Work worth having

Jo is eighteen. She lives in a town in the North East, she is good with her hands, and she has no particular plan.

Here is what happens to her now.

There is no apprenticeship, because the firms that might have offered one are bidding for six-month contracts and cannot commit to four years of anything. So she takes agency work. A warehouse, then a care home, then a warehouse again. Shifts confirmed on Thursday for the week after. By twenty-four she is competent at several jobs and qualified in none.

She rents a flat with poor insulation and a prepayment meter, and pays around £1,800 a year to keep it half-warm. Rent takes a third of what she earns. She cannot save a deposit, so she cannot buy, so she keeps renting, which is why she cannot save a deposit. The bus into town takes fifty minutes. If she’s on early shift, there’s no bus at all.

Her mother is sixty-eight and lives four miles away. She keeps the heating off until December.

Nothing terrible happens to Jo. She is not in the papers. She works hard, she is liked, she is never once asked to do anything that engages her creativity, and at forty she is doing roughly what she was doing at twenty-four.

Now the other version.

At eighteen she starts a four-year apprenticeship, because the firm that takes her on can see two decades of retrofit and grid work in front of it and needs people. At twenty-two she is a qualified heat pump and low-carbon heating engineer, on a nationally negotiated rate, in a trade that did not have enough people in it and still doesn’t.

Her flat costs around £600 a year to heat, because it was one of the first streets retrofitted. She buys a house at twenty-seven, round the corner from the leisure centre. The bus is quicker and runs early on a morning. Her mother’s house was insulated in the same programme and she has the heating on in November like anyone else. By the time she’s forty, Jo has a savings ISA and is building up a decent pension.

Same person. Same town. Same aptitude. The difference is not character, and it is not luck.

It is whether the work exists.                 

A fair day’s pay

Most people in this country are not asking to be given anything.

They are asking for the deal they were promised, which is very old and very simple. Work hard. Be useful. Live decently. Own something eventually. And watch your children do a bit better than you did.

That deal has been broken. Not because people stopped working hard – they work longer and produce more than their grandparents did – but because the connection between doing the work and living decently has been broken, quietly, in several places. This report is a description of where.

At the heart of restoring it is changing what work is available.

What the pay isn’t

Public health expert Michael Marmot spent decades studying civil servants, which sounds like the least dramatic research project imaginable and produced one of the most uncomfortable findings in modern medicine.

Everyone in the study had a job, a home and enough to eat. And still, health tracked rank, all the way up. Not a cliff between poor and comfortable – a gradient, running from the bottom of the hierarchy to the top, with each grade doing measurably better than the one below.

The best explanation wasn’t income, or diet, or smoking. It was control. How much say you had over your own work. Whether what you put in matched what you got back.¹

Which is the argument of this entire report. A country with no control over its own conditions is a country in trouble, and so is a person. The absence of control is not merely undignified. It shortens your life.

“So when this report says good work, it means three specific things. Security, so you can plan. Control, so the job is yours and not just done to you. And effort matched to reward, so that being good at something means something.”

Everything else in this chapter is about how to get those three.

Why wages are what they are

Your labour is priced by what else you could be doing.

In a town with three big employers, that price is set by the people hiring, not the people applying. Rents are set by what tenants can be made to pay. Electricity is priced at whatever the last gas plant costs. Same failure, three times: the price is set by the absence of an alternative.

A twenty-year pipeline of secure, skilled work changes the alternative. Not by legislating a wage. By giving you the freedom to vote with your feet.

That is why this programme raises pay for people who will never fit a heat pump. When the warehouse has to compete with a retrofit apprenticeship, the warehouse raises its game.

Voice

“In 1979, around four in five British workers had their pay set through collective bargaining. Today it is two in five, and in the private sector one in five.”

One person negotiating against everybody else’s wage bill has very little to bargain with. Bargaining at the level of a sector is a different instrument entirely, and it is how most of northern Europe sets pay.

The employer’s case for it is not sentimental. Unionised workplaces hold on to their staff, and turnover is expensive – recruitment, induction, the months before somebody is up to speed. And a workforce with a voice tells you about the problem on the third floor before it becomes a legal claim.

There is a hidden cost in the other direction too. A gig worker cannot be an absentee. They simply stop being offered shifts. The cost of their bad back does not disappear, it moves to the NHS and the DWP, and the rest of us pay it. Insecure work does not eliminate the expense of human beings being human. It just puts it somewhere the accounts don’t show.

And the money itself behaves differently depending where it lands. Wages get spent, mostly locally, and about 40p in the pound comes back to the Treasury. The same pound in a private equity dividend does neither.²

Bargaining at sector level requires a legal framework that permits it, and Britain’s has been built over forty years to do the opposite. This is not the place to go into detail, but it cannot be left unsaid: you cannot bargain sectorally under rules designed to stop you bargaining at all.

