Scotland
in the
heat
John Cameron
For one third of the US workforce, the job-for-life is a fading dream and they operate as freelancers, temps or contingency workers financing their own health care and pension.
These are not just McJobs but include accountants, lawyers, journalists and many others floating from project to project, often cobbling together a living from different sources.
Some do this by choice but most have no choice because firms need to be flexible and lean and it is cheaper to hire staff on a contingency basis than put them on the payroll.
The major downside in America is finding affordable individual health insurance and with no unemployment insurance, freelancers simply cannot afford to be sick.
This is an argument for universal health care and some system of unemployment benefits for all workers but that setting these up in America would be a nightmare.
The phenomenon is spreading across the Atlantic and we need to ensure basic rights for all rather than just defend Europe’s privileged groups or the UK’s public sector.
In my own career I had a basic job-for-life providing a low but reliable income which I supplemented with freelance work to pay school fees and provide a decent pension. It was very stimulating and I worked for all sorts of people including Robert Maxwell who, contrary to posthumous vilification, was an excellent and generous employer.
Yet I wonder what Charles Dickens – who would have been 200-years-old this week – would make of this brave new western world where the clock seems to be turning back. India, China and the rest of the Far East look to be re-taking the lead they had for so long in trade and innovation and even Africa and South America are in the frame.
Of course, the US is perfectly capable of fighting its corner, but Europe, though it has a good past record of rising from the ashes, will have to rethink its welfarism.
The UK in particular needs to change its employment laws and regulations to reflect reality, rather than maintaining the myth of stable employment as the norm.
I suspect that as the public sector shrinks the majority of British workers are going to have to look after themselves a lot more, but at least they can fall back on the NHS.
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The Midgie
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One good reason
why we should not
trust business
Jill Stephenson
The fight back has started. Individuals from business and finance are speaking publicly – in the wake of the recent bonus controversies – about this being a country that is hostile to business. They should look around to see why people are hostile to some businesses: ‘payday loan’ companies fleecing the poorest of our citizens, surgical clinics closing down after the breast implant scandal and then reappearing in a new identity, and a broad range of public services under renewed pressure to conduct themselves as businesses.
Indicative of this is the inclusion of responsibility for universities in the brief of the secretary of state for business, innovation and skills. Rather than being hostile to business, it often looks as if this is a business-obsessed country (and world).
Let’s take one of the businesses that has behaved disreputably recently, namely the breast implant business. On the one side, it is about self-esteem (‘vanity’, as an implanted woman on TV put it, describing her own motive), on the other side it is about making money. Thus it’s a transaction, and an expensive one: it is not a medical issue, until it goes wrong.
It’s easy to understand unscrupulous surgeons setting up businesses that do their best to persuade women that they should be unhappy with their shape and that they should spend a few thousand pounds (that they probably don’t have) on ‘enhancement’. There’s a weasel word. I once was asked to serve on a panel for an ‘Enhancement-led Institutional Review’. Happily, there was a timetable clash with my other commitments (including teaching), and so I never found out what that piece of managerialese meant.
The breast implant scandal has raised a number of issues. One is whether the NHS should be responsible for removing, and even for replacing, the shoddy PIP implants that were inserted into women’s bodies to assuage their vanity and to make a profit for the unscrupulous. There is a small number of women, perhaps 3,000 out of a total of 40,000, who had these implants inserted as part of their reconstruction after surgery for breast cancer. I can’t imagine that anyone would suggest denying them a replacement on the NHS. But the vast majority of the women with shoddy implants underwent this pretty horrifying procedure for purely cosmetic reasons. Is the NHS responsible for them?
