ARE WE A NATION OF IDLERS?

This question is in Britannia Unchained in 2012, written by, amongst others, Liz Truss. 

More fully it said: 

“Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor…. Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”

Oh dear. This is an ill researched cartoon. We work longer hours than nearly every country in Europe and retire later. “Worst idlers” is such an old-fashioned term. Successful people I know are idle but smart – they get other people to do the work for them. What’s more current thinking by a Silicon Valley consultant, amongst others, suggests that productivity would be improved by lower, not higher hours.

Britannia Unchained feels so out of touch with the reality of today’s world. Had the writer been to China where at 12.30 every day the lights are turned low for an hour and everyone goes to sleep? Had they watched Chinese at work? 

The same applies to India where workmen often work in slow motion. Of course, there are showcase examples of speed of construction in China – a multi-storey hotel being erected in a few weeks but health-and-safety doesn’t seem to figure high on their agenda. “996”, the so called Chinese work ethic – 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week  - which the authors of “Britannia Unchained” might presumably have espoused -  was put unfavourably under the spotlight in February this year when a 25-year-old content moderator for short-video streaming site Bilibili died of brain haemorrhage after working extreme hours. The company called it a “wake-up call.”

A friend of mine who’s a corporate lawyer working possibly 70 hours a week on average has worked in Japan and China and thinks it is not that the British are idle, not at all, it is they are a bit “soft”, a softness engendered from us having had it rather easier than the previous generations (up to now). 

The huge salaries some earn are generally the result of working extraordinarily hard (read the story of Bill Gates’ youth). Often at the top of the wage pyramid great wealth, poor health, long hours, burn-out.

Generally at the bottom of that pyramid, terrible wages, poor health, maybe doing several jobs to pay the bills and very long hours. These poor people are not idlers, they’re exploited and have got by so far through being work machines.

But I’m like anyone writing on this subject liable to lapse into generalisations so let me take a step back. Our world is unrecognisable from that of just 10 years ago. We are just beginning to grasp the opportunities of technology like AI and are struggling to grapple with the problems and challenges it will create. The current strikes across the public sector are caused as much by a realisation that a radical change of working practices is imminent as they are about rates of pay.

I believe most people prefer working hard than having too little to do. I believe most people want to do a good job. I believe most people want a decent job.

We need to spend time working on a strategy for the future of work and remove the word redundancy from our lexicon. Work is changing. We need to explain why and how that can benefit us rather than enforce people to be unemployed or unemployable.

We need to work, not just for money but to feel we are relevant and to give us self-respect.

IT SERVES US RIGHT

 It Serves Us Right

Two things on my agenda are productivity and customer service. Often the two are linked. The quicker a purchasing transaction happens the greater the productivity but speed carries a cost. And that’s the absence of taking time to cement a relationship. 

A friend of mine briefly worked at the call centre for a global brand of amongst other things baby products. She was berated for taking too long talking to customers and, when she thought necessary, cheering them up (“that’s not necessary.” She was told). The most successful people in that call centre (by their standards) were foreign with limited, transactional vocabulary. Productivity trumped building a meaningful brand relationship.

We’re building business models in which increasing short- term profit is more important than investing in building trusted brands with whom customers can have a conversation. So it serves us right.

Whilst Jack Welch, one-time, legendary CEO of General Electric, said technology would eventually replace the need for people to be involved in a purchasing transaction, he still fervently believed in consumer satisfaction. Figure that one!

Recently I bought my wife some cosmetics but the delivery address the “system” picked up was a previous one we’d lived at 7 years ago. Try as I might there was no mechanism to phone and say “I goofed, please put it right”. Try as I might there was nothing in the list of pre-selected issues that corresponded with “I’m an idiot. I chose the wrong address” option. And so cheerful emails thudded in saying “we’re delivering to…WRONG ADDRESS… in 48 hours.” I solved it eventually. But I’d wanted a human being saying cheerfully “Don’t worry. Could happen to anyone. There. All sorted.”  What actually  happened was a standoff between human frailty and faultless technology. Man versus Machine with man helplessly losing. 

Now this isn’t the futile lament of a senior about how much better things were before self-service and shopping online.  Because they weren’t. Despite the current “crisis” our world is better, richer in choice and cheaper than it was. We now have “Influencers” rather than “Brand Champions” – not an improvement in my view. But the one thing beginning to disappear is someone on the end of a phone who calmly helps you. 

Exception: NatWest have introduced a direct line for over-60s where you get through straightaway and the person who answers has time and the inclination to do whatever is required. 

More exceptions: Serious Readers. Victoria Health. Richer Sounds. And Waitrose who once turned me from a gibbering wreck to a normal human being in seconds. Everyone tells me Apple is the best in quantity and quality of Customer service. A friend said they’d sorted out a tricky issue regarding the validity of insurance on an Apple product bought in Germany pre-Brexit with aplomb. 

