Jacqueline and I were out yesterday, deliberately looking at the work from different directions. Aside from birdwatching, our main focus was the economics of attention, which I will write more about soon, but we also spent time deliberately reframing well-known issues to see whether we could add new angles.
For example, we discussed unemployment and agreed that instead of thinking of it as the absence of useful things to do, we should describe it as a state-imposed prohibition on people doing work society plainly needs because no authorised funding stream connects the worker to the task.
In summary, there is no shortage of work in Britain; there is just a shortage of funding to do it.
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That is totally correct – just walk down most streets in Britain and you can see it wholesale; use public services and marvel how long it takes you to get things done or get what you need.
This is a country that has a plague called ‘austerity’ and one of its pathogens is ‘debt’. It is a strange pathogen because it works psychologically rather than biologically. And once it takes hold, the effects on society are real and devastating.
Work to do, literally under our feet. Ask any user of a wheelchair or mobility scooter. Neglected pavement politics.
Agreed
Yes, indeed. And not only these but, in reality, anyone who is unsteady on their feet.
I wonder if it might be better to word it like this instead?
“There is no shortage of work in Britain; there is just a shortage of the political will to fund it”
The problem I see with the current wording is that, for someone unfamiliar with the rest of your thinking, it may simply reinforce the “we can’t afford it” narrative. When in fact the lack of funding is a policitcal choice rather than a financial constraint.
I thought about that – bit I seek to reach those who do not understanmd as well
Wealthy people and organisations are using their wealth to extract value rather than to create it. Hence no jobs. They exist in a bubble that they believe will protect them from all the negative implication of their actions. Bubbles burst.
Much to agree with
Do the mega rich live in constant fear of losing their money? This would perhaps explain their irrational behaviour.
They do.
But it is wealth, power, and influence they fear losing, not money per se.
The very wealthy seem to recognise that money actually lacks real substance and is in a sense illusory, so they use it accordingly as a turnkey to achieve greater real wealth. Many politicians, and ordinary people, on the other hand believe, or at least go along with the narrative, that money in itself has solidity and purpose. It is this disconnect that is, at least in part, enabling the wealthy to exploit society and transfer wealth to themselves.
I suspect they fear the revenge, legal or otherwise, for all the nasty things they’ve done to get to the top and whilst at the top too.
Absolutely, unemployment is when the state fails to utilise someone’s labour to create wealth for society.
Yes, every town has work that needs doing.
A government job guarantee means:
1. Communities get what they need
2. People are valued and improve self-esteem
3. Workers pay taxes
4. Workers improve their skills
5. No benefits/welfare are needed
The only problem is – this assumes people get to do what they want, and that is not how any scheme would work
Full employment policies can work. The JG is an academic pipe dream
Can still give people choice, communities must need bricklayers, electricians, plumbers and carpenters, and can train people to provide them with a long term trade. And there must be countless untrained positions.
But the JG is meant to suit the individual. And you are confirming it will not. You are suggesting retraining.
We are routinely told that the UK cannot afford to:
Provide good quality healthcare
Have affordable dentistry
Run a functional social care system
Offer quality mental health care
Provide a real safety net for the vulnerable
Fund pensions that people can live on
Provide affordable child care
Build enough affordable houses for the people
Invest in necessary national infrastructure
Run efficient and affordable transport systems
Maintain a well funded defensive military
Have a sufficient number of drinking water reservoirs
Be protected by sufficient levels of policing
Have clean affordable energy
Not destroy our environment
Have flood defences to protect people and homes
Have affordable education for your children
Imagine if you were starting a new country and the proposal for how it would function was this.
Kelvin, Scotland has already implemented most, if not all, of your wish list where it has devolved authority to do so. The rest of your list is reserved to Westminster and a succession of Tory and Labour UK governments in the last 20+ years have failed utterly in their responsibility to the people of the UK. The fact that Scotland’s government, whose powers are hugely restricted, can implement these policies despite not having its own currency or central bank tells me that Westminster governments have deliberately sought to exploit the UK economy by diverting wealth upwards. Some of this is due to ignorance and incompetence – there’s been no shortage of that – but their unquestioning adherence to neo-liberal economics shows a deliberate intention to extract as much wealth from the economy as they can get away with.
