Katie Allen poses three crucial questions on how to improve Britain’s productivity (The road to greater productivity is via pay and flexibility, 28 November). Namely how it links in with low pay, how it interacts with working hours, and what it tells us about the importance of staff taking ownership of their work.
I have put a proposal to the government that sets out to cover each of these points. I have proposed a network of public employment services, driven locally by Jobcentre Plus and sustained by City Deal funding, with the specific aim of helping low-paid workers to climb the earnings ladder and craft their jobs to match their skills and circumstances.
Its main benefit to workers would be the provision by a dedicated caseworker of information, advice and guidance, as part of a clear and agreed contract which is aimed at helping them earn more money and improve their working lives – be it through altering their hours, negotiating a pay increase, taking advantage of local childcare services or discounts on public transport, gaining specialist skills, or finding work elsewhere for which their circumstances are better suited.
The government’s own in-work service is currently being piloted among a limited group of universal credit claimants only. To help solve the productivity puzzle in which our country finds itself, a more comprehensive offer is required to help change the nature of low-paid work.
Frank Field MP
Labour, Birkenhead
• Philip Hammond says that in the real world a German worker takes four days to make what we make in five. This is a heavy burden to put on to a metric that is just one big number (GDP) divided by another (workers). It is like saying that people have on average 1.99 legs, ie technically true perhaps, but quite hard to find an example and not very helpful.
Given the same tools and the same task, I’m sure a British worker is just as productive as a German one. What brings our average productivity down is a higher proportion of people in low-paid work, and a long-term failure to invest in capital equipment. Proper sectoral analysis is required, not eye-catching headlines which just make us feel inadequate to the modern world.
Whether it is right to reward the worker for making more widgets by using a better machine is a different question – perhaps the return on capital should go to the business owner. But while you can always mothball an underperforming factory, at a national level you can’t just mothball a workforce. Even Henry Ford knew he needed paying customers to buy his cars.
Tim Grollman
London
• Productivity in the UK car industry matches or exceeds the best elsewhere in Europe. Productivity while selecting parcels in a warehouse would be much lower due to the large number of people employed on zero-hours contracts, which will still have to be taken into account when calculating productivity. Crudely average the two and you have a misleading view of the UK economy. Only by analysing the economy sector by sector will we identify where attention is needed, either by better training or legislation to outlaw poor employment practices.
Richard Bull
Woodbridge, Suffolk
• Gaby Hinsliff is wrong (The golden generation should enjoy the luxury of being useful while it can, 25 November). Many retired people wonder how they ever had time for work. I recall that, over 30 years ago, predictions of a “leisured age” led to the view that society should prepare for a reduced working week. Recent articles (eg Just about managing? In these towns that’s a dream, Aditya Chakrabortty, 22 November) and diminishing opportunities for even skilled work suggest, in respect of work, the predictions were correct. Yet there is increased necessity for employment. Both partners in a family work to make ends meet, pension age is increasing, people resort to spurious “self-employment”, and graduates undertake unpaid internships. What went wrong?
The cause is concentration of the benefit from automation into the hands of the elite. Business heads’ rewards are disproportionate to their workforce.
Shared more equally, the need for full-time work should diminish. Equalisation in pay levels, coupled with redistributive taxes, could allow provision of a basic income sufficient to permit a shorter working week. The old-age pension could disappear. Anyone could continue working at occupations they enjoy, or which are their own rewards, but financial reward should not be the principal stimulus for any undertaking. Pay differentials and “capitalist” methods of earning could remain, but rewards would be appropriately taxed so that no one was forced into full-time employment. What creativity might be unleashed.
Utopian? Perhaps, but to avoid the conflict predicted by George Monbiot (Trump’s climate denial is just one of the forces that point us towards war, 23 November) we must reverse the present “survival of the richest” and reduce the need to work in order to live.
Ian King
Westbury-on-Severn, Gloucestershire
• In the 1970s there was considerable discussion about what society should do to cater for all the “leisure time” that would arise when repetitive processes were automated and made more efficient. However, in that age of the welfare state and fairer taxation it was assumed that the benefits of automation would be to a significant extent shared.
However, along came Thatcher and Reagan with authoritarian monetarist economics (which in an Orwellian misuse of language is now referred to as “liberal economics”), and in particular the tax race to the bottom so that, as technological advance means we have become much more efficient at producing the goods and food we need, the benefits have been retained by an ever decreasing minority, while the incomes of the majority have stagnated, or even regressed, for the last 40 years.
With an ever smaller workforce required to produce the products we need, unless we can reverse the trend back to redistributive taxation, and accept that not everyone can contribute directly to material wealth creation (but still want and need a good share of that wealth), I think George Monbiot’s prediction that we are heading towards major conflict is almost inevitable.
Graham Dean
Wellington, Somerset
• If there is going to be less employment in those areas where robots will replace manpower, can someone explain our governments’ arguments for more immigrants to do “the jobs we don’t want to do”. There is a contradiction here. If this doomsday theory is right, encouraging the arrival of immigrants from other parts of the world can only lead to a nightmare scenario of more people turning to extremist parties, social problems and social unrest when jobs and homes go.
Peter Fieldman
Paris, France
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