‘You Can’t Handle The Truth’: Forced To Create A ‘Legend’ In The Workplace

As regular readers will know in the past few years I have suffered in jobs as a result of individual words and sentences that I have uttered. These were not rude words or offensive sentences, they just did not fit with very exacting standards that employers have around every word you might utter. I have got into trouble for saying ‘I am not a cleaner’ when in fact I was not a cleaner. I have got into trouble for trying to notify my manager of a hospital appointment connected with my diabetes. I have got into trouble discussing the curriculum that the boy who lived in my house was studying. I have got into trouble for saying that I was not responsible for organising an even date that, in fact, I truly was not responsible for organising. I guess one problem is that as yet I have not learnt how to suck up all the blame being levelled at my managers as if it was my own fault; I do not step forward fast enough or enthusiastically enough to take the blame off their shoulders and as a result it is open season to criticise me as ‘inappropriate’ or rude or incompetent.  The censorship and self-censorship that develops can harm companies, see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html


Now, I know from people who have written to me, that I am not alone in suffering such problems and that schools should teach young people that in any job, no matter how competent they might, they must always expect to be the ‘fall guy’ for any errors made around them even if they are not connected to them. My mistake has been not been ready to do that. Ironically as a consequence I am portrayed as the one creating a ‘blame culture’ simply because I am not able to absorb the blame into myself quickly enough. In this I am hampered further as it seems I have Asperger’s Syndrome. Whilst I doubt it has worsened in recent years, the clear changes in UK society and in working culture mean that there are more pitfalls that I may be missing with heavy consequences for my job and thus for the rest of my life which has been largely wrecked this year.


I began a new job in September and was relieved that a lot of the behaviour I have noted above was absent. This was both relaxing and also reminded me how abnormal the previous places actually were. Workers should behave as adults not primary school children and certainly it seemed as if that was more the case where I am now working, despite the fact that the company, like most in the UK is facing hard economic times and so instability. However, the seemingly warm reception I received in this job clearly led me into a false sense of security. I had originally gone there, scared from my previous jobs to mention anything about my life outside work or my past. However, with people confiding in me about their cancer treatment, medical conditions, marital problems, etc., I too opened up especially about some of the things that have hit me this year. Partly this was also because I have had to speak with people so much about losing my job, my house and household that they have now become mundane; they are the ache that has become dull so to me these things are no longer a big issue. To start viewing this way and even letting down my guard a little has proven to be a big mistake.


On Friday I was summoned to see my line manager who outlined the complaints against me. Now, these differ in nature to the problems I have had before. These days I avoid making statements unprompted even to people I think will not distort them. However, when people ask me questions I respond truthfully. Given that the workplace has an atmosphere of being open, people have asked direct personal questions that they might not have done elsewhere. The first was that I had been asked why I was eating biscuits during a training session. I explained briefly that this was because as a diabetic I tend to have a low blood sugar in the late afternoon especially when I have been on a day’s training as had been the case that day and so ran the risk of hypoglaecemia. I know I should not have used the word ‘hypoglaecemia’ but when you have had a condition 24 years as I have done, you tend to slip into these things. I have explained my diabetes to hundreds of people, so think nothing of it.


The second one was I was asked why I had left the lovely town on the south coast that I have recently moved from, by someone who still lives close by but is also employed now by the same company as me. I responded, ‘because I lost my house’. Now that is the truthful answer, it is the only reason why I left, but again that was an unacceptable answer. A similar situation came when waiting for a meeting to start there were comments at how the set-up of the room resembled that for an interview. I was asked as a newly appointed member of staff, how many interviews I had had. Again I told the truth: ‘67 in the past 4 years’.


I have noted before how people feel somehow contaminated by reference to redundancy and unemployment:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/how-redundancy-became-dirty-word-once.html  However, when asked a direct question, and this may be as a result of Asperger’s, I have the tendency to give the truth. Yet, me describing what has happened to me or my medical condition, not in an unprompted way, but in response to a question, is these days seen as ‘inappropriate’ and even verging on the offensive. Clearly I cannot read the mind of the person asking me the question. I have been alerted to the fact by one company that has interviewed me three times, that I give an answer without first having ascertaining the type of answer the questioner is looking for. I missed out on the training on this approach to answering at school, university and in work. In fact, I received the opposite: answer a question as directly and truthfully as you can. I know I am enthusiastic when talking with people and these days they will not tolerate an answer which is shorter than the question asked. I thought I had cracked that with the answers given above. However, now I have to also quickly judge whether the truthful answer is what they are seeking.


I am in no position to say ‘well that is my business’ as I could clearly have done with these three personal questions or even ‘why are you asking that?’ as that would clearly been seen as rude. You cannot be defensive as that rouses suspicion. The truth, if it encompasses failure or illness or simply bad luck is also unacceptable whether given briefly or explained in full. Thus, my line manager has now advised me to come up with what I call a ‘legend’. This is the term used by spies and undercover police to describe the false identity they establish. It is a fiction, weaving in elements of the truth, but in general appealing to the assumptions of the people that the agent will be working with whilst distancing this fictional personality from the agent’s genuine one. I need to learn this legend well and be able to respond with aspects of it whenever I am asked a personal question again. I have to be careful, as, unfortunately, I have already revealed the truth about my life to quite a few people. I also have to avoid slip-ups that contradict or differ from what I have said before.


Now, from the troublesome questions I have faced recently, I have to come up with an explanation for why I might eat carbohydrates in the afternoon, which does not reference any medical condition nor makes me appear a glutton. I suppose in future I must sneak off to the toilet to eat them. This presents an ideological challenge for me. Back in 2005 when the UK law put diabetics into the disabled category, I took the decision to ‘come out’ as a diabetic. Now it appears I have to go back into the medical closet and conceal my condition as best I can. In terms of why I left the town, I am rather stumped what to say. All the suggestions about house prices seem to be equally as negative and something along the lines that the area was going down clearly are not true to people who know the town. If I say it is simply because I tired of the place, that might make me look feckless. Even saying that I moved to be closer to family would sound like there was bad luck if not for me then for them, so that is out. With the interviews, clearly I have to severely reduce the number. I cannot really guess what the tolerable number of interviews would be over a 4-year period, do readers think 10 still sounds excessive?


The one thing that I must bury even deeper in my legend, is a sense of indignation.  People accuse me of self-pity, however, it is impossible to keep lying to yourself that things will get better or to take all the blame on to yourself for how you have been mistreated; as it is, I cannot shake the sense of guilt at what I may have done wrong, not helped by people telling me that I am a 'natural victim', something which I reject entirely as that is the path to racism and disability discrimination, things I will have no truck with.  As the government tells us that we need to suffer for the sake of the country, people in many workplaces see it as wrong to even indicate that you are suffering as a consequence.  I cannot reveal how badly I have been treated in previous jobs, the social class discrimination, the disability discrimination and the simple maliciousness I have encountered. I cannot express my dismay at the fact that in 2009 I earned £42,000 per year and had 35 days leave and now earn £26,000 (what I was earning in 2002) and get 19 days and 2 hours leave (what is the point of 2 hours’ leave?). I have to pretend that my life has not gone down the drain in so many ways and that my chances of ever owning even a flat, let alone a house, are now zero.   I have to conceal how the pressure from the bad treatment I have received has worsened my blood pressure and consequently my eye sight. My legend has to show me as a successful man, going places despite the worst economic depression in 80 years. It has to pander to the assumptions of the people who ask me questions. It has to provide the answers that they find acceptable, because it has been made very clear to me that in fact, they cannot handle the truth.

