Meritocracy: the great delusion that ingrains inequality

Jo Littler in The Guardian







We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers!” shouted Donald Trump in his first address to Congress last month, before announcing that tighter immigration controls would take the form of a “merit-based” system.

Like so many before him, Trump was wrapping political reforms in the language of meritocracy, conjuring up the image of a “fair” system where people are free to work hard to activate their talent and climb the ladder of success.

Since becoming prime minister, Theresa May has also promised to make Britain “the world’s great meritocracy” (or, in The Sun’s phrase, a “Mayritocracy”). She reiterated this pledge when announcing her revival of the grammar schools system, abandoned in the 1960s. “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege,” she proclaimed, “where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.”

In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, many people noticed that the meritocracy they had been taught to believe in wasn’t working. The idea you could be anything you wanted to be, if only you tried hard enough, was increasingly hard to swallow. Even for the relatively pampered middle classes, jobs had dried up, become downgraded and over-pressured, debt had soared and housing was increasingly unaffordable.


Even Thatcher presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility

This social context, created through 40 years of neoliberalism, was reflected on TV: in Breaking Bad, being brilliant at chemistry was not enough to guarantee mainstream career progression or even survival; the evisceration of social support was the backdrop to The Wire; and the precarious creative labour depicted in Girls was very different to the glamorous stability shown a decade earlier in Sex and the City.

In the face of this instability, May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality. They use different cultural accents: Trump’s brash rhetoric panders overtly to racism and misogyny; May presents herself as a fair-minded headmistress of the home counties. But their political logic is intertwined, as indicated by the indecent haste with which May rushed to the White House post-election. Both acknowledge inequality but prescribe meritocracy, capitalism and nationalism as the solution. Both want to create economic havens for the uber-rich while deepening the marketisation of public welfare systems and extending the logic of competition in everyday life.

When the word meritocracy made its first recorded appearance, in 1956 in the obscure British journal Socialist Commentary, it was a term of abuse, describing a ludicrously unequal state that surely no one would want to live in. Why, mused the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, would you want to give more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted? Instead, he argued, we should think about “cross-grading”: how to give those doing difficult or unattractive jobs more leisure time, and share out wealth more equitably so we all have a better quality of life and a happier society.

‘May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

The philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed, arguing in a 1958 essay: “Meritocracy contradicts the principle of equality … no less than any other oligarchy.” She was particularly disparaging about the UK’s introduction of grammar schools and its institutional segregation of children according to one narrow measure of “ability”. This subject also troubled the social democratic polymath Michael Young, whose 1958 bestseller The Rise of the Meritocracy used the M-word in an affably disparaging fashion. The first half of his book outlined the rise of democracy; the second told the story of a dystopian, meritocratic future complete with black market trade in brainy babies.

But in 1972, Young’s friend the American sociologist Daniel Bell gave the concept a more positive spin when he suggested that meritocracy might actually be a productive engine for the new “knowledge economy”. By the 1980s the word was being used approvingly by a range of new-right thinktanks to describe their version of a world of extreme income difference and high social mobility. The word meritocracy had flipped in meaning.

Over the past few decades, neoliberal meritocracy has been characterised by two key features. First, the sheer scale of its attempt to extend entrepreneurial competition into the nooks and crannies of everyday life. Second, the power it has gathered by drawing from 20th-century movements for equality. Meritocracy has been presented as a means of breaking down established hierarchies of privilege.

Even Margaret Thatcher, despite her social conservatism, presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility. Under New Labour, meritocracy embraced social liberalism, rejecting homophobia, sexism and racism. Now, we were told, really anyone could “make it”.

Those who did “make it” – the enterprising mumpreneur, the black vlogger, the council estate boy-turned-CEO – were spotlighted as parables of progress. But climbing up the social ladder became an increasing individualised matter, and as the rich got richer the ladders became longer. Those who didn’t make it were ignored or positioned as having personally failed. Under the coalition and Conservative governments, meritocratic yearning took a more punitive turn. In David Cameron’s “aspiration nation”, you were either a striver or a skiver; the very act of hoping to reach upwards became a moral obligation. Those who could not draw on existing reservoirs of privilege were told to worker harder to catch up.

The fact is, meritocracy is a myth. Social systems that reward through wealth, and which increase inequality, don’t aid social mobility, and people pass on their privilege to their children. The Conservatives have made this situation far worse by raising the inheritance tax threshold. And their reintroduction of grammar schools would involve using extremely narrow educational measures to divide children and to privilege the already privileged (often with the help of expensive private tutors). As the geographer Danny Dorling has said, it is a system of “educational apartheid”.

“Merit” itself, moreover, is a malleable, easily manipulated term. The American scholar Lani Guinier has shown how, in the 1920s, Harvard University curbed the number of Jewish students admitted by stipulating a new form of “merit”: that of “well-rounded character”. A more recent example was supplied by the reality TV filmmaking contest Project Greenlight, in which the white actor Matt Damon repeatedly interrupted black producer Effie Brown to tell her that diversity wasn’t important in film production: decisions, he explained, have to be “based entirely on merit”. This “Damonsplaining” was widely ridiculed on social media (“Can Matt Damon tell me why the caged bird sings?”). But it illustrated how versions of “merit” can be used to ingrain privilege – unlike clear criteria for specific roles, combined with anti-discrimination policies.

