Disagreement up on Mount Olympus. The £1bn found behind the sofa cushions to subsidise employers who recruit young people does kind of put the lie to the position hitherto occupied by the Coalition: that 'the jobs are out there' and the fault's with the unemployed. In fact this means that the government are taking a more nuanced position than the notoriously biased taxpayer-hating BBC, whose recent interventions on the subject of unemployment were enough to make you nostalgic for the days when the issue was a media blind spot.
First there was John Humphrys, given an hour-long programme to explain his Parsonsian theory about the decline of the Decent Working Class. He began by telling us that, in his youth, there had only been one deadbeat dad in Splott, and that he'd been looked down on by the entire neighbourhood (a stark contrast with the modern era, when those on benefits are venerated as national heroes.) In his spirited campaign to revive working-class shame, Humphrys did briefly entertain the radical idea that the unemployment figures there (as high as 24%) might be due to the state of the job market, but such outlandish notions were put to rest by a visit to the local jobcentre, where he found 'friendly staff' and '1,600 jobs'. At this point he went back to collecting anecdotes from curtain-twitchers, while viewers struggled to digest the inferred conclusion that Cardiff (plus the surrounding areas) has a population of just over 6,400. Patient examination here, if you're inclined.
Next, safely ringfenced away on BBC3, a panel discussion-cum-reality show called 'Up For Hire', which put four young jobseekers through a variety of employment-rated challenges while discussing the issues around the subject with guests and a live audience. The show's remit was very limited. It illustrated perfectly how insubstantial the discussion of unemployment becomes when anything political is pre-emptively taken off the agenda. So we talked about things like how young people might need to adopt more creative jobhunting strategies, like walking around town with a sandwich board, without stopping to consider why this was being reported as a quirky That's Life! human interest story rather than a sombre indictment of our entire economic and political system. The show boiled down to the same hilariously point-missing question posed over and over again: 'there are 2.5m unemployed - what are they all doing wrong?'
The programme's studio guests - mostly celebrities and business owners - weren't short of suggestions on this.* Footage of one of the contestants overreacting to some negative feedback in a challenge was spun into a ten-minute collective philippic on how thin-skinned and coddled young people were today, and how they all needed to toughen up, face reality, and so forth. From laziness to scruffy appearance to lack of imagination, everyone wanted to pitch in with their incredible one-shot diagnosis of youth unemployment (based of course solely on their small sack of personal anecdotes - cf Kaplan, 'someone who has actually been there'). One point everyone agreed on is that 'graduates shouldn't expect to walk into a job' - a neat piece of ideological sleight of hand, that, evoking as it does arrogance, entitlement, whereas in fact (for graduates and non-graduates alike) it's surely not so unreasonable to expect to have some decent chance of finding work.
As it happened, the young people (contestants and audience members) all seemed rather bright, articulate and well-adjusted, with no particuar illusions about their prospects. At one point (with the discussion focussing on preciousness, and how young people were unwilling to get their hands dirty in 'real' jobs), the visiting celebrities regaled us with tales of they'd all worked briefly in low pay/service sector jobs before striking it rich, and the panel all reached the consensus that kids should take any job they can and work their way up to something better. A sharp malcontent in the audience leaned forward and asked 'but how long are you supposed to stay in that job if nothing better comes along?' The panel stuttered along the lines of 'well, er, forever' before the host quickly moved the discussion on. A simple realistic counter-factual question was enough to derail the magical voluntarist received wisdom.
If the young people acquitted themselves well, the same couldn't always be said of the guests, whose purported expertise and insight looked distinctly tired and threadbare. Worst of all was Katie from 'The Apprentice', who boomed out unpopular populist talking points ('media studies is a waste of time... if you went to a polytechnic, blow yourself up') like a drunken relative at Christmas dinner, while the audience cringed and shuffled their feet. That particular line of argument - that the problem is airy-fairy education which should be tailored to be more directly relevant to employers - is another one that's gaining traction. We can only dream of a world in where the reverse was true.
What's increasingly clear is that magical voluntarism is the only game in town. The ever-windy CBI's best idea on the economy is to strip away employee protection - or, as the only slightly insane Evening Standard poll had it, 'should it be made easier for firms to sack people to help tackle joblessness?' Of course, if employers want to take on conveniently disposable staff without employment protection, they could just hire agency temps, but never mind. Everyone enjoys a race to the bottom.