The Challenges To An Early Sleeper

Having reached the age of 44, I know that I upset people.  As a child, my name, where my family lived in the town, who my father worked for, the fact we did not attend church, the fact we had an old car, old furniture and a black-and-white television were all grounds on which people felt they could despise me, tell me they despised me and then punch me.  These days it is the industry I work in, my appearance, my qualifications, the fact that I have an enthusiastic manner and like to chat, that I either ask too many questions or insufficient questions, the fact that I am a white man, my lack of hair, the country I come from, the fact that I drive an old car and my view of politics that stirs people to get vocally upset at my mere presence.  Fortunately since reaching the age of 19 I have been spared the physical abuse which was once so common.

The strangest basis on which people get upset at me is the focus of today's posting, i.e. the time I get up in the morning and even more than that, the time myself and the woman who lives in my house go to bed.  It is the going to bed time that causes most upset among the people I meet.  You might argue that it is no-one's business what time I choose to go to bed and you would be right.  However, as I noticed on many occasions on this blog, these days much of the population of the UK feels it has a right to not only judge on a whole host of aspects, many of them very mundane, but to tell you explicitly of its judgement on your behaviour as if without their help you would never have noticed what you were doing 'wrong'.  Britain is the home of unasked-for advice; even random strangers in the street feel obliged and unshamed to come up to you and simply tell you the error of your ways.  They are aloud to be indignant but you have to be at minimum stoic and preferably grateful for them enlightening you.

Fortunately most people I meet cannot tell what time I go to bed.  However, colleagues can.  This is especially the case when you have evening events or they telephone you after you have gone to bed.  I had a manager two jobs back who found out that I am often in bed before 21.00 and sometimes as early as 19.30 and on that basis he felt I was unsuited to be sent overseas on work and that he was obliged to ridicule me about bedtime every time he met me.  The problem for these people seems to stem from the sense that only children go to bed early, so an adult who does so is juvenile and cannot be given responsibility.  There is still a lingering macho/macha attitude that you should have the stamina to work long into the night the way Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler were supposed to do, though the latter it is sometimes conceded, slept during the day to make up the time.  So early sleeping equals immature, unbusinesslike and weak behaviour; going to bed late suggests you are mature, professional, hard-working even exciting.

These attitudes are very culturally specific and of our era.  When the bulk of the population worked in agriculture, in the UK, sometime up to the mid-18th century most people rose and bedded down with the daylight.  The woman in my house keeps very much to agricultural hours, something like 04.00-05.00 to rise and 19.00-20.00 to sleep.  Her son, aged 10, nowadays goes to bed at 19.30 in the week and 20.00 on Friday and Saturday night, but it is difficult to keep him in bed after 06.00 in the morning especially with his mother awake and working.  Acquiring chickens has just added to this tendency in our house as they become impatient if still in their coops after sunrise and alert us to that impatience.  I am the late one in our house, getting up at 06.45 in the week (05.00 on Mondays) and sleeping in until 07.30-08.00 at the weekend.

Professions like farmers, bakers, market traders, the remaining milk deliverers all keep such hours.  Of course, shift workers have other patterns, working right through the night and sleeping the day or 'early' work something like 06.00-14.00 or 'late' work 14.00-22.00 which mean they have other patterns.  This all tends to be forgotten.  We are all middle class now, so the assumption is that we all work 09.00-17.00 and so rise no earlier than 07.00 and are happy to stay up until 23.00 each night.  Ironically, even working in an office, my day has lengthened and many people I know now do 08.00-17.30 meaning earlier getting up time and so an earlier time to bed.  Interestingly the 'lie-in' which seemed such a middle class luxury in the 1970s when people would not get out of bed at the weekend until 12.00 appears to have faded and remains a habit confined to students and other young people who have raved the night away.  Whilst late rising is no less 'unusual' than early rising, it retains a cachet of 'cool' whereas early to rise/early to bed just seems 'worthy'.

There are advantages in getting to bed early.  Some people, clearly the two other residents of my house, work better early in the morning. The shops are quieter in the morning and with extended opening hours, aside from on Sundays, there is no need to hang around for them to open, you can get out and buy what you needed before the masses reach the supermarket.  Perhaps you miss going out in the evening, but being unable to afford to eat at restaurants and being unable to sit comfortably in the cinema and theatre seats in my town I am not missing much that I would be able to do by staying up later.

Getting a decent amount of sleep, which is seen as nine hours for children and teenagers has regularly reported benefits.  A key difficulty is the noise.  In our district now that all tenants have to smoke outside, doors banging and loud conversations do not only go on in the evening but into the early hours of the morning too.  I am lucky, I fall back asleep easily when roused, but the woman in my house finds it far harder.  The noise does not have to come from your district, you have to make sure that friends and relatives know not to telephone. 

With recordable digital television and catch-up online facilities many of us 'time shift' our television watching anyway and it is far easier to try to access the latest episode of 'Sherlock' on the I-Player at 05.30 than it is at 18.30.  The only down side seems to be playing online community games as there are fewer people (though never none) to partner up with at that time of the morning.  Email which is my main form of communication for work and leisure is asynchronous anyway and it is rare that I am able to answer a phonecall when it comes in, it is far more common to have answerphone to answerphone conversations.

If we manage to go through with our plan of relocating to living on a co-operative farm, then the sleep patterns will be an advantage rather than something to conceal.  However, for now, having experienced the prejudice of revealing that you are in bed before the ten o'clock news comes, this is something that I intend to keep as secret from friends, colleagues and especially managers as much as I can.

Why Are British Managers So Bad?

You would think that in a period of high unemployment that the person in a job would be the best that you could get. The government is keen to remove the ability for workers to bring a tribunal against unfair dismissal, but it already seems it is pretty easy to remove people from a job. With all these lists of competencies we each have to match, let alone set targets for each month and year, it is easy to find something that an inefficient worker is unable to meet and so remove them on those grounds. However, in terms of incompetent managers that seems to happen very rarely and rather these are tools for them to intimidate the workers below them with.
 

Time after time recently, meeting with people from within my own company and from others in the sector, I hear about bad managers. I am talking about the people at the level of managing a team or and office or two, something between, say 5 and 50 staff. I have no idea how many there are of them in the country, but certainly the places I have worked, they are numerous and for the large part very poor at their jobs. British business has always suffered from cultural problems. It has had a senior management content to take high pay for little work, with no interest in innovation and happy to add more than one job at a time to their activities. This is one reason why so many successful British companies have been run by people from ‘outside’, even if from Britain, they have not been part of the Conservative-Anglican mainstream, rather immigrants or the grand/children of immigrants or from different religious groups including Nonconformist Christians. It has had a middle and lower management which is terribly self-centred and at best paternalistic, but too often bullying. It has had a workforce with little interest in personal training and development and with a tendency simply to blame outsiders for their problems whilst also be unwilling, certainly since mass unemployment returned in the 1980s to risk challenging bad practices in the workplace.
 