It is not hard to see why people find the idea of meritocracy appealing: it carries with it the idea of moving beyond where you start in life, of creative flourishing and fairness. But all the evidence shows it is a smokescreen for inequality. As Trump, May and their supporters attempt to resurrect it, there has never been a better moment to bury meritocracy for ever.

Lucky Dip

by Girish Menon

Shiv is in a bind

Got no more options

Throws the ball to the leggie

Abdul save me from my plight

What should I do skip?

Flight or darts?

The game will be lost

In a jiff or in time

Do what you please

Take a risk if you wish

Take the field that you want

Save me from my fate

I will be deposed

My record exposed

Personally divorced

Abdul, take the risk

You don't have to worry

It is my flutter

Just get me a winner

Abdul flights the ball

Six runs to win

Twelve balls to play

Three wickets left

The ball slips from his grip

Dips and hits a divot on the pitch

Shoots along the mud

Hits the batter on his foot

The ump raises his finger

The crowd is happy

The experts begin to rave

At the great bowling change

I still have some hope

My record intact

My family safe

The match is won soon after

The experts sing my praise

The cup is saved

I will remain captain again

  

Many wins follow

Folks call me the greatest

Skipper and tactician

That ever played

But if it was not for Abdul

And the divot on the pitch

Daily I’d be walking to Tesco

To buy a lucky dip.

Denise worked all her life. Then she got ill – and the state pulled away the safety net

Frances Ryan in The Guardian

The Conservatives like to sell the public a promise: do “the right thing” – work hard, look after your family, pay your taxes – and in tough times, the welfare state will be there for you. But here’s a snapshot of what could happen to any one of us if bad luck hit. Denise, has been a nurse for the best part of 30 years, but since she became too ill to work, she’s been left to live without sickness benefits for five months and counting.

Denise, now 48, trained as a mental health nurse straight out of school and tells me she has worked all her life. It wasn’t easy. In her mid twenties she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and by her thirties, as she raised a young son in Leicester, she developed fibromyalgia. With it came pain and exhaustion: each joint hurt to move, and for months she needed a wheelchair and hospital car to see a specialist. “At times, I actually crawled on my hands and knees to attempt to make us a meal,” she says.

Over the next 15 years, Denise did what many with long-term illnesses will be all too familiar with: she pushed herself to keep working – going part-time to try to manage her bipolar, pain and fatigue. When things were at their worst (in 2011, she had major surgery on her spine), she lived off the out-of-work sickness benefit, employment and support allowance.

Last winter, again, Denise tried to work. After being on ESA for almost three years, she felt well enough to move to Bristol to be near her partner and take a job nursing in a women’s secure hospital. But after eight weeks, the impact of the work on her mental health was too much (“helping pregnant women with psychiatric problems … it was very emotional,” she says) and she had to give it up. She got by on company sick pay – half her wage – for three months, but by April she was earning nothing at all.

Ask most politicians and this is exactly when they’d say the safety net would kick in. But when Denise contacted the Department for Work and Pensions to say she’d had to leave her job, she was told she was no longer eligible for out-of-sickness benefits – despite receiving them only four months earlier. Because she’d been off the benefit for more than 12 weeks, in the mire of DWP rules, technically Denise was making a “new claim”, judged on a different tax year – meaning the DWP could now rule her as not having enough national insurance points to get the benefit.

Worse, Denise was told she wasn’t eligible for the alternative either – the type of ESA based on income, rather than NI contributions. Why? Because she was now living with her boyfriend.

In another rarely publicised DWP rule, if a sick or disabled person shares a home with a partner, the fact that their partner earns a wage can be used to rule them out of sickness benefits (the income threshold varies). When I contacted the DWP, it confirmed: “Claims for ESA are assessed against a number of circumstances including living arrangements, income and national insurance contributions.”

That means that people like Denise – who the government are fully aware are too unwell to work – are effectively shut out from social security.

“I put my trust in the DWP,” Denise says. “I wouldn’t have taken a job if I’d known there wasn’t a safety net if I became ill again.”

Since April, with no sickness benefit, Denise’s only income has been her disability living allowance – which she needs to pay for the extra costs that come with bad health. As she puts it: “It’s meant to pay for taxis [to hospital], not bills and food.” But even that’s been cut now: when the government abolished DLA and transferred her to personal independence payments in May, she lost part of her benefit. Now she’s living off just £82.30 a week. “It’s horrific,” she says, and she’s becoming withdrawn and isolated.


When an employer won’t hire you and the state won’t help you, to be sick or disabled simply means having no income

Her partner has a decent wage as a transport contractor – fine for one but not easy to stretch for two – and besides, she says, it’s “awful” when he’s forced to pay for everything. “It’s not like we’re married. We don’t have a joint bank account,” she says. “I don’t like having to say, ‘can I have a money for a haircut, or for tampons?’”