The Institute of Economic Affairs, meanwhile, suggest 'suspending' the minimum wage; in fact, between apprenticeships (£2.60ph, impossible for anyone not living with very tolerant parents, with no guarantees at the end), the ever-more-compulsory internships, and the looming encroachment of workfare, everything we do seems to be based on the possibility of getting everyone doing a day's work for considerably less than a day's pay. The Citizens UK Living Wage campaign itself, which seemed to be making some tentative progress into the mainstream, has disappeared into the long grass.
The government staunchly deny the existence of the working poor; confronted with the statistics, they preach that the solution is to 'make work pay', something achieved not (as a foolish man might assume) by increasing wages, but by capping benefits. The vultures are circling around tax credits. Household incomes are falling for most, while managerial and boardroom posts remain untroubled by austerity. The Tories, who are imposing their policies on the basis that we must tackle our deficit, have admitted that they may not be able to reduce the deficit after all.
If you see anyone out on the streets, mind, they're just protesting for protest's sake. Back to you, Dermot.
*A fine example of the species is the role model Philip Green, who decided to share his pearls of wisdom on youth unemployment on the same day that he threw a few hundred young people on the dole. Unfair to blame him personally, perhaps. But it follows that if we praise these men for 'creating' jobs in more favourable times (as if employing someone was ever a selfless act), we can also blame them for 'destroying' those jobs later on.
Showing posts with label bad television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad television. Show all posts
Saturday, 26 November 2011
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Fairy Jobmother deconstructed.
‘Fairy Jobmother’ may be a reality show, but we can nonetheless categorise it as fiction. These aren’t real people - they’re grotesque stereotypes who are broadcast solely to reassure the public that their prejudices are correct. The show is a useful pantomime that reinforces received wisdom. The official line on the unemployed is that they are entirely to blame for their own plight as a result of being lazy, feckless, stupid, or badly brought up (by people who were lazy, feckless, stupid…) This is what we see in the programme. We don’t see Hayley Taylor being sent to live with families who are killing themselves jobseeking, beating their heads against the same brick wall day after day with no hope in sight - because it wouldn’t be a good story. Each episode has a safe and familiar routine - Guru lives with family, Guru diagnoses family, Guru inspires family to solve problems, group hug-and-cry session (along the lines of Adam Curtis’ writing about emotion-driven television).
The key this week was apparently the long-dead family patriarch, praised as a man with a great work ethic (in other words, he grew up in a time when work was more easily available), whose stern Fatherly influence the family was clearly missing. The shabby surroundings, the family’s lack of drive and poor physical condition were all too easy to diagnose with a little amateur psychology on Taylor’s part. She encouraged the family to ‘move on’ from their loss and take responsibility for themselves.
Taylor helps the mother get over her grief at the loss of her husband by first expressing sympathy (an overfamiliar arm around the shoulder and group cry at the cemetery) then by making her face some ‘harsh truths‘ - harsh medicine, of course, being the favoured kind in neo-Thatcherite times. The two children lack self-esteem, so the son is sent to learn boxing in a gym, while the daughter gets a makeover in preparation for an interview with an electrics store. She gets the job. More group crying, only this time with happiness. Simple. Perhaps we can all be ‘solved’ in this way, by people who possess no relevant qualifications on the matter - but then qualifications aren’t important, are they? It’s just a matter of common sense.
In fact the programme’s title is misleading - finding work is only a minor feature of this family drama. Taylor organises the climactic job interview herself (the daughter never actually applies for the job) and we never see any of the family doing any other jobhunting. Taylor obviously believes that there are deeper problems to fix before she can think about sending the family to work. While this is a refreshing change to the attitude held by successive governments (blindly prescribing work itself as a cure for all personal or psychic ills), it's more sinister than it seems. Bear in mind that Taylor’s former employers, A4E, are keen to extend their influence into all areas of their clients’ lives - not just work and training, but financial advice, legal advice (to the point of driving a CAB out of business in Hull) and now even medicine. Their latest scheme (described in a recent entry at http://watchinga4e.blogspot.com) is ‘offering their expertise in reducing long term sickness related absence from work’ - in other words, using their own medical personnel to declare employees fit to return to work as soon as possible and taking the decisions out of the hands of GPs. Perhaps I’m an alarmist, but I can’t help thinking of the early twentieth century and the era of the Company Store, when the firm you worked for owned and controlled every aspect of your life, and there was next to no idea of a private existence beyond the reach of your employers.