In this structure, the average manager can behave how they like and this is what makes so many workplaces stressful and so inefficient. What has exacerbated the problem is the return of 1980s managerial style. I have seen managers walking around telling workers that they should be grateful for the jobs that they have. It is not sufficient simply not to complain about things, workers need to be seen to be lauding their managers at every given opportunity, a tendency which eerily is reminiscent of officials in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. To be passive is now to be disloyal. Loyalty has become a key trait that managers want demonstrated again and again by their staff. A key reason for this is that managers know that they do blunder and in the blame culture which permeates so much of British business, they know the only way they can escape from having to face up to the consequences of their actions is to conceal them and this can only be done if they have sufficiently terrified the workforce into keeping quiet, or, even better, taking the blame themselves.
 

Loyalty is vaunted as a necessary trait for keeping your job and is often associated with ‘professionalism’ no matter what the nature of the job. The sense that someone who is ‘disloyal’ to their boss, typically because they are ‘loyal’ to the wider company or the customers, is unprofessional is an attitude which managers perpetuate, to add additional pressure on workers not to reveal their manager’s shortcomings. Usually quickly added on top are descriptions like ‘unusual’ and ‘not fitting in’, to make it easier to remove any work who dares complain, or in fact, increasingly is seen as insufficiently vigorously supportive of the manager’s approach no matter how flawed it might be. The worst managers even begin chiding workers in other areas. In my company a colleague was shocked when my manager gate-crashed a meeting she was in because she believed it was discussing an area of work which she had an interest in. In fact she was mistaken, but that did not stop her redirecting the meeting to cover that topic. My colleague who had arranged the meeting, sat stunned at the gall of the manager and simply agreed with everything she said to bring the meeting to an end as quickly as possible. However, even that was insufficient for the manager, who, after the meeting was over, lectured the woman for whom she has no line managerial responsibilities for twenty minutes about how her attitude was wrong. It was not that she had not agreed with the manager it was she had done it in a sufficiently deferential style.
 

Deference and gratitude are two terms which come up increasingly when employers talk about what they want from their staff. You could have conducted a survey in 1811 and had much the same answer. These traits seem more valued than ability to use IT or organise meetings or any other skill necessary for an office of the twenty-first century. Deference and gratitude simply promote the status quo, they do not lead to innovation. Deference and gratitude are what meant that the Indian princes, the Japanese Shogun and the Chinese Emperor found themselves overwhelmed by the imperial powers who had allowed a little room for challenging and innovation and so had advanced technologically.
 

As I have noted before, there are major problems when no-one has the courage to challenge the statements a manager makes. It creates a vicious circle as the manager feels that without complaints they must be doing everything perfectly alright and they are encouraged to develop more and more outrageous projects. If anyone makes an alternative suggestion they are told that they are in a minority so their view cannot be legitimate and this discourages them and anyone else from ever raising a question again. This attitude is not a new one: it appears in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ first published by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837 in the third volume of ‘Fairy Tales Told for Children’.
 

The self-centred attitude of so many managers lead to ‘one-way traffic’ in terms of communication. Not only do the managers not listen to their workers, they feel obliged instead to lecture their workers at length. Again this seems characteristic of the Soviet system in which the ‘leader’ was lauded at length, from the head of the state right down to the leader of the unit. Under such regimes, it appears to have been necessary to keep telling the workers at length that they had such a great boss and that his/her boss was great too and so on. My current manager is the worst in this respect that I have worked for. Colleagues joke about ‘Songs of Praise’ (named after a BBC television religious programme involving lots of hymn singing) sessions held by my manager. In one two-hour meeting for which no agenda had been circulated, the manager spent 100 minutes going on about how everything she had done was so wonderful and successful. She made no reference to the success of the team or the efforts that had allowed her to receive praise from her bosses. This is incredibly demotivating, let alone simply a waste of time to have such a long meeting at which nothing was advanced.


The self-centredness and the belief that there is only one truth explanation for any situation, however temporary or ill-founded it may be, can be seen as stemming from the attitude that I regularly highlight as being endemic in British society, the 'me first' attitude. This was promoted during the Thatcherite era and causes harm to the UK everyday not least how people drive and use any public service. I guess I should not be surprised given people behave this way when simply moving around a town or going shopping or using a hospital or a school that they apply such behaviour to their workplace where they feel so much more vulnerable and in need of being in total control in order to ensure that everything turns out precisely how they want it, down to the smallest degree.


Aside from ensuring that every worker within their area is cowed, the main job for managers seems to be to kow-tow to their superiors. My current manager spends much of the day making friends with those above her. This causes many problems, because even though she is useless at management, the people you would complain to her about simply think she ‘is wonderful’. She massages their egos by constantly praising their initiatives and ideas. Networking is fine, but when it simply becomes about sucking up to people it uses up work time for something which provides minimal benefit to the company and in fact can be harmful. Of course, experienced senior managers can often see through this and make an effort to call on the views of a wider range of staff. However, in these circumstances, the worker who speaks up is liable to suffer later from their manager. The anger the manager unleashes comes from a number of bases. As they see any suggestions that differ from a plan as best irrelevant at worst insulting, they feel upset if you make a suggestion to a senior manager because in their view you are simply being blatantly rude. Second if the idea is a good one, they are irritated that they had not thought of it and so have, in their mind, lost ‘points’ to you, even if you are unable or unwilling to play in the ‘game’. In this second situation, they are liable to take on board the idea as their own or, at very least, say that the idea came about because of how supportive they have been.
 

With all of these concerns with keeping down their workers and buddying up to their seniors, it is no surprise that so many managers cannot see beyond their own personal concerns. This is not aided by the fact that they think that their view of the office and the wider world is the only true one. My manager told me recently that there was ‘my perception’ of how things were going and then there was the ‘truth’, which of course was her perception. She could not accept that there was my perception and her perception, let alone that mine had some legitimacy. This is the third manager I have had who has believe that their viewpoint is the only true one and this has led to ridiculous demands such as re-writing a report to remove the views tens of people had expressed in a survey because, in my manager’s eyes, these people were not speaking the ‘truth’ even though they had simply outlined their opinions and the information had been captured.
 

The sense of the ‘truth’ extends down to individual words used in print, orally or in emails. Poor managers waste ages complaining about individual words and phrases. Me saying that I was ‘trying to fit in’ with my manager led her to go on for 10 minutes about how that was an inappropriate phrase. There was apparently no need to ‘fit in’ with what she wanted because all that she wants is common sense and that is what should be driving everything that I do and I am ‘unusual’ in not understanding that. Certainly on the basis of a majority view of what was ‘common sense’ we would not be doing many things the way she compels us to do them.


Training is seen as the cure-all for any discrepancy between the manager’s view of the world and that of their workers. Alarmingly the perception seems to use the sense of training as ‘re-education’ is used in Communist China, i.e. a form of indoctrination. Bizarrely managers think that by sending their staff on some training course they will come back with the ‘right attitude’ rather than new skills or wider perspectives. Interestingly, the managers themselves seem to feel no obligation to attend any training. You soon find they have been on no managerial training courses and simply ‘learned on the job’ perhaps even at ‘the University of Life’ which apparently is fine for them, but utterly useless for developing effective workers. Funnily there is no recognition that sending someone on a decent training course is actually going to make them more confident, more perceptive, more skilled and so more liable to challenge the narrow-minded behaviour of their manager.
 

