'The Hard Thing and The Right Thing are Often The Same'

 

Virender Sehwag's Approach to Cricket and Training

 

The agony of returning to work in September

Janan Ganesh in The FT 

For eight improbable years, TS Eliot earned his crust as a clerk for Lloyds Bank. He did not have the excuse of ignorance, therefore, when he misidentified April as the “cruelest month”. All working people know the real ogre to be September. Millions of us are winding down our summer holidays around now and answering the call of necessary employment. 

I enjoy my job to an almost indecent degree. Yet even I felt a pang as I flew out of Perugia recently and into my nine-to-five (or, if you must, my eleven-to-two). La rentrée is all the harsher on people with proper jobs. 

The sour atmosphere in airport departure lounges does at least clarify something. The search for pleasure and meaning in work is, beyond a certain point, a fool’s errand. No doubt, some jobs are better than others. But as long as work is an obligation — something one must do, to uphold a standard of living — there is a limit to the joy it can ever bring. Leisure will always feel better, and by a margin that is unbridgeable with worker-friendly offices and other blandishments. 

I started my career just before any of this needed saying. But then the promise began to emerge of work that need not feel like work. Companies vied to lay on the most ergonomic environments, the kindest mentors, the loosest schedules. A generation of in-demand graduates came to expect not just these material incentives but a sort of credal alignment with their employer’s “values”. The next recession will retard this trend but it is unlikely to kill it. 

All of this is as it should be. I was raised by people who had to toil without any of these perks. I don’t romanticise it as an era of Spartan virtue. Whatever companies do to nudge their staff up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is to be saluted. 


The perk to really haggle for is not in-job comfort but the maximisation of paid leave. 


 It is just that the kindest service we can do for the young is manage their expectations. Work can be made a lot better than it might otherwise be. It cannot be made to be something other than work. The idea is taking hold, I sense, that it is odd to do something that is not exactly what you would wish to be doing at a particular moment. But this is the lot of even the most “creative” worker, the most self-governing entrepreneur. Very few professional tasks are so absorbing as to be one’s first-choice pursuit in circumstances of total freedom. 

A personal ambition is to reach the end of my career without having managed a single person. Friends who have been less lucky, who have whole teams under their watch, report a quirk among their younger charges. It is not laziness or obstreperousness or those other millennial slanders. It is an air of disappointment with the reality of working life. They will be among the people described in Bullshit Jobs by the anthropologist David Graeber. They will not be among the mere 18 per cent who told YouGov in 2015 that work was “very fulfilling”. As much as the fogey in me blames their entitlement, they were promised more than was plausible by company brochures and a culture that pretends an office can feel like something else. 

Companies are only able to soften the experience of employment so much. What they cannot finesse out of existence is the crux: the surrender of time for money that you would ideally fill with something else. The perk to really haggle for, then, is not in-work comfort but the maximisation of paid leave. 

Twenty years have passed since Office Space, and the cult film remains the acutest satire of alienating employment. In the central scene, workers do to an eternally malfunctioning printer more or less what liberated Iraqis did to statues of Saddam Hussein. 

It has one dud note, though, and it comes at the end, when the main character quits his office cubicle for life as a construction worker. The message is that manual labour does not have its own kind of soul-sucking boredom and pressure. It takes a cocooned sort to believe this kind of thing, but lots of people believe it of careers other than their own. The simplest jobs and the most cerebral are both heroised. But the defining thing about work is not its exact content. It is the fact that you have to do it. Look around at the faces in the departure lounge. In a stratified labour force, a rare unifier is dread of the cruelest month.

The non-EU workers who’ll be deported for earning less than £35,000

 Despite having spent her adult life in London, Alyson Frazier could be sent back to the US under new income rules. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian


Donna Ferguson in The Guardian


Alyson Frazier, a 25-year-old classical musician from Washington DC, is trying to describe how it feels when people ask her whether she wants to stay in Britain. “It’s like asking a fish: ‘How’s the water?’. London is my home. This is where I have built my adult life since the age of 19.”

