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White hell
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Professor Ailsa McKay
In spite of Jill Stephenson’s (14 March) trenchant and well-argued dismissal of the banking fat cats, I suspect that in general our society still values a corrupt banker who earns an obscenely large salary rather more than an unemployed person who looks after children or elderly people, or voluntarily runs the local after-school club.
But why should ‘work’ of the paid variety still be generally regarded as a good thing when all the evidence suggests that there is not enough paid work for those who want it, and that what work is available is often meaningless, degrading, or downright immoral?
I used to think that my entry into a job field was a sort of kiss of death to its value, as whenever I turned up things would change, and old hands would tend to make remarks along the lines of: ‘You should have been here five years ago – it was great then’. After graduating, I became a civil servant dealing with unemployment claims, with a manager who stressed that the first requirement of the job was no more than to act as a servant of the public, and to behave accordingly, even when dealing with the most disadvantaged, difficult or unpleasant individuals. His view was that to understand their circumstances would be to forgive.
Today the job I did then is almost wholly concerned with massaging unemployment statistics or sending geology graduates to work for free in Poundland. I subsequently moved to local government, hoping to contribute to the development of democracy in practice, and found it rapidly developing into a bad parody of the private sector, with an emphasis on providing services on the cheap and massaging the egos of self-absorbed councillors.
I then tried becoming what used to be called a personnel officer, believing that this role was responsible for trying to achieve a best fit between the aspirations of the employee and the needs of the organisation. But it was not long before ‘personnel’ became ‘human resource management’, supposedly concerned with ‘strategic’ issues, but in fact regarding humans as just another resource to be rapidly dispensed with if there was any worry about securing managers’ bonuses or shareholders’ dividends.
I was told by one successful, that is highly paid, HR director that I had clearly failed to understand that the purpose of my role was to become associated with enough ‘strategic’ successes to put on my CV so that I could move rapidly to the next organisation before any blame could attach to my decisions in the previous one. Actually attempting to improve working conditions for non-managers was regarded as pointless, if not directly treacherous to the managerial cadre I was supposed to belong to.
Moving to university education, my experiences of that sector have ranged from at worst, an unapologetic and meretricious credentialism, and at best an obsession with the most logical way to arrange angels, in the form of abstract concepts, on the head of a pin. As one of my fellow labourers in the vineyard of academe used to remark: ‘Sadly, ethics and a decent income are rare bedfellows in our culture’, and academia is now no exception.
I have a sufficiently good memory still to be aware that there has never been a golden age of working life, where meditative yokels leaned on rustic gates watching their peaceful flocks and the like. Business has always been a somewhat grubby affair – Dickens is good for reminding us what ‘Victorian values’ were really like for the average employee of the time; local politics has ever been full of…local politics; pace the arts and crafts movement, manual workers have not all been talented artisans creating things of beauty, some preferring to do a shoddy job and take the cash without a conscience, and academia has always been an environment encouraging of intellectual arrogance and egocentricity.
What does seem to be new these days, however, is the emphasis on money-making (or entrepreneurship as it is cosmetically termed): the idea that being able to charge significant fees for your consultancy advice, as seen in several recent scandals in the NHS and elsewhere, marks you out as a successful person. There is also a consistent emphasis on the importance of management, but in its ‘managerialist’ guise, where the former implies that a manager is paid to add value to the organisation which employs them, and the latter signifies belonging to a cadre of people who batten off the efforts of others while avoiding responsibility when things go wrong.
It’s one thing to complain but what can be done to change the situation? Recently, Professor Ailsa McKay of Glasgow Caledonian University proposed the introduction of what she termed a Citizen’s Basic Income (CBI), a type of universal benefit to be paid to all, regardless of circumstance, while those who were more entrepreneurially-inclined could top it up by their own efforts. Those, however, who preferred to spend their time tending their allotment, looking after children, or simply being a good neighbour, would be rewarded for doing so.
Interestingly, there’s a precedent for this: the Greek historian Herodotus describes city states of his period (5th century BCE) where citizens had to show what they were doing to support the local environment or political decision making in order to claim a share of any local windfall like the discovery of a gold mine. Yes, I know these societies warred with each other, had slavery and restricted women’s autonomy, but they did not claim to be perfect. However, they were sufficiently small for ideas such as a citizen’s basic income to be feasibly trialled.
A small country like an independent Scotland might well be a suitable case for experiment, especially when all the bankers have taken themselves off elsewhere.
