Talk-talk has replaced make-makeUK unemployment claims fell more than expected in December to a nine-month low as expansion in service industries prompted companies to hire more workers.
It has been said that the British worker is motivated by a number of factors, of which ambition is the highest rating. It’s also been said that he lacks motivation in the first place and the blame for this is sheeted home to the employer, which is only partly fair.
The portrait of the British worker has changed. You know the old images – cap and gladstone bag and British workmanship equalled quality. Now it equals words. Also, the service industry is not production. It doesn’t actually … er … produce anything tangible except images and words.
Another aspect is that the British worker has priced himself out of a job, as our own Martin Kelly has mentioned before. The worker has overunionized himself.
All of this is characteristic of a banana republic and the road there is twisted and pockmarked but nevertheless, it is all downhill and inevitable.
All this expansion of the service industry in Britain and so little improvement in the quality of service! It's better than it was but we've a long way to go in this respect.
ReplyDeleteWhat have you got against the service industries? I see nothing particularly wrong in generating large amounts of money from providing services like insurance, banking and financial services to the world, not to mention inbound tourism. These produce wealth, which is easily turned into anything tangible you may happen to need at the time.
ReplyDeleteSeems to me that the physical product isn't worth a great deal until it's brought to market, delivered to someone who wants it, and you've received payment. Then the payment isn't worth very much until you've turned it into something you want (be that a product, a service or an entry in a bank book). All this shifting stuff around and providing the financial and administrative services to make it happen is as much part of the process of wealth creation as is making the objects in the first place.
Where they're made doesn't, it seems to me, matter very much.
My son has been trying to get a weekend job at Tesco and they have all been given to Eastern Europeans who are good and reliable workers. You can't blame the bosses in many cases.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing wrong with the service industries but when a nation's improved stats are predicated on those industries, rather than on manufactured and exportable goods, that's another matter. I'm well aware that IT, for example, is exportable and that servers in cafes do a sterling job. But these are not uniquely British or where Brits command the field.
ReplyDeleteAll this may be so but I suppose I was getting at a product Britain produces where it is still the acknowledged world leader, e.g. as Sheffield steel was.
ReplyDelete