So, yes, great personal, customer service exists but I fear the finance people often see it as  an expense they’d like to eliminate. Its shaky existence reflects many businesses’ attitude to brand building and customers.

I recall a marketer at Heinz, that once-great company which marketing professionals adored, saying they thought of their consumers as two housewives having a cheerful conversation with each other over the garden fence. 

 It’s a romantic concept no doubt but you cannot build a brand that’s loved by technology alone.

Anyway I love romantic concepts but it takes two to tango and when I said “it serves us right” I was also thinking that the behaviour of many customers has deteriorated. We’ve got worse at saying thank you and smiling.

Try it. It’ll change the customer service that you get. 

OUR DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK

I have always been impressed by the inventiveness of the young when lying. Our 8 year old granddaughter demonstrated a surprising sophistication when slightly late in returning home. I suggested excuses: 

“we could say there was a sinkhole in the road which was vast and several cars had already fallen down it – the screams of the people down there were blood curdling”. She shook her head. “too much stuff grandpa let’s just say there was a big hole in the road that meant we had to take a long way back…” She has all the makings of a Tory politician, that girl.

I remember one chap who realised that dog had had its day and said “our parrot shredded my homework…” He was shredded himself for that.

But nowadays we are protecting our young from books that might cause them stress. A number of Universities have triggered “beware” notices on or banned several books and plays. Amongst others “A Midsummer night’s Dream” – for classism; Strindberg’s most famous play “Miss Julie” – contains discussions on suicide; works of Jane Austen, Chaucer, Charles Dickens and several others.

To return to our inventive young, we are handing them the ammunition to avoid work.

“I couldn’t read King Lear…ageist,  violent and sad” 

“I’m not doing any more maths as a professor in New York said ‘the equation 2+2=4 reeks of white supremacist patriarchy’.”

“I can’t do history as I’ve read the old historians we’re asked to read were narrow-minded white men who delighted to write about other white men”

“The Fairie Queen is potentially homophobic – I can’t read that.”

“Oliver Twist is about pederasty, criminality and violence towards women – why was it published?”

The continued decline this year in the number of young people taking English Literature ’A’ Level and the removal of it from some University syllabuses should allay concerns we have about the stress-inducing literature.

I read English at Oxford and if I’d had access to this branch of stress-sourcing I’d have slammed the ghastly Beowulf straight on to that list of “banned texts”. Why? Animal abuse, misogyny, classism and more. Indeed I’d have led a crusade against anything Anglo Saxon on the basis that this was a beastly, cruel period study of which should be avoided. Like Covid it should be locked down.

Yet those providing the reference points for such censorship of literature and other subjects like Latin (“Latin is a dead language – studying it equates to necrophilia”) come from a bunch of radical thinking post-graduate Tutors who have created the anti-establishment wokeism that can infuriate or divert.

For me increasingly it is diverting but it suggests the study of the humanities at University may be becoming increasingly controversial and expendable. The very idea of a University education being essential has been contradicted by the legacy of punitive debts such an education creates.

Yet, as you’ll previously have gathered, my view about today’s youth or indeed youth at any point of history is that they were/are in general optimistic, good humoured and enterprising.

Three tiny lavatorial examples of this:

Years ago before Oxford Colleges were unisex a woman’s college installed a urinal for visiting men. Above it a woman had written. 

“Who is Armitage and what is shanking?” 

In an American college someone had inscribed over a washbasin “Think.” Sometime later someone added an arrow from “think” to where soap was dispensed and it said “Thoap.” 

Finally In a pub urinal the immortal “The penis mightier than the sword”

So long as we encourage such laughter, irreverence and freedom of speech all will be OK.

"CRISIS. WHAT CRISIS?"

This is what appeared on the front page of the Sun referring to the then Prime Minister, the laconic Jim Callaghan, during the so called Winter of Discontent in 1978.

44 years later we’re back again to the “C” word. Friday’s Times headline was ”Britain slides into Crisis.” Note, not Crashes, not Plunges but Slides. There’s a  graceful inevitability to sliding but there’s only one direction to slide…down. And in the context of economic recession there’s a subtext…a slide isn’t sudden it’s a progressive state often caused by inattention. 

Growing inflation and recession have been inevitable for most of this year so there are no surprises here. It’s not just Britain that has its problems, Europe is struggling towards recession too with Italian debt the highest on record and France and Germany both struggling to cope. Most worrying of all is the Chinese economic slump and especially the issues with a mortgage-repayment- revolution. It smells a bit of 2008.

Read Ian Williams – “The Fire of the Dragon” which is just out. A reviewer for the Daily Mail called it “a devastating exposé.” Chinese ambition for global domination mixed with internal discontent and an economy in trouble is a caustic cocktail.

So what can we do? Apart from being worried, frightened or just angry.

