there'll be no jobs, you know" - rather reminds me of Paul Ehrlich's bet on resource depletion. Following one thread takes you to a point where logic and common senses collapse. The theory still looks shiny and right but it has lost any contact with reality. Which, I guess explains why seemingly intelligent people are sucked into believing the sort of nonsense that is basic income (or worse job guarantees that are essentially slave labour directed by the state - we feed and clothe you and you do whatever work we demand).

If there is more stuff (in the widest sense of the word stuff) for us that is good especially if that more stuff comes without us having to work more hours. And that increased earning means more time for arts, sport, celebration, fun and games (and for all the people that provide such pleasure).

So let's be optimistic about what the robots bring and let's escape from the controlling, dictating approach that is captured by one advocate of basic income:

And I don't think anyone from the basic income side would dispute that the public sector might need to help those who are not self-starters to find useful and productive things to do.

And this from someone who self-describes as a "liberal" - such a view is as far removed from liberal as it is possible to get. Look folks, the future's a great place - there'll be flying cars, jet packs, holographic opera and leisure trips into space. And, even better, nearly everyone will be able to afford this stuff. So let's get on with the free markets that make it work and give up on the idea that the solution lies in either a vast lump of unmotivated drones paid to do nothing or else a slave labour force for the masters to direct to projects of their choice.

Above all let's remember - always remember - that government, mostly and most of the time, is the problem not the solution. And let's enjoy the future - it will be better than the past.

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Robots are great and we need more of them to make stuff for us...

****

I get ever more irritated by the bonkers notion that technological advance and improvement is a bad thing for the economy. You see it churned out all over, mostly (but not always) by the good thinking Guardian left. These folk just don't get it:

It's about technology taking jobs, about what it can and can't provide. Hoskyns quotes Jaron Lanier's new book Who Owns The Future?, in which he argues: "Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be customers." Lanier, a computer scientist and a musician, is rightly called a visionary because he sees what is happening, when everything is live-streamed but no one knows the name of the person who made the music any more. Content is free.

This is just plain daft. Free is good. We like free - not only is it a magic word but, more to the point, it's an improvement on 'costs so much only people such as Guardian journalists can afford it'. Now in one respect, Lanier is right but his emphasis is still on production rather than consumption. We aren't here to produce stuff, we're here to consume stuff - even if we love our fabulous creative industries job, that's consumption (we're eating up the pleasure).

So yes robots and digital wizardry will "destroy jobs" (this translates as 'makes things a whole lot cheaper because you don't have to pay wages') but all the while new playthings are being invented - think how many people are scraping an adequate living from creating stuff to make use of that digital wizardry, for example. And, so long as the idiot protectionist lefties don't get to control things, stuff gets cheaper so we don't have to work as hard as we do now to get the good stuff. Brilliant!

So no, it's simply not the case and never has been the case, that technical innovation is bad for the economy. Protectionism, subsidised overmanning and the refusal to embrace technology - that was what caused China's 500 year stagnation. And if we adopt the same approach, we will stagnate, there really won't be the jobs we need and future Suzanne Moore types really will be scraping by in some rat-plagued garret.

So let's grab that technology, let's get it working for us, let's shove aside the barriers - unions, business oligopolies, MPs and silly Guardian writers - and get the robots working. We'll all be richer, less frazzled by work and more able to have a bloody great time with the few years we get living on this wonderful planet.

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Thoughts on work, welfare and Bradford...

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So I'm sat at the breakfast table in a North Yorkshire B&B where, by happenstance, everyone present has a current or past connection with Bradford. The conversation chitters back and forth, what people do (or don't do), memories of Bradford and inevitably a discussion about Bradford's 'problems' such as they are.

What struck me however wasn't the shared concern about Bradford but the near universal view that, at the heart of the problems - 'grooming' of young girls, crime, city centre decline, the persistent failure of estates like Ravenscliffe, Holme Wood and Allerton - sits the benefits system. Not immigration, not the corruption of youth by radical clerics and not even the legacy of industrial decline. The benefits system.

The discussion touched on using pregnancy as a route to housing, on why Bradfordian's don't take jobs killing chickens despite the lack of work and how the Asian community now seems to have a more enterprising outlook that the white population. And we kept coming back to there being no - or insufficient - incentive for someone to take that chicken-killing job.

