IS IT WORKING?

In the late 1970s a poster appeared with the headline “Labour Isn’t Working”. This idea of the Labour administration failing and especially failing in the area of employment resonated so powerfully that Margaret Thatcher won the election.

The other day I was sitting in the train from Brighton thinking of the rose tinted past, a kind of UKIP moment. But it wasn’t as special as some like to pretend.  And life today puts me in so much better a mood than life in the past. Except for the unemployed… especially if they’re gifted…. and stuck….and playing to the rules of the past.

In the seats just ahead of me I heard this conversation. Two young guys just into their twenties speaking that “whatever, you know, excellent, awesome “  language as unfamiliar as French to older generations, meaning I got some but not all of it.

They were talking about getting employment…”I like the sound of that …. they’ve  got no deadlines and you get lots of time off… it’s a three month fixed contract… I can do it blindfolded.” Of course they were from Brighton and as they say down here well Brighton is different.

Whilst they seemed happy enough they’re living in a world where employee rights have diminished, work for many is a necessary means of getting by for now not about creating a future, where you only have fixed term contracts not jobs and terms of employment are unknown.

Maybe that doesn’t matter.

Because change shakes people up;  because the entitlement society (a mostly bad thing) is dying; because energy and application are in fashion and because I smell the whiff of an emergent, enterprise culture.

But the trouble with change is that some people get hurt. And we aren’t educating young people in the scale of this real change…probably because we don’t get it ourselves. But overall is it working? For parts of the service economy, yes.

Aldi, for instance, is now the Oxbridge of employers paying graduates £40,000 a year, plus a new Audi A4– nearly twice the £25,500 offered by lawyers, banks and Marks & Spencer. But you are expected to work all hours, do everything (“clean those lavatories”, “learn all the prices”, “do everything.”)

I used to joke that to get a job in the Pizza Express at Brighton you needed an Upper Second.  I don’t think that’s a joke any longer. So why am I so optimistic? Because in the middle of the mess I can smell the whiff of enterprise and adventure. The young people I heard were more savvy than they seemed.
They were behaving like consumers not employees. And in the end consumers drive up quality.

WE HAVE A STRATEGY. IT'S CALLED DOING THINGS

That’s what Herb Kelleher, who founded the successful Southwest Airlines, said.

In a week dominated by Margaret Thatcher the media have been rolling out their reaction wagon and lazily seeing what stories they can create. She would have been ironically amused by how well “The Witch is dead” is doing in the charts.  If they say of me “Let’s bury the old Bastard” I’ll know I’ll have made an impression on some,  been unpopular with many and actively disliked by a few.

I think she’d have said that the witch is dead but not maybe her spell.

Back at the end of the 1970s when this poster appeared, there was massive inflation, powerful and irresponsible unions and some rusting industry suffering from underinvestment and a feeling from some the country was on its last legs.

But it wasn’t. Where I worked in advertising there was a sense of great creativity and self-belief. We thought anything was possible.

Sure there was a need for change. Britain was still very hard up after the war and there was a need for demolition (of fabric and institutions) and a need for action.

But we’ve never been good at demolition preferring to keep things that are ineffective either to save money or, if they’re broken, in case they turn out to be useful. In a factory I visited in the 1970s I admired brass plaques on machines ponderously clunking and recalled the Japanese kit I’d seen the week before in Germany whirring along busily…. no history, just very efficient and fast.

As for action in the 1970s - most of us didn’t do action. We talked. We wrote. We didn’t do.
Under her, things like the privatisation of British Gas happened and happened breathtakingly fast. So a failing concern became a modern industry.

She made us feel global and different. In this zero sum game she created a climate of doing things.

Like good old Herb Kelleher.

Herb said of Southwest’s new CEO who took over from him:
“I think now probably everybody says, "Wow! He's one heck of a CEO! And who's that old guy with the wrinkles sitting in the balcony?"

It’s interesting that our famous witch and her spell have lingered on, wrinkles and all. That’s partly because we have a need for a similarly spirited assault on flabbiness and indecision today.

Someone whose strategy is to get things done, regardless.

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