As managers see their perception of things as the ‘truth’ and often ‘common sense’ they see no need to actually tell anyone how they view things. To them it would seem a waste of time outlining anything that should be so blatantly obvious to everyone. This causes major difficulties and a lot of wasted effort as workers try to guess actually what their manager wants, fearful of making a mistake in their guesses for fear of being chided as discussed above. The manager is dismissive of the efforts, finding it difficult to comprehend that proposals do not match perfectly the vision held in their minds. This leads to repeated iterations, painfully slowly edging towards the model the manager desires as the feedback in the blame culture is only about what has been done wrong, not what needs to be done to make it right.
 

Another problem with this assumption that the manager’s view is common sense is that the manager feels t no obligation to remember what they have previously said. Thus their workers can get caught out by their capriciousness. My manager initially asked for one copy of a particular form to be submitted, then weeks later decided this had to be three copies. Some weeks after that she decided it had to be two copies. Her changing her mind would not have been a major issue, nothing more than rather irritating. What made it so much worst on each occasion she gave a new number she became indignant that we could have thought that the previous number she had demanded was acceptable. Not being able to remember her command she assumed we had taken the initiative and come up with that figure ourselves. Thus, we were harangued for daring to make a decision without reference to her, though this was precisely what we had done. The same applied for moving meeting days back and forth in the week. Again, it should not be a huge issue but she shouted that ‘I could never have wanted it on a Thursday, I do not think that way’ despite Thursday being the precise day she had ordered the meeting moved to. This capriciousness again seems reminiscent of the Soviet system with workers fearful of not complying with some industrial plan that was liable to change weekly without warning. I have been advised to save every email and even keep a notebook to log every instruction I am given. In addition to being time consuming, I am sure she would still challenge what I had recorded as being imagined or misunderstood by me, especially as she could not longer envisage herself ‘thinking that way’.
 

This short-sightedness of managers can have some incredible outcomes. I have worked with managers who have been oblivious to bullying occurring even though workers even a number of offices away have been aware of what was going on. My manager entered the league table for being so wrapped up in her own vision of the world to not even comprehend what was being said. I am not a rich man so lunch consists of a sandwich I have made eaten at my desk. Early on in this post my manager stormed into my office demanding I look at something and saying dismissively that she did not accept people sitting at their desks as having a legitimate lunch break and so she had the right to interrupt them. When I complained about the issue of my lunch break being ‘violated’, offering to have it at a set time if that was what was required, my manager made repeated righteous statements that she would strongly defend me from having my lunch break ignored. She did not understand at all what I meant when I pointed out that the only person doing that was herself. Of course, she has a different view of how she behaves and that view is the ‘truth’, so she appears unable to comprehend a different perspective on what has happened.

 I have worked for numerous companies over the past two decades, in part due to short-term contracts and three turns of redundancy. However, what has struck me is how prevalent such bad practice is across business. I accept that I have not worked outside London, southern England and the south Midlands, but the managers I have had have come from across the UK, so I do not imagine they would be any much different if I worked under them in Scotland or Wales. I know I am not alone in experiencing such outdated, self-centred approaches to management that seem oblivious of modern methods. What we appear to have is a kind of 19th century attitude reinvigorated by trends of the 1980s and revived once more by the current Depression. Ironically at a time when British companies need to be working more efficiently, this corrosive managerial behaviour appears to be increasingly common. Too many people I talk to have the same anecdotes to recount as me. No-one appears to be challenging these approaches and so British business will continue to suffer in the face of strong competition all because too many managers cannot see that satisfying their egos is not what a company should be focused on.

Employers Demanding Unquestioning Loyalty

I have noted that with the recession and the rise in unemployment, employers are returning to the oppressive behaviour of the 1980s.  Though most companies were not involved in using the financial approach that brought about the credit crunch and recession, they have certainly been happy to exploit it and drive back what they felt were the excessive gains made by employees during the past decade.  I was advised as a manager to crack the 'whip' of unemployment and remind employees that they should not complain about anything, including shortcomings in planning and operations that they see, because they should be grateful that they had a job. 

This morning I heard that 7 out of 10 employers look up their prospective employees on social networking sites and will not employ those using 'bad' language or portraying themselves as drunken in pictures on the website.  Apparently 28% of sackings are now based, not on the employee's behaviour at work but their moans about their work on websites.   I accept that such people are probably foolish to show themselves in that light on easily accessible websites, but when has it been the employer's role to police the morality let alone the spare time behaviour of its employees?  This seems particularly rich when we hear about the often sordid behaviour of leading business people.  Now we seem to have one moral code for the rich and another one for the ordinary people.  Have we really gone back to the 19th century that quickly.  What next?  Children working up chimneys?  Homes for 'fallen' women?  This is the 21st century and I would rather employ someone who had a life outside work and was a well-rounded individual with a social life than someone who obsesses over only work and has no friends.  That sad loner character might be fine for some jobs, but in an age when so much of business is about networking and in particular business with China involves a lot of socialising and drinking, you need someone who can cope.

If you are employing people in their late teens, twenties and thirties and these days it applies to people in their forties and fifties too, why should you expect them to behave any differently to anyone else in that age group?  In the UK, (young) people go out and get drunk, then take photos of it, that is a fact of British life; no employer will ever change that.  Naturally the employers would baulk at anyone telling them or their children how they should behave in their spare time.  Of course, again the rule seems to be that the privileged can behave how they like and the rest of us should lead dull lives in which we thank God every day that our employer has been so generous in giving us work and allowing us to remain in it.  Whatever happened to free will?  Well, as in the past, it again seems to be becoming the reserve of the already privileged.

You might say that even if the employer cannot police behaviour outside the workplace they can expect their employees to be loyal and not to bad mouth the company.  I would argue that that is an unhealthy approach to running any business whether in the public or private sector.  I suppose it is simply an extension of the attitude to customers that puts up facilities for them to complain but when they do the company simply lectures them about what a good service they are actually receiving and why they should be grateful for that, as far too many UK companies do (try complaining to an airline).  To say to employees that they have to pretend that everything is perfect in a company is coming at the issue from entirely the wrong end.  If you run a good business then your employees will willingly, voluntarily in many cases, bear testament to that.  If you are running your business poorly then you need to hear that.  Too many employers forget that it is often the people at the frontline of a business who see where improvements are needed.  Of course, there is an arrogance that such people know nothing and too many British businesses ignore the voice of the 'footsoldiers'.  I would point them to the John Lewis Partnership which continues to prosper despite hard times because of its full involvement of the workforce.

No company will ever suppress bad news about it.  Even if you stamp down on every Facebook page, every Tweet, every blog entry about your company, then it will still spread by traditional means such as word of mouth.  You have to remember that you have no control (even the intelligence services have found this) over former employees who will often go out of their way to draw attention to what you are doing wrong.  The only way to combat such bad publicity by current and former employees is to listen to them while they are working for them and rather than jump on discussion, if you feel something needs to be different to how they feel it should be done, then you should be in a position to defend how you are doing it.  Suppressing comment about your business is lazy and means that you will miss the vital warning signs that could save you from serious problems in the near or more distant future.

