Current Fashions In Interviews

I have commented before about how there are fashions in interviews:
http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/in-interviews-say-as-little-as-possible.html
http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/interviews-you-are-weakest-link-goodbye.html and my recommendations for running interviews effectively: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/rooksmoors-guide-to-conducting-job.html  Looking back over these old postings has reminded me of how much fashions in interviewing have changed over the past 3 years. Who changes these fashions and where you can find out about them, remains a mystery to me. I guess you need to subscribe to some human resources journal to find out what is now required. The woman who lived in my house used to be sent the latest style of CV by her sister who appears to have had a supplier of these. I wonder why there are so many changes so frequently. To some degree I guess it is to keep human resources people in work or to make sifting out applicants easier. As yet I have to encounter a human resources department which is not over-staffed or one that is busy. Given that entire departments at two companies I have worked for take a whole day off not leaving even one person to answer the phones and that at least one had enough time to specifically write to the Department of Work and Pensions to try to get my benefits stopped, they clearly have a lot of time on their hands.

Certainly one thing they do not do is communicate what they have changed to other departments. The most disheartening thing, when you have followed every instruction to the letter to be told by the interviewers ‘well that’s not how we used to do it’ and ‘you must have got it wrong’. You are blamed for them not being updated that now applications come on this form or are sent to this person. I know blame-shifting is second nature these days, but to blame the poor applicant for a lack of communication within your company is terribly mean spirited.

Thus, having applied for 39 jobs since the start of June and having attended 14 interviews, with 2 more scheduled, I thought I would alert you to new trends in recruitment for the Autumn 2012 employment season in case you are out there trying to get a job.

The first thing is the deterioration of online application systems. About 90% of the jobs I apply for, I apply through an online system. This means I have to set up an account with them. I must be on fifty different companies systems now even if I have just applied for one job. In some cases this can be an advantage as I do not have to type in how many ‘O’ levels I got in 1983 again and again. I am always astounded how much information they want which is utterly irrelevant to the job. Does it really matter if I got an ‘A’ or a ‘B’ for O Level Chemistry in 1983? I am not applying to be a chemist. I suppose it helps with the filtering. I guess this is the reason why you have to list what school you attended and where, so they can simply bin those who did not go to Eton or one of its equivalents.

The problem is that these systems are unstable. They can lose everything you have written in an instant. They can suddenly deny you access to certain pages. Contacting the company whose website you are applying through is useless. They only see it from their side and so do not see the buttons missing for people coming from the public side. I had to abandon one application because there was no way I could register for an account, only people who already registered could get in. I emailed the company which sent me a link back to the page which was missing the registration button, telling me it was there. Again I am portrayed as the stupid one. Of course, a lot of companies simply buy in these systems without checking if they work or are suitable. I have mentioned before how you get 2000 characters to respond to 25 job requirements, working out at something like only 380 words. For one company I could not fit my response in the box they provided and asked what the character limit was for it and they said they did not know. Conversely, I have been given 5000 characters to write my nine character national insurance number into and 2000 characters to write ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the question about whether I had a right to work in the UK. Some employees are aware how bad their systems are to the extent that I have now learnt their names and simply email my application to them rather than trying to wrestle with the system. 

One element which has certainly been around for the last five years if not longer is the fact that if you cannot match every single one of the characteristics listed on the job specification, do not bother applying for the job.  Often if you say you have not used Software Package X but are very experienced in Software Package Y, which in my sector tends to be far more up-to-date than X, your application is often rejected even before it is seen by a human.  The trouble with this matching every requirement, typically 20-30, is that you can never progress.  You are only interviewed for jobs that you have entirely done before.  There is no ability to step up a level.  This is contrary to the long standing trend in the UK going back probably two centuries, that you moved job to climb to a higher position, something in contrast to Japan for example.  To progress you must pay to go on training courses and get certification yourself and in your own time, without support from your company even if they benefit from you doing this.  Being unemployed I do have the time but not the money to go on such training.  As a consequence my career having peaked in 2010 is now on a downward trajectory as some of the skills I have become obsolete, I cannot apply for as wide a range of jobs as I could have done two years ago.  People tell you that it is your job that becomes redundant not you as a person, but actually in the UK today, that is not the case.

Both salaries and leave are falling.  Jobs I held back in 2005 are now paying £5,000 per year less now than then, despite the sharp rise in the cost of living since then; petrol is twice the price per litre that it was in 2005.  Interestingly pay rates for the same jobs at different companies have now become incredibly varied.  I have seen everything from £27,000 to £44,000 per year for an identical post in different companies.  The most leave I have ever had in a job was 38 days and the average has been 33, but many jobs are now offering only 20 days.  The number of job specifications which state 'must be flexible as to hours' which in its poorly phrased way suggests that you will be expected often to come in early and work late or at weekends.  Clearly despite falling salaries companies want to squeeze more work out of each worker.  As discussed below, this is aided by new technologies which mean you are expected never to be free of the office.  The other thing is 'must be able to work under pressure and to tight deadlines'.  To me, any office especially one which is not associated with the media, where there is constant pressure and tight deadlines is a highly disorganised and inefficient office.  In addition, this requirement contradicts the many others about you being able to organise well, manage your time and prioritise effectively.  Consequently it suggests that the company expects bosses to suddenly spring work on you and expect you to do it for them.  I suppose that with so many attitudes in the UK returning to the 1950s we should not be surprised at this.  However, it hardly suggests working practices that are going to make British industry competitive.  The 1950s were the time when efficiency in British business slid fastest despite the growing prosperity not only in Britain but across Europe and in Japan and North America.

The length of time vacancies are advertised has been reduced with some being taken down within a few days of being advertised.  I imagine that is to reduce the number of applicants.  On a number of occasions jobs I have applied for have got back to me to say that the decision has been delayed by some weeks or the interview arranged for a date two months into the future.  Also vacancies have disappeared usually because the funding has been withdrawn.  I have found that there is absolutely no point in asking about these vacancies and certainly not to point out that you spent a lot of time applying for the post.  In my field it generally takes 8 hours and 5000 words to apply for a position.  The Job Centre presses you to chase up employers you have not heard from.  However, these vacancies which ultimately never have an interview and effectively, disappear, are treated by companies as a particular case.  Often their disappearance is the result of funding changes or difficulties or changes in policy so to respond to queries about the vacancies going is embarrassing to companies to the extent that they can be hostile to queries about them. This is added to the fact that they know they have wasted money in advertising the post and even beginning to analyse applications.  I have learnt it is better to fob off the Job Centre with an excuse which is probably close to what actually happened even if the company would not say it, e.g. that the funding for the post was reallocated and they decided not proceed with the vacancy and hope that the Job Centre staff do not insist on written proof of that supposition.

The other thing that has been reduced is the length of time in which you are notified of an interview.  Back in 2009 when I was invited to an interview 2 days later I was quite surprised but this is now the norm.  I rarely get even a week's notice.  The shortest notification was at 15.15 for an interview at 14.30 the following day, so less than 24 hours.  What made it worse was that the email giving me this information did not actually arrive in my In-box until 22.30, leading to me going to bed immediately.  Fortunately it turned out that the administrator has her work emails going to her smartphone day and night and she texted me back that night to say she had received my message.  I have not been able to afford a smartphone, but it is clear employers are now expecting you to be accessible via email even well outside office hours.  The thing about such short notice of interviews is that it discriminates against anyone with caring commitments.  In addition, it discriminates against people already in a job but looking to move.  Employers still prefer to employ someone currently working rather than someone unemployed, yet there is no way that you can book leave for the following day.  Thus, this approach clearly contradicts the actual attitudes of the companies with no real benefit in my view and in fact preventing many good candidates from attending the interview.

One thing which has certainly appeared in the past year is the need to prove your identity when you arrive at an interview.  The UK has stepped away from identity cards more than once in recent years, but these days to get a job, because of the immigration regulations, you have to constantly prove your identity.  All the markings on my passport have worn off as I have had to use it so often.  I cannot remember when I last travelled abroad, perhaps four years ago, so effectively my passport is no longer used for foreign travel, it is simply my UK identity card.  Mine has expired but I lack the funds to renew it and do not know anyone suitable to sign the photographs.  As yet I have not been challenged for using an out-of-date passport, but I know soon someone will say that they cannot be certain whether I am still British and will bar me from a job on that basis.  I do not know how anyone can claim that immigrants are taking British jobs because the nationality proof requirements are so stringent even if you want to attend an interview let alone actually get the job.  Of course, bigots exclaim loudest from positions of ignorance.

There are some interview trends that I am happy to see have apparently died.  From about 2003 up until last year 95% of the interviews I attended, somewhere around 80, insisted that you did a PowerPoint presentation.  Now, I became very adept at these.  Though some people complained my slides were too plain and lacked decoration, most welcomed their clarity.  The key problem was that in so many cases the interview panel could not operate the equipment.  On a number of occasions the interview was postponed by 1 hour whilst the technical staff were fetched.  On other occasions, I simply had to hold up print-outs of the slides I had produced.  This year interviewers have turned right around and say there will be no facilities for such presentations and you should not bring them.  The new fashion is 'initiating a discussion' on a particular theme.  I quite enjoy this approach.  The key difficulty is not being able to gauge how long to speak for.  This is the same with the responses to questions, you want to appear knowledgeable but not exceed the time the questioner has in their head for what is an appropriate answer.  The tolerated duration varies between the different members of the panel and bears no relevance to the length or complexity of the question asked nor to whether one question was asked or four were asked wrapped up to appear as a single question.

