Making the Best of a Bad Job
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2013
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Goodhart considers whether the declining status of basic jobs can be halted and even reversed.
Successive governments have prioritised widening access to higher education to try to drive social mobility, without giving much thought to the impact this has on the expectations of young people who, for whatever reason, are not going to take that path.
But even in a knowledge-based economy, the most basic jobs survive. Offices still need to be cleaned, supermarket shelves stacked, and care home residents looked after.
The best employers know how to design these jobs to make them more satisfying. Are politicians finally waking up to the problem?
Contributors in order of appearance:
Caroline Lloyd, professor and industrial relations specialist at the University of Cardiff Donna Braithwaite, supermarket worker Bill Mumford, chief executive of care charity MacIntyre Geoff Dench, sociologist and founder of the charity Men for Tomorrow. Sir Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick Josie Zerafa, cashier at Iceland supermarket Tracey Vella, cashier at Iceland supermarket Sandra McNamara, store manager at Iceland supermarket
Producer: Ruth Alexander.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:39.0 | In this edition of Analysis, presented by me David Goodhart, we ask whether too much stress on |
| 0:44.4 | social mobility has made it harder to recruit people to do some of society's most |
| 0:48.7 | essential work. This is a story of low-skilled jobs, their declining status and the people who still have to do them. |
| 0:57.0 | Even though many economists and successive governments have tried to will them away. |
| 1:02.0 | When I first started in care, people would you say. successive governments have tried to will them away. |
| 1:03.0 | When I first started in care, people just saying, |
| 1:05.6 | why are you doing this? |
| 1:06.7 | That's the attitude that comes across to me |
| 1:09.6 | is that anybody can do that job. People put too much value on what you earn. |
| 1:14.0 | If you don't earn enough, you're a loser. |
| 1:17.0 | If you haven't managed to work your way up, it's because you haven't tried or you're lacking |
| 1:21.0 | rather than, you know, maybe you don't want to or you know not everybody |
| 1:25.2 | can. Back in the early 1990s when I was employment editor of the Financial Times |
| 1:29.8 | hardly a week would pass without another survey landing on my desk declaring the imminent disappearance of low skilled jobs. |
| 1:37.0 | Pretty much everyone in the future, these surveys assumed, will be working in a highly skilled job in business services or the creative sector or some such. |
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