As a result the UK is getting gradually closer to the point of collapse and successive PMs’ curt dismissal of even discussing the possibility of secession by the devolved nations will only increase the determination of the Celtic nations and their governments. All parties really have to get a move on and take this matter seriously before it’s too late.
With the South Atlantic back in the news, due to Presidents Trump and Milei, Westminster will be forced to declare absolute respect for the will of the people in the Falklands and Gibralter, while refusing to even consider it, in Scotland and Northern Ireland. (British values?)
Janus rules.
And all those deliberate destructive degradations have taken place during a period of so-called unparalleled economic growth, prosperity and stock market increases, after we threw off the “dead hand of monopolistic state control” during the second half of my adult life.
French economist Thomas Pikketty talks about “La Belle Epoque” in France – 1871-1914
I wonder how he would describe the UK, 1980-2026? “L’époque de la merde”?
https://image.chitra.live/api/v1/wps/153c3e2/c44d91ee-95c3-4b7c-af48-8ebdda89d62d/0/290520p7273KeenanOrbitalIMG-9411-Main-679×419.jpg
(Neoliberalism at work)
Involuntary unemployment is a truly horrible thing to experience as I can attest from personal experience. When you keep applying for jobs but get nowhere. I was fortunate that I had savings and family to fall back on. I would hate to have children to look after or a mortgage to pay in such a situation as my mother did in the early 90s during that horrible recession. I’ve seen first hand what the stress does to people – and the benefits system is much harder on single parents nowadays.
The thing I truly detest about the Tories and their press is they not only know there aren’t enough jobs but they also bitterly oppose Full Employment. Indeed they came to power in 1979 on the back of a poster which said “Labour isn’t working” yet all the while they planned to have significantly higher rates of unemployment in order to break the unions and discipline the working class.
Putting people in an impossible position and then vilifying them for it is unconscionable to me.
Much to agree with.
Kelvin’s list is an excellent point of reference for the jobs that need doing, but which are lacking partly or wholly.
The people are available and might need training.
In my book, this is purely a failure of gov economic policy. Unemployed resources are an abnegation of economic understanding.
The key is simply that money is always available to use such resources. The cry of ‘where will the money come from’ betrays a staggering level of economic ignorance that amounts to a disgrace in a civilised, educated society in the 21st century.
A big factor in my view is that many existing jobs are what David Graeber called ‘bullshit’ jobs so the challenge is a huge one.
“f someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.”
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-a-work-rant/
Thank you
While visiting a family member in a deprived area of West Yorkshire yesterday I noticed that the houses were as well maintained as possible but the streets, the parts the council were responsible for, were pot holed, poorly surfaced, covered in grass, and just shabby. Definitely work to be done.
Keynes 1942 “Anything we can actually do, we can afford”. I once found online the full text of his amazing radio talk, but I haven’t been able to find it again. If one of your readers knows it, it would be much appreciated
Miachel G – I don’t know it and have not the time to listen to a few found here – maybe you recognise the one?
The Internet Archive. Both recordings and audio are listed under my search
https://archive.org/search?query=John+Maynard+Keynes&tab=all
Here’s hoping = otherwise would be worth approaching BBC library directly?
Here I think – it was in The Listener and then in a collected writings volume.
https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs2324/Keynes_How_Much_Does_Finance_Matter.pdf
Thank you
Thank you, thank you
Keep saying it. I call it “percolating”. My wife accuses me of sewing the seeds of ideas. I prefer to call it letting an idea percolate so that the synapses start to form.
I like percolating…
As my son said to me today, we are going back to feudal times.
There is a danger of forcing people into work at minimum wage, under threat of losing benefits, into occupations that should be paid far fairer wages.
I have been carrying out a little thought experiment, imagine if an alien observer was looking at our world, it would see a world of plenty in which large portions of the population lived in poverty while a relative minority lived in excess, and all of it controlled by a purley human invention called finance, which we claim is scarce and preventing us from solving the vast majority of issues affecting most of the population. I can’t take credit for this idea as I first come across it in one of Douglas Adams Hitchikers guide to the galaxy books. We would be seen as one species arbitrarily divided and largely ineffective at dealing with our problems despite having the intellectual ability to do so.