My gut response would be no. They brought this upon themselves, by gullibly putting themselves in the hands of the type of surgeon and clinic that clearly have no moral scruples whatsoever. They were able to raise the money for the procedure. Of course the clinics and surgeons who performed their procedures with substandard implants should either remove and replace them or fully reimburse them so that they can have someone more fastidious remove and replace them. But, on the hand, I was moved by the matter-of-fact tale told by a young woman on TV who said that her implants were leaking and had leaked into her lymph nodes. Surely it is imperative that she be treated with all expedition, which probably means by the NHS, given the wrangling goings-on to try to get clinics to do the decent thing.
I am less impressed by those who argue that ‘the government’ should take responsibility because there should have been stronger regulation in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening. I’m not sure that governments could have foreseen the kind of chicanery involved in this case, and I can’t see that governments or the NHS should be expected to clear up private companies’ messes as a matter of principle.
Some of the women I have heard speaking on radio or TV think that, because they have paid so much for this, someone else should pick up the pieces. The only people who should do that are those responsible for the scandal. But it seems that some of the businesses involved have closed down – only to reopen in a new guise, denying all responsibility for their former selves. There must surely be a way of going after these people. If that is what ‘business’ does, it does not say much for it.
The consequences of getting into the implant culture (if that’s the word)
can clearly be dire, especially when women are persuaded that they
should have even more delicate parts of their body re-engineered.
The real question, though, is: why have so many women felt the need to raise a few thousand pounds to have foreign bodies implanted in them? It is clear that this is not by any means the preserve of the rich, vain and idle. It is not merely ‘celebrities’ and the wives of rich businessmen who have resorted to this kind of mutilation, but also ordinary women for whom finding, say, £5,000 for an operation has been a struggle. Some of the women say that they were depressed because of the inadequacy of their breasts. Except that, much of the time, they refer to their ‘boobs’. I really detest this usage. It is not a matter of fastidiousness: I am quite happy with ‘tits’. But to my generation a ‘boob’ was a silly mistake, and referring to an important part of one’s body as ‘boobs’ sounds ineffably ugly and vulgar.
Depression about inadequate breasts seems rooted in a belief that ‘I didn’t feel like a real woman’, or ‘I wasn’t a proper woman’. How on earth do women get ideas like that? Do they have boyfriends or husbands who complain? Are these men teased by their friends about having a flat-chested partner? Do these men not have sufficient regard for the woman of their choice to accept her as she is? Or perhaps the men are not entirely to blame.
We live, after all, in an environment where near-naked bodies are on show much of the time. Did we not recently hear the editor of the Sun tell the Leveson inquiry that ‘page 3 girls’ were something to be proud of, with their natural beauty? It would be interesting to know how many ‘page 3 girls’ had had their assets cosmetically re-engineered. But if they are allegedly a gold standard to be aspired to, I can see why some men hanker after their pneumatic charms and some women despair. I never thought I’d say this, but perhaps Mrs Mary Whitehouse was right – about ‘page 3 girls’, anyway.
The flaunting of so many apparently perfect female bodies – those little girls in pop videos, for example – probably does make ordinary women feel less than adequate. Those of us with middle-aged (by the recent definition in SR) spread either fret or simply contentedly accept that we are not in competition with these people. But younger women just fret. I was surprised, and not in a good way, to find that quite a number of women who have had implants are very young, around 21. Some are in their 40s, when the sag has set in, but it seems so sad that young women and girls are so disgusted with their own image that they resort to expensive mutilation – and probably get into debt in the process.
Perhaps the Scottish Government (we used to call it the Scottish Executive) should, in one of its periodic intrusions into people’s personal lives and habits, launch an education campaign to persuade women that, as long as they are neither too fat nor too thin, they should be content with their body shape. The consequences of getting into the implant culture (if that’s the word) can clearly be dire, especially when women are persuaded that they should have even more delicate parts of their body re-engineered.
So to those who complain that we are treating business with hostility, I would say: ‘Look at the kinds of thing that are perpetrated by profit-making businesses in this country and tell me that there aren’t businesses that should clean up their act’. That, of course, is before we even start on the businessmen who squirrel away their profits in offshore accounts.
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
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