Another trend that I am glad to have seen the death of, is the requirement to bring along a copy of every single qualification you have ever received.  This never seemed to have any point for me as you cannot get 'A' Levels unless you have done GCSEs (or if you are as old as me, 'O' Levels) and you cannot get a degree unless you have 'A' Levels or some equivalent.  So each level effectively renders the previous one obsolete.  In the case of specific skills, such as have you studied French to 'A' Level when you did a degree in Financial Management is a fair thing to ask if appropriate for the job, but up until last year it was every single scrap of paper accumulated since I was aged 13.  Now about 20% of the interviews I have attended ask for qualification certificates and in every case only the highest.  However, you do still get asked about your competency in English, in fact, this is asked more than before, I think as adjunct to the immigration scrutiny.  I suppose also given how poor spelling and grammar is among young people today it is a fair point even for those with a degree, but to someone of my age it seems a bit silly.

A less common fashion is a revival of what I call the 'civil service' style.  I have had tens of appalling interviews in my career but one that sticks out in my mind was with what was then the Department of Employment in 1993 for a job in a Job Centre.  The lead interviewer held up a piece of paper in front of her face and simply read in a very mechanical tone a list of questions that all started with 'give us an example of ...'  I suppose you could say it was a very fair process, it was pretty much like being interviewed by a computer.  Two interviews I have had recently have used this style.  They have a list of 'competencies' and expect you to give an example which shows that you can do all of them.  They do this in addition to a normal interview.  Now, such requirements are standard on job specifications but they are not often checked in this mechanical way.  A challenge is that they often include a range of different aspects.  The classic one which I see on about 80% of job specifications is 'must be a team worker but also be able to work on your own initiative'.  Now this is one requirement yet responding to it you have to show skills that are in fact in the opposite direction.  Unsurprisingly the interviews at such companies using this competency approach constantly over-run as it is difficult to get through 20 competencies, a typical number in 30 minutes.  The last one I attended started 45 minutes late and rather than the 30 minutes I had been assigned mine ran to 45 minutes, adding a further 15 minutes to the delay for the next candidate.  Many interview panels simply pick a duration at random and do not make any effort to judge whether the number of questions and reasonable answers to these will fit into the time they have assigned.  It happens both ways.  At an interview due to last 1 hour we found it was all over after 40 minutes with all the questions thoroughly answered.

Two interviews on the same day with different panels is a fashion which, whilst not common, still seems to be around.  I have no real problem with this approach though often you find yourself repeating things to the second panel you said just moments before to the first panel.  The first panel is often in a rush as they are conscious of over-running, first because in two-panel interviews each session is shorter than a standard single panel interview and second because they are conscious that any delay at their end with impact on the scheduling for the second panel.

In my sector, something which has gone through a big revival is the activity test.  Sometimes these are cognitive analysis exercises.  However, they are generally purchased from generic business suppliers and in my position are not always suited to the jobs I do, particularly in the case of the level of proof which is required to make a judgement.  Most, however, consist of summarising a document or producing a policy briefing based on it.  Generally these are fine, though you need to learn to move fast to set up a strange computer to how you do things, especially if you are left-handed.  Some companies give you all the company documentation relevant to the task as if you had time to read it.  These are internal handbooks and guidelines not accessible outside the company.  Thus, whenever I am given so much documentation which could not be processed in the 30 minutes always assigned for the task, I know an internal candidate is favoured or in fact, as with so many aspects of interviewing, the panel have thought it a good idea to set a test but have not thought through how long it will take or what in fact it is supposed to be demonstrating.

I must say that employers are getting better at letting you know if you have not got the job.  A couple of years ago you simply heard nothing, but these days they send an email, sometimes telephone and in one case actually sent me a rejection letter.  I think they have realised that in a time of high unemployment, they get people ringing and ringing to find out what has happened, something we are strongly encouraged to do by the Job Centre.  Though they loath having to send out rejection messages, companies have learnt that it ultimately saves time fielding calls from concerned applicants.  Only two of the 14 companies have offered feedback on my interviews.  About a third have either ignored requests for it or have refused to give it citing confidentiality of the interview process.  Some of the feedback is useless, wheeling out the set phrase 'another candidate better matched the job description' which suggests they cannot really articulate what I did right or wrong because that judgement could easily have been made from the application form alone.  The number of companies paying interview expenses has fallen to about 1 in 3.  The rates have remained the same which means you are worse off with rising petrol prices.  The level varies quite considerably.  Having attended interviews at companies which lie less than 7 Km apart I received £35 to drive to one but £90 to drive to the other.  Of course, even with the rise in petrol costs, driving can be up to four times cheaper than travelling by train to the interview and as companies often do not pay beyond the main journey you are often stuck walking kilometres from the station or having to ride the back streets and housing estates on a local bus, assuming you can find the right one.

My concern in all of this is that British companies have still not found interview methods which provide them with the staff they actually need rather than what they think they need.  I am hearing of too many companies not being able to fill vacancies which in a time of high unemployment is very strange.  It seems to come from them setting job specifications that cover so many different skills that you need an individual who has had three or four different careers to be able to fulfil them.  In addition, the interview process is often so poor that the company does not know whether they have got a suitable person or not so err on the side of caution.  They have no willingness, however, to train or develop staff, so when they cannot find the people with 100% of the skills they want down to a very specific level, they would rather go without.  This leaves more work to fall on the existing staff increasing inefficiency.   You can do well with someone who has 90% or even 80% of the skills and they will like being able to expand into new areas rather than feeling they are trapped in a job which is identical to all the ones they have done before.  Companies also really need to reflect on what they actually need the person to do in the job rather than pile up a whole list of dream requirements that apparently make the company seem dynamic but actually make it appear poorly run.  They also need to give people time to apply for jobs and to arrange to attend interviews.  By using a 'just in time' approach to interviewing they actually exclude a lot of candidates who in fact may be the best they would get.  As with so much in British business, we need to move away from 'seems' being the driver for so much behaviour to approaches based on the actuality.

Facing Pride And Prejudice

Facing the repossession of our house, myself and the woman who lived there plus her ten-year old son initially sought to move to rent another house nearby, partially so that we did not have to have the chickens slaughtered and the boy could go to the same secondary school next year as he had intended to attend; the end of September being the deadline for applications to enter the competition for secondary schools. As I have noted before, in our town there are ten secondary schools, but five of them he could not apply for being either the wrong gender, the wrong religion or he had already been ruled out from attending on the grounds his teacher’s felt he would not pass the 11+ Examination. However, we soon found that because we had defaulted on paying our mortgage, we now have a black mark on our credit rating for the next six years, by which time I will be 50, so barring us from renting a house or in fact any other property, via a letting agency. We must now only rent property from a private landlord/lady who does not do a credit check.

With a seven-year waiting list for social housing in our town even for a woman with a primary school aged child, the options seemed to be living on the street or going to live with our families. Of our relatives only my parents and the woman’s sister live in this country. If my parents or her sister had managed to emigrate to Australia as they planned, then I would now be living in a tent illegally camped on common land and the woman and boy, I have no idea where. It is incredible how quickly in the UK you can go from having a house and a job, to having nothing and either being homeless or begging people for a bed. Hence the title of this posting. I have mentioned before how people now see the period of the British welfare state, of approximately 1948-82 as being anomalous. The ‘norm’ is what we are experiencing now. If you have work you may still need to ask for charity, just look at the number of people in employment getting food parcels from the Trussell Trust and other such charities. If you lose your job, depending on where you live, you may become homeless or be put up in a bed and breakfast room. There are apparently some council houses and flats left but personally I only know one couple who have managed to get one and they did that over a decade ago now.

Thus, people end up living with their families. The number of middle-aged people who, like me, with no other option, have gone to live with their parents once more is so much that it was warranted a feature in ‘The Guardian’. I have gone from being a renter and then an owner of a three-bedroomed house to living in a square room which is only 10cm longer along any wall than I am tall. Since the start of June alone, I have applied for 39 posts and have attended 13 interviews. I was offered a job which I accepted 8 weeks ago. Unfortunately I picked on someone to write a reference who went on holiday for 5 weeks so delaying the start date of my job which is still ten days away. I have been told that the work for me is piling up, but because of the precision required around references I am not able to start the job and begin reducing it. Apparently two of the three referees I had to provide have not been able to give the exact dates on which I started and left my employment, in one case going back to 2005; there is an issue about whether I started one job on the 1st or the 10th of a particular month. Due to this need for precision I am in this weird limbo of ‘having a job’ but not actually being employed. I guess people on zero-hour contract, i.e. with no assigned hours each week but required to be constantly available on call, can understand that previously anomalous, but now entirely acceptable position. I am still signing on unemployed while I wait for this situation to be resolved.