What my fellow politicians need to understand is that, if we proceed to ignore these views and listen to the welfare industry's special pleading, we reveal ourselves to be just as out-of-touch as that industry. Everyone but us seem to see a world filled with people living off benefits, cash earnings and petty crime - a world of smuggled booze and fags where social and family arrangements are determined by the best way to maximise income from benefits rather than by the desire to support a future generation to success.

Those people sat round that table may be wrong - for sure we aren't representative. But those voices remind me that the need for benefits reform isn't about saving money. It's not about cuts. And it's not about "demonising the poor" as so many advocates of welfarism claim. No.

We need benefits reform so as to give the people - and especially the young people - of Bradford's inner city and Bradford's estates the right chances and incentives to succeed, to get to a place where an Incommunities flat in Buttershaw isn't the only choice.

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Guilt by association...the Telegraph tries to skewer an MP on his predecessor's sins

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The Daily Telegraph reports on the success of Conservative MP, Stephen Phillips:

Stephen Phillips, the member for Sleaford and North Hykeham in the East Midlands, has reportedly been charging clients about £600 per hour in his capacity as a commercial lawyer.

He is believed to be the best-paid politician in Britain as a result, clocking up more than 1,500 hours of non-parliamentary work since July 2011.

Mr Phillips, 43, has received £922,380.20 in barrister's fees since July 2011, in addition to his annual MP’s salary of £65,738...

Now this seems to me wholly admirable. Mr Phillips points out that he does this work when the House isn't sitting (and that it's turnover not profit) plus mentioning how this provides him with a tentative link to the real world.

In my view we need more MPs like Mr Phillips who see it as public service rather than just a job (albeit a quite well paid job).

What I didn't understand, since no-one is accusing Mr Phillips of wrongdoing or dereliction of duty, let alone expenses fiddling, why the newspaper chose to conclude the article by talking about his predecessor Douglas Hogg. Seems to me that this is a rather unpleasant attempt to smear Mr Phillips by associating his working life with the moat-clearing expense of the man he succeeded as MP.

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Why we're conservatives...

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It's pretty simple really but sometimes someone captures the heart of it with a little story. Here's Marco Rubio:

Many nights growing up I would hear my father’s keys at the door as he came home after another 16-hour day. Many mornings, I woke up just as my mother got home from the overnight shift at Kmart. When you’re young and in a hurry, the meaning of moments like this escape you. Now, as my children get older, I understand it better. My dad used to tell us — (SPEAKING IN SPANISH) — ‘in this country, you’ll be able to accomplish all the things we never could’. A few years ago, I noticed a bartender behind the portable bar in the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father, who worked as many years as a banquet bartender. He was grateful for the work he had, but that’s not like he wanted for us. You see, he stood behind the ball all those years so that one day I could stand behind a podium, in the front of a room.

It's not about elites or privilege. It's not about government or administration. And it's not about banks or capitalism.

It's about people, about opportunity and a world where, if we take responsibility for our future, we have the chance to succeed. Even if that success is just seeing our children get a better start, a higher score on the dice. Rubio's little story doesn't mention the government, it doesn't weep about ill-luck or carp about poverty. Instead it tells of the human spirit and the pleasure of knowing that our achievement stands atop the broad shoulders of family and community.

It's why I am - and you should be - a conservative.

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Marketing, professionalism and some advice from an "anti-guru"

Markets - go watch some, you'll learn a lot & it's fun

A former advertising colleague of mine was once, for reasons of politeness, introduced as a “marketing professional”. Howard, my colleague, politely and gently put us right:

“I’m a businessman. I happen to be in the business of advising other businesses about marketing and advertising. Doctors and lawyers are professionals. Like the people I work with, I’m a businessman, doing business.”

This may seem a quirky response in these days when ever job role aspires to being ‘professional’. The concept of doing a job and doing it well or of being ‘in business’ appears to have faded. We have instead the triumph of ‘book learning’ and the dominance of the ‘profession’. And because we have taken the bait of “I’m a professional not some nasty rapacious businessman”, there has arisen a vast industry stroking our professional sensibilities.