The other thing these employers forget in these days is that 'no news' is actually 'bad news'.  In many ways, despite wanting to attract the best staff, they patronise us and assume we do not investigate them before we even start applying for jobs with them.  In the same way they forget these days that in an interview, they have to impress us as much as we have to impress them; again higher unemployment is making them entirely lazy in this respect and they assume applicants will take any job offered. So, we investigarte.  If I find a dearth of information about the company on the internet, social sites, blogs, etc., then naturally I am going to be suspicious of them from the start.  In addition, I can learn nothing about the company's strengths and weaknesses.  Of course, there will be official sites, but only a fool takes those at face value.  I am far more likely to take my expertise to a company that is open about how it works and its challenges than one in which all of this is hidden and any critical comments are suppressed.  Companies without discussion inside stagnate and walk into pitfalls they could have avoided.

Another serious mistake that employers make is to assume that loyalty to a company is the same as loyalty to particular members of staff.  Weak or bullying managers make this mistake repeatedly.  They emphasise the employees must be loyal for the good of the company, whereas in fact they make it clear that they mean loyal just to them.  This can damage an employee's standing in the company as when the weak and the bullies fall as they will sooner or later, those who seemed to back them can suffer too.  A good manager, like a good company does not suppress comment whether positive or not, in fact they solicit it as a valuable check on their own activities and because of the benefits, noted above, for the broader company.  A manager choking off comment because they fear what they will be told, is damaging their company because it is not getting those measures from frontline staff and the warnings about current or upcoming problems that you need to keep a business thriving.  You only had to watch a single episode of the series 'Back to the Floor' ( shown on BBC 1997-2002) to see that.

Policing expression of your employees' views let alone censuring their spare time activities is the sign of a vulnerable, insecure employer who forgets that workers are people and are better for having a full life.  Critically, it is far better for the longevity of your business that you do not use the 'stick' of loyalty to suppress the comments you need to hear.  If you work to earn that loyalty not only will have have a more effective workforce but you will attract solid business now and good employees in the future.  Blocking expression is just the sign of a poor employer and one heading for bankruptcy.

Cracking the Whip of Unemployment

Well, as I had feared, just as has been the case, unemployment has completely sapped my inspiration. Despite having more time to blog, the spirit has gone out of me. Unemployment is terribly insidious it saps the will to do anything much. I suppose this is because most of us are people of routine. When you are unemployed, you can make yourself a routine: I rise at the same time each day (7.30am) and look for jobs in set locations on set days of the week, but I know it is false and it is only because I am compelling myself to do it that I do not let the apathy of unemployment completely swallow me. Of course, I have only been unemployed for two months, so it might be tougher in the future to overcome this. I have heard that women find it easier to cope with unemployment than men do, because their lives change much more than men's; every month their period throws them off track to a greater or lesser extent and they learn how to overcome feeling tense or tired or washed out and yet continue with the daily chores much better than men do. Perhaps this is why men are becoming obsolete in modern society, but that is a topic that I have already tackled.

One thing which is not the case is that I have not lost the desire to work. To some extent the more unemployment saps me the more I want to escape the effect it is having on me and I know that will only come from having a job. Consequently, when I do have a focus, i.e. a particular job to apply for I put lots of work into it. I have an interview tomorrow and I have spent a day reading all I can about the company and the people who are going to interview me, so that even if they are not well prepared for the interview and like many interviewers even uncertain about what they actually want, I can hopefully demonstrate that I am the person they need to employ. Of course the job is temporary, not permanent and pays £9000 per year less than I earned in my last job, but that is what happens when unemployment rises. It provides an excellent opportunity for employers, especially in the UK, to force down salaries (though prices are not falling as fast, of course) and to reduce job security.

British employers always feel their workers are lazy and over-paid. It may have been proven that when compared to workers in eastern Europe, British workers do not work the longest hours, but certainly when compared to neighbouring states such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, post-industrial, western European economies which we should be on a par with, UK workers do work long hours. In terms of pay, well, we have the added burden that the price of housing, food and petrol exceeds the costs in neighbouring states and we receive only 12 salary payments per year compared to the 14 they get in Belgium and the 13 workers even get in South Africa. Despite this, the xenophobia and lack of language skills of the British, means most of us are ignorant of these facts so sit back while employers tell us we are lazy and greedy and should be grateful that they deign to give us any work while they take salaries and bonuses equivalent to the combined pay of large sections of their employees.

Last year, I wrote about how many employers felt that with the prosperity of the UK since the 1990s, they had lost the 'whip' of unemployment to frighten workers into being compliant and accepting poor pay and conditions without complaint. Ironically, even immigrant workers especially from elsewhere in Europe were unwilling to take what employers felt was 'fair'. People complain about migrant workers but forget they would not come if employers did not seek to bring them into the UK as a cheaper alternative to training British workers and skilling them. You notice that there is a sector of society which despite being right-wing, is pretty quiet on the immigration issue and these are employers who want the cheapest labour they can get. Now that Poles and other migrants are returning to their own countries now that the UK economy is in downturn, their only option is to pressurise British workers to take lower wages.

Radio news broadcasts today have reported that 'the economy is picking up' and that there are more jobs available. UK unemployment remains at 2.4 million, the highest level since 1996 and conflicting reports say it will worsen. Peaks in unemployment tend to lag behind the economic crises. The economy in the UK nosedived in 1981 but unemployment did not touch 4 million until 1983 (of course real levels were concealed by the Thatcher government's distorted methods of reporting the figures). Unemployment did not start falling until about 1987 and still remained around 2.2 million in the supposed boom of 1989. There was another peak in the recession of 1990-3 getting back to 3.5 million briefly before a steady decline through the remainer of the 1990s and into the 200s, returning below 1.5 million around 2004 for the first time since 1980; 24 years earlier.

Such broad figures conceal the fact that often the people in work were in part-time or temporary jobs rather than permanent ones and at lower salaries than they had been previously. Of course, such factors dent consumer confidence and slow down the economy so holding up recovery in other elements of the economic system outside employment. Ironically, I have not seen any figures on how many jobs the introduction of the minimum wage created. Right-wingers whined that it would wreck the economy, whereas in fact by increasing consumption it helped stimulate service-sector orientated Britain in the late 1990s and most of the 2000s.

To me it seems that employers do not feel that the recent recession has stung hard enough yet. I think most would love to get to a situation where they could say 'we could employ so many more people if there was no minimum wage in the way, it needs to be suspended or scrapped'. Though this is not in David Cameron's list of policies (assuming he actually has one; it is not visible) but I could imagine him being sympathetic to such arguments if he comes to power in 2010. British employers always think they pay too much tax even when it is at historic lows, far below what they paid in 1981. They always feel salaries are too high, even though if they fall further consumption in Britain will continue to be suppressed. I know of no country where business is so indignant about what it sees as its rights and the fabricated 'uppity' nature of its workers that it would cut its own throat in terms of sales to get back at employees. Greed in Britain blinds employers to the fact they are part of a complex economic machine and if they keep banging one part of the machine the rest of it will not work that well. Just look at the German government's policy of paying businesses to keep people in work compared to the slash-and-burn attitude with jobs in the UK.