So I am living with my parents. Naturally I feel as if the last 26 years have been an utter failure. I am in fact worse off than when I left home to go to university at the age of 18. It is as if nothing that happened in the meantime ever amounted to anything. Mentally this is hard to deal with, but I am repeatedly told that I should not mention feeling down or confused, or any of the natural emotions losing your house and job throw up. The other thing I have stepped into a play of manners. The woman from my house is suffering it even more. When you are unemployed let alone when you are homeless, people feel that they are obliged to tell you how to live your life. Clearly everything you have ever decided to do, every decision or effort you made was wrong, it has been proven to be the case. This means that any opinion you hold is wrong and must not be expressed as it is illegitimate. Family members keep telling us how wrong we are. Any suggestions about improving our situations are dismissed as wrong or delusional and yet we are told that we are feckless, lazy, not applying ourselves. We are illegitimate and even if we accept that, it does not stop us being told many times per day that we are ‘wrong’. The criticism does not just stretch to work or economic issues but to everything. The woman from my house was questioned at length because she happened to kiss her former boyfriend when she met him, something her sister happened to witness. She was harangued when she mentioned in passing that she would like to buy a DVD of a particular series in the future. There is a sense that we should not even discuss or think about these things, these are not for the likes of us. 

As you see in dramatisations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels the family members seem to take delight in correcting us.  On one hand they feel a very heavy duty to correct us but also appear to get a pleasure or at least some contentment from doing it.  It is as if, because we failed to remain in work and keep our house, we must be doing things wrong right through our lives down to where we sit in the house, where we put glasses, how we communicate with other people and even how happy we are.  I am constantly being told off for looking 'too sad' as if given that after months of bullying and the collapse of the life I had I must be able to put all that behind me immediately and march boldly forwards without any feelings if something reminds me of better times, typically something I did with the woman and boy from my house.  Seeing 'Dr. Who' listed in the newspaper was painful as it was a programme that I would watch and discuss with the 10-year old and now I will never do that again.  It is not a bereavement or even a divorce but it feels incredibly close to those things and yet I have to keep on apologising for those feelings as they are 'inappropriate' in my current setting.

Since I lost my last job, I have increasingly felt as if I have become a species apart from other people. They can go into shops, they can think about a new car or a holiday even. I am not even allowed to discuss buying a DVD. Advertising now seems like something in an alien language. There is no point watching any of it, because even if there is something I can afford, if I bought it, it would be ‘wrong’. It is as if I have slipped through a membrane and whilst I slide through consumer society, I cannot touch or interact with it. Given my age, it is apparent that I will never likely touch it again. No house means no way to fund my care when I am elderly. For the first time I have begun to understand the rioters of last summer. You feel no qualms about damaging things from this other world that you are barred from. To think otherwise is equivalent to those who ran the Apollo space missions suddenly feeling guilty about damaging the Moon by landing men on it. It is that removed from my life now. This is why politicians fumble around for some explanation of what went on and simply blame whatever they want to criticise. If you can alienate a 44-year old, well-educated man from society, how are you going to hold on for those who had a lot less going for them and would envy the kind of life I have led up until now.

My father has not policed who I might kiss, but he has opinions on everything and seeks to put his nose into every corner. I was trying to speed up the references I was waiting for. My approach to writing an email to one of the referees actually worked out better than I had anticipated. However, it was not the way my father would have written it so I had to stand there why he shouted at me how much of an idiot I was and how naïve and foolish I was to think that was the right way to do things. My way succeeded, but because I am now categorised as being ‘wrong’ it still needed me to be abused. Talking to the Job Centre, he stands nearby tsking and criticising every response I give. I am caught between answering the demanding questions in a way that I think my father will approve of. I can never be ‘right’ even when my decisions are shown to be correct.

The fact that we are receiving charity means that every aspect of our behaviour can be policed. We have to be seen to be deserving of help. This is achieved by looking for jobs, not just any jobs, but the ones which our family feel we must get. If we do not get them, or in my case, not start them soon enough, then it is our fault. It is not because unemployment is too high or I am too old or too qualified or all the other excuses companies give me for not employing me. Whatever stops me and even more the woman from my house, in getting back into work is purely and simply our fault and we need to be lectured at length about it. We are incredibly grateful for the help we received knowing we would be on the streets otherwise, but the price demanded is impossible to pay, it is a thirst for indignation directed at us that can never be sated. It is not helped by the myths that these people believe in which I have highlighted before, the most common, ‘how come you cannot get council housing, all these immigrants turn up in Britain and get given a three-bedroomed house for nothing’. This is not true but they would rather believe the ‘Daily Mail’ than the actual responses you have got from councils and benefit bodies.

Another aspect is the house rules. I have mentioned before, the challenge of being a lodger. You will always fail unless you can precisely read the mind of the homeowner. The rules are immense, down to where you can put a glass, the amount of food you can eat, when even down to what demeanour you must have and what you can talk about in the house. Any violation leads to another round of haranguing, because if you have put a cup out of place then it shows once more how useless, feckless, lazy you are and you must be alerted to and lectured about that. It is exhausting but clearly satisfies some need in the charity-givers psyche. This has shown me why, as Francis Beckett highlighted in ‘Clem Attlee’ (1994), Attlee disliked charity and insisted that the state should dispassionately give assistance to those in need. The direct giving of charity, unmoderated by organisations, is acidic to the souls of both the giver and the receiver. Of course, this is something that Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and those other writers who so effectively wrote about our times feature in their novels. The mid-20th century anomaly is over and I suppose as I find myself facing ‘Hard Times’ I guess tolerate a lack of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and simply cope with the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and pray that I can get a job and rent somewhere to be away from here.

The Myth Of Benefits

It was not long after I had started working in offices, even for comparatively small companies, that I came across what I think of as the 'Holy Grail Syndrome'. There may be some official term for it, but that is the one I use. Basically it is a belief that is widespread across a company and held very strongly that some handbook or piece of software exists that contains regulations, guidance or some facility that you need to solve some common problem in the company. I have held down over 16 jobs in the past 25 years and have encountered this view in almost every single one. Of course, if you ask where this handbook is or where you can download or install the software from, no-one knows, but they would swear that someone knows, you just have to ask. The trouble is, once you have asked around and found that no such thing exists and so the problem you have encountered cannot be solved by this non-existent thing, then you encounter hostility. The response is that you must be useless or stupid not to have been able to locate the item or have simply not spoken to the right people. The faith in the item exceeds faith in your abilities and so your reputation suffers. In the end you have to simply put up with the problem the way everyone else has done up until then or look a complete idiot and/or lazy. I thought encountering this attitude once or twice was just coincidence but have now found it so prevalent that it seems inherent in a range of British workplaces. I wonder if readers from elsewhere have found it in their country too or if it is confined to the particular attitudes of the UK.



Now I am unemployed once more and on the slippery slope yet again to having my house repossessed I have encountered a very similar situation in regard to benefits paid by the government. I have had very good moral and financial support from my family as has the woman who lives in my house and shares the mortgage with me. Her business is in meltdown given the economic climate, another complicating factor I will come to in a minute. Anyway, the hardest thing to deal with after the lack of money, having no job and about to lose our house, is how repeatedly friends and family keep saying 'I cannot understand why you cannot get benefits to pay for this stuff' and then followed up with 'have you asked?' and then 'you can't have asked properly/in the right way'. Then you get 'in the papers you read about these people get hundreds/thousands of pounds and you are more deserving than them, why can't you get this money?'. So it goes on. We are made to appear as if we are lazy or clueless because we cannot get the funds that everyone knows that other people are getting.



I have worked in a job centre and I know how hard it is to sign on to get benefits and how rigorous the checks are on people. As someone who has been unemployed more than he has been in work in the past three years, I have also seen it from the consumers' side too. I have noted before, how if there are doubts about the way your job ended, even if you were made redundant, this can delay or eliminate your ability to even claim the basic Jobseekers' Allowance: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/oh-your-job-didnt-end-in-correct-way.html This has happened this time round. First my claim was delayed by over five weeks while they Department for Work and Pensions tried to work out why the woman in my house could be working 16-20 hours and ending the week with less money than she started. These days they assume everyone gets paid minimum wage for every hour they work. However, this does not apply if you run your own business. As prices have been slashed she is now in a situation where competitors are selling at below the price she paid for her stock, so when she sells it, it is at a loss. She has been told she cannot wind up the business because that would be making herself deliberately unemployed which would bar her and me from benefits and yet she is not losing enough to be declared bankrupt. Every week I have to fill in an inappropriate form for her saying how many hours she has worked and when she will be paid by her 'employer' and how much tax she has paid, assuming she is on PAYE (Pay As You Earn) rather than Self-Assessed Tax. The net pay these days is generally a negative number. There is no form available if you have someone who is self-employed in the house, but you still have to show how their 'income' impacts on the household budget, week-after-week. Of course, there is no government pay to plug a loss.