Unfortunately Frazier – who has a first class MA from the Royal Academy of Music and is the co-founder of Play for Progress, a therapeutic music programme for refugee children – only earns £17,000 a year.

That’s less than half the salary she, her fellow-Americans and other non-EU migrants will soon need to stay in the country permanently, thanks to rules being introduced next month.

From 6 April all skilled workers from outside the EU who have been living here for less than 10 years will need to earn at least £35,000 a year to settle permanently in the UK. Some jobs, such as nurses, are exempt (see How the rules are changing, right) but Frazier’s is not. Unless she gets a higher-paid job, she will be deported in September.

“I’ve chosen to take a lower salary because I’m trying to improve the lives of unaccompanied child refugees and do good in the world through music and education,” she says. “How do you put that on paper in a visa application? How do you show the value of trying to make a child’s life better?”

A petition to scrap the £35,000 threshold has attracted more than 100,000 signatures from British citizens and was debated in parliament on Monday. “I started the petition because I don’t want to live in a Britain that will quietly usher thousands of people out of the country without raising a whisper of protest,” says Josh Harbord, the British citizen behind the Stop35k campaign which has attracted the support of SNP, Labour and Green MPs. “I don’t want to live in a country that values people’s incomes over people’s contributions to society.”

But the government is adamant that the policy is fair, and that individuals have had many years to prepare.

A Home Office spokesman said: “In the past it has been too easy for some businesses to bring in workers from overseas rather than to take the long-term decision to train our workforce here at home.

“We need to do more to change that, which means reducing the demand for migrant labour. That is why we commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee to provide advice on significantly reducing economic migration from outside the EU. These reforms will ensure that businesses are able to attract the skilled migrants they need, but we also want them to get far better at recruiting and training UK workers first.”

Home secretary Theresa May was criticised for failing to attend the debate in person, instead sending a junior minister with an unrelated portfolio – Richard Harrington, minister for Syrian refugees – to defend the policy.

In its own impact assessment, the Home Office estimates the new salary threshold will cost the British economy between £181m and £171m (PDF), while the other organisations have put the cost much higher, at £761m (PDF).

The word ‘bonkers’ springs to mind. If the so-called gain is a modest one, why inflict so much pain?Stuart McDonald, SNP MP

“These new rules will damage the British economy, our standing overseas, and our society as a whole,” says Ralph Buckle, co-founder of the Commonwealth Exchange. “We have already seen dramatic falls in Commonwealth migration to the UK due to existing restrictions and the salary restrictions will only make things worse.”

Latest Home Office statistics show there were just over 55,000 applications for skilled work visas in the year to March 2015. Americans were among the largest groups – 12% of applications – while Australians made up a further 4%.

The government’s own admission that the reforms will only make a “modest” contribution to its target of reducing net migration was repeatedly highlighted during the debate: “The word ‘bonkers’ springs to mind,” said Stuart McDonald, an SNP MP. “If the so-called gain is a modest one, why inflict so much pain?”

Gillian Brown, 26, is one of the Australians at the receiving end of that pain. Her entire family decided to emigrate to the UK when she was 18 but, due to her age, she could only enter the country on a student visa (while her younger brothers were classed as dependents and are now full British citizens). She graduated with a first class BA and an MA from The University of Sheffield, and currently earns £20,300 as an online marketing assistant after moving into a skilled workers’ Tier 2 visa in 2014.

The fact Gillian Brown’s family emigrated to the UK is not enough to prevent her having to return to Australia. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

“Previously, I’d have been able to apply for permanent residence in the UK after five years, earning my current salary. Not any more,” says Brown. “It’s a constant worry. If I can’t convince a company to sponsor me again next year, I’ll be deported back to Australia after eight years in the UK, and separated from my parents and brothers. But the British government doesn’t care about separating families – they’ve made that very clear. ”

Australian migration specialists True Blue say the new rules have caused a spike in the number of British-based Aussies looking to head back home. In the last week of January, it saw a 50% increase in calls seeking advice on how to secure their British partners a visa in Australia.