The Fairy Jobmother, for all its disposability, feels like a step in the same direction. If factors in our lives are making it more difficult for us to find work (that is, make employers less likely to be impressed by us), we can expect to be hassled and bullied into changing our lives to remove the obstacles. We cannot, of course, expect any material help along these lines - it’s just a matter of threats and motivation. If you have the temerity to be out of work, your personal life is not a private matter. The DWP and shady organisations like a4e have every right to examine your circumstances, deem them unsuitable, and, on pain of starvation and homelessness, mould you into a better person - that is, one more amenable to employers*. And this process will be cheered from the sidelines by those who rail at the ‘nanny state’ and become puce with rage at the thought of local authorities telling them what to put in their wheelie bins.
This no small matter. What‘s at stake here is the principle that a human life has value beyond the use that can be extracted from it in the meat grinder of Capital - and it’s an argument that the other side is winning.
On another note, it’s revealing that Taylor’s partially-successful methods required the production company to shell out on bereavement counselling sessions, gym membership, new clothes and an expensive makeover before even one of the family could enter work. The average jobseeker could not afford any of these things. The family could barely afford to keep food in the house (many commenters have drawn attention to the mother ‘wasting’ her money on cigarettes, as if those weren’t famous for being addictive and very difficult to give up. But the idea that benefit claimants would have loads of money if they didn’t waste it all on beer and fags is just another keystone of the mythography of the undeserving scrounger). The obvious point to conclude from this is that the family were too poor to find work. Without some source of disposable cash, they were incapable (even if they were willing) of improving themselves to the standard required.
Looking at this another way - the family’s position improved when they were made artificially less poor (or at least made to appear that way). The estate-dwelling ‘underclass’ are unemployable - intrinsically unattractive to employers - and the only way for them to escape their situation is to remodel themselves as respectable middle-class (or, at the minimum, respectable upper-working class) citizens. Even if they are struggling to buy food and pay the rent, they must present a professional appearance, learn the language of the professional workplace (the interview talk of ‘flexible team players’ and ‘highly motivated self-starters’). The moment when Taylor revealed the post-makeover daughter (made-up, coiffured, and dressed exactly like a miniature Hayley, scarf and all - now that‘s one for the amateur psychologists out there) pulled aside the veil. What the working class unemployed are being asked to do is to become middle class. Being a member of the Morlock underclass is a failing in itself, making you fully deserving of the starvation and homelessness that will follow if you can‘t adapt.
This is the crass, condescending, point-missing message of all the ‘problem-solving guru’ shows - “Why can’t the bovine masses solve their problems in the way that’s so obvious to us? Why can’t they be more like us? We’re psychologically well-adjusted, well-dressed, fit from morning gym sessions - what‘s holding them back?”
The show’s very title gives us an idea of what kind of strictly limited conclusions will be drawn at the end. Taylor’s steps did improve the family’s situation, but it was made clear that these ‘fairy godmother wishes’ were miraculous and unexpected, a break from the normal order of things. The idea that they be distributed on a wider basis, or even structuralized as part of the benefits system, is never on the table. The majority of the working class unemployed are expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps - become mini-Hayleys and fully valid humans without any outside help. So what exactly was the moral of the show? That finding work is easier when you have a well-known, well-connected recruitment specialist in your corner? Shocking. And even then - if Taylor fails to find work for the family next week, we can expect blame to be diverted to them. There is no systemic analysis. Blame falls solely upon the individuals (and, yes, their families.)
Again, it’s in keeping with the official narrative of unemployment in this country: work is available to those who want it, the unemployed have themselves to blame, and the only problem they face is not wanting it enough. As the events of the last few years have shown, this is unchallengeable by any amount of empirical evidence. Trawling the comments and discussion threads of the internet, you can see that there’s been only a slight adaptation of the common wisdom as the number of unemployed has reached its highest level in decades - ‘granted, there are a few genuine unemployed, people being made redundant from skilled and professional jobs, and those people deserve our support, but for the most part they’re still lazy scroungers and a drain on the economy.’ One commenter on a thread about Fairy Jobmother rather plaintively suggested:
Maybe there should a government agency that detects those who don't/won't work and their benefits should be stopped. Those who are carers of children, eldery or disabled NEED greater financial support to enable them to work. Those are the people I have empathy for, not the scroungers.
And that’s the question, isn’t it? How do we tell the deserving poor from the undeserving? Make no mistake, we’re in the realm of simple ontological categories. We are Good People - the state should be punished, stripped of its powers for even having the temerity to bother us. They are Bad People - the state should intervene to make them Good (more charitable types may avow that this is for their own health). The Good Jobseekers need to be helped. The Bad Scroungers should be hassled and starved into submission.