As an insight into just what sick and disabled people are up against, Denise has been trying to find a nursing job this summer – one with less stress – but when she told an employer about her bipolar disorder, a medical report judged her as unfit for work and the job offer was withdrawn. She’s been “scrabbling together” information from the mental health charity Mind to know her rights, and has put in a request to see if the employer will accept changes such as shorter shifts – but if it refuses, she has no way of paying the legal fees to take it to court.

When an employer won’t hire you and the state won’t help you, to be sick or disabled in Britain simply means having no income. Denise has adapted over the years to living on very little – “because I’ve had to”, she explains – but things have never been this bad.

“For anyone to go through this when they’re already ill … just to live, you really think at times like this you’re going to be protected by the government. But you’re not.”

Nobel prize winners’ research worked out a theory on worker productivity – then Amazon and Deliveroo proved it wrong

Ben Chu in The Independent


Financial incentives are important. We all know that’s true. If you were offered a job that paid £10 an hour and then someone else came up offering to pay you £11 an hour for identical work, which one would you choose?

Most of us would also accept that well-designed employment contracts can get more out of us. If we could take home more money for working harder (or more effectively), most of us would.

Bengt Holmstrom won the Nobel economics prize this week for his theoretical research on the optimum design for a worker’s contract to encourage the individual to work as productively as possible.

The work of Holmstrom and his fellow Nobel laureate, Oliver Hart, is subtle, recognising that the complexity of the world can cause simplistic piece-rate contracts or bonus systems to yield undesirable results.

For instance, if you pay teachers more based on exam results, you will find they “teach to the test” and neglect other important aspects of children’s education. If you reward CEOs primarily based on the firm’s share price performance you will find that they focus on boosting the short-term share price, rather than investing for the long-term health of the company.

Holmstrom and Hart also grappled with the problem of imperfect information. It is hard to measure an individual worker’s productivity, particularly when they are engaged in complex tasks.

So how can you design a contract based on individual performance? Holmstrom’s answer was that where measurement is impossible, or very difficult, pay contracts should be biased towards a fixed salary rather than variable payment for performance.

Yet when information on an employee’s performance is close to perfect, there can also be problems.

The information problem seems to be on the way to resolution in parts of the low-skill economy. Digital technology allows much closer monitoring of workers’ performance than in the past. Pickers at Amazon’s Swansea warehouse are issued with personal satnav computers which direct them around the giant warehouse on the most efficient routes, telling them which goods to collect and place in their trolleys. The devices also monitor the workers’ productivity in real time – and those that don’t make the required output targets are “released” by the management.

The so-called “gig economy” is at the forefront of what some are labelling “management by algorithm”. The London-founded cycling food delivery service app Deliveroo recently tried to implement a new pay scale for riders. The company’s London boss said this new system based on fees per delivery would increase pay for the most efficient riders. UberEats – Uber's own meal delivery service – attempted something similar.

Yet the digital productivity revolution is encountering some resistance. The proposed changes by UberEats and Deliveroo provoked strikes from their workers. And there is a backlash against Amazon’s treatment of warehouse workers.

It is possible that some of this friction is as much about employment status as contract design and pay rates. One of the complaints of the UberEats and Deliveroo couriers is that they are not treated like employees at all.

It may also reflect the current state of the labour market. If people don’t want to work in inhuman warehouses or for demanding technology companies, why don’t they take a job somewhere else? But if there are not enough jobs in a particular region, people may have no choice. The employment rate is at an all-time high, but there’s still statistical evidence that many workers would like more hours if they could get them.

Yet the new technology does pose tough questions about worker treatment. And there is no reason why these techniques of digital monitoring of employees should be confined to the gig economy or low-skill warehouse jobs.

One US tech firm called Percolata installs sensors in shops that measure the volume of customers and then compare that with the sales per employee. This allows managements to make a statistical adjustment for the fact that different shops have different customer footfall rates – it fills in the old information blanks. The result is a closer reading of an individual shop worker’s productivity.

Workers who do better can be awarded with more hours. “It creates this competitive spirit – if I want more hours, I need to step it up a bit,” Percolata’s boss told the Financial Times.

It’s possible to envisage these kinds of digital monitoring techniques and calculations being rolled out in a host of jobs and bosses making pay decisions on the basis of detailed productivity data. But one doesn’t have to be a neo-Luddite to feel uncomfortable with these trends. It’s not simply the potential for tracking mistakes by the computers and flawed statistical adjustments that is problematic, but the issue of how this could transform the nature of the workspace.

Financial incentives matter, yet there is rather more to the relationship between a worker and employer than a pay cheque. Factors such as trust, respect and a sense of common endeavour matter too – and can be important motivators of effort.

If technology meant we could design employment contracts whereby every single worker was paid exactly according to his or her individual productivity, it would not follow that we necessarily should.

Three-day working week 'optimal for over-40s'

• 18 April 2016
 
• From the sectionBBC Business

Image copyrightAP

Workers aged over 40 perform at their best if they work three days a week, according to economic researchers.

Their research analysed the work habits and brain test results of about 3,000 men and 3,500 women aged over 40 in Australia.

Their calculations suggest a part-time job keeps the brain stimulated, while avoiding exhaustion and stress.

The researchers said this needed to be taken into consideration as many countries raise their retirement age.

Double-edged sword

Data for the study was drawn from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, which is conducted by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research at the University of Melbourne.