Our own slide into crisis is an acceleration owing to sleepy, eye-off-the-ball government plus the pandemic, Ukraine and Brexit. The global picture isn’t our concern  right now. That blaze down the road can be sorted out when the fire in our own home’s been extinguished.

I recently helped in a recruitment process of young, recently graduated Financial Analysts. The candidates were well qualified, gifted, high-achievers with positive attitudes to life. They were impressive. I was uplifted.

The biggest lessons they discussed were the resilience of human beings and the positive outcomes that crises like the pandemic, brought out in general and, specifically, in the ability of specialists to achieve in months what would normally have taken years. They didn’t talk much about government but instead about the inspirational impact people could have who had the will and capability to change things.

The heroes of the pandemic were  Kate Bingham who drove the vaccination programme and the team at Oxford who got so much of the Astra Zeneca programme to happen so quickly.

One of these clever young people I met said, crisis, more often than not, accelerated creative solutions and that, in general left to their own devices to work things out, people came up with good solutions or, at the very worst, muddled their way through.

These candidates’ faith in human ingenuity, reliance and energy has been missing in the media and in many people I speak to.  A more accurate Times headline would have better described the mood if it had read “Britain slides into depression.” But these clever, single golf handicap, accomplished musicians, county standard chess playing, A* gathering, 1st class degree (of course) young people were clear-sightedly confident “it” – this crisis- could be fixed. And fixed quickly.

Their refreshing view of life and their own obvious ability to juggle as well as excel cheered me and made me want to make sure we keep them rather than lose them in the brain drains that happened in previous economic difficulties.

Later that day walking along Brighton Seafront I saw what just 20 years ago had been scruffy, grotty quality stalls and caffs but was now transformed to a smart – could have been the South of France – resort of the middle class. This uplifted me further. So again:

Crisis? What crisis?

CHEER UP!

Imagine a news flash over 50 years ago “Today the pound hit a new low against the dollar” followed by the tuneful

“Woke up this morning feeling fine
I've got something special on my mind” 

That’s actually what  happened in 1964 with that Herman’s Hermits hit, I’m into Something Good

Herman’s Hermits had loads of UK hits and 18 top 40 hits in the USA selling over 80 million records. Lead singer Peter Noone described their name as being a huge disadvantage – The Beatles, Stones, Animals or Who all had names allowing them a breadth of repertoire and were all hard-core, genre-changing bands. In contrast Herman’s Hermits sounded a just a bit silly and they only produced hits about young love but most of all were feel-good. 

Isn’t “feel-good” what we all desperately need now? Hence I suspect one of the problems the BBC has. Their interviewers are really good at being nasty and gloomy. 

 

On Times Radio recently an interviewer of a Labour Shadow Frontbencher failed to get a straight answer to any of her polite questions. Afterwards she lamented her performance saying she’d tried her best. Her crestfallen humility was in pleasant contrast to most of her peers.

It's hard for us to compare 1964 with today. In almost every respect today is better in terms of health, wealth, education, opportunities and our general infrastructure. We’re spoilt for choice with hundreds of TV channels  and free music and everything shows we have it better now than we did then. 

Back in the 1960s “mental health” was not a topic of general conversation but had it been I suspect casualties to it would have turned out to be just as great as they are today.

So where do we get our feel-good pick-me-ups today?

Fact: the commercial world for music has changed. Example: The Arctic Monkeys are going on tour soon – 59 gigs in 19 different countries in 4 ½ months. Ticket prices range from £140 to £300 and way beyond. They’ll be very tired and richer when they get home after Christmas.  Tunes will be the last thing on anyone’s minds. 

Near to top of current best sellers: Lizzo and “About Damn Time”? Terrific song and video but not the pink-scrubbed-clean sound of a Herman ditty. Kate Bush is currently the third best-selling song with “Running Up That Hill.” But it’s 37 years old.  And it doesn’t have a catchy tune. Back in the day of Herman they used to say if you heard a milkman whistling your latest single that you had a hit on your hands.  I haven’t heard anyone whistle anything recently. It went out of vogue about the same time as smoking. 

But don’t we all need a tuneful song to ease the pressures of an overheated world.  An upbeat tune to remove the black-dog grumpiness in the news?  We used to have Herman and the Hermits, the Hollies and Joe Brown. Now we have videos and musical extravaganza.

By the way, talking of tunes and feel-good I see Joni Mitchell was persuaded to sing at the Newport Rhode Island Jazz Festival  - it was very emotional stuff. And it struck me she once had a “woke up” song too:

“Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning
And the first thing that I knew
There was milk and toast and honey
And a bowl of oranges, too
And the sun poured in like butterscotch
And stuck to all my senses

Oh, won't you stay, we'll put on the day
And we'll talk in present tenses”

Ah. I feel so much better already.