Given that the entire bureaucracy of the DWP can’t reliably make this distinction (every long-term jobseeker has tales of undeserved, apparently random benefit stoppages, usually contrasted with some other lazier jobseeker who went unchallenged for years), it’s not exactly clear how a new ‘government agency’ will do it - will it employ half the population to follow the other half 24/7 to make sure that they’re really putting the effort in for their benefits? Is there any way of making progress on this front that doesn’t involve the complete abolition of individual privacy (for the unemployed only, naturally)? And is there any way to conduct this debate without clinging stubbornly to the resentful fantasy of millions of life-of-Riley spongers living it up at ‘our’ expense?
These sneering-at-proles programmes aren’t just harmless, cheap-to-produce trash - they’re actively setting back the political dialogue in this country. Thanks for contributing, Channel 4.
*Anyone getting advice on a CV can expect to be told which extracurricular hobbies and activities will look good, and which ones are best left off - in other words, employers already get to pass judgement on the way we choose to spend our time outside work...
The key this week was apparently the long-dead family patriarch, praised as a man with a great work ethic (in other words, he grew up in a time when work was more easily available), whose stern Fatherly influence the family was clearly missing. The shabby surroundings, the family’s lack of drive and poor physical condition were all too easy to diagnose with a little amateur psychology on Taylor’s part. She encouraged the family to ‘move on’ from their loss and take responsibility for themselves.
Taylor helps the mother get over her grief at the loss of her husband by first expressing sympathy (an overfamiliar arm around the shoulder and group cry at the cemetery) then by making her face some ‘harsh truths‘ - harsh medicine, of course, being the favoured kind in neo-Thatcherite times. The two children lack self-esteem, so the son is sent to learn boxing in a gym, while the daughter gets a makeover in preparation for an interview with an electrics store. She gets the job. More group crying, only this time with happiness. Simple. Perhaps we can all be ‘solved’ in this way, by people who possess no relevant qualifications on the matter - but then qualifications aren’t important, are they? It’s just a matter of common sense.
In fact the programme’s title is misleading - finding work is only a minor feature of this family drama. Taylor organises the climactic job interview herself (the daughter never actually applies for the job) and we never see any of the family doing any other jobhunting. Taylor obviously believes that there are deeper problems to fix before she can think about sending the family to work. While this is a refreshing change to the attitude held by successive governments (blindly prescribing work itself as a cure for all personal or psychic ills), it's more sinister than it seems. Bear in mind that Taylor’s former employers, A4E, are keen to extend their influence into all areas of their clients’ lives - not just work and training, but financial advice, legal advice (to the point of driving a CAB out of business in Hull) and now even medicine. Their latest scheme (described in a recent entry at http://watchinga4e.blogspot.com) is ‘offering their expertise in reducing long term sickness related absence from work’ - in other words, using their own medical personnel to declare employees fit to return to work as soon as possible and taking the decisions out of the hands of GPs. Perhaps I’m an alarmist, but I can’t help thinking of the early twentieth century and the era of the Company Store, when the firm you worked for owned and controlled every aspect of your life, and there was next to no idea of a private existence beyond the reach of your employers.
The Fairy Jobmother, for all its disposability, feels like a step in the same direction. If factors in our lives are making it more difficult for us to find work (that is, make employers less likely to be impressed by us), we can expect to be hassled and bullied into changing our lives to remove the obstacles. We cannot, of course, expect any material help along these lines - it’s just a matter of threats and motivation. If you have the temerity to be out of work, your personal life is not a private matter. The DWP and shady organisations like a4e have every right to examine your circumstances, deem them unsuitable, and, on pain of starvation and homelessness, mould you into a better person - that is, one more amenable to employers*. And this process will be cheered from the sidelines by those who rail at the ‘nanny state’ and become puce with rage at the thought of local authorities telling them what to put in their wheelie bins.
This no small matter. What‘s at stake here is the principle that a human life has value beyond the use that can be extracted from it in the meat grinder of Capital - and it’s an argument that the other side is winning.
On another note, it’s revealing that Taylor’s partially-successful methods required the production company to shell out on bereavement counselling sessions, gym membership, new clothes and an expensive makeover before even one of the family could enter work. The average jobseeker could not afford any of these things. The family could barely afford to keep food in the house (many commenters have drawn attention to the mother ‘wasting’ her money on cigarettes, as if those weren’t famous for being addictive and very difficult to give up. But the idea that benefit claimants would have loads of money if they didn’t waste it all on beer and fags is just another keystone of the mythography of the undeserving scrounger). The obvious point to conclude from this is that the family were too poor to find work. Without some source of disposable cash, they were incapable (even if they were willing) of improving themselves to the standard required.