It looks at people's economic and subjective well-being, family structures, and employment.

Those taking part were asked to read words aloud, to recite lists of numbers backwards and to match letters and numbers under time pressure.

In general terms, those participants who worked about 25 hours a week tended to achieve the best scores.

"Work can be a double-edged sword, in that it can stimulate brain activity, but at the same time, long working hours and certain types of tasks can cause fatigue and stress which potentially damage cognitive functions," the report said.

Colin McKenzie, professor of economics at Keio University who took part in the research, said it would appear that working extremely long hours was more damaging than not working at all on brain function.

The figures suggest that the cognitive ability of those working about 60 hours a week can be lower than those who are not employed.

However, Geraint Johnes, professor of economics at Lancaster University Management School, said: "The research looks only at over-40s, and so cannot make the claim that over-40s are different from any other workers.

"What the authors find is that cognitive functioning improves up to the point at which workers work 25 hours a week and declines thereafter."

He added: "Actually, at first the decline is very marginal, and there is not much of an effect as working hours rise to 35 hours per week. Beyond 40 hours per week, the decline is much more rapid."

Unconditional Basic Income for all?

The idea of a universal basic income is about to leap from the margins to the mainstream, bringing promises of a happier and healthier population

 

With a basic income, the harsh, punitive model of ‘welfare’ is a distant memory – passing in and out of the gig economy is something everyone can afford. Photograph: David Pearson/Alamy


John Harris in The Guardian 

Imagine a Britain where the government pays every adult the basic cost of living. Whether rich or poor – or, crucially, whether you’re in paid employment or not – everyone gets the same weekly amount, with no strings attached. The harsh, punitive model of modern “welfare” is a distant memory; passing in and out of employment in the so-called gig economy is now something everyone can afford. The positive consequences extend into the distance: women are newly financially independent and able to exit abusive relationships, public health is noticeably improved, and people are able to devote the time to caring that an ever-ageing society increasingly demands. All the political parties are signed up: just as the welfare state underpinned the 20th century, so this new idea defines the 21st.

Welcome to the world of a unconditional basic income, or UBI, otherwise known as citizens’ income or social wage. It might look like the stuff of insane utopianism, but the idea is now spreading at speed, from the fringes of the left into mainstream politics – and being tried out around the world. The UK Green party has supported the notion for decades: staunch backing for a version of UBI was one of its key themes at the last election. At its spring conference last month, the Scottish National party passed a motion supporting the idea that “a basic or universal income can potentially provide a foundation to eradicate poverty, make work pay and ensure all our citizens can live in dignity”. A handful of Labour MPs have started to come round to the idea – and serious work is being done among thinktanks and pressure groups, looking at how it might work in the here and now.

Meanwhile, there have been UBI-type policies and experiments in India and Brazil. These have suggested that, contrary to modern stereotypes about “welfare” sapping people’s initiative, a basic income might actually increase people’s appetite for work, by adding to their sense of stability, and making things such as childcare and transport more accessible. A pilot of a UBI-ish policy whereby people on benefits are paid unconditionally is happening in Utrecht, in the Netherlands; other Dutch towns and cities look set to follow its example, and there are plans to pilot a more ambitious kind of basic income in Finland. On 5 June, the Swiss will vote in a referendum on a plan that would see all adults receive about £1,700 a month, with an extra £400 for each child.

And then there is the rising noise from Silicon Valley. The California-based startup incubator Y Combinator has announced that it wants to fund research into UBI’s viability. Its president, Sam Altman, says: “It is impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income.” In New York, the influential venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been sounding off about a basic income for at least three years, claiming it offers an answer to a very modern question. If, as he says, “we are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done”, how do you avoid “a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who don’t”?

This Saturday, thousands of people are expected in central London for the latest demonstration organised by the anti-austerity alliance the People’s Assembly. The top-line is pretty much as you would expect. “End austerity now” is the big slogan, accompanied by four key words: “health, “homes”, “education” and, of course, “jobs”. But there too will be noise about UBI. A group called Radical Assembly, founded last May, is organising what it terms the No Jobs bloc: a subsection of the march for people sick of the daily grind, looking ahead to a world without it and convinced that technology is the answer. As they see it, the point shouldn’t be to argue for more, or better work, but to demand a world with very little paid work at all – and the key way to make that vision work is a basic income.

The idea cuts straight to the heart of the crisis being experienced by mainstream leftwing parties across Europe and beyond. For the UK Labour party, the concept of a basic income raises a painful question: how can you carry on styling yourself as the party of workers when traditional work is disappearing fast?

If the machines take all the jobs, we’ll need to disentangle the link between work and wages. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

As well as books such as Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class(2011) and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015), one recent text is talked about more than most among people interested in UBI. Inventing the Future was published last year and has already created significant buzz in leftwing circles; its two authors, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, will be appearing at this year’s Glastonbury, and their work is the key inspiration behind what Radical Assembly have planned for this Saturday. The No Jobs bloc, in fact, echoes the slogans printed in bold type on the book’s cover: “Demand full automation, demand universal basic income, demand the future.”