Anyway, this brings me to my main point about today's 'news' about recovery. If everyone believes that there are more jobs available, then employers can whine 'anyway unemployed is not trying hard enough to find work; they are demanding too much in terms of salary/security'. This happens through individual behaviour already. I am applying for jobs that last only 2 years (so far I am ignoring maternity cover jobs as I know it will cost me more to move to the area than I could make back in 9 months) and at salaries two-thirds of my previous level. Thus, even if I get work, I am still going to be going on no holidays, not buying any clothes or DVDs or a new car. My contribution to the economic recovery is going to be minimal, it is just that I will not lose my house. I know we consume too much, but until you can work part-time locally and travel on wonderful public transport to reach your job and still afford to pay rent on even a small house, then I need to push for better terms. The bulk of us will never be self-sufficient and live in a yurt, so we have to make living in 3-bedroomed terraced houses with a 10-year old car out front at least feasible on an income which is 50% above the national average salary. Heaven forbid that some of us might want to take time to train as a teacher or a social worker! No way of doing that without becoming homeless. Saying this, as someone pointed out after training as a social worker (which the UK is desperately short of) you can earn £28, 000 (€31,640: US$46,200) per year and get attacked in the media at every turn whereas if you train as a manager of the discount supermarket Lidl you can earn £45,000 (€50,850; US$74,260) per year and get hassle only from the occasional irate customer not newspapers selling millions of copies.

We will all jump at the poorly paid, insecure jobs because the bulk of us want to work and any work is better than unemployment. However, again we will have allowed employers in their delusions about their own personal greatness and our supposed greed, to knock us back into living a life that is nerve-wracking and does not permit us to plan or save or experience life. The whip of unemployment is being cracked by this latest claim that there are jobs and the only people not taking them are the lazy or the too-demanding. It is a lie. Unemployment is high and rising and forcing people into temporary, low paid jobs is going to continue that situation for far longer than would be the case.

Gagged by My Employer for Telling the Truth

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have worked on contracts in every job I have had. Most last 2 years. In my current employment I am on my second 2-year contract. Now, under EU legislation, that means at the end of this period of work, i.e. August 2009, I should be made permanent in my post. However, when I contacted the human resources department of my employer, they said that somehow none of this work legislation applied to them, nor did a recent court case about contract workers working for a similar company. I quoted the law chapter and verse at them and they yielded a little saying I could apply for permanency in February, though they thought it was unlikely I would get it. Since then the company has been through an extended period of making redundancies, a process which has now been lengthened since the credit crunch kicked in. Thus, it seems highly unlikely that I will be employed by the company after August 2009. Given that I am now over 40 and have always found it difficult to find work (usually it takes 125 applications and 5 interviews from those before I get one), I am likely to be unemployed by September 2009, whatever the economy does, and we have all been promised a recession lasting until at least 2010 if not 2012. Now, I part bought a house last December, and it is clear that when I lose my job, I will lose my house which has fallen £25,000 (€31,000; US$39,500 - I find it difficult to believe that £1 has fallen from US$2.04 to only US$1.58) since it was bought. I cannot sustain the payments of my part of the house if I am not in employment or even if I get a job that pays less than my current one. I want to sell the house, but the market is incredibly slow, so repossession which is rocketing (11,000 houses repossessed in the UK in October alone) is the likely outcome.

Last Wednesday I was switching off my computer before being on leave and travelling to Whitby on the Thursday to help the woman in my house trade. My email system has an 'Out of Office' function which you switch on to tell people when you are not in the office and when you will be back. Now earlier in the day we had had an email from the very head of the company whining how the company cannot afford our pay rise and how it is going to have to break with national collective bargaining so it can keep our salaries down, of course he earns over £180,000 (€223,200; US$284,400). In that atmosphere I wrote on my out of office message 'I am away from my office trying to help earn enough money so that my house will not be immediately reposessed when my contract expires'. This was entirely truthful. The woman in my house was trading to earn money to pay her share of the mortgage. It is also true that the house will be repossessed after my contract expires next year.

Given the extreme reaction, you would have thought I had said something rude or damaging about the company, not the truth about my own life. While I was away messages were criss-crossing the company and my immediate manager was questioned about how could he permit me to tell the truth in this way. The IT section was contacted to remove the message from my email system and also lock me out of all my work accounts. I was hauled into see my manager the moment I got into the office and was told to write such a thing was damaging to my standing in the company. I am so angry, that actually just stating what is going to happen to me is so shocking to the bosses that it offends them and they have it removed. I was completely offended by the head of the company whining about how greedy we are. I know workers have no comeback and are free to be kicked around by employers. I have already commented on how bullying is carried on without any action against it and in fact support for bullies in senior positions. I need to cling to this job but I am going to leave it as soon as I can. The company has a vaunted policy of free speech and communication but come down heavily on a minor observation about my own life not them.

I would love them to tell me that it is a lie and that I have a permanent position or that the contract is extended, but they are not saying that at all. They have destroyed any lingering loyalty I had to them and have turned my resentment into hostility. I will have revenge on them as soon as I can and in the meantime I am going to stop doing anything more than the most obvious work. What is the point anyway if I have no idea whether I will be there any longer than 9 months? There is no point planning events that I cannot guarantee I will oversee. Who wants to work for a company that is so petty that it puts all the wheels of its machine into action over a single sentence on an email. Surely they should realise that if they cannot stomach such a simple statement and have to so over-react there is something seriously wrong with them. I have not whistle blown, I have not revealed the bullying through naming them, I have not sold secrets to a rival, I have simply said (in line with what they have told me) that I will lose my job and then my house. They want me to be grateful, to kiss their feet for being treated this way. They want to behave badly and treat me like scum and yet not be alerted to the fact of how they are behaving.

People say I am wrong when I say I am powerless, but it is clear that I am if I am unable to make such a simple statement without provoking such a harsh reaction. My only power comes in revenge and I am going to turn my efforts to that now. My intention is to wreck the company as best I can even if it takes the rest of my life.

Unemployment as the Whip

At the end of the Second World War there was obviously a concern not to return to the mass unemployment of the 1930s, partly this was because it was blamed for aiding the rise of Nazism in Germany that had led to the war breaking out. In addition right across Europe by 1938 there were very few democracies left and even if they had not become as extreme as Nazi Germany, most Europeans were under the rule of a dictator in a society that was authoritarian and discriminatory on grounds of race and religion. There was also a fear in 1945 of a repeat of what had happened 1919-21 with the end of the war and the return of demobilised troops leading to unemployment that was hard to decrease before the really bad levels that followed in the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1929.

In the UK in 1945, under a Labour Government, and even before then when civil servants had started thinking about the post-war economy, one issue was how far the UK could get to full employment. It was believed that Keynesian economics which had begun to be experimented with in the UK from the 1941 budget onwards could get the UK in a better shape in terms of unemployment. There was a great deal of debate about how high unemployment should be kept at, because it was feared that if everyone had a job then there would be no incentive for workers to work hard and they could effectively blackmail employers for higher wages. So it was believed that to achieve flexibility in the economy that unemployment should be somewhere between 3%-8% of the working population with left-wingers favouring the lower figure and the right-wingers the higher level.

