Mike Bracken <mikebr@internet.emap.com> wrote:
>True. We should welcome the government's moves in the last budget to
>redistribute from single people to married couples with children,
>
>[Mike Bracken] Errmm, no we shouldn't.
Precisely: why single people? AFAICS two other groups of people who
are even more affluent financially are
1 DINKY professional couples, and
2 retired people with generous occupationa pensions, such as my
parents.
My mother once commented that in Malvern where she lives, many of the
larger houses (3-4 beds +) are owned by older people for whom they
serve as much as status symbols as necessary accommodation, while
families with kids are cramped into smaller properties. Social
justice?
jdc <john.courouble@keble.oxford.ac.uk> wrote:
>Nonetheless I would be wary of imposing rigid limits on working
>hours - if someone feels themselves capable of working long hours
>for a short period of time in order to save up for something special
>it would be the very worst of Old Labour to suggest we ought to keep
>them down. Only when the problem of employer pressure becomes very
>serious, or there are other pressures, we must act as a society.
IMO we are already in a position where there are serious pressures of
this kind. I'm certainly not just talking about a few ambitious
people working for short periods as described above. Another
colleague tells me that on her last project, where she was working
away from home and staying in a hotel, the project manager had them
all going back to work till midnight after their evening meals - and
to start with they weren't even paid overtime. This is perhaps an
extreme case but I certainly do see lots of examples of this in some
parts of the IT industry.
And, as you say yourself...
>I'd challenge you to tell that to someone who has been unemployed
>for ten years and see what their reaction was.
..fair point, but doesn't this also indicate a need to redistribute
work from the work-rich to the work-poor, and therefore add even
further weight to the argument for attempting to renormalise the
hours worked by the former groyp?
And, though I agree with the welfare-to-work approach and what you
have both said about aspiration targetted at the excluded, how does
any of this address the fact that we deliberately have unemployment
in order to control the rate of inflation. I challenge the
government to justify _that_ to someone unemployed for ten years!
>> For example there's one girl at our office, just graduated from
>> university, who has been brazen enough to tell me all about how she
>> takes advantage of her sex to cadge cigarettes for herself and her
>> friends, and how she gets away with things which if they were done
>> by a man would probably result in him getting punched.
>
>I know lots of people like that, and there is a view that crime is
>"capitalism in action". Anyway, people will innately want to take
>what they cannot afford to buy. We deal with that by tackling >poverty and
>criminality (TOCTOTCOC) not by limiting people's aspirations.
But neither poverty nor overt criminality are really relevant to the
person I refer to here. She's from a good home with fairly affluent
parents, went to a Catholic school, has graduated from university and
now has a professional job in IT. This sort of antisocial behaviour
can be seen at many levels of society, not just amongst the less well
off. It's the urge for instant gratification, ie... having greater
aspirations than one's current lifestyle can deliver.
Andrew Smith <ecreu@csv.warwick.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>As far as I can see people still live predominantly in families,
>those that don't usually (although by no means universally) aspire
>to, people do hope one day to live with their partners, and the
>break up of a family is generally regarded as a bad thing to happen.
>I'm not saying there haven't been significant changes, and
>government may need to take account of changes in the nature of
>families, but the family unit does appear to remain the building
>block of our society.
I'm not sure about this. Firstly, I perceive there are a lot more
people, esp women, who choose to live alone these days. Secondly, I
suspect there are a lot of people who still settle for living in a
family because of the economic advantages it offers, rather than
because it's what they'd ideally want. Historically, of course,
economic survival has been probably _the_ major factor that underpins
the family.
Are we seeing the evolution of a post-modernist alternative to family
life emerging here? There certainly seem to be factors that cause
people of both sexes to prioritise career and (usually to a lesser
extent) personal/social aspirations over relationships and families.
And how often do you hear people groan when they tell you they're
going so some or other family gathering?
Louise Locock <Louise.Locock@templeton.oxford.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>One of the important things is having time for ourselves (and
>perhaps in the process redistributing work more evenly?).