Srnicek, 33, is from Canada: he came to the UK in 2009, and works as a freelance academic in London. He says he’s both thrilled and surprised by the idea of people marching in favour of what he and Williams advocate. “I’ve heard about the No Jobs bloc, and it sounds great,” he says.

As he explains, the concept of a basic income has been doing the rounds for centuries, and has been voiced by such people as the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, and the free-market guru Milton Friedman. In the US, the Nixon administration of the 1970s had plans for a rightwing version that nearly made it into law. Meanwhile, between 1968 and 1978, the US government did a series of experiments with a basic income in such places as New Jersey, Seattle and Denver, Colorado. It was also tried in the small Canadian town of Dauphin, Manitoba. Although it took years for the research findings to be published, they suggested that among the results had been a drop in hospital admissions, and a rise in the number of teenagers staying on in school.

This tangled history contains a few warnings about different political conceptions of the UBI idea. “The right tends to see it as a replacement for the welfare state,” says Snircek. “Basically, in their conception, UBI is a way to do away with benefits and marketise everything. And, obviously, that has to be warded off completely.”

He says he also has concerns about interpretations of the idea from some parts of the political left. “UBI has to be universal: it has to apply to everybody,” he says. “It’s problematic for some people that it includes the rich as well, but universal benefits have a political power that means-tested benefits don’t. It has to be unconditional. It can’t be means-tested. Everybody gets it, no matter what.

“The other aspect is, it should be as a high as possible. It can’t just be some middling level, like the Green party was proposing at the last election.” Their idea, he explains, was to pay everyone around £72 a week, roughly the same level as Jobseekers’ Allowance. “That would help people, but they would still have to go out and find a 40-hour job to survive, so it doesn’t do any of the political things that are so important.”

As Inventing the Future explains, these include boosting people’s bargaining power with employers, and UBI’s distinct feminist aspect: “One of my favourite stories from the experiments with UBI in Canada and the US is that they found that divorces went up. Women had suddenly got financial independence to leave bad and abusive relationships.”

The big theme that sits under Srnicek and Williams’s ideas is that of automation, and its effects on the place of work in our lives. A third of jobs in UK retail are forecast to go by 2025. The Financial Times recently reported on research predicting that 114,000 jobs in British legal sector would be automated over the next 20 years. As and when automation reaches transport, all this could turn nuclear. Recent estimates have put the number of jobs in the US related to traditional trucking at 8.7m – which, when people are talking about automated haulage (in last month’s budget, for example, George Osborne promised trials for driverless lorries), gives a sobering sense of how huge the future changes to paid work could be.

“The technology we’re talking about today is really touching on areas that we thought were always going to be the preserve of humans: non-routine tasks, things like driving a car – but then also the automation of basic social interaction, like call-centre work, customer service work and all that kind of stuff,” says Srnicek. “A lot of jobs are going to be taken, possibly at a very rapid pace. That means that, even if it doesn’t lead to mass unemployment, automation leads to a massive shift in the labour market, and people having to find new jobs and new skills.”

How long does he think it will be before UBI becomes a credible part of mainstream politics?

“Well, I do think this is a longterm project; it’s not going to happen overnight,” he says. “You need to build it up over time. And you also need to find new revenues for it. So you need to be talking about the Panama Papers and tax havens, and how you’re going to claw back tax revenues to pay for it.” The basic point is that something as ambitious as a basic income that allows people meaningful choices is going to cost, and the only way of bringing in the funds chimes with our rising concerns about tax avoidance and evasion – and, for that matter, global inequality and the fragile job markets that increasingly sit under it.
The key point, he says, is context: putting UBI alongside other plans and proposals, so as to flesh out the idea of a world beyond work, and what it would mean. “One big thing would be reducing the working week,” he says. “My preference is to implement a three-day weekend. We already have that in certain cases, because of bank holidays. We’re already used to it. And everybody always really enjoys it. That could plausibly be done in the next five years.”

Friday or Monday?

“I think we’ve got such a hate for Monday, that might be something we need to hold on to. So, maybe Friday.”

Caroline Lucas: UBI is ‘a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated.’ Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock

The Greens’ sole MP, Caroline Lucas, is a fan of Inventing the Future: “I love the way they talk about a basic income as something really transformative,” she says. She recently tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI. Thirty-two MPs signed up to it: 23 from the SNP, with six from Labour, and two from Northern Ireland’s SDLP. The Tories and Lib Dems were conspicuous by their absence.

“This idea works on so many levels,” she says. “It’s a very practical policy, in terms of ensuring that people don’t fall between the cracks of the welfare system. But it’s also a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated. It also gets you into a sense of contributing to your community, cleaning up the beach, visiting an elderly friend who might be lonely. There’s a whole freedom and liberation that it gives you, and I think it takes you into really deep questions about whether we really exist simply to spend a third of our lives working for someone else.”

If all that sounds rather high-flown, she also emphasises the hard work that is being done on UBI’s basic economics. In this context, she mentions Compass (the pressure group that includes Greens, Labour members, and many people with no party attachment) and the RSA, formally the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, whose basic-income proposal was published in December 2015.

