Generations Apart: Finding Work

The ultimate baby boomer: but how will today’s younger generation fare?

So far this month my head has been filled with all sorts of plans for self-improvement, not to mention preparing to get married this April. Thanks are due then to BBC Radio 4‘s recent Generations Apart programme for helping me get outside of my own head and helping me think about how we as a society can respond to the the challenges today’s generation of young people are facing.

Finding Work

The episode of Generations Apart I happened to catch was looking at young people’s experiences of finding work. Told through a series of personal stories, it contrasted the experiences and expectations of young people living in Britain today with the baby boomer generation which came of age in the 1960s. 

You can listen again to the episode by clicking here.

While you might expect any programme based around older people’s recollections of their younger years to suffer from the whiff of nostalgia, I felt the programme succeeded in providing a balanced view of people’s experience of work. By and large, the baby boomers described a world where work of one kind or another was plentiful for young people whilst the young people interviewed spoke of the intense competition to find work of any kind.

What Counts as Work?

Besides the drop in the total volume of work available to young people, the personal stories revealed how social attitudes and expectations around work had also changed significantly. For example, one retired journalist described how he and most of his fellow students were recruited to a paid trainee positions before they graduated. He described being recruited on the basis of his potential and with no expectation that he could do the job already. This world could hardly be further away from the one described by the modern day trainee journalist, competing for the opportunity to carry out unpaid work in the hope of one-day securing a scarce paid trainee post. 

Silver Linings

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, and the programme equally powerfully highlighted the restrictions female baby boomers in particular experienced in their working lives. It’s easy to forget how many workplaces operated a ban on married women, either formally or informally, and the consequences these policies continue to have on the economic security of today’s generation of women approaching retirement . Again, Generations Apart’s personal stories cut through the noise and to get to the heart of the issue.

No Future? No Thanks

While Generations Apart most definitely presented a sobering assessment of the life prospects for many of today’s young people, I am determined not to adopt a pessimistic outlook. To do so would be to ignore the many great personal qualities that were evident in the stories the programme’s young people told and to write off a generation.

Instead, what I took from the programme was a belief that it is possible to have a different society. Notwithstanding the clear social progress that has been made since the 1960s, it seems to me we’ve collectively lost our generosity and willingness to give young people a try. Certainly I know the expectations I place on young people joining organisations I work for are arguably higher than those that I could have fulfilled at their age.

Somehow we’ve got to create a more humane society, one that recognises the vital importance of giving all people the chance to make a positive contribution and be valued. Given the state of the economy and the long-term decline of ‘jobs with prospects’, I’m not sure whether the regular employment market will ever be able to offer today’s generation of young people the same opportunities it offered the baby boomers. Whatever the mechanism, Generations Apart confirms to me we need to give people more not less grounds for optimism.

Mind the Gap

The Great Wealth Divide. Photo: BBC World Service

Updated: 06/02/2012

Last week I had the good fortune to stumble across a great little two-part radio documentary on the BBC World Service called The Wealth Gap: The View from London. The programme vividly brought to life how our lives are shaped by inequality. It also succeeded in conveying the complex nature of inequality and the challenge it presents to policy-makers wishing to take steps to reduce it. 

2012: a year defined by inequality?

Inequality and the widening gap between the richest and the poorest in our society has hardly been out headlines of late. Wherever you look, from the recent political jockeying over the size of Stephen Hester’s bonus to the ongoing high-profile protests organisers by the likes of Occupy movement and UK Uncut, it seems, at a rhetorical level at least, everyone is agreed that ‘something has to be done’ about inequality.

Throw in some added economic gloom for good measure and the timing of The Wealth Gap’s broadcast starts to look like an inspired move on the part of the BBC World Service (itself a victim of deep reductions in public funding).

The Wealth Gap: Economics with a Human Face

The Wealth Gap’s chief strength is that it succeeds in turning what could easily be a very dry discussion about economics and statistics into a gripping human interest drama with a satisfyingly complete three-act narrative arc. Well, not quite, but the producers of The Wealth Gap should be commended for bringing out the human impact of widening inequality without sacrificing the underlying substance.

The programme focuses on inequality through the lives of people living in London, one of the most-international cities and a magnet for many of the wealthiest people. At the start of the first episode we’re told that rising inequality is a global phenomenon, with statistics in both developed and emerging economies showing an increasing share of income and wealth is held by an ever-narrower elite. After that, however, we’re given the chance to focus on the lives of different people living in the capital and how they relate to inequality.

 

Home is where the heartache is 

The focus of the first episode is London’s over-heated housing market. We hear from a range of voices: an an estate agent who has witnessed first-hand the rise of ‘super-prime’ £5 million+ properties; a low income family with  young children experience over-crowding and a senior teacher who cannot afford to buy a property within commuting distance of her school. These voices bring to life what it feels like to live in a city where housing has become ever more expensive as people at the top end of the income distribution, whose earnings have outstripped those of the population as a whole over the past thirty years or so, continue to exert upward pressure on housing prices. 

Sufficed to say, after the first episode my moral indignation at rising levels of inequality was turned up to 11. What’s new, you might say? Luckily, episode two of The Wealth Gap came along an shook me out of my comfort zone by suggesting that inequality can also bring with it certain benefits and, gulp, maybe we should in fact show a little more gratitude for the super-rich and the jobs they support. 

Let’s hear it for the 1 per cent 

Making the case for inequality, we hear from management and shop-floor staff from a company that produces luxury £80,000 beds fit and another company that arranges bespoke experiences for super-rich clients. As unpopular as they may with the public at large, are the world’s super-rich an important source of jobs in London. Similarly, despite everything we know (and even more we don’t) about the consequences of tax avoidance and tax evasion. Paul Johnson, Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, tells us that the top 1 per cent of earners now contribute to around 28 per cent of all income tax paid in the UK, an increase from 11 per cent in the late 1970s. While Paul is quick to point out that this change reflects the extent to which incomes of the super rich have grown, it also shows the extent to which current levels of public spending are dependent on high levels of income inequality. 

Living with complexity 

Given the recent brouhaha over bankers’ bonuses and executive pay, there was something refreshing and daring about The Wealth Gap being prepared to make the case for the super-rich. While I remain unconvinced that the growing inequality we are experiencing in London is neither inevitable nor is it a price worth paying for the tax base and jobs the super-rich support, I feel I have a better appreciation of just how complex the issue is. As someone who is keen to see a progressive future I would have liked to have seen more attention given to the practical steps we as a society and through our individual actions can take action to manage and ultimately reduce levels of inequality but this is a huge subject in of itself.

If you hurry you should still be able to find both episodes of The Wealth Gap on BBC iPlayer. and as a podcast download.

What did you think of the programme? Do you think rising levels of inequality are a fact of life? Would we be better off spending our time focusing on other matters? Feel free to get in touch and share your thoughts and experiences of inequality.