In fact as it turned out, injections of US capital through Marshall Aid from 1948 onwards and the demands of reconstruction and then the various wars of the Cold War, combined with cheap oil kept unemployment low right until the mid-1970s and really there was no need for Keynesian economics. By the time they were tried in 1976, the world had become so used to not using deficit finance, and to a more stable budget pattern that such an approach was seen as unacceptable and the UK began to go into its highest levels of unemployment since the 1930s. This was not helped by the Thatcher government's privatisation of nationalised industries which then cut cost and the strict monetarist policies which exacerbated the shift from manufacturing to service dominance of the UK policy. There was also an increasing maldistribution of wealth as salaries of the richest pulled away further from the bulk of the working population. This in fact reduced consumption in the economy and millions of poor people actually consume a great deal more than a few rich people and so even the service sector did not prosper. The vigorous encouragement for people to buy rather than rent property also increased frictional unemployment as it made it far harder to move to a new area to find work, especially with the sharp disparaties between (not only in terms of housing but also food and other essentials) prices in different parts of the UK. Official OECD figures put UK unemployment in the mid 1980s at around 3.6 million, it was probably in fact over 4 million out of a working population of somewhere around 22-25 million. It also concealed all of those in part-time, insecure low paid jobs.

Unemployment now in the UK is around 1.65 million people out of a working population of 29 million, so 5.7%. We use ILO figures much more these days than simply counting the people who are claiming benefit was was the case in the 1980s and which actually excluded lots of people seeking work (such as married women whose husband worked, people between the ages of 55-65, etc.). The right-wing press, notably 'The Daily Mail' still complains that there are too many economically inactive people, they claim 7.95 million who they seem to condemn as being unwilling to contribute to the economy and thus should be chasitised. In fact of these 1.89 million are students, the bulk of whom work to pay their way through university and college given the high costs of study. They often take the low paid casual jobs that anyone supporting a family could not live on. Also it is still the case that the more someone studies the more they rise their income. Universities also generate a lot of wealth and in some areas are now the main industry of the town, often employing 3-5000 staff who contribute. Portsmouth claims that even just visits by parents of students who are studying in the city, bring £26 million per year into the economy, let alone what the students and university staff spend themselves. So I would hardly call students economically inactive. These days may go on placements into companies as part of their studies and so form an educated free labour force for part of the year.

Of the economically inactive, 2.35 million are either caring for elderly relatives or for children. Mothers are now condemned as 'stay-at-home' mothers. The thing is the policy of the Blair government and the Conservative ones that preceded it was that having mothers at home was a good thing to be encouraged but at the same time they should also go out to work. This contradictory policy has never been reconciled in the past 30 years in the UK so mothers are attacked from both directions. It is seen as alright for them to stay at home as long as they do not claim benefits. Women in the workplace still earn 17% less than a man in the same post, so where is the incentive to go out and be criticised for not looking after your child when you are going to get paid less. Mothers at home save the state millions of pounds. Private childcare is beyond the reach of most parents in terms of cost so to bring more mothers into the workforce would need a huge increase in cheap nursery places probably supplied by the state. The same goes for carers of the elderly and the disabled. The Thatcher government ran down many long-term care institutions to save money and forced 'care in the community' on the population. Scotland has reintroduced some of the provision for elderly people, England has not. Again, then, these carers might not be economically active, but they are effectively saving the state millions of pounds in the care it would be obliged to provide.

Apparently 619,000 people have retired early. Now, given that unemployment is 1.65 million, if these people were still in the workforce you would actually raise unemployment by 36%. These people tend not to be a burden on society and they are consumers so stimulating the economy. It seems perverse to want them back in the workforce in the place of younger people. By definition people who have retired early do not need to work to earn an income, so why should they not yield their place to those who need a job to support their family? It seems ridiculous to concern ourselves about the early retired they are a benefit not a burden to the economy. We were all encouraged during the 1980s to make millions and retire at 30, so is it any surprise that many people have done that? Again it seems like a contradictory policy. Conservatives want it both ways, it is a very old-fashioned attitude that is reminiscent of the 19th century attitudes of Non-Conformist denominations, that somehow it is sinful not to be working and those who do not work are guilty of committing an offence. We are long passed such attitudes and also to cling on to them suggests we put no value on study or caring.

There are people in the economy who do not want to work, these are the 34,000 termed 'discouraged workers'. Interestingly this figure is almost exactly the same as the number in the 1960s despite the increase in the size of the population. The question is would you want to employ such a person anyway? It is clear that such people are a smaller percentage of the population than they were, say, in 1968 and the number does not necessarily mean it is the same 34,000 people as some will drift in and out of this category as economic pressures dictate. If you think of the homeless people in the UK, of those with mental conditions who have been pushed out from institutions and so on, then this figure actually seems quite low, representing 0.12% of the total working population, actually probably lower than those people who are economically active but making their income from crime and probably scooped up in the 3.75 million people described as self-employed and lionised by the right-wing press!

The other neglected sector is the under-employed, those people who want a full-time permanent job but can only get temporary or seasonal work with very little security or rights. When I lived in East London, this characterised the employment of literally hundreds of people in any given street. When the minimum wage came in many doubled or tripled their weekly income though they had no access to the employment rights that should be taken for granted and in many cases their employers were scooping back their wages through introducing various charges and most often through not paying the national insurance contributions. In some parts of the UK, this grey economy which has legitimate businesses behaving in illegitimate ways is terribly common as the bulk of the employees have no other option bar crime or going back on state benefits. Contrary to the portrayal of the bulk of the population, the large majority of people hate to subsist on handouts and will go out of their way to get a scummy job with no rights, long hours and low pay rather than stay on benefits. However, such jobs do not pay enough and you are at risk of losing them on the whim of the employer. Tax credits have helped for those in such situations with families, but if you lose the job they stop too and you are back to benefits, constantly flickering between the two states.

Why have I got on to unemployment today? It is not because new figures are out, it was stimulated by a report (reported in 'The Guardian' on Saturday) that employers are complaining that people under the age of 40 lack the experience of mass unemployment (you could argue those under 34 as if you are 34 now, you were 16 in 1990) and so do not work hard enough as they have insufficient fear of losing their jobs. This goes back to the thoughts at the end of the Second World War about how much unemployment was needed to prick people into accepting low-paid work. No-one seems to realise that a worker who is in fear of unemployment is not an efficient worker. I am in this situation at the moment. I am likely to be unemployed from August 2009 onwards and yet I am already in fear that I will lose my house and other things despite their being a year to go. I am 40 so maybe I have that fear of the Thatcherite years still lodged in my brain. The effect is though that the fear of unemployment is causing sleepless nights and utter despair. I feel there is little point in putting in any effort to a job I will not see out. I am refusing to start projects that I know I will not see the end of. It causes arguments with my housemate and my family. Is this the kind of situation we want for younger people to be in terror all the time?