Its author was Anthony Painter, the RSA’s director of policy and strategy. He says a lot of his initial interest in UBI came from his work on the board of an FE college in Hackney, east London, and the way that the local job centre took money from people who were going on its courses, so as to kick them into jobs instead. “This seemed to be the tip of an iceberg of a system that had gone haywire,” he says. So it was that in the spring of 2014, he began looking in depth at the various experiments with a basic income down the years, and how the idea might work in the 21st century. “Our starting point was, how do people get economic security, and why’s the current system going wrong?”

His favourite example of a basic income is the model tried in Manitoba, and what happened as a result. “What was really interesting about it was the wider benefits of a basic income, in terms of health, education, kids staying in education for longer, better mental health and fewer hospital visits,” he says. “Whereas now, our entire conversation about welfare has been narrowed down to a single question: is someone in work, or not in work?”

The RSA proposed an annual UBI of £3,692 for everyone aged between 25 and 65, rising to £7,420 for pensioners. There would also be a temporary basic income for children up to four years old of £4,290 for a family’s first child, falling to £3,387 for other children as they come along, and down to £2,925 for all between the ages of 5 and 25. For people without kids, that would put the weekly UBI at £77 a week. Is that really enough?.

Matthew Taylor is the RSA’s chief executive. Between 2003 and 2006, he headed Tony Blair’s Downing Street policy unit. He’s more sceptical about the looming future of automation than some, but still thinks a basic income is the best route to greater security in an insecure economy. When I mention the argument that less than £80 a week is a rather small amount, he sighs.

“Let’s establish the principle and see that the world doesn’t collapse,” he says. “Then, by all means, if it does work and it does lead to a better society, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t grow. You’ve got to be practical about this. But let’s start the argument in a place where we’re most likely to win.”

Talking to this former Downing Street insider about such a cutting-edge idea feels like proof in itself of how far the idea of a basic income has come. He says the fact that UBI is now discussed all over the left of politics and beyond is proof of how much everything is in flux, from the basics of the economy to the fundamentals of politics. This is an age in which ideas can quickly whizz from the radical fringes to the centre of political debate.

“There was a slightly kind of anally retentive obsession that people like me used to have when I was involved in New Labour – that if you float a dangerous idea, it’s kind of terminal for you,” says Taylor. “But I don’t think people feel like now. I think things can move much faster. And a basic income is one those things where if the argument was made in the right way, all the assumptions we have about how people would react could be blown away pretty quickly.”

Even Amazon will be swallowed up by the free market – and there's nothing Jeff Bezos can do about it

Even the most successful companies are merely small boats bobbing on the surface of a great and treacherous ocean

Ben Chu in The Independent

“The Everything Store” sounds like a pretty brutal place to work. An in-depth report by the New York Times on Amazon last year exposed a culture of borderline harassment from line managers, stupidly long hours, vicious evaluation sessions, a high staff turnover rate and a cult-like atmosphere personally imposed by the internet firm’s founder Jeff Bezos.

“Purposeful Darwinism” was one word used to describe the Amazon culture by a human resources director. Amazon contested the bleak picture painted by the report. And yet Amazon’s boss Jeff Bezos sounds like he’s rather pleased with it.

“People self-select” he wrote in his letter to shareholders last week, in an indirect reference to the New York Times report. “Over the last two decades we’ve collected a group of like-minded people. Folks who find our approach energising and meaningful.” In other words, the unsuited get selected out of existence at Amazon.

There’s something about the idea of Darwinian natural selection as a description of the business world that people who lead companies (particularly those in the fast-changing world of consumer-facing technology) find compelling. And one can see why. They are often faced with an array of strong competitors; consumers can switch their spending easily and quickly; a company has to be better, perhaps more adaptable, than the rest of the pack if it wants to make a profit. Bosses must feel as if they are in a constant battle for survival.

Yet, as a metaphor for business activity, this is rather misleading. In Charles Darwin’s great hypothesis it was random phenotypical traits resulting from genetic mutations that gave certain creatures an advantage in the struggle for survival in their particular natural habitat. So, for example, if a finch happens to be born with a certain shaped beak well suited to cracking open nuts common on a particular island that bird will survive, reproduce and pass down its genes. And over the generations the island may, ultimately, become populated by a species of finch with that particularly useful shaped beak.

It wasn’t that original finch’s brains, or anything it had control over, that gave it an edge, or meant it got “selected” to pass on its physical traits to future generations. The idea that it is the smartest, or the most energetic, or those with the best culture, that thrive and survive owes more to the pseudo-science of “social Darwinism”, as outlined by 19th century sociologists such as Herbert Spencer, than anything from Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

Free markets are Darwninan in a truer sense, in that selection is often much more about luck than judgement. Andy Grove of Intel wrote in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, that: “Most companies don't die because they are wrong; most die because they don’t commit themselves. They fritter away their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is in standing still.”

Grove, who died last month, was a truly exceptional businessman, but on this point he was wide of the mark. Most companies, over the long run, die because technology moves on and patterns of consumption shift – and there’s nothing their managements can really do about it. It’s story not so much about the quality of leaders or their innovative corporate cultures, but the inexorable disruptive power of markets.

Nothing a manufacturer of horse-drawn carriages had done upon the invention of the car would have saved the businesses (in its original form) from oblivion. Look at the composition of a stock market index of the world’s largest companies. It has changed almost beyond recognition over the decades.