After the situation of the woman in my house was sorted out I received backdated benefit of £70 (€88.20; US$108.50) which does not cover the food and utility bills but is something. It also opens up the door to other benefits, notably reducing the council tax to 20% of the usual charge, once we have filled in the relevant six-page document from the council, and after 13 weeks of unemployment, the interest, not the capital, on the mortgage will be paid. However, by the time that comes around we will have lost the house as we are already defaulting on the mortgage. One month's default puts a black mark on the credit rating of everyone in the house for six years, even if they are not named on the mortgage (I had a friend who was affected by his father's bad credit rating years after he had left home); by the second month's default they move to repossession, on the third month's there is no way back. So, I thought, great, despite the complexity of the business situation, I could at least get some money. Then what happens? My previous company, the one that discriminated against me and treated me in such an appalling way, decided that it had not hammered me enought and wrote the Department of Work and Pensions to say that I had left my job in an inappropriate way. I had made great efforts to secure accurate letters outlining what had happened so that I would be acceptable to the government and then I find the vindictive staff have decided to try to reverse this and so get me barred from benefits for six months. Once the Jobseeker's Allowance is taken back the other benefits fall down like a house of cards even down to the boy who lives in my house being disallowed from getting school meals.



Of course, this is not the picture which is painted in the media. You only have to walk into a supermarket to see the right-wing newspapers, notably 'The Daily Mail' screaming about 'dole cheats'; people having multiple children to earn benefits or being foreigners and qualifying immediately for payments and people working and getting paid benefits paid unchallenged. I have seen how hard it is from both the civil servants' side and the claimants' side. I have seen the anti-fraud teams setting out from job centres to catch the genuine criminals who tend to be men running cleaning, building or agricultural businesses who organise for their workers to claim so they can reduce their pay. I know how whenever I go to a job interview or go into a benefit office or even to the bank, I have to produce a current British passport as if identity cards have been introduced by the back door. Even if you manage to fool the job centre, what do you get? I was receiving £70 per week and a couple could get £111 as if the second adult is expected to eat a fraction of what the first one does. You could get more from stealing a mobile phone from someone let alone their bicycle.



The constant stories about people getting so much money out of the state makes it impossible for anyone receiving the standard benefit payments let alone people like me, who because of complex issues, regulations and the malice of employers, cannot even get that. Family and friends believe it is so easy to get this money that I should be able to pay the mortgage and other bills, when in fact I am battling to get even the money to pay for food and it now seems that even that has been choked off. The sensational headlines pander to the prejudices of readers and sell more newspapers, but they make it even harder to claim benefits , which is part of the reason billions of pounds remain unclaimed. I think this is partly a drive to benefit employers by encouraging people to take any low paid job going, even those below minimum wage. The woman in my house is trained in catering and a woman who range a catering service offered her a job, saying she could set her own pay level. The woman from my house did, asking for £10 per hour and then reducing it to £7.50 per hour for a ten hour day. The caterer laid her off after that day, expressing anger that the woman from my house did not ask for pay below the minimum wage, even though to pay it was illegal.



There are people who manipulate the system, but the extent and the severity of it is far, far less than the myths that are peddled by the newspapers. By lying in this way, they hurt ordinary people, trying to get the low levels of benefit they are entitled to and allow family, friends and even random strangers to harangue those of us who are trying to hard to get what we are entitled to, let alone need. When you have no job accusations of laziness or lacking knowledge are hard enough to deal with, without this extra layer of stress being rained down on you by those who should be most supportive.

How Redundancy Became A Dirty Word Once More

I remember during the last depression in the British economy in the 1980s when redundancy became commonplace, even for people in what had previously seemed ‘jobs for life’ that there remained an attitude ingrained from the 1950s and 1960s that people were made redundant as a result of something they had done wrong. I guess in middle class professions the attitude was perhaps even older because in the 1930s when mass unemployment first really hit national consciousness it was often very regionally and sectorally focused on heavy industries in northern England, Scotland and South Wales, whereas much of the Midlands and the South and new more technological and service sector industries did not suffer nearly so much. My father was only made redundant once in a career which lasted about 43 years and that was at an age when he was entitled to early retirement. My mother was never laid off, but that was because she was a nurse and it has only been in recent years that nurses have been unable to find work very easily.



Going back to the 1980s, my father had a friend he had known since childhood, who worked in the construction industry. I still remember the sticker he had in the back of his car which said ‘Don’t Nationalise Building’ and had a picture of a pair of hands one holding a brick and one a mortar trowel, locked together with handcuffs. The whole campaign these days somehow seems as alien as something that might have been run in East Germany at the time. Anyway, he was made redundant as happened to millions of middle aged family men in the 1980s alongside all sorts of people. I remember being told that his mother was so ashamed that he had been made redundant that she would not talk about it. She could no disassociate being laid off because the company had closed down or was ‘downsizing’ from being sacked for improper behaviour or laziness. Though it was her son, she could not shake the sense that he had done something wrong to be without work. I never found out if she changed her attitudes. My father advised his friend to train in computers which were just coming in on a large scale at the time. The friend took the advice and in his next job avoided further redundancy because of the skills he had and was able to continue working to a profitable retirement.



In my career which has spanned 20 years this year, I have been made redundant three times. In addition, for much of the time I have been on fixed term contracts, which whilst being set up that way have pretty much the same effect when they come to an end, especially if you are uncertain if the contract is going to be renewed or not, something you are usually only told late on. The similarity of the end of such contracts to redundancy is why in the UK since 2002 companies have had to pay redundancy pay if they do not renew the contract of a worker on a contract of 2 years or more. In addition, if the person has been on contracts for 4 years they have to be moved to a permanent contract. This was because previously there were cases of workers on contracts for 12 years with no security. While it might seem the same in terms of pay and condition, that threat of your job coming to an end through no fault of your own does prey on your mind and reduces your productivity.



Anyway, redundancy has been a fact of working life for at least thirty years and in certain industries it has been incredibly common. Now, always on the lookout for a new job, especially as I always seem to end up with the most appalling managers and working far from home, I subscribe to online services such as Monster and LinkedIn. As well as the job searching, CV listing and networking facilities these sites often send you articles about work. Many of these seem to be influenced by US tendencies, which Americans appear to believe are universal, at least for their English-speaking cousins. However, some of them appear to be quite comic to British readers especially when it comes to the precision about matters of clothing for the workplace. For a start we do not have Labor Day and no self-respecting businesswoman would ever wear white shoes to work anyway; for men black suits without a stripe have no such negative connotations that they seem to have in the USA. Setting such cultural differences aside, reading US workplace attitudes can be useful as British employers have a common tendency to follow their American counterparts sooner or later.



The interesting trend I have picked up on at a time when we are facing high unemployment and redundancies, is how ‘redundancy’ is once again a dirty word as if we were back in the early 1980s. I received an article from LinkedIn about networking which advised you when speaking to people you should never mention you have been made redundant and should find some euphemism for the period that you were without work as if it was some kind of dirty secret rather than a fact of working life for people at all levels.



My view of why this attitude has reappeared is that it stems from other recent trends in business. I have heard from employers in my sector and others that two of the key things they value from employees are not their ICT skills or their ability to manage projects or speak a foreign language but ‘deference’ and ‘gratitude’. Employers, or rather managers at all levels, are leveraging the fact that jobs are scarce in order to compel a forelock-tugging attitude towards them from among their staff. They expect workers not only to be grateful for their jobs but to actually say this repeatedly. Of course, because there are recruitment processes in place, often the job is not a gift of your manager but once in post you have to behave as if it is and as a result, regularly thank your manager and support their view no matter how hare-brained or unethical it might be. To even propose a different approach is to be ‘disloyal’, not with a view to the company as a whole but to the individual who wields power over you. I have noted before that even commentators on business have observed that this attitude is unhealthy for a company that wants to survive let alone prosper in the current economic climate: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html



It is interesting that the Coalition government is seeking to reduce the opportunity for industrial tribunals and even remove the chance to protest unfair dismissal. Clearly their view is that all dismissal is ‘fair’. The government is aiming to reinforce this attitude that all workers, whether professionally qualified or not should simply keep their mouths shut and accept whatever they are told by their bosses and similarly to accept the prejudiced treatment which is once again increasingly common.
 

How does this connect to mentioning redundancy in your career history? Well, managers never like you hear you criticising your previous employers even if they are competitors. They assume that if you are critical of the previous companies you have worked for you can easily be critical of them, something we know they now have no tolerance for. Mentioning redundancy in a single word seems to be critical of the planning of that company and of their treatment of their workers. In addition, you are exhibiting ingratitude for not expressing how grateful you were that the company actually employed you in the first place and kept you there for as many years and months as they did. I soon noticed this three jobs back when I, along with 200 others (the first phase in a lay-off of 500 staff), were told we were being made redundant. I was criticised for any mention of the fact and my email account was shut down because my ‘Out-of-Office’ statement mentioned it. Despite that 10% of the staff were in line to be made redundant gave us no right to discuss it. Consequently it became impossible to even hand over work to the staff who were remaining and projects very close to completion were simply dropped, unfinished with the funds that had gone into them wasted as I was not allowed to talk with people who could have picked them up and finished them off as it would have meant me saying why I would not be around to do it myself.