Walkabout, the Australian bar chain, has already begun stepping up its recruitment strategies to try to deal with any fallout from the visa restrictions. “We have been losing Australian staff for some time,” says Nina Marshall, HR director. “Recruiting Australians is essential to the authenticity of our brand and this challenge is only going to become significantly more difficult.”

Jeffries Briginshaw, CEO of BritishAmerican Business, is also concerned: “American companies are deeply entrenched in the UK economy and American citizens are part of UK society, whether this is in business, schools or families. Any restriction to the Tier 2 visa scheme will have a negative impact on the way American businesses operate in the UK and how American citizens can be part of the UK.”

It’s not only business leaders who are against the change. “Migrant teachers make a significant contribution to the UK,” says Kevin Courtney of the National Union of Teachers. “It seems absurdly counterproductive to force schools to dismiss migrant teachers they’ve trained and invested in, and who are still very much needed, at a time when highly skilled, qualified teachers are in great demand. The policy urgently needs to be reconsidered.”

Jon Excell, editor of trade publication The Engineer, is equally worried about the impact on the UK’s engineering sectors, which he says are also facing an acute and worrying skills shortage. “If the UK wants to maintain its position as a world leader in key areas of engineering, international skills are essential. Not just to fill roles, but to help UK-based firms retain an international perspective and reap the economic rewards of a diverse workforce. Yet the average salary of a junior engineer is just £32,000.”

The Home Office insists that the £35,000 threshold is a fair reflection of skilled salaries in the UK. It adds: “We do not believe there should be an automatic link between coming to work in the UK temporarily and staying permanently. The £35,000 threshold was set following advice from the Migration Advisory Committee, an independent advisory body consisting of expert labour market economists, and was equivalent to the median pay of the UK population in skilled jobs.”

It points out that anyone entering the UK on a Tier 2 basis has been aware of the changes since 2011. “Those individuals were aware when they entered that new settlement rules would apply to them. Employers have had since 2011 to prepare for the possibility that their non-European Economic Area workers may not meet the required salary threshold to remain permanently.”

Following the debate in Parliament the Stop35k campaign is urging the government to reconsider the implementation of the new rules, and to give the Migration Advisory Committee an opportunity to complete an assessment of suitable pay thresholds across different jobs and regions in the UK.

It says it will continue to lobby MPs, regardless of whether or not the policy is implemented as planned.

How the rules are changing

To enter or stay in the UK as a skilled worker, non-EU migrants must have a Tier 2 visa. To qualify, you must have been offered a job in the UK and have held at least £945 in your bank account for 90 days.

The job you’re offered must pay at least £20,800, although the government is currently considering a recommendation to raise this to £30,000. Certain occupations do not have to meet this threshold.

You must also get a certificate of sponsorship from your employer (which involves a fee of between £536 and £1,476), pay £200 per year as a healthcare surcharge and be able to prove your knowledge of the English language.

Non-EU migrants are only permitted to remain in the UK on Tier 2 visas for a maximum of six years.

However, at the moment, skilled workers who have been living here on these visas for five years are able to apply for “indefinite leave to remain” in the UK.

It’s this that is about to change (PDF).

From 6 April, only those who earn £35,000 a year will be eligible to apply for “indefinite leave to remain” once they have lived here for five years.

Nurses are temporarily exempt from this threshold, along with PhD level jobs and anyone whose occupation has ever been on the official “shortage occupation list” at any point while they have been living here. The new rules also do not apply to anyone who entered the country on a Tier 2 visa on or before 5 April 2011.

In January the Migration Advisory Committee also recommended the government set a £1,000-a-year levy on companies employing skilled migrants from outside the EU, and raise the salary threshold for Tier 2 visas from £20,800 to £30,000. The Home Office has not yet outlined its response.

There is still one route to permanent UK residence for low-earning migrants, however. You can apply for “indefinite leave to remain” if you’ve been living in the UK legally for 10 continuous years. There is no salary threshold for this.

For example, if you entered the UK 10 years ago on a student visa and moved directly onto a skilled workers’ visa – without ever leaving for more than 180 days at a time or for 540 days in total – you would be eligible to apply to settle in the UK, no matter how little you earned at that point.