From out of no-where springs the idea of ‘professional ethics’; as if no-one besides the professional knows how to behave properly. Maybe we’re still worried about being ‘trade’ and having to use the back door? And given the behaviour of all those banking ‘professionals’ perhaps being an honest tradesman (paid in cash, of course) is rather more appealing these days. I note, however, that the bankers we blame are mostly either foreigners or barrow boy traders. The professional bankers, quiet, calm and understated, slip by unnoticed in our blame game.

This brings me, in a round-a-bout kind of way, to my ‘profession’, that profession denied by Howard – marketing. In a free market (or the over-regulated sort of free market we actually have) marketing should be the thing shouldn’t it? After all it has the magic word – ‘market’ – stuck right in the middle of it telling that we’re the ones who get that mystic (and invisible) hand like nobody else. Except we haven’t got a clue and choose instead to clutter round the knees of erudite – often self-appointed gurus – listening to the latest re-hash of old truths.

I’d thought about unpicking one or two of these gurus. Maybe Seth Godin with his repackaging of age-old sales principles as “permission marketing”, and letting others misuse these principles to justify – yet again – the pyramid scheme or the mathematically deranged ‘multi-level marketing’ idea.

Or perhaps I could describe seven principles, five watchwords or 375 “things every marketer should know” – a process involving the collecting of, mostly trite, observations and bundling them into some form of schema. But the thought of this results in the guilt buzzer sounding as I know that none of this actually helps make your business more successful.

Back in my direct marketing agency days, we coined the term “magic wand” to describe what us account planners were to do in the bowels of a mill conversion in Bradford. Businesses would arrive – often businesses doing OK, making money, growing slowly, giving their owners a living – and ask us to reveal the deep occult truth about marketing. To wave the magic wand that would change them from a business turning over £750,000 and making a decent enough profit into the world beating mega-business on the front of the newspaper business section.

And we would have the sorry task of explaining that, despite all the books written, all the gurus, all the conference speech with splendid presentations – despite all this, there is no magic wand. Just as the bearded maharishi doesn’t really offer spiritual enlightenment in exchange for cash, the marketing guru won’t provide (in exchange for cash) the way for your little business to become a big business. Those gurus will tell you this - it’s how they sell their books – remember that Seth Godin didn’t become your friend or even ask your permission before flogging you his book explaining how that’s the way to sell stuff. Mind you we can pretend we’re his friend by following him on twitter and subscribing to his newsletters.

But enough of this – so Seth’s made a load of money from guru-ness, from our desire to find “The Answer”, to locate that magic wand, to reveal the occult truth. And sometimes – gurus are very convincing – we feel we’ve found that truth. Except that it doesn’t seem to make us richer or our marketing more effective. Maybe we’re not following the guru’s strictures correctly? Or, more likely, there simply isn’t a magic wand.

So, in the spirit of the ‘Anti-guru’ here are some things I’ve learned about marketing:

1. Marketing isn’t about “free markets”. In truth, marketers hate free markets as they make our job harder and our results less good. Us marketers love monopolies.
2. Strategy is mostly a word used by consultants so they can charge more money. Marketing is almost entirely about tactics. Strategy is the easy bit – what market are we in, what route to market. It’s getting what we actually ‘do’ right that makes the difference.
3. Marketing is 1% clever brainy stuff and 99% boring routine – indeed this explains most people’s struggles with the stuff and the search for that ‘magic wand’. That dull repetitive routine – capturing and storing information, managing communications channels, monitoring and analysing results, checking timings and all the other tasks that your junior marketing executive is doing – is the meat and drink of effective marketing. Your high level strategy and visioning conference isn’t.

And that’s it really. I could add stuff about product development, about pricing or about the behaviour of that tricksy thing, the human being – all of these things matter to marketing. But in the end the whole point is to look for market advantage (ideally monopoly), decide what & where we’re selling and get on with the daily grind of actually doing that job.

I guess this is why I’m not a marketing guru!

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A question about jobs and immigration...

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An exchange on twitter with Chris Dillow whose stumblings and mumblings are always worth a read, raised the issue of immigration and jobs. A familiar subject most usually heard in the "immigrants come here and steal our jobs" kind of argument - or indeed in cries such as "British Jobs for British Workers".