Precisely; it's here I get into difficulty with anglo-saxon
christianity. I think a major reason for the happenings of the 1960s
was that many people felt oppressed by the puritannical attitudes
that prevailed in post-war nuclear families, fed by the over-zealous
worship of 'duty' ie putting others before oneself. Though there has
to be a balance betwen meeting our individual personal/emotional
needs and fulfilment of our responsibilities to those around us, I
still don't feel the importance of the former is sufficiently
recognised.
I agree with everything else Louise said, it was a very neat summary
of my own position.
"Portes, Jonathan" <Jonathan.Portes@nera.com> wrote:
>
> One possibility is the benign, free-market one. People -
>especially professionals who are working with their brains and
>keyboards rather than breaking their backs - like and enjoy work
>more, so want to do more of it.
I'm sure this is true of a relatively small number of people such as
business leaders - these people are the basic constituency of the new
right - and I agree we shouldn't discourage it. Perhaps one aspect
of the wider problem, though, is that some of these types of people
tend to think that everyone else's values should be the same.
> Another possibility is a straight Marxist one. Employers are
>simply exploiting "economies of scale"; put another way, there is a
>fixed cost to hiring and training a worker (not to mention benefits,
>office space and so on) so its obviously cheaper to hire 2 workers
>and work them 60 hours a week rather than 3 for 40 hours.
There is an element of this too. I don't know what the current
position is but I also suspect the way the tax and NI systems are
structured may encourage it. If so then oughtn't the government to
review things so the tax system acts as an incentive to employ more
people rather than less, eg a more extensive version of the Tories'
job sharing initiative?
> The third explanation is that we have all somehow become trapped
>in a "bad equilibrium": that is, we would like to have much more time
>for ourselves, but we worry that we won't get ahead in our careers,
>especially because everyone else is working harder.
>...
> This is certainly the explanation which accords most with my
>experience. So what is the right policy response? I do think there
>is a role for some direct regulation: perhaps not of working hours,
>but of paid maternity and paternity leave, etc. Fiscal incentives
>like subsidised job-shares might also help, although less at the
>middle and upper end of the income distribution. Insofar as the
>working families tax credit implicitly helps part-timers, this is a
>start.
Precisely: the rat race effect. I find time and time again, when I
talk to colleagues, that lots of people are frustrated at these
pressures to work long hours. Even the vast majority of managers
really would really prefer to treat us as well as possible. But most
people are reluctant to speak out. More junior staff are worried
about carrer blight or even redundancy, whereas the senior managers
are worried that our competitors would exploit the situation.
So when even an employee-friendly company like ours has relatively
little power to resist these trends, isn't one forced to conclude
that outside intervention, eg government regulation, is the only
workable answer? Hugh Wilmott's idea of celebrating peoples
achievements outside work certainly seems worth pursuing, but I
frankly doubt that it would make more than an marginal impression,
valuable though even that would be.
A further possible approach might be for governments to include
clauses in their contracts that require their suppliers not to
discriminate against employees who aren't prepared to work all hours
of the day.
The trouble with the specific policy responses that Jonathan suggests
is that they all appear to be specific to _family_ life rather than
personal or other needs. Even many businesses regard it as tolerable
for people to attend to clearly-identified family responsibilities.
This again places too little empahsis on people's personal needs and
aspirations, and could even be regarded as discrimination in favour
of those with family responsibilities. This is not the solution. We
need to arrive at a position where nobody feels compelled to work
more than a normal 35-40 hour week, so those with families can give
them their proper attention _and_ those whose aspirations are
predominantly outside the workplace can devote the time they want to
these pursuits too.
Regards
Adrian
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Adrian Putley adrian@roscalen.demon.co.uk
Horsham, West Sussex, England http://www.roscalen.demon.co.uk/
-------------------------------------------------------------
Posted to uk-policy, a service of Nexus. http://www.netnexus.org/
Hosting and email provided by new media consultants On-Line Publishing