In such circumstances reality begins to become distorted. Simply because of the criticism-phobia which is now permitted among managers, money is allowed to be wasted and no proper follow on from a period of large-scale redundancy can be implemented, further damaging the company. We have to face up to what is being balanced up here. On one side it is that some managers for a few weeks will be irritated that staff being made redundant talk about it, on the other side thousands of pounds is wasted and projects left unfinished damaging the funds and reputation of the company. Yet, in our distorted world it is the managers’ unease which wins out.




There is an additional way in which the person being made redundant suffers if they cannot mention that they have been made redundant and this is when you apply for other jobs. You have to come up with a range of more or less feasible excuses for why you left your previous employment. With fragmented careers it becomes increasingly difficult to produce good ones and interviewers become suspicious, assuming that you must be hiding something. Of course, it would be easy if you could simply state the reason as ‘redundancy’ but to do so would clearly damage your chances for the new job, yet often the alternatives are little better. Saying you left because you no longer fitted in, for family reasons, for better pay or conditions, to work nearer to home and so on all seem to provide reasons not to employ you in another post. It would be better if you could say I was made redundant, it had nothing to do with my abilities it was simply the company could not afford to employ me and 499 other people any longer.


The default assumption by interviewers that you are seeking to hide something just accentuates this problem. Too often interviews are coming to resemble police interrogations. Rather than trying to gauge what skills you have and whether you could apply them in a new post they cross-examine you to find any flaws in your story. Having read advice about writing a CV I had begun only listing jobs going back over the past 10-12 years. This was a big mistake at one interview. They spent the whole time asking me about my work in the 1990s and in the post-interview feedback said it was because they believed I had been serving a prison term at that time, not realising that at their company the form declaring that I had no criminal record was sent to their human resources department. It seems that other excuses used to conceal redundancy could open you up to a similar risk.




By making redundancy once again a taboo subject the myth that we have total control over our careers is promoted and the view that we are to blame if they are at all disrupted. In turn the view is perpetuated that companies are blameless for the hardships they impose on the ordinary worker even if, as if often the case in the UK, it is the result of bad planning, inertia or not being alert to changing conditions. It is particularly galling when your redundancy comes as the result of some development you tried to alert the company to but were choked off by the ‘I don’t want to hear that’ mentality which is so prevalent.




In the 21st century redundancy is going to be a factor for every worker no matter how illustrious a career path they take. Even members of the boards of multi-nationals lose their jobs. What we need is not to somehow brush it under the carpet but acknowledge it is a fact of working life and not make the person made redundant feel guilty for something that is imposed on them simply because it makes some managers feel a little uncomfortable for a short time. Compared to the worry and financial pressures the person losing their job faces, such unease is nothing and should not become the prime driver for workplace expectations of behaviour.

Rioting 1911/2011: Similarities And Differences

As regular readers know I have done a lot of research into the Great Unrest of 1911: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/11/great-unrest-1910-11-part-1.html  I have been in contact with people involved in commemorating this period of strikes and rioting, notably in Liverpool which experienced effectively a general strike.  It is ironic that precisely 100 years on we are seeing much the same kind of riotous activity.  As I have noted that, in contrast to the early 2000s when people on history discussion boards discussed any reference to the Great Unrest as a fantasy or a counter-factual, elements of it are even appearing in prime time television, such as reference to the shootings during a riot in Llanelli in 1911 on 'The One Show' on BBC1.

What then are the similarities and the differences between what we are seeing now and what was witnessed in 1911?  The basis is very different.  The unrest in 1910/11 had its roots in strikes by coal miners, railway workers and merchant sailors.  In 2011 there are no such strikes going on.  The coal industry has been all but destroyed in the UK and our coal, where needed still, is imported.  A lot of freight that arrives in the UK is carried by foreign vessels, whereas in 1911, the UK was the dominant country for sea freight.  The railways were as fragmented as they were in 1911 since the privatisation of the 1990s.  However, at present railway workers seem not to have any reason to strike.  Consequently, unlike in 1911, there is not an established pattern of unrest on which the riots can be based.  A lot of this stems from the hammering of the trade unions during the 1980s under Thatcher and the loss of any collective identity among workers.  Thatcher's greatest success in weakening the unions was not the legislation restricting their behaviour, much of which Labour tried to introduce in the past anyway, it was her success in getting us simply to think of 'me first'.

Another factor that is different to 1911 is the lack of radical rhetoric.  In 1911 Labour MPs notably Keir Hardie went around not only supporting the riots as an expression of legitimate working class unrest which they generally were not, but publicly calling on soldiers to mutiny if their commanders ordered them to fire on rioting working class people.  In contrast this time we have supposedly left-wing Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney one of the most deprived areas of London calling for a London-wide curfew, something that was not even imposed (outside Liverpool) even in 1911 and would appear as if we were under foreign occupation.  No-one in the Labour Party will even try to squeeze out some reference to this unrest being a representation of the anger of the public over a mixture of issues, notably continued police mistreatment of ordinary people, especially from ethnic minorities and youth unemployment at a level higher even than the worst days of the 1980s.  Without channelling there is a danger that the unrest will turn to racial violence as it did in South Wales in 1911 and could easily do in many parts of London.  This may not be black/white violence but as happened in Cardiff a century ago, targeted at people seen as taking jobs, so aimed at Poles and other EU citizens who have settled in London and who we know the CBI favours as employees over UK young people.  This seems to be an unforeseen danger that needs to be addressed now.

Another difference to 1911 is the fact that the weather is not as hot.  The summer of 1911 was exceptionally hot and this always provides a context for rioting.  However, neither is it raining heavily, so the weather may not provoke rioting but it is not discouraging it either at the moment. 

Rioting in 1911 was generally carried out by people unconnected to the strikes going on at the time and it focused on much the same things as this time: attacking the police (especially those brought in from outside the area) and looting.  Looting is especially popular at times of economic hardship and conspicuous consumption that we are experiencing at the moment.  The largest similarity between 1911 and 2011 is the economic context. It is noted that in 1911 a lot of anger stemmed from the fact that real wages were falling but consumption by the wealthy especially of very visible luxuries was increasing.  We are in a very similar position now.  Real pay has been declining for forty years now and even those people in graduate professions cannot afford a fraction of what their parents in such jobs could have done. 

Everyone is suffering from the inexorable rise in petrol costs, utility prices and housing both in terms of buying houses and, in particular, rent, which seems to have had a new burst of climb since the recession started.  The disruption to household incomes by redundancy and unemployment further impinges on disposable income as well as income used to pay for the essentials.  I have been unlucky, but my circumstances are probably not atypical, with over half my monthly income paying for somewhere to live, to light and heat it, to fuel my car and to eat.  I do not go on holiday, my car is 15 years old, I do not eat in restaurants and do not go to the cinema.  You can put up with a dull life and battling for every penny, but after a while it impacts on you.  I am lucky, there are millions of people in the UK far worse off than me, but if I am disgruntled can imagine how many of them/you feel?  Whilst most ordinary people struggle we still keep seeing the obscene salaries and consumption of the privileged.  Bankers pay continues to be high and yet we are still suffering the consequences of their failed greedy gambles and will be for decades to come especially in terms of lost social care and local facilities such as libraries being closed down.  As in 1911 the obvious greed of the wealthy is painful and pricks us, made easier by the constant flow of information to us through every medium available.  Whilst the trains may be slower and less frequent than they were in 1911, information travels far faster these days to people in all walks of life and all ages.

There are a number of other similarities to 1911 not just the conspicuous consumption in a time of hardship.  The drafting in of police to cities is just like in 1911.  There are promised to be 16,000 police on the streets of London tonight; 10,000 of these brought from outside the capital; nine constabularies are sending officers to London.  In some ways this is a reverse of 1911 when the Metropolitan Police provided officers to other parts of the country, but that was only because London remained quiet and the unrest was located in other cities.  However, it seems likely that cities will draw on constabularies in neighbouring more rural counties.  The UK has far fewer constabularies than in 1911, but we still have a very decentralised system.  I wonder if cities in the North East will bid to buy in police from the Cleveland Constabulary given that their former Chief Constable and Deputy Chief Constable, arrested this week for corruption, seem happy to sell their officers to the highest bidder. 

The call from the local authorities for troops to be on the streets of Croydon is just like the hysteria of 1911.  Fortunately local magistrates are no longer in a position simply to summon a local unit as they were 100 years ago.  Given how many people whine about Winston Churchill as Home Secretary centralising the despatch of troops in 1911 to tackle unrest, that is more the system we have now. The issue, ironically, is unlike in 1911, Britain is currently fighting in two wars.  Whilst we no longer have imperial possessions to defend and the commitment in Ireland is far from what it was in 1911, the British Army would be pretty stretched if it was mobilised to police the streets.  In 1911 the Territorial Army was not trusted to oppose rioters, but in 2011 given class fragmentation and the dependence the UK has on its part-time soldiers, they may, in fact be called up to combat unrest.  However, I would imagine even now they would be sent to areas outside those in which they were recruited to avoid any questions about opening fire on family members for individual soldiers.  Of course, these days the odd tank or armoured car can achieve what a squadron of hussars would have been needed to do in 1911, so they could be spread thinner.  They are also no longer dependent on the railway system to reach the scenes of unrest.  However, experiences with civil unrest in Northern Ireland in the 1970s show the hazards of such action. 

