On the scrapheap…

There is one thing worse than working a 45-50 hour week against a backdrop of constant pressure…and that’s the prospect of having no job at all. This is the very real prospect we face in my workplace after the one and only client announced that after a year long review of their procurement, our services were no longer required. We are now in a period where the existing workload will be cleared, the handover process undertaken and then…it’s out the door for the vast majority of us.

All this comes after major changes in our terms and conditions – increased hours and pay cuts – to meet the requirement from the client for lower fees to be charged for the work. Not to mention the huge amount of work we have done for them throughout the summer. What thanks do we get? Sod all apart from goodbye, it’s been nice knowing you! So as you can imagine, there are some very bitter people where I work… Not only that, as part of the internal re-organisation at the aforementioned client, a lot of their workers are also facing redundancy or the prospect of having to re-apply for their jobs with companies who the work has been outsourced to. Again, as you can imagine, there’s not a lot of happy bunnies there either…

All of this made me think about the human and social costs of the ruthless drive of neo-liberalism to maximise profits come what may. The decisions made by our soon to be ex-client may have a certain rational logic when looked at in a very narrow business context. It’s when you start to look at the human cost – and the consequences – that the logic rapidly starts to fray. To work for a company having to go through a year long review process with their main client, knowing that at the end you could very well be ruthlessly cast aside, is a corrosive and soul destroying experience. People are forced to put their lives on hold, postponing expenditure and holidays as they await the decision. What the client has been doing is sodding around with people’s lives with no regard for the human cost of their actions.

Moving away from my immediate concerns, when you look at the way work is outsourced abroad, it seems that very narrow business criteria are applied with no regard for the human cost and no understanding of the huge social cost that will eventually have to be faced. A decision made by one business to move work from the UK to a location abroad may very well make good business sense to them – it’s when that process is repeated hundreds of times that a massive social cost is incurred.

In my industry, an increasing amount of work is outsourced overseas, leaving behind skilled workers such as myself struggling to find jobs with decent pay and conditions. This will put me in a situation where I’ll have to take on any job going to pay the bills, regardless of what the terms and conditions are. With the quality of jobs available declining, there will be many more instances of vacancies being filled by people who are over qualified but cannot find anything else. This will have a knock on effect all the way down the chain so those with few or no qualifications will find it nigh on impossible to get a job.

So we will have a situation where people are increasingly forced to take on jobs that in no way meet fulfil their aspirations – in effect they are being been proletarianised to use a piece of Marxist terminology. Underneath this there will be a layer of people with few or no qualifications who will find there is no work available to them as everyone above them in the pecking order has been forced to trade down – they will be joining the rapidly growing number of the unemployed.

We have the prefect storm – a growing number of workers in jobs that do not fulfil their aspirations and relentlessly rising unemployment as employment opportunities become ever more constrained. This is a sure recipe for growing social unrest. At the moment, rising unemployment is still a hidden crisis. The much heralded ‘summer of rage’ never happened. The world gives the appearance of carrying on as normal – the Sunday papers are still full of lifestyle guff and pointless gossip, there are still home makeover programmes on the TV, designer handbags are still being sold for obscene amounts of money and so on as the circus continues….

Yet, all of this is an illusion. Under the façade there are hundreds of thousands of people who are having to drastically scale back their aspirations and a growing number who can see no hope at all for the future. All may appear to be calm at the moment but it will only take another banking crisis to shock the system and the house of cards will well and truly start to collapse as people start to wake up to the grim reality of how the economy is being destroyed. This will be the point where life starts to get interesting…