For what it's worth, I take the view that this argument gets its cause and effect in the wrong order. Immigrants come here because there are jobs. Indeed Chris provided a link to an interesting piece explaining how the immigration/jobs link isn't as plain as it is sometimes presented and it concludes;

"...that there is absolutely no discernible correlation between the areas where new migrants from Eastern Europe settled and changes in the claimant count. More sophisticated analysis shows pretty much the same thing; and using other data sources, and other definitions of migrant, likewise."

So my question is this: why, when UK unemployment levels are high and rising, does economic migration - people moving to the UK to work - persist?

To bring it right down to Cullingworth -  why are all the workers in the chicken factories immigrants?

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More on the need for benefits reform...

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Some readers may be familiar with Debbie Purdy the 'right-to-die' campaigner but she's been in the news again. This time the campaigning lady was in the Magistrates' Court for non-payment of Council Tax. And, while there she said this:

...benefits officials told her on five occasions that she would get more money if her musician husband Omar Puente stopped working.

“It is outrageous. The benefits system is supposed to be a safety net, not a hangman’s noose,” she said.

The couple’s benefits were recently reviewed and officials told them if her husband was unemployed they would get further benefits such as free council tax, free prescriptions and help with paying the interest on their mortgage. 

Tell me again about having a system that rewards working?

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Which came first - the job or the immigrant?

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In its latest piece of well-researched scaremongering, Migration Watch has been speaking of the number of jobs filled by immigrant workers - and now some government advisors suggest that immigrants have "displaced" UK workers:

The government's official advisers on migration say there is a link between immigration from outside the European Union and job losses among UK workers.

The Migration Advisory Committee said there were 23 fewer UK jobs for every 100 migrants from outside the EU.

The implication of this reporting (and it's the BBC so will have been written carefully) is that British workers are being sacked to make way for immigrant labour. This is, however you want to look at it, both a dangerous statement and utter rubbish.

The problem isn't with British workers, it's with British non-workers. Immigrant labour is (and I've heard this time and time again) more reliable, hard-working and less trouble than native British workers. But more importantly, immigrants are filling those jobs because the native British workers aren't. The jobs come before the immigrants - people don't trog across half a continent at their own expense if there isn't a pretty good prospect of work.

Here in Cullingworth there's a chicken factory. It makes a living (sometimes to the annoyance of residents) killing said birds and shipping them across the UK and Europe. All the work force are Eastern European. Yet Bradford has high rates of unemployment especially among unskilled young men. Killing chickens seems like a job they could do but, I guess, choose not to.

If those British workers took those jobs, the immigrants wouldn't come here to fill them. Rather than running scare stories about immigration, we should be asking why - during such tough times - British workers aren't taking those jobs?

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And lo, the EU creates unemployment!

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It was predicted:

Employers scaled back their use of temporary workers in the run up to the introduction of the Agency Workers Regulations, according to research by the CBI and recruitment consultancy Harvey Nash.

Thank you Europe from all those folk who won't now have a job...

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The joys of annually managed expenditure - a look at the Work Programme

The Work Programme – described often as the government’s “flagship welfare-to-work” scheme – represents an important shift in the delivery of these programmes. Rather than being funded from a limited pot of money (the “Departmental Expenditure Limit” – DEL) the scheme is funded by a demand-led approach (the “Annual Managed Expenditure” – AME).

In previous programmes the provider of service was contracted to provide a given number of “outputs and outcomes” (e.g. number of people entering the programme – and output, or people into jobs – an outcome) and remunerated on that limited basis.  Under the Work Programme the only limit, in theory, is the number of workless people – the payment to providers is set against the savings to the overall welfare budget.

There are some important elements to consider here. Firstly, the government can invest more on finding work for those people who are more expensive to maintain on benefits – single mums, disabled people. 

Secondly, the government has shifted much of the risk from the department to the provider. The payments are on results – there are few payments for outputs and much of the money comes after the client has been in work for six months, one year and two years. In principle this means that the provider has a real incentive to get clients off welfare and to keep it that way for two years.

The Social Market Foundation thinks there’s a problem – the providers aren’t going to hit the targets (these are minimum numbers) set by government:

At least 90% of organisations involved in delivering the Government's flagship back to work scheme, the Work Programme, risk having their contracts terminated because of unreachable performance targets set by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The Social Market Foundation, the think tank originally behind the idea for the Work Programme and responsible for the analysis, said that without an urgent rethink of the performance criteria this could lead to the failure of the entire scheme with potentially dire consequences for the 2.4 million long term unemployed it is designed to help.

