Reading Ian Jack’s column (Sorry, would-be sandwich makers: you’ll find it much harder to get a job than I did, 15 November) made me reflect on how much has changed with respect to employment opportunities and social mobility over the past 50-odd years. My CV illustrates this point perfectly. I left school in 1959, aged 15 with no qualifications. Over the next year or so I was sacked from three jobs (for instance, for nibbling at the rounds of cheese in the cellar when working as a shop assistant in a grocer’s), yet each time was able to walk into another job with no intervening periods of unemployment. Eventually, still with no educational qualifications, I was accepted for nurse training. I became a state registered nurse, qualifying in 1966. I wasn’t a very good nurse and sought new opportunities. After an uncertain period in which I, among other things, sold brushes door-to-door, worked as a labourer in a steel mill and suffered periods of unemployment, I had a stroke of good fortune in 1968 when, working as a clerk at a sportswear manufacturers, I was accepted for training as a computer programmer. I worked in information technology until 1989, when I went to Ruskin College (John Prescott’s alma mater) to study history. After 30 years, I had found my role. After 25 years’ studying, teaching and researching history, I am now a semi-retired university lecturer.
Dr Neil Redfern
Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire
• While Linda Tirado poignantly documents the pain and humiliation of poverty in the UK (G2, 17 November), she doesn’t go far enough in her analysis of its origins. Of course capitalism needs its winners and losers and of course at the moment the winners feel they can safely condemn the losers. But this is not because Paul Ryan or Iain Duncan Smith are more loathsome than other cheerleaders for the neoliberal bandwagon. There is nothing personal in their attacks but to argue that they mean well is ludicrous. They do what they do because it’s what the system requires. A fear of pauperisation is vital if people are to be persuaded not to reject whatever zero-hours contract or minimum-wage-plus-humiliation job they are offered, and there is no greater cause of fear than not being able to feed yourself or your children. How long before we see the Victorian workhouse making its reappearance?
Tony Owen
London
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