Can we get rid of crap jobs?

It must have been some time in 1970 when I went to the Labour Exchange on Brunel Road in Rotherhithe. The building was massive and probably existed to find employment for South London casual dock workers.

The day I went the place was completely empty. This was still the age of “full employment”. You could leave one job in the afternoon and walk into another the next day. The member of staff wishing to point me in the direction of future employment seemed pleased to have someone to talk to. After a friendly chat she sent me to a job at a local factory.

The upper floor of the factory manufactured lard, wrapped up in half pound (250g) blocks and put into cardboard boxes for distribution. The blocks had various labels like “Spry”, or supermarket brands like Tesco, but they were all the same stuff. My job was to load the cartons onto pallets for lorries to take away.

A persistent problem arose when too many cartons came down the chute at once, clogging up the assembly line. Several cartons split and the ever wise foreman’s solution was to have them pushed off the line. Eventually this caused a large mountain of lard to form - a kind of iceberg of white, with dirty black greasy specks. When asked how he’d handle this problem should a factory inspector come calling, he said “cover it up with a tarpaulin”!

Health and safety issues weren’t much evident in the staff canteen either. The cook there was stirring a large pan of stew with a cigarette in her mouth, the ash end of which was growing to an increasingly worrying length. Gravity took its natural course (plop!) and from then on I brought sandwiches to work.

The era of “full employment” which is said to have lasted from 1945 to 1973 didn’t mean people had marvellous jobs. Working in a lard factory certainly wasn’t one of them, but then I only did it for a month.

I had plenty of other shit jobs after that before I ended up teaching in a Further Education (FE) college. In the first few years in that job I actually looked forward to going back to work after the summer break! Unfortunately the job would progressively turn to crap when FE was taken out of local authority control by the Tory government in the early 1990s.

Colleges became market-driven entities run on the lines of management techniques copied from Japanese car factories. Micro-management, increasing demands to tick bureaucratic boxes to justify the jobs of the ever burgeoning non-teaching hierarchy, and the remorseless Ofsted inspection regime, sucked out most of the satisfaction and enjoyment the job once held. It felt in the end a bit like the one I had in the lard factory, only more stressful.

Education

Many of us in the 1960s working class saw education as a way of escaping from the physically demanding and monotonous working lives our parents endured. At the start of the 1970s the proportion of the UK population getting higher education was 8%, rising to 14% at the end of the decade.

With Blair we got to 50% of young adults entering HE by 2020. Getting a university degree didn’t mean getting a socially useful or personally fulfilling job though. Flipping burgers wasn’t what a PhD student had in mind. Taking a law degree in the hope of becoming a barrister only to end up as a barista ditto.

That’s not meant to denigrate anyone who does those jobs. They should be respected and certainly paid a darn sight more than they are now.

But many working-class parents and grandparents nowadays fear that young people won’t get “decent jobs”.

The goal must be to make people’s jobs rewarding for themselves and society at large. The United Nations International Labour Organisation doesn’t hold out much hope for that at the moment though, with its warning that there is a dire shortage of decent jobs and a stagnation in efforts to improve global job quality.

Artificial Intelligence and automation may worsen the problems young people have getting jobs which are looked on as highly skilled. “Poor quality jobs” mainly in hospitality, retail and care, are driving a rise in young people off sick according to research done for the TUC.

There are plenty of dirty, unpleasant or dangerous jobs most people wouldn’t like to do, but in our capitalist society workers who have little choice but to do them often end up with the worst pay and conditions. In the first instance it’s the task of the labour movement to get these workers into trade unions so that their pay and conditions can be less crap.

Recent TUC research found that 40% of people working in accommodation and food services had insecure working arrangements, including zero hours contracts, agency working or low paid self-employment. Additionally young people were more likely to leave their jobs for health reasons and become economically inactive if they worked in insecure low paid sectors.

Socialism

Can crap jobs though be eliminated in a socialist society? The Rotherhithe lard factory and the warehouses in that part of London are long gone, mostly given over to housing. Hardly anyone cooks using lard these days, and if there are still lard factories in the UK, then I’m sure the job I did has been automated.

In the days when TV channels treated their viewers to intelligent discussion programmes at teatime, they occasionally featured thoughtful left-leaning trade-unionists such as Clive Jenkins and Mike Cooley talking about the future of work and leisure.

Jenkins and union colleague Barrie Sherman wrote The Collapse of Work (1979) in which they argued new technologies would result in millions of people becoming permanently unemployed. Under a profit-driven economy fewer people would be working harder, whilst many others did nothing and “depending on the prevailing reward system one group or the other, or perhaps both, will feel very aggrieved.”

Job-sharing and the breaking down of barriers between work and leisure would help counteract that, but would require a complete alteration of the way human society is controlled and run. Marx’s famous desire to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner…without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” is an apt one to bear in mind, although some of the examples can do with updating.

Mike Cooley was talking about Artificial Intelligence forty years ago and became in 1987 founding chair of AI & Society, an international forum for socially responsible technology. Cooley was one of the activists behind the Lucas Plan which sought to prevent layoffs at Lucas Aerospace by converting production from armaments to making socially useful goods such as solar heating and artificial kidneys. The plan was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Unsurprisingly Lucas management rejected the plan and Cooley was sacked for allegedly spending too much time on union business.

As long as automation, AI, and other technologies are employed by corporate capitalist enterprises, the outcomes will be redundancies for some and “de-skilling” for many of the rest. Only a planned socialist society based on democratic principles can make these technologies socially useful, take most of the drudgery out of work and make working lives meaningful. We can then look forward to crap jobs becoming a thing of the past!