Applying for “indefinite leave to remain” costs up to £1,900 and applications can take six months to process.

The Home Office says anyone who is unsure whether they may be affected by the changes can call the general inquiries for immigration matters on 0300 123 2241.

Branson's fine print on unlimited leave for staff

 

We should be open to the idea of self-managed holidays, but it won’t work in a climate of anxiety

• 
• • David Boyle
  • The Guardian, Friday 26 September 2014 18.20 BST

'If you had to be 100% certain that you were up to date on everything, would you ever dare to pack your bags, let alone head off on holiday?' Photograph: Isopix/Rex Features

Half Brazilian, half Austrian, Ricardo Semler runs one of the strangest companies in the world – though perhaps “runs” is the wrong verb. He recently held a party to celebrate 10 years of not making any decisions.

Semco is a Brazilian engineering conglomerate, and over the past two decades Semler has led a dramatic series of experiments to find ways of accessing the enthusiasm of his staff.

They now manage the company themselves. They work in teams without job titles. Like Richard Branson’s much-heralded experiment announced earlier this week, they choose their own holidays and their own hours. However, although Semco is on the syllabus of most of the world’s business schools, few business graduates have copied it. Quite the reverse: iron control by IT system seems to be the trend.

But the salaries, holidays and hours Semco’s employees choose are transparent, and therein lies the power. It isn’t so much the power of self-control but the power of peer control. The most imaginative companies have realised the same thing in recent years: that group pressure may be a good deal more effective at controlling their workforce than an IT system, powered by a top-heavy, heavy-handed human resources department.

It is the same revelation that hit Muhammed Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank. He realised that peer pressure by borrowers on each other was far more effective at avoiding bad debts than the traditional command-and-not-quite-control.

Branson is only the most recent business leader to grasp this – he got the idea from Netflix – and the power of small teams answerable to each other has done wonders for productivity in companies such as General Electric and WL Gore.

But before we take Branson’s approach at face value, there are a few things we need to think about. Peer control can be pretty ferocious. It can lead people to extremes. Even some of the most disillusioned first world war soldiers, such as Siegfried Sassoon, went back to the trenches willingly – strove to do so, in fact – so as not to let their colleagues down.

I’m self-employed. I have complete control of my holiday entitlement and I still don’t take it. It may be that self-managing teams can also be kinder and more understanding, once you have earned their trust. Given the choice between working in an Amazon warehouse, timed when I go to the loo, and in a self-managed team choosing my own holiday schedule, I know which one I would prefer. But that isn’t to say it would always be comfortable or that there wouldn’t be places where people suffered the consequences of coercive, bullying, group dynamics.

There are two other peculiarities about Branson’s thoughts on the subject, which are taken from his new book The Virgin Way. One is that it applies only to his head office staff in the US and UK – just 170 people. Virgin doesn’t do much except invest and rent out its name to other companies. Behind this apparent empire is a vast database and linked call centres, but not much else. Branson’s company owns just half of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, and only around a tenth of Virgin Media, a subsidiary of a different company entirely.

He says he will be encouraging them all to use the same idea if it is successful. But the real test is whether similar arrangements are offered to frontline staff bearing his logo, which he barely has the power to do.

The other peculiarity is that Branson seems to be trying to have it both ways. He reveals himself to be not quite the radical, bearded, liberal-minded guy he might occasionally look like.

He rather gives the game away on the company blog when he “assumes” that his staff will only take holidays “when they feel 100% comfortable that they and their team are up to date on every project and that their absence will not in any way damage the business – or, for that matter, their careers!” This convoluted sentence faces all ways at once. It seems to be saying you can manage your own holiday entitlement – if you dare.

The self-managed holiday idea is a radical experiment and needs testing out. But in Branson’s formulation, it is doomed from the start: if you had to be 100% certain that you were up to date on everything, would ever take a long weekend, let alone head off on holiday?

It is a sentence that seems to emerge from a nervous manager in a bit of a muddle. He is opening the doors of the cage but not quite daring to put down the whip.