Some firms are undoubtedly better run than others. Some are more innovative than others. But even the most successful are merely small boats bobbing on the surface of a great and treacherous ocean.

One day they will all be capsized. And others will take their place as new markets open. It will happen to Intel. It will happen to Amazon, too. And when it does, it’s unlikely to be a result of a lax corporate culture or employees who weren’t prepared to work weekends.

To be fair to Bezos, he readily admits in his letter that “luck plays an outsized role in every endeavour and I can assure you that we’ve had a bountiful supply”. He also stresses that Amazon’s culture is not the way all firms should be. It’s simply the one he believes will deliver the best results for Amazon.

Perhaps he’s right. He can certainly point to his company’s stunning rates of growth from zero in 1994 to today’s $275bn behemoth as evidence to support his methods. But he may well be wrong.

Perhaps different methods would actually produce better results. There’s evidence that workplaces in which people have a decent work-life balance are more productive and innovative. We can never really know.

The good news for those looking for a job in the technology sector is that the defining feature of competitive markets is diversity; meaning there are always lots of different firms and potential employers. It may feel like “The Everything Store” has become the everywhere store, but Amazon’s global workforce is still only 230,000. Compare that to the 1.5 million people who work for McDonald’s worldwide.

Thankfully, no one has to work at Amazon, or any place where the law of the jungle reigns.

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Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules

BBC News

Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled.

This time has not previously been considered work by many employers.

It means firms including those employing care workers, gas fitters and sales reps may be in breach of EU working time regulations.

BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman said it could have a "huge effect".

"Thousands of employers could now find themselves in breach of working time regulations," he added.

'Falling below minimum wage'

Chris Tutton, from the solicitors Irwin Mitchell, agreed the ruling would be "very significant" and could have an impact on pay.

"People may now be working an additional 10 hours a week once you take into account their travel time, and that may mean employers are falling below the national minimum wage level when you look at the hourly rate that staff are paid," he said.

The court says its judgment is about protecting the "health and safety" of workers as set out in the European Union's working time directive.

The directive is designed to protect workers from exploitation by employers, and it lays down regulations on matters such as how long employees work, how many breaks they have, and how much holiday they are entitled to.

'Bear the burden'

One of its main goals is to ensure that no employee in the EU is obliged to work more than an average of 48 hours a week.

The ruling came about because of an ongoing legal case in Spain involving a company called Tyco, which installs security systems.

The company shut its regional offices down in 2011, resulting in employees travelling varying distances before arriving at their first appointment.

The court ruling said: "The fact that the workers begin and finish the journeys at their homes stems directly from the decision of their employer to abolish the regional offices and not from the desire of the workers themselves.

"Requiring them to bear the burden of their employer's choice would be contrary to the objective of protecting the safety and health of workers pursued by the directive, which includes the necessity of guaranteeing workers a minimum rest period."

We don’t live to work, we work to live. Why don’t we say so?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

 

‘It appears that you need to be in the bull-headed world of high finance before you can make this simple assertion: I’m don’t have to justify scaling back my work on the basis that I’m swapping one role (‘hardworker') for another (‘mother'). Photograph: Loop Images/ Alamy



“Hardworking” is the ubiquitous political denominator of our age, source of morality, citizenship, respect and status. It slips inanely into even the blandest legislative literature: the psychoactive substances bill, for instance, vowed to “protect hardworking citizens from the risks posed by untested … drugs”. The precise meaning of the phrase is rarely explicitly spelt out (except in the context of benefits and universal credit, where the working week that qualifies as “hard” is endlessly recalibrated by the Department for Work and Pensions). How many hours constitutes hard work? Can you even count it in hours? Does working hard to care for someone count? What about pets? Is there any room in this formulation for work that you find hard – poetry, aerobics – which doesn’t bring in any money? Or is it really a measure of economic productivity, turned by hazy phrasing and sleight of hand into a badge of honour?

This picture jars, rather, with the priorities of the people who are actually doing all this work, as described in the Flexible Jobs Index, out this week. It is compiled by Timewise, a recruitment organisation that also studies cultural attitudes to the workplace. “If you put together the people who work part-time who choose to, plus the people who are working full-time when they would rather work part-time, because they have no choice: that’s half the population,” says Karen Mattison of Timewise. This tells quite a different story to the one we’ve come to accept, of an insecure and underemployed workforce who would like more hours. About 14.1 million people want to work flexibly. One in 10 British workers – or three million people – don’t have enough hours, rising to one in five in so-called elementary or low-skilled occupations. But professionals tend to have more hours than they want.

We could ascribe this to a fundamental difference in outlook between one class and another, with energy levels and can-do attitudes peaking at the lowest pay grades then tailing off among higher earners. But it seems more likely, to me at least, that all these figures point to the same conclusion: people work extremely hard when they can’t live any other way, and steadily less hard – or wish they could work less hard – when they can afford to.

Hard work does not seem to be valued for its own sake, as a marker of identity or bestower of meaning. Work is part of a greater entity known as “life”, and even the fabled “work-life balance” is a bit last-century; given the choice, we see work as a subset of life, and not its rival.

