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Posh jobs and poor jobs: the real future of work

Thursday, 25 March 2010
Category: The Good Work Commission

For all interested in the changing nature of work, the Skills Audit released recently by the skills behemoth, the UKCES, is an important and impressive document.

There is encouragement in it for those who believe in the relevance of the knowledge economy concept. By 2017, even allowing for the recession of 2008-9, the top three big occupational groups of professionals, managers and associate professional and technical occupations (think nurses and computer technicians) are expected to generate 2.2 million new jobs.

We can quibble that being a "manager" could refer to a globe-trotting CEO or the owner of a corner shop, and plenty of professionals complain their work is being commodified and degraded, but it is still astonishing to think that almost half (47 per cent) of all jobs will be in these groups.

Yet many of the fastest growing jobs in percentage terms are a long way from the buzzy, creative, laptop-tapping, free agent end. They are not so much professional as para-professional, having been created underneath the "proper professionals" – teaching assistants, paramedics, legal advisors, care-giving trades. The concept of "support" like the equally meaningless "management" is a colossal driver of 21^st century jobs. Nevertheless, it is telling that it is not real expertise and experience that counts so much as the copying of those that have it.

Elsewhere, the risers are a curious reflection of our times. Many reflect public spending that is soon to be switched off – town-planners, recyclers, youth workers, conservation officers. Or they are the by-products of body-consciousness and lifestyle economics – fitness instructors, psychologists, theme park attendants, hairdressers, beauticians.

The document contains a sharp warning, if any were needed, that the knowledge economy is absolutely no panacea – and in fact may ultimately amount to a crisis of social solidarity and cohesion.

Accompanying the growth of high skill work will persist millions in the "lo-no skills" sector. Low-wage work is not automatically bad work. But all too often it is. By 2017, eight million people, a quarter of all workers, are expected to be in the bottom three occupational groups of sales, machine and transport operatives, and "elementary" work. The ladders up and out of it are not obvious, as intermediate, middling sorts of jobs (the skilled trades, for instance) stagnate and age. To some people, this is the doomsday scenario of social polarisation – posh jobs and rubbish jobs with little in between.

Policymakers have few thoughts about what to do about the lo-no quarter. It’s all very well bigging up the knowledge economy for the UK’s competitive future, but having nothing to say about the future of eight million people borders on scandalous. What does the good life look like? More poorly regarded anti-qualifications? Gratitude that knowledge workers need people to nanny their kids and clean their houses? The master and servant principle lives on.

Another striking feature of the Skills Audit is the shift of emphasis away from thinking purely about supplying more skills. There is recognition that demand is also a problem.

What this means is that officialdom is finally recognising the long-running arguments of some academics (all hail, Ewart Keep) that boosting the supply of skills when too many firms are happy to keep trundling along the low-quality, low-skill, getting-by road, in preference to pursuing superior performance and higher value, simply does not add up. "Over-qualification" is the bureaucratic description for immeasurable personal despair at the injustice of work.

But the politics of improving skills demand look agonised. What policy levers really exist in the current political climate to get employers to up-skill their product offerings? Campaigns and exhortation may get you so far. Tougher medicine from state agencies in telling firms how to compete are unlikely to be welcomed.

Stephen Overell