Nobody is campaigning for the knocker-upper

There was a man whose job was to tap on your window with a long pole so you got to the mill on time. The cheap alarm clock finished him. Nobody wants his job back.

Nobody wants the typing pool back either, and that one is recent enough that your mother may have worked in one. Mine was a telephonist.

Industries end. That’s technology. It’s how they end that matters.

Automatic exchanges came in over about twenty years, one exchange at a time, across the whole country, while other work was appearing in the same streets. Telephonists moved to another exchange, or into clerical work, or into the operator services that survived. Most of them experienced it as a career, not a redundancy.

Contrast that with the coalfields. Tens of thousands of jobs, inside a handful of years, concentrated in places where the pit was the only employer, with nothing arriving afterwards. Two generations on, the employment and health statistics in those towns still show it.

The difference is not that one industry was treated kindly and the other cruelly. The difference is pace and concentration – both are government choices.

Which turns just transition from a plea into a specification. An industry can close without doing lasting damage if the replacement work already exists, and if the closure is spread across enough time and enough places. That is the same discipline as the capacity guardrail. Pace the change to what the system can absorb.

Scotland’s Just Transition Commission – a statutory body, not a campaign group – put it bluntly. There is still no transition plan for oil and gas workers, and warned that if the pace and sequencing are determined mainly by turbulent commodity prices, the transition will be unjust.

That is this report’s thesis in a sentence, written by an official commission. Leave the timing to global markets and people get hurt. The offshore workers’ own proposals, developed with their unions, ask for the same thing from the other end: a guarantee of equivalent work or funded retraining, bargaining rights across the sector, and public ownership of what replaces the rigs.³

So the promise has to be stated accurately, because a false one is worse than none. Not your current job is safe. Some jobs end. But your future is safe.

Your skills are needed. The jobs are coming. And they will be here first.

Notice, too, what a trade looks like when it ends well. There are still blacksmiths, still farriers, still chimney sweeps – fewer of them, doing skilled work for people who value it, keeping their dignity. That is what a slow ending looks like. Compare that with a pit village.

Work a machine can’t do

Someone will ask about artificial intelligence, and the answer here is short.

The work in this report is fitting a heat pump into a Victorian terrace where nothing is square. Laying cable in a wet trench in February. Bricklaying. Scaffolding. Sitting with somebody at four in the morning.

Nobody knows what this technology does to accountancy or graphic design over twenty years. What we can say is that the jobs this programme creates are among the hardest to automate, they are needed now, and they are needed at scale.

If you are eighteen and wondering which way to jump, that’s a good option to have.

And the people who look after us

Every job that builds infrastructure is underpinned by jobs that don’t. 

The retrofit engineer had teachers. The bricklayer’s mother is in a care home. The site that catches fire needs firefighters, and the apprentice who falls off a ladder needs a hospital.

Think about what these services actually are, economically. Every other input to a business can be bought. Steel, machines, power, premises. A workforce cannot. A firm that hires a new apprentice is taking delivery of eighteen years of work it didn’t pay for, and could not have commissioned.

That is not a cost the country carries. It is the input everything else runs on.

And there‘s a reason this work is chronically undervalued. It’s not that anyone fails to appreciate it. It’s that its output is an absence. A crime that did not happen, an illness that did not occur, a child who did not fall behind. Every other sector in the economy gets to show you what it made.

And be clear about what actually happened to a nurse’s living standards. Pay did not keep up with prices. That is the whole of it. Not a failure of one settlement or one review body, but fourteen years in which the cost of heating a house and living in one rose faster than the wage did.

Which is why this matters to people who will never fit a heat pump. A pay round is fought over every year, in public, with a ballot and sometimes a picket line. What it costs to keep the house warm is settled somewhere else entirely, by a market nobody bargains with. £1200 off an energy bill is worth around £1700 of gross pay, because nobody taxes a bill you didn’t have to pay. A teacher on a starting salary can live near the school she teaches at, because houses stop moving away from wages. And it arrives without anyone needing to go on strike for it.

The same is true of pensions. Every increase in contributions, every rise in the retirement age, every move away from final salary was justified by the same four words: “we can’t afford it.” This report is not about the funding or operation of public services. But it transforms the terrain on which that argument is had.

A country that is not hostage to a gas market, not paying a private financing premium on its own infrastructure, not handing tens of billions a year to commercial banks in interest on their own reserves, is a country that can afford to invest in its public services.

And it affects what those services are. There is a teacher somewhere reading this who buys cereal bars out of her own money because some of the children in her class have not eaten. She didn’t go into teaching to run a food bank. Nothing in this chapter will do more for her than a country where those children’s parents have secure work and a warm house.

Jo, again

Both versions of Jo’s life are ordinary. Neither is a tragedy. One of them is just smaller, and duller, and shorter.

Which one happens is not decided by Jo.