We need to understand that SMF’s analysis is based on the performance levels of welfare-to-work providers in the last government’s “Flexible New Deal” programme. Indeed, under this analysis there is a problem. However, this does rather assume that the shift from a programme delivering to a pre-determined set of outputs and outcomes to one based on payments on results will not alter the performance of providers. This seems unlikely to me.

And the people who own these businesses seem to think it’s a fair bet too as Chris Grayling, the minister concerned points out:

"The Work Programme is the biggest payments-by-results scheme of its kind in the world. The providers are investing £500million of their own money into it this year alone, and they wouldn't be doing that unless they were confident of making a real difference in getting people into sustainable employment and achieving results."

And more to the point - if the providers miss their targets, there is little or no loss to the government. So more incentive to deliver (that's where the money is) and less downside risk. Seems like a good deal to me.

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Should small children be made to work?

Shocking I know! But Meredith Small thinks so - and he's a professor of anthropology!

Look outside Western culture and watch children, even very small children, as they gather firewood, weed gardens, haul water, tend livestock, care for younger children and run errands. And no one complains because they are mostly outside and usually with other children.

By doing these chores, they also master life skills, like caring for a baby or how to herd goats, and with that comes proficiency and responsibility. 

It's an interesting point of view and Professor Small goes further and suggests that our approach to the development of children demonstrates a different - not necessarily better - cultural attitude to them:

In non-Western culture, parents expect children to learn about what it means to be an adult by doing adult work. When we were an agriculturally based nation, American children used to work just as hard and contribute in the same way. But now, Western children are trained intellectually, in school, where they are taught to think about things as the entree to adulthood, and few contribute anything to the household economy.

That cultural expectation is now creeping earlier and earlier as 3-year-olds go to preschool and 4–year-olds start kindergarten. Everyone sits quietly at their desks, thinking and thinking, just when they’d rather be out tending cows or weeding the garden.

An interesting view that is worth thinking about (while we tend the cows of course).

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"I can't dig the garden like I used to..." - some thoughts on getting older.

I thought that, for a change, I’d write about getting old. And how our attitude to age – and the process of getting older – changes and evolves. But first a little story from my Mum.

Many years ago – back in the 1970s – my Mum delivered meals-on-wheels in and around Penge. On one of the rounds there was a couple called Mr & Mrs Squirrel. Rest assured that these are human squirrels rather than the beady-eyed, bushy-tailed variety. Now Mr & Mrs Squirrel were well into their nineties – which back then was deifinitely a ripe old age – and lived in a sizeable house in Sydenham (or rather that bit of Penge that folk liked to call Sydenham so as to avoid using the ‘P’ word).

On one occasion, my Mum was delivering Mr & Mrs Squirrel’s dinner and she got to chatting with Mister. He explained how – it being a nice day and all – he had been out in the garden pottering about. After a few minutes chatting about the garden (my Mum being an especially keen gardener), Mr Squirrel complained that:

“I can’t dig the garden like I used to.”

And therein lies the point. This elderly – very elderly – gentleman refused to accept that the things he did in days past were no longer possible. Digging the garden may take a little longer, he might not be able to dig as deep or turn as much soil but we’re going to dig! And so it should be.

However, as we age, society still expects us to become less able and more dependent until we reach a point when in our dribbling, dotage others must care for us entirely. And much planning for this seems to assume that old age begins at 50.

I’m not joking here – nor am I moaning about the rapidity at which my 50th birthday approaches. Planning for services assumes that someone aged 51 has similar needs to someone aged 97 (ceteris paribus). Housing strategies for older people begin at 50. Saga holidays begin at 50. We are old at 50!

Except we’re not. Old that is – not even remotely old. Most 50 year olds in England can expect to live at least another 30 years – nearly all of those years independent and active. While three of my four grand parents were dead by the age of 76, my son’s grandparents are all alive and all past that age (with three passed 80). And all those people are living in their own homes, driving their own cars, feeding themselves and getting on with enjoying life. In truth they place a little more of a burden on health services – the jokes about rattling with pills do apply – but they are not old in the way previous generations were old.