The thing about being threatened with unemployment is that it breaks any common interest between you and your employer. I have seen this happen so many times. In the past year two women who knew they were going to be layed off at my work (by a very bullying very misogynistic boss) simply stopped working, minutes were not typed up, things were not filed, they left everything in a mess because they no longer felt any obligation to the boss who had treated them so shabbily. Such fear stunts initiative. I have no incentive to start new things or even make suggestions on how to improve them. There is no point in me receiving training; there is no point going for promotion to work for the employer I will be parting company with so very soon. Fear of unemployment does not make people work harder, it instead quickly leads them to draw in and work less effectively. The hardest workers are those who are valued and feel they have a future in the company they are working in. Employers tend to see their workers simply as a resource like they electricity or raw materials, they forget that workers engage emotionally in their workplace as often the spend more time there awake than they do with their families.

One thing that the employers overlooked about people under the age of 40 is that they tend to view their life as much more changeable. They tend not to have mortgages or families, especially these days when people are leaving (or being forced by the economy) to leave buying a house or raising children until much later in their life. In addition, the age at which it is seen right to do certain things has shifted greatly. In my youth, you were deemed to be entering middle age at the age of 40. These days people in their early 40s carry out the kinds of activities that would have been done by 25-year olds in my youth. A colleague of mine in her 50s water-skiied for the first time last week and another who is in her mid-40s regularly goes scuba diving in tropical waters. Back in the 1970s these women would not think of doing such thing. Despite British people being pretty unadventurous when compared say to their French or Australian counterparts we are all constantly encouraged to get 'out there' travel and experience life. Given this context it is unsurprising that people under 40 are not keen to keep their heads down and work solidly at a job particularly when (in contrast to in the 1950s and 1960s) there is no guarantee that they will not be dropped with minimal notice and minimal redundancy pay. Commitment is two-way and employers cannot whine that their employers make no commitment to the business when the employers make it clear they are making no commitment to the workers.

This leads on to the other complaint from employers that workers under 40 see going to work as an extension of their social life. If employers have suddenly discovered this then they have been blind about employee behaviour for decades. In terms of marriages in the UK, 40% are between people who met at work and this figure has continued to be the case for decades even if the level of marriages (climbing again) has fluctuated. This does not take into account the other relationships and friendships established at work and often promoted by employers through 'team building'. Again employers' expectations are unrealistic if they think they can have their employees working as a team and not for social contact to develop. The shift has been in terms of the media used for the contact. People do not stand around the 'water cooler' as they used to and far fewer gather in the smoking room and many workplaces no longer have a canteen where people socialise. A decade ago people complained that employees used the telephone to talk to friends and relatives now of course they email or text or instant message. This makes it more visible to some employers and in fact more in their control as many now block the usage of such websites through work machines. Another factor is now that we are all service sector workers it is much easier than if you are bellowing across to your colleague standing the other side of a production line. However, I bet if you measured how much time spend socialising at work now and compare it to 1958 or 1978 or 1998 you would find the time would be pretty much the same.

Thus, unemployment is still seen as the necessary whip in the UK to get a higher level of work out of employees. The fact that we work longer hours and have fewer holidays than our European colleagues is not factored into this at all. Fear, despite what employers think, does not make people work harder, it makes them work less efficiently. Society has changed and so have our expectations but people who feel happy and above all secure in their job work hard and make sacrifices for their employer. People who feel they are simply a disposable commodity and are threatened to make them work harder are not going to do. To get a good return on people you have to invest in them as you invest in the other aspects of your business. Of course as in so many facets of British business there is under-investment in this aspect as well as many others and so companies see the consequences of their policies.

The Guilt at Being Sick

This is another posting inspired by an article I have read but it goes to something that many of us living in the UK and probably many other countries have experienced. The portrayal of the average UK worker by employers in whatever media they are asked to comment is that we are lazy and that we are always trying to get out of work. Every year it is reported how much money is lost through UK workers having bank holidays (despite the fact that we have 5 fewere per year than the next nearest country) and how we will not work long hours (though the UK is the only EU country that has been exempted from the Working Time Directive restricting workers to 48 hours work per week) and so despite working longer than elsewhere we are made to feel guilty that we are somehow weakening the British economy. There is never any reference to how little work bosses do or how their high salaries and bonuses eat up far more profits than the few bank holidays that workers get in the UK.

The new focus is on sick leave. The Health Secretary Alan Johnson wants to stamp out the 'sick-note culture' in this urge to make us all work harder or pay the price. It is stated that apparently there are 175 million sick days taken each year (about 7 per person of working age) costing the country £13 billion (compared to the £5 billion it is spending on identity cards, though how they calculate this loss from missed work days is never revealed and there is no consideration that many of us make up the work we have missed by being off sick). Apparently the DVLA, the motor vehicle licensing authority says on average its workers take 11 sick days per year and they are seeking to clamp down on it.

Nowhere does anyone seem to look at this issue with anything except the sense that everyone is faking illness to get free time of work and it is something they should be stopped from doing. No-one looks at how inhospitable many workplaces are where bullying is very common and the prospects for a decent salary and promotion are limited or non-existent. No-one takes into account that many sick days are taken when parents are actually not sick but have to stay home to look after their ill children especially these days when schools are loath to have anyone exhibiting signs of (or being suspected of having been in contact with) illness. No-one analyses how stressful workplaces are in the UK where so many of us on short-term contracts are fearful of slipping up and losing our jobs. In addition, in an environment where the bulk of us feel compelled to keep on working while still ill or get back to work as soon as we can, no-one considers how many infections we pick up from our fellow workers who should be at home.

There are lazy people in the UK, but the bulk of the population is keen to work a decent day for a decent wage. We know that employers look askance at us if we reveal that we have had more than 2 sick days off within the past 2 years (the usual maximum permitted in the UK before questions are asked), so we try to keep ill-health to a minimum. We even try to keep the ill-health of our children to a minimum so as not to affect our jobs. Yet, this is not enough and employers seem to have a free hand to accuse us all of being malingerers when so many of them have poor attendance and slide off to pay golf. In the UK you have to accept that you will work longer than people across the English Channel, in poorer conditions and at lower wages and yet you should be so grateful for the job you have and never dare to be ill. Ironically if employers finally moved away from this 'master-and-servant' criticising and hostile attitude to the workforce and recognise that 'life happens' in fact they would find poor attendance would fall. Bullying workers and making them fill guilty worsens how people feel and brings sick people back to work to contaminate the rest. Vomiting sicknesses like Novovirus are rife in British society at present and are spread easily when sick people return to work alongside tired, stressed colleagues. Of course, British employers have no desire to invest in their staff just in flogging what they can out of them and to make them feel guilty that they are not grateful for that flogging. If the UK economy is ever going to survive in the 21st century it needs to change from the sickness guilt trip.

P.P. Since writing this I read that in France sick leave days come out of your holiday allowance and if you take off 3 days in a single month your salary is reduced to 85%. To me this seems harsh and encouraging the kind of problems I have noted in the UK example. The issue in the UK though is that pay is so low compared to a rapidly rising cost of living (fuel up 20p per litre (23%) in 12 months, utility costs rising at 11-15% per year, house prices rising at anything from 2%-48% depending on what area you live in but salaries rising at 1.5-3%) losing such pay would raise repossessions. In addition, the working week is shorter, the lunch break longer (often 2 hours still in France compared to the average of 23 minutes in the UK) and they receive more holidays (not least bank holidays) and retire at 60 rather than 65. The trouble with the UK is that it might be less regulatory in some things but it offers so much less to its employees in the first place.