I typed “Keynes 1942 radio address recording in full” into Google and got the following answer from it’s AI which was then followed by the full text.
An original, full audio recording of John Maynard Keynes’s landmark April 2, 1942 BBC radio address is not known to exist in the public domain or online archives. While fragments of Keynes’s voice from other eras are preserved by institutions like the BBC Archive and the National Sound Archive, historians and researchers have noted that a full audio master of this specific 1942 broadcast has not been recovered. [1, 2, 3, 4]
However, the complete text survives. Titled “How Much Does Finance Matter?”, it was published in The Listener immediately after the broadcast and is preserved in Volume 27 of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes
Thank you
This reminded me of a piece of theological reflection that I did with a friend at church back in the early 1980s. We were both unemployed and struggling with the demonisation of the unemployed at the time (“Get on y’ bike…” “Scroungers”). In our reflecting we came to just that same conclusion; that there was indeed plenty of work to usefully be done but it was that there was no wage or salary being attached to doing it. Sometimes some got done voluntarily but that becomes a bit hit and miss. And then we also realised that there was valuable work being done that rarely got compensated or rewarded: domestic labour and child-rearing chief among that work. -Work which actually enabled the compensated work to be done at all.
Much to agree with
“There is no shortage of work in Britain; there is just a shortage of funding to do it.”
It troubles me to write this but Oswald Mosley said almost the exact same thing in the 1930s during the Great World Depression.
Could Farage pick up this idea, put his Fascist spin on it then run with it to the voters he so desperately needs?
This is the problem.
The debate around unemployment often drifts into abstractions about “labour markets” and “activation policies”, but anyone who has worked with the long‑term unemployed knows the reality is far simpler. Britain does not suffer from a shortage of useful work. It suffers from a shortage of funded pathways that connect willing people to the work society plainly needs.
We have tried countless versions of Job Guarantee‑style schemes over the decades — Foot in the Door, Work Trials, Employment Zones, New Deal, and more recently Sector‑Based Work Academies. They all aimed to break the cycle of long‑term unemployment. And they all ran into the same barrier: employers were reluctant to take the risk of hiring someone they did not know. The issue was never motivation. It was fear of a “bad hire”.
The solution is straightforward. Give the long‑term unemployed the ability to say to the employer of their dreams: “Try me — you’ll see the value I bring.” And remove the employer’s risk entirely. The DWP should continue paying existing benefits plus £50 a week during a trial period. If it succeeds, the person gets a job. If it fails, it still has value: the employer learns what they actually need, and the trialist gains confidence, feedback and direction. Failure is not waste; it is learning.
We also need to rethink “value”. Take the humble road sweeper — dismissed by many as low‑status work. In reality, they lift community morale, provide daily human contact, deter crime, spot hazards early and keep public spaces usable. A road sweeper pays for themselves many times over.
Britain has no shortage of work. It has a shortage of imagination in how we fund it.
Much to agree with
As someone who views the imposition of involuntary unemployment on people as basically a form of violence that is one of the best comments I’ve ever read on the matter.
It’s funny how people from the Job Centre are never interviewed in the media.
“Take the humble road sweeper — dismissed by many as low‑status work. In reality, they lift community morale, provide daily human contact, deter crime, spot hazards early and keep public spaces usable. A road sweeper pays for themselves many times over.”
Just brilliant.
And correct.
You certainly hit the nail on the head with this article!
It’s important that the general public knows how to distinguish between work and jobs because they are often conflated.
Work are tasks that have to be done. Jobs are work that is rewarded with money.
To illustrate this, if I offered members of the public the opportunity to move a large pile of bricks from my front garden to my back garden, and told them they won’t be paid any money – just a cup of coffee and a biscuit, then that is work. If I told them that they will be paid money, at least minimum wage, then that is a job.
It could be summarised that a shortage of jobs is a combination of people who have tasks that need doing but are unable (or unwilling) to pay somebody to do them, and people who have money to pay for somebody to do tasks but don’t have tasks that need doing.
Thank you