Looking at this another way - the family’s position improved when they were made artificially less poor (or at least made to appear that way). The estate-dwelling ‘underclass’ are unemployable - intrinsically unattractive to employers - and the only way for them to escape their situation is to remodel themselves as respectable middle-class (or, at the minimum, respectable upper-working class) citizens. Even if they are struggling to buy food and pay the rent, they must present a professional appearance, learn the language of the professional workplace (the interview talk of ‘flexible team players’ and ‘highly motivated self-starters’). The moment when Taylor revealed the post-makeover daughter (made-up, coiffured, and dressed exactly like a miniature Hayley, scarf and all - now that‘s one for the amateur psychologists out there) pulled aside the veil. What the working class unemployed are being asked to do is to become middle class. Being a member of the Morlock underclass is a failing in itself, making you fully deserving of the starvation and homelessness that will follow if you can‘t adapt.
This is the crass, condescending, point-missing message of all the ‘problem-solving guru’ shows - “Why can’t the bovine masses solve their problems in the way that’s so obvious to us? Why can’t they be more like us? We’re psychologically well-adjusted, well-dressed, fit from morning gym sessions - what‘s holding them back?”
The show’s very title gives us an idea of what kind of strictly limited conclusions will be drawn at the end. Taylor’s steps did improve the family’s situation, but it was made clear that these ‘fairy godmother wishes’ were miraculous and unexpected, a break from the normal order of things. The idea that they be distributed on a wider basis, or even structuralized as part of the benefits system, is never on the table. The majority of the working class unemployed are expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps - become mini-Hayleys and fully valid humans without any outside help. So what exactly was the moral of the show? That finding work is easier when you have a well-known, well-connected recruitment specialist in your corner? Shocking. And even then - if Taylor fails to find work for the family next week, we can expect blame to be diverted to them. There is no systemic analysis. Blame falls solely upon the individuals (and, yes, their families.)
Again, it’s in keeping with the official narrative of unemployment in this country: work is available to those who want it, the unemployed have themselves to blame, and the only problem they face is not wanting it enough. As the events of the last few years have shown, this is unchallengeable by any amount of empirical evidence. Trawling the comments and discussion threads of the internet, you can see that there’s been only a slight adaptation of the common wisdom as the number of unemployed has reached its highest level in decades - ‘granted, there are a few genuine unemployed, people being made redundant from skilled and professional jobs, and those people deserve our support, but for the most part they’re still lazy scroungers and a drain on the economy.’ One commenter on a thread about Fairy Jobmother rather plaintively suggested:
Maybe there should a government agency that detects those who don't/won't work and their benefits should be stopped. Those who are carers of children, eldery or disabled NEED greater financial support to enable them to work. Those are the people I have empathy for, not the scroungers.
And that’s the question, isn’t it? How do we tell the deserving poor from the undeserving? Make no mistake, we’re in the realm of simple ontological categories. We are Good People - the state should be punished, stripped of its powers for even having the temerity to bother us. They are Bad People - the state should intervene to make them Good (more charitable types may avow that this is for their own health). The Good Jobseekers need to be helped. The Bad Scroungers should be hassled and starved into submission.
Given that the entire bureaucracy of the DWP can’t reliably make this distinction (every long-term jobseeker has tales of undeserved, apparently random benefit stoppages, usually contrasted with some other lazier jobseeker who went unchallenged for years), it’s not exactly clear how a new ‘government agency’ will do it - will it employ half the population to follow the other half 24/7 to make sure that they’re really putting the effort in for their benefits? Is there any way of making progress on this front that doesn’t involve the complete abolition of individual privacy (for the unemployed only, naturally)? And is there any way to conduct this debate without clinging stubbornly to the resentful fantasy of millions of life-of-Riley spongers living it up at ‘our’ expense?
These sneering-at-proles programmes aren’t just harmless, cheap-to-produce trash - they’re actively setting back the political dialogue in this country. Thanks for contributing, Channel 4.
*Anyone getting advice on a CV can expect to be told which extracurricular hobbies and activities will look good, and which ones are best left off - in other words, employers already get to pass judgement on the way we choose to spend our time outside work...
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