I am more familiar with the King's Regulations of 1908 than I am with the current Queen's Regulations, and I would be interested to hear what the procedure is for the military called on to deal with unrest.  I cannot believe it is to simply fire into the front row of rioters but with the power of modern rifles and sidearms, even firing over their heads would cause a hazard.  Of course, the British police, since the 1980s have possessed anti-riot equipment pretty much undreamt of in 1911.  There would be no need for police to fall back on furled raincoats, instead they have baton rounds, tear gas, shields of different types and in some locales, water cannon.  Cameron ought to be alert to coming down too hard on the rioters if he wants to secure his political legacy.  Misremembered accusations that Churchill had striking miners shot were to haunt him politically even forty years after the event.

Whilst it is clear that 2011 is not a re-run of 1911, there are similarities which furthermore makes me ask why no-one in power was ready for the unrest which broke out this month.  As I have noted before, I believe that they probably did foresee and are happy for it to run its course.  Cameron is clearly enjoying sounding off as the authoritarian leader in the media and no doubt taking steps to further reduce liberty in the UK.  Perhaps, I am simply giving him credit for foresight that is undeserved and he is simply even more incompetent than I believed.

Student Inflow/Outflow

This is something I guess been aware of since when I first moved to southern England in 2005, but has come home more to me now that for much of my time I am living in West London.  For some reason around where I am living are lots of educational institutions from primary school right up to universities and so simply travelling to work I see a cross-section of our being-educated public of all ages.  Of course, for the moment all of them, even the university students are on their summer holidays (though universities seem to be all Americanised now with semesters rather than terms and they have always had vacations rather than holidays).  However, I noticed that this did not seem to make the university campuses any quieter, in their place are literally thousands of young people who seem to range from about 12-16 years old.  Saying that I have seen some Chinese students who look about 9-10 years old.  That might be the case, I imagine a British mother would be loath to send their child 8,000 Km for the summer, but I might be wrong.  Anyway, the bulk of them seem to be teenagers.  The nationalities I can make out have included French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and some East Europeans, I am unfamiliar with East European languages so could not tell you whether they were Poles, Czechs or Russians, perhaps from the Baltic States.  It is heartening that the immigration policies that threatened to kill the language school trade in the UK have been bent sufficiently not to choke off this important industry.

Anyway, each university seems to have been colonised by a one or more language schools run by energetic young staff in bright teeshirts for the summer.  I guess this works well for all concerned.  The school gets a purpose built teaching space and accommodation with a convenience store and cafes that all universities seem to have and the university presumably gets lots of fees at a time when the campus would normally be empty.  It also seems to employ lots of young graduates as organisers and language teachers at a time when any jobs that can be created especially for people under 24, are desperately needed.  Though I did not really notice it at the time, I now realise I have witnessed the same occurrence in Hampshire and Devon too.  Madly I had forgotten the two students who lodged in my house last year, I somehow put them in a different box, perhaps because I was only seeing one of them rather than large clusters and generally I am not in areas where students or tourists go.  I guess that it is simply the draw of London and the scale of the operations in the capital that make it more apparent, maybe simply my route to work.  One point to note is how uniformly dressed so many of these students are, fitting in very much with what Niall Ferguson was saying in his series earlier in the year, that a teenager from Beijing now is a replica of one from Madrid in the clothing and electronic equipment that they have.

I have no idea how much it costs for a 14-year old to be sent from Beijing or Madrid to London for a number of weeks, I guess they come for a fortnight, perhaps it is more.  From what I can ascertain and referencing the other examples I now recognise I have witnessed, they seem to get teaching in English all morning and then trips out to the standards of British tourism, everything from Bath and Stonehenge to Windsor Castle and the London Eye.  Shepherded around I guess they never really encounter the London beyond the campus bounds.  It is probably a good thing.  Students are never particularly popular even with 42% of British 18-year olds attending university and these groups are certainly noisy as any cluster of teenagers is.  What is apparent is their wealth.  Sending anyone from China to the UK costs money and these students all seem to have the latest smartphones and fashions.  I guess it is something that only the rich middle class parents of various European countries could afford and that is rather alarming, because it shows that even the UK's middle class is lagging behind its neighbours and the Chinese in what is affordable to do.  This is of course no surprise given that the real incomes of 90% of the UK population have slid in the last 40 years.  Perhaps it would have been affordable in 1975 but not now.

I would like to think that in western Paris or western Madrid there are hundreds of British teenagers there for a fortnight or a month and being drilled in French or Spanish (let alone western Beijing learning Mandarin) mixed in with some sports and some sight-seeing, but know it is not happening.  How do I know?  Well simply because I read 'The Guardian' newspaper.  It is not the font of all knowledge but if you want to get inside the heads of what the Europeanised (and this is what marks 'The Guardian' out from 'The Times' and 'The Daily Telegraph' which are pretty Little England in attitude) middle class aspires to be doing you read 'The Guardian'.  I can see no features on packing your 14-year old, let alone 10-year old off to Paris for the summer (unless it is to relatives) to learn a foreign language. 

Partly, as I have intimated above, it is the cost: the fact that the British middle class is falling in terms of disposable incomes because very few in Britain are willing to insist on a greater share of the prosperity that heads of companies are clearly benefiting from and did not even before the credit crunch was allowed to happen.  I know that these days the middle class holiday is camping in the UK, something once left to the unimaginative and those with no money to go abroad.  The other factor seems to be the 'parent fear' that has taken parents by the throat and sends them into hysterics the moment they lose eyeline with their child let alone mobile phone contact.  More examples of this were revealed to me this week with accounts of a colleague at a child's birthday party with mothers running around frantically the moment one of their children was lost in the crowd (given there were 50 children in attendance, that was no doubt easy).  The middle class has never relished packing their children off to holiday camp the way that their US equivalents have always done, they have never trusted anyone to look after their children and even their trust in teachers has slumped, hence the terminal state of even term-time school trips.  The upper class, of course, have been happy to bundle their children off into the care of others almost from the moment they are born and certainly once they turn 8.  Even if somehow, middle class real incomes rose, you would never see the equivalent of what I witness with French children (France is nearer to where I am living now than Yorkshire) happening with their British counterparts.  The woman in my house worries over the 5-minute walk it would take her 9-year old son to reach school and has already ruled out him going on any trips which involve him sleeping away from home, not that she or I could afford to pay for him to go.

Does it really matter if there is an imbalance in the flow of teenaged language students?  Is it not better for the British economy that more are coming into the UK, spending money here, rather than it being balanced up by an outflow.  The cost in my view is human.  If we go back to Ian Duncan Smith's speech earlier in which he encouraged British employers to take on more British young people, the retort from the CBI was to ask why would any UK company want to do this when it could employ better qualified East Europeans with a real work ethic compared to ill-qualified British people with an attitude of looking out for what they can get from a company.  I have no desire for British young people to be compelled to forelock-tugging lackeys, but it does seem that there are skills that they are not getting to compete with people from other parts of Europe.  It is not only people from Eastern Europe, apparently around 300,000 French people live in London alone, more than the entire population of Southampton; 123,000 Poles over the age of 16 live in London with 398,000 in other parts of the UK. 

Now, I know many people from other parts of the EU returned to their home countries when the recession kicked in and we have not returned to the figures of 2007, but it does suggest there is something that enables such migrants to get work in the UK.  It may be that they are cheap labour, but even then 16 year olds have always tended to be cheaper to employ.  One clear thing is that the migrants have the confidence to get up and come into the UK and find work in a language which is not their own.  How many British 18-year olds or even 21-year olds with a degree in their backpack do that?  A key challenge is that they do not speak the language, another is that often they have not ever been in another country, these days, not even on holiday let alone to study.  It seems ironic that the Conservatives (and New Labour who are/were minimally different to them) with their occasional forays into attempts at discrimination, are in fact further reinforcing the conditions that hamstring British young people.  They have pandered to the tabloid media which have hyped up the fear that a child out of your sight is being abused by a paedophile.  They have allowed companies to distort the distribution of profits so whilst bosses' salaries have rocketed the real incomes of 90% of employees have continued to slump unabated.  Thus, they have engineered and are sustaining a situation in which a 14-year old from France or Spain or even China is getting the intellectual and personal skills to find work across the world and yet their British counterpart is closeted at home learning nothing beyond the distance between their home and the park.  Thus, when I see another coach disgorging a fifty or so teenagers ready for some weeks of language school, I do feel depressed knowing that if I was in one of the other capitals of Europe I would not be witnessing the equivalent with British students.

Fear Of Putting A Foot Wrong In A New Job

As noted in my last posting, after 12 months of unemployment I have finally found work.  Whilst that has lifted a great deal of burden off me and lifted the threat of losing my house and never being able to own one again, it has opened up new fears, which in my weariness after joblessness, weigh heavily on me. 