All this is a good thing – unquestionably. But costly. The entire system of pensions, healthcare and social care is predicated on most people dying in the ‘70s rather than – as will be more and more the case – in their ‘80s or even ‘90s. And, as medical and surgical interventions allow (wonderfully) further extension to active life, those costs will continue to rise.

The question for us all is how much longer the present system can last until it breaks beyond repair. We can’t carry on with the assumption that our property assets will remain undisturbed by the costs of old age. And we have to recognise that pension schemes beginning at ages below 60 are unsustainable. We must also question why we have not raised the retirement age for the ‘active’ professions – police, fire, army and so forth. Finally, we will get used to the idea of people working well into their ‘70s – perhaps not full time but working nonetheless.

The market – as we see from adverts, new products and the images of older people used therein – has already got there. Sadly, the public sector – and the delivery of its services – remains stuck in the 1970s. Time to catch up I guess?

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Today I am busy....

Today I am busy. Not yet - unless you count putting photographs of thistles on my blog as being busy. And busy is what we were always told to be back in Rat Race Training College. Passive-aggressive little adages like; "the devil finds work for idle hands" and "hard work never hurt anyone" were churned out so as to socialise us in the ways of the working world. Even when we climb the educational ladder a little we get Weber's little tome thrust in our face as pedagogues insist that we're only successful as a nation because of that work ethic.

It isn't that I'm against work - although there are times when I'm with Bing on this matter - but that the thing isn't inherently a good thing. Working isn't essentially ethical and not-working essentially unethical. It may be unethical to lay about the place knowing that the efforts of others will provide for you laying about - but even then I'm not sure that applies in the aggregate.

Today I am busy. I shall work 12 hours. But I don't think this is a good thing. Nor does it make me better. It's just today.

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Are you wasting your life with work? Remember you work so you can consume!

After a lousy day, a trip to the hospital and a decent (exceptionally decent) pie at The Grouse, I returned home to read an article from the delightful, charming and usually right, James Delingpole.

Just as a 12th-century knight’s son would have been considered next to useless if he couldn’t joust and shoot an arrow and wield a sword, so, I believe, a modern young male of the professional classes ought to be able, by 25, to do at least three quarters of the following things on a level where he does not look like a total spaz: scuba dive; windsurf; surf; ski; water-ski; skateboard; snowboard; golf; tennis; squash; darts; piano or guitar; mix records on a set of decks; ride a motorbike; sail; drive a speed boat; shoot; ride; Scottish dance.

Absolutely – even though I don’t wholly agree with James’ list, I get the sentiment. And the great man asks further questions of us – pointing what it’s all about:

This is what I like about surfing. And hunting. And badminton, tennis, bridge, wild swimming, Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, walking, reading, Matterhorn, and all those other things I’d much, much rather be doing right now than writing this sodding piece which is taking far longer than it should because my mind’s still in its post-August fug. All the things in the world that make me most happy — all of them, damn it — are the things that have nothing whatsoever to do with work. Yet work is the thing I have to do for at least 46 weeks every year. While not-work is the thing I do only for a measly six.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES. We do not live to work. Work is a means to an end. We live to consume (and, to be blunt, we also consume to live). Our entire life – to be fulfilled – should be focused on the moments when we indulge. Our hedonistic, epicurean blow-outs. Drink, food, sex, games of cards, great art, wonderful music – consumption.

So why do so many righteous, self-important (mostly left-wing) folk rail against consumption? Are they so wrapped up in Marxist angst that they cannot see that we live to consumer – that consumption is everything? That we produce so others can consume not for the sake of producing? Even the subsistence farmer works to consume – he has (he sees) no choice but to carry on with back-breaking, painful, dispiriting labour. Why? Because he must consume to live.

We are lucky. Our creativity, success and the efforts of past generations have bought us free time. Time to consume – to fly kites, to watch crap movies on the telly, to smoke big fat Cuban cigars and to drink malt whisky. And that’s why we work. There is no other reason or purpose to work whatever the protestant moralists may tell you about work’s value. Our production (the effort of our work) allows us to consume. We promote exports so the choice in our consumption is extended.

In the final analysis, it is our desire to consume that drives the economy not the organisation of production. James Delingpole gets it right when he concludes his advice to his son by saying don’t be like your Dad. If you can consume without effort take that opportunity and enjoy it.

Hedonism rocks!

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