This is already reflected in the reality of work – 95% of companies already offer flexibility – but it’s completely absent from the way people talk about work. In the language of recruitment, ambition and fealty remain inseparable – the truly committed employee thinks only of the job. “The research is saying,” Mattison concludes, “that we have to stop talking about flexible working and start talking about flexible hiring.” From a distance, it is a complicated distinction, but up close, obvious: there is no language in the process of getting a job that allows you to say you want it but only for 60% of the time. Just imagining this crushing awkwardness – when do you even bring it up? – is enough to trap many people in existing jobs they’re overqualified for because the hours work. It’s very wasteful, for them and for employers, who could often get someone much better than they could afford if they were only prepared to have them for fewer hours.

This is one of the critical modern taboos: the way we really feel about work – that it’s OK in its place but cannot be the wellspring of all fulfilment – nor occupy all our hours; versus the role of work in the sociopolitical narrative, in which the solidity of your citizenship is built on the foundations of your fervent industriousness. Partly this is because everyone insists on framing it as a conversation about work versus children; which in turn makes it a women’s issue, which in turn leads people to dismiss flexibility as a signal that ambition has receded, leaving only maturity and reliability in its stead. Going part time is the cultural equivalent of shifting from Cos to Boden.

Furthermore, the new consensus about hardworking people, hardworking families, human units defined by the intensity of their effort, actually sounds, when you decouple it from whichever smooth voice whence it came, a bit Soviet. It calls to mind those glory years of post-revolutionary propaganda in which to work – particularly with your top off – was to wrest back dignity from the capital forces that had tried to steal it from you. And yet we are meant to exist in this era of self-interest, in which our sense of identity is created not by work but by consumption. It’s a totally contradictory trope: of course it couldn’t brook challenge or nuance or an honest account of what work actually means to people. It would disintegrate.

“This is a work-life thing. That life isn’t just children. That life is life,” says Clare Turnbull, who has worked in the famously inflexible world of asset management and hasn’t done a five-day week since 2001. I’d asked her if she would go full time once her children left home. It appears that you need to be in the bull-headed world of high finance before you can make this simple assertion that we should all be able to make: I don’t have to justify scaling back my work on the basis that I’m swapping one duty for another, one role (“hardworker”) for another (“mother”). I don’t have to justify it at all. This life is life.

One in 10 do not have a close friend and even more feel unloved, survey finds

Study by relationship counsellor Relate finds a divided nation with many left without vital support of friends and family

• Alexandra Topping
• The Guardian, Tuesday 12 August 2014

Millions of people in the UK do not have a single friend and fewer still feel loved. Photograph: keith morris / Alamy/Alamy

Millions of people in the UK do not have a single friend and one in five feel unloved, according to a survey published on Tuesday by the relationship charity Relate.

One in 10 people questioned said they did not have a close friend, amounting to an estimated 4.7 million people in the UK may be leading a very lonely existence.

Ruth Sutherland, the chief executive of Relate, said the survey revealed a divided nation with many people left without the vital support of friends or partners.

While the survey found 85% of individuals questioned felt they had a good relationship with their partners, 19% had never or rarely felt loved in the two weeks before the survey.

"Whilst there is much to celebrate, the results around how close we feel to others are very concerning. There is a significant minority of people who claim to have no close friends, or who never or rarely feel loved – something which is unimaginable to many of us," said Sutherland.

"Relationships are the asset which can get us through good times and bad, and it is worrying to think that there are people who feel they have no one they can turn to during life's challenges. We know that strong relationships are vital for both individuals and society as a whole, so investing in them is crucial."

The study looked at 5,778 people aged 16 and over across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and asked about people's contentment with all aspects of their relationships, including their partners, friends, workmates and bosses. It found that people who said that they had good relationships had higher levels of wellbeing, while poor relationships were detrimental to health, wellbeing and self-confidence.

The study found that 81% of people who were married or cohabiting felt good about themselves, compared with 69% who were single.

The quality of relationship counts for a lot, according to the survey: 83% of those who described their relationship as good or very good reported feeling good about themselves while only 62% of those who described their relationship as average, bad or very bad reported the same level of personal wellbeing.

The survey, The Way We Are Now 2014, showed that while four out of five people said they had a good relationship with their partner, far fewer were happy with their sex lives. One in four people admitted to being dissatisfied with their sex life, and one in four also admitted to having an affair.

There was also evidence of the changing nature of family life – and increasing divorce rates – in the survey, which found that almost one in four of the people questioned had experienced the breakdown of their parents' relationship.

When it comes to the biggest strains put on relationships, a significant majority (62%) cited money troubles as the most stressful factor.

The survey also found that older people are more worried about money, with 69% of those aged 65 and over saying money worries were a major strain, compared with only 37% of 16 to 24-year-olds.

When it comes to employment, many of those questioned had a positive relationship with their bosses, but felt putting work before family was highly valued in the workplace.

Just under 60% of people said they had a good relationship with their boss, but more than one in three thought their bosses believed the most productive employees put work before family. It also appears that work can be quite a lonely place too: 42% of people said they had no friends at work.

Nine out of 10 people, however, said they had a least one close friend, with 81% of women describing their friendships as good or very good compared with 73% of men.