One key fear is that I will not be able to do the job.  Much of the feedback I received from interviews over the past year has been incredibly negative.  One company sent me three pages of criticisms of my performance in the interview and another accused me of having lied on my application form because when they met me they felt I was incompetent and could not have been the man who appied.  When I was a teenager you were told that if you saw a vacancy for which you could match 4 out of 5 of the requirements you should apply for it.  That principle has long gone.  These days not only do you have to match 25 out of 25 of the listed requirements but also show evidence of what you have done.  I think this may be one reason why youth unemployment has reached a level even higher than in the 1980s even though overall unemployment has yet to reach that decade's peak.  Recruitment has become 'mechanised' and so the young without vast experience now do not even get the chance to show their potential because they are filtered out at stage one for not being able to say they have 3 years' experience using every piece of industry software listed on the job specification.  The increase in industry-specific qualifications which I have also noted on this blog, is an additional factor in this too.  By the time I applied for recent jobs, I was stretching every crumb of experience so as to match the specifications.  I was scrupulous in never lying, not even exaggerating, but now fear that I am simply not as confident or as skilled in the wide range of activities my job expects me to undertake as the interviewers believed as a result of my desperation to get interviews.

Other fears stem from coming into a new office and company environment.  I made a huge mistake in going to work for my last employer.  I had not checked what kind of working culture they had and so was really caught out when I found that it was a culture from the 1950s.  The snobbery and social class division at the company was incredible.  I was told that I should not be at the level that I as at, not because I could not do the job (I actually did it far better than my predecessor), but because of my social background.  I was told this blatantly by my line manager.  Bizarre things such as me being unable to say what my favourite recipe cooked on an Aga (a range oven burning wood or coal costing around £6000) was used to show how unsuited I was for the post.  I do not anticipate this in my new job, but it has made me very cautious of 'not fitting in'. 

In two of my last three jobs I have been bullied.  In my last full-time post a manager took a personal dislike to me from the start and taking individual words from emails portrayed me as setting up a 'resistance group' within the company.  She went around eliciting any negative comment or even neutral comment, that she could use to compile a list of complaints against me.  None of the complaints had substance and the word were taken out of context and blown up into some fantasy.  It made me phobic of saying or doing anything, knowing that even good work could be twisted some way to appear as a flaw.  The trade union representative found it incredible that she could do such things.  However, like me he recognised that these days you have little ability to fight back when someone even in a slightly more senior position decides to use the system against you.  Her behaviour cost the company thousands of pounds but they seem to have taken no steps to head off something like that happening again.  Procedures are wonderful for helping run a company smoothly, but too often in the hands of someone with a personal grudge, as I have seen happening too often to colleagues of mine, they can easily be used as a method of bullying.

Two jobs back from that I was bullied for a year by a colleague on the same level as me.  He was incredibly arrogant believing that anything that came out of our office had to have been influenced by his ideas and so should have his name on it rather than mine.  He was terribly impatient and assumed that if he sent an email it would be received instantly and in turn he would expect an instant response.  As anyone who has worked in a large company knows, this does not always happen.  I have had emails arrive between 4 and 14 days after they have beens sent and internal mail has arrived up to 2 months late.  In addition, I had other work to do other than that which involved him, often on behalf of more senior staff or with a greater urgency.  On aspect on which I was employed was my ability to time manage and prioritise, which I did.  Yet, of course, that often meant his work involving me had to wait in a queue, something he could not accept.  He was also critical of me for not being married or having children and so felt it meant I was immoral.  In fact I led a quiet, celibate life free from drugs and alcohol abuse.  This was not enough, the simple fact that I was unmarried implied to him that I must be a reprobate and unsuitable for work alongside him.  Both these bullies were 'nice people' liked by those they were not bullying and in both cases it proved impossible to make more than a handful of people understand how much I was suffering from working with them.  Bullying in 2 out of 3 jobs make me fear it will happen again, to the long-term detriment of my career.

I have certainly learnt not to say anything of my private life; not to have a photograph of my girlfriend or her child on my desk, because I have found these would be things used against me.  At my last job so many characteristics of my girlfriend (being from abroad originally, coming from a 'low' social class [daughter of a police officer], being a single parent, running her own business) were criticised and these criticisms were added to those of me, even though she had never even been within 120 Km of the company site while I was working there.  From now on I am going to keep all mention of my life outside work a complete secret.  Conversely, though, I do worry that I will be charged with being 'distant' or 'cold' because I cannot bring a wife along to work social events.  It seems ironic in an age when you have to complete extensive 'equal opportunities' forms every time you apply for a job, outlining your nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, marital status and any disabilities, to then find that even minor elements of these will, in fact, be used as a basis on which to criticise you.

Another thing I have learnt in the past 2-3 years is not to hold too tightly to the truth.  I think that I feel a real discomfort when lies are spoken partly because of Asperger's tendencies (and going for a proper diagnosis of that, I have now been persuaded, would be best put back if I want to keep my job).  However, as I have noted before, we are in an era of management culture which again smacks of the 1950s, with bosses feeling freer to say 'my way or the highway', to compel workers, no matter what their level to 'put up and shut up' rather than raising concerns about what is planned.  Of course, this is a trend which is prevalent in Chinese companies and government so I guess we should not be surprised to see it so common here in the UK.  In addition, the 'whip of unemployment' is back in full effect just as many employers were crying out for in the mid-2000s.  I am certainly cowed by it and know that in the coming year I am going to have to bite my lip and not speak out even when I see a plan which is bound for disaster.  It is ironic given that I have been employed for my expertise in 17 areas and have reached office manager level, that my views are not only not solicited but even raising concerns risks me losing my job.  You can term this the 'Titanic mentality' but it seems increasingly prevalent in British business and as a consequence projects are going to be driven through without sufficient discussion or reflection, based on the enthusiasm of one or two individuals rather than drawing on the knowledge of a range of staff.

Related to having to remain silent about any potential flaws in proposals is the need to check word-for-word everything that I write or say.  In my last post, emails would be checked literally word-by-word by my line manager and single 'offending' words were used as the basis for complaint. It was not about the overall content or the thrust of an argument, simply about the vocabulary used.

I speak plainly and clearly, but now need to learn how to discuss issues, no matter how controversial they may be, in language as circumspect as that used in the court of the Japanese emperor.  When a single word in a set of minutes or a report can be used to suggest you are trying to undermine the company, you have to check and check again.  Not only that, you have to quickly understand what your managers and colleagues understand by certain phrases, even if that understanding is out of step with the rest of the industry.  In the age of desktops and laptops we are all our own secretaries, but from now on, I am going to get as much written by other staff as possible so at least to put a 'fire gap' between me and the readers of the minutes or reports, knowing that so much will be 'lost in translation' as we battle to know what the readers (not only those who the material is intended for, but anyone who may stumble across it later too) understand by individual words.

Another challenge for me is length of communications.  As I have noted before, there is a demand for everything to be very brief as if Twitter has become the baseline for our communications.  Again I have been criticised for the simple length of what I write, not the content.  I have failed to learn the unstated acceptable length for an email, which of course varies depending on the particular recipient and the subject being discussed on that occasion.  The length dismisses any discussion of the actual content and so makes it pointless for me to even bother communicating.  I have no idea what the acceptable length of communication is in my new job, but you can guarantee that I will be sending lots of single sentence emails filled with abbreviations; with separate emails to cover different aspects of a single case, rather than risking putting them into a single email or report.

My experiences make me feel as if I have become an outsider in the workplace and that, despite all my years of expertise, have missed out on the training on what seems to so many employers to be the 'standard' and only acceptable approach to working in an office.  Ironically it ignores things which on paper should be basics of office work, such as clear communication and avoiding discrimination on any basis.  I am certainly going into the workplace fearful of saying or writing anything wrong.  This has effectively castrated me as an employee, not willing to risk making comments on any proposals, let alone taking any initiative or leading an activity for fear that even minor differences from the 'norm' will be used to attack me.

A Year Of Living Joblessly

This posting started out being entitled 'Joining The Ranks Of The Long-Term Unemployed' to mark my year without a full-time job.  However, incredibly I have been offered a job which starts today, 12 months to the day from when I was laid off by my previous employer.  Whilst I have been incredibly fortunate, after 80 job applications and 29 interviews to have escaped unemployment (for now) and stop the sale of my house, I still feel it is worthwhile reflecting on the impact being unemployed for longer than all the combined previous periods of joblessness in my life has had on me.

The latest figures I can find for long-term unemployed people, i.e. those without work for 12 months or more, date back to summer 2010, so with the recession having continued since then, I imagine they are higher.  The figure in July 2010 was 787,000 people, with 50% of unemployed people over the age of 50 falling into this category, the suggestion being that they will never work again.  I have heard that current figures are over 900,000 people, though cannot find hard data to support that.   In addition, it is claimed possibly millions of people are in part-time work as they cannot get a full-time job and so there is also a category of long-term 'underemployed' who are not able to contribute as much to the economy as they could and would like to do.

Anyway, as of today, I suppose I can count as long-term unemployed.  The last time I had a full-time job was 12 months ago.  Strictly I suppose I am not counted because I worked for a couple of days per week for a period of six weeks around the start of 2011.  However, it did nothing much to raise my household income.  I guess I will also not count because I am not claiming jobseekers' allowance.  I exhausted my contributions based payments back in December 2010 and because the woman who lives in my house runs her own business and works more than 24 hours per week, I am excluded from claiming incomes-based jobseekers' allowance.  It is for reasons like this that there is always a discrepancy between the number of people claiming jobseekers' allowance, currently around 1.45 million and the actual number of unemployed people, now 2.48 million, according to BBC figures.  This is because benefits tend to look at the household income so an unemployed husband/wife (or co-resident lumped into that category) or grown-up child living in a house with a man or woman working will often not be entitled to any benefit, but still be without work.  If it had not been for HM Revenue and Customs realising that they had made a vast mistake in the tax I had paid, then by now I would have had my house repossessed and guess I would be begging friends to sleep on their floor.  I certainly count myself one of the lucky ones.

What does it signify being long-term unemployed?  Well, the first thing seems to be that people feel free to treat you as if you are feckless or lazy or an idiot.  As has been discussed before on this blog, I think this varies depending on the area you live in, as in areas of high unemployment, it has to be a fact of life for lots of people.  Living in southern England where the recession is only steadily biting, and especially in a district where most residents seem to be self-employed, the Thatcherite attitude that you are only unemployed because you want to be, persists.  Without any knowledge of the vacancies available or what qualifications you need to fill them  people insist that there is work.  As I know from trying to get jobs in local shops, these days it is not an issue of being qualified but having a whole array of industry-specific qualifications whether to work in a baker's or as a travel agent or an estate agent.  With unemployment high there are always lots of people around that have such qualifications that I do not have and so I got knocked out of the running at the application phase, especially these days when so much recruitment is about matching requirements to the applicant's statements as the first phase.  If you do not have a 100% match then you stand no chance.  So you get told that there is work and then bewildered questions about what you are doing wrong turn quickly to condemning you for being flawed in some major way.

Though less common than it used to be, there often comes the suggestion of setting up your own business.  Given that we are in a recession and established businesses are folding every day and 50% of new businesses collapse within 6 months, I do not see this as an escape from unemployment, just a way to quickly lose whatever money you may have remaining.  In addition, if we were all budding entrepreneurs, would we not all be doing it anyway?  As programmes like 'Dragon's Den' show, even many people who think they are entrepreneurs are often sadly deluded and many more people get rejected even on that show, than win funding.  Why should it be any different in real life?  The laziness comes in the assumption that that is the answer for everyone, when in fact it is only the answer for a small minority and then only with luck rather than skill.

Ironically, whilst long-term unemployment is usually seen as being your fault, people also treat it like an infectious disease.  Unemployment defines my life as it has for the past 12 months.  I go nowhere, I talk to few people, so being out of work and applying for work are the key elements of my life.  Yet the moment you start talking about them, you get the 'I don't want to hear that' attitude, almost as if it is a contagion that through talking you will somehow blight that person's job.  This myth is one the government and employers like to perpetuate, that unemployment is the consequence of your personal actions.  If you have been dismissed for inappropriate behaviour, then, yes, that is acceptable.  However, very many unemployed people have been made redundant as a result of lay-offs affecting hundreds if not thousands of people.

We have minimal control over our working lives these days.  Unless we can go back in time and change which career path we went down.  When I started in my industry back in 1994 it was seen as a secure one which was going through a period of boom and now it is in crisis.  How could I have predicted in 1994 that instead I should have been taking travel agents' qualifications so I could still get a job in 2011? 

People say 'save'.  I have done this throughout my life.  I used up my first batch of savings covering my mortgage while unemployed for five months in 2009.  I have now used up my redundancy package and tax rebate paying it in 2010/11.  Of course, I had mortgage protection, but it does not apply if you are not claiming unemployment benefit and you cannot claim that if someone in your house works for more than 24 hours or you have been in fixed-term contract work.  I should have saved the premiums on paying for that insurance.  If I had got a job just 3 months after being unemployed or even 6 months, then I would be comfortably off and ready for when the next crisis hit.  We are only at the start of the government-augmented recession, we have years of this to go.  It took from 1979 to 1994 before the economy recovered last time, so on a tight estimate we have about until 2023 before we can breathe easily in the UK, perhaps longer given how severe Cameron has been compared to Thatcher in the damage he is intentionally doing to the economy for ideological rather than pragmatic reasons.  However, all that money is now gone, so next time I lose my job it is going to be very nasty.

Of course, I have not been lazy. I have now applied for 80 jobs which works out at 1.5 applications per week, below the level of 2 per week that the Department for Work and Pensions insists on. However, that average does not reflect the seasonal ebb and flow of vacancies and that in some weeks I have applied for 6 vacancies and in others none. In addition, applying for jobs these days is not just about sending in your CV. On average I write 5000 words per application, with some as long as 10,000 words. The longest, with 51 requirements, took me 8 hours to complete. In addition, as so many applications are done on unstable online application forms, I have probably re-typed many thousands of words again when the system has crashed and lost all that I have input. I lost two hours' worth of work last month because they system decided to drop out. Another even timed me out, after three minutes, before I had time to set my password for the application, then would not let me access or delete or replace the account which only had my name and address on. When I emailed the company I was told that a lot of people had had a problem with the online application. Why not get it fixed then?

I estimate I have written 400,000 words in applications, enough for four doctoral theses or a series of novels (I used to calculate things on the basis of an Agatha Christie novel, they were 60,000 words long, but these days they seem very short, so probably 120,000 is closer to the average). Of course, a lot of it is repetitive stuff and I still have no idea why companies want to know which 'O' levels I got in the 1980s, what grade I got for each of them and the precise day (not just the month or year, but the actual day) on which I was awarded the qualification. What difference does it make if I got a B or C in Chemistry 'O' level on 29th June 1984 for whether I am a good office manager or not?

I have had 29 interviews which works out at more than one every single fortnight.  Of course, they have not been spread out evenly and things like Christmas, Easter and the run of bank holidays, means they have been ill-distributed; on 4 occasions I have had 2 on the same day.  I have applied for jobs ranging from £19,000-£54,000, meaning, in fact my life could have gone down very different paths if I had got a job from one extreme or the other.  The same applies to where I will end up living.  The geographical bounds of my applications are now Southampton-Swansea-Edinburgh-Colchester, an area which covers a large chunk of the UK's population and economic activity.  In southern England, of course, it is distorted because a lot of the jobs in a particular circumference are actually in France and some UK employers seem reluctant to accept applicants from other areas.  One employer in Hertfordshire actually said to me 'we've never employed anyone from the other side of the M25' as if it was an iron curtain.  It is bitterly ironic when the phrase 'get on your bike' has returned to attack the unemployed with, you find employers who have a difficulty envisaging employing people who live elsewhere even within the South-East region.  Of course, being unemployed, you cannot be picky, you know you have to be willing to go anywhere and rent a shitty room in a house that you have had to compete with six others to secure in order to get work.  Quality of life does not even come near the equation.

The biggest problem for me being long-term unemployed is the fear.  Having already lost my house and the career I once had, I worry how much longer this can go on and how much worse it can get.  Employers are reluctant to take on the long-term unemployed as if they have succumbed to their disease and are now incurable of all the bad habits that unemployment instills in people.  They do not understand that we are so desperate we are willing to work for poverty wages, wherever they choose and dare not question whatever outrageous demands they may make.  That is the impact of 12 months' lashing with the whip of unemployment.  I am doubly cursed now because I am over 40 too.  An article recently said employers see the over-40s as lacking energy and being fixed in their ways.  This is ridiculous, I have had to adjust so many times in my life, I have worked for four different employers at times, that I am honed in the art of being flexible and adjusting the work changes.  As for energy, I have never rolled in hung over like many in their 20s, I do not spend time texting my friends or updating Facebook pages, in terms of productivity I will be better than someone 20 years younger.  However, of course, such prejudices are not challenged and in fact as attacks on feminism have shown, in many ways, prejudice in terms of what you are is again acceptable, just as David Cameron and his supporters have desired.

Stretching out in front of me is an ongoing path of uncertainty.  Will I still be unemployed this time next year?  How much poorer can I get?  I know there will be loads of disappointment.  I have been rejected 28 times from interviews and another 51 times been told I was not even good enough to get there.  Every piece of feedback seems to contradict the one before.  Just recently I was told that I did not come across as sufficiently sympathetic to workers when apparently being overly-sympathetic was criticised in my last job.  Even now with work, nothing seems certain.  I have been incredibly lucky, but will always remain fearful that it will be short term.  I was laid off from my old job only 7 months after being appointed to it.

I am both weary of how long having no job went on for with no succees and retain a fear that this is the pattern my life will hold in the future especially as I progress further into middle age.  No-one seems able to offer practical help, they just seemed to be able to harangue me or avoid me.  Joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed does not permit access to a fraternity, rather you simply become classified a pariah.  Of course, I am grateful that I am now in a job, but I know that there are many hundreds of thousands of people in the UK in even worse situations with even less hope than me and I mourn for that and the long-term damage it is doing to the UK.