Who is the most important person in your company? The Managing Director, Finance Director, Centre Forward, Lead Singer or perhaps the PA who makes sure the MD is at the appropriate meeting, properly prepared at the correct time? Or, is it, in fact the security guard who opens up the premises on a morning? Because if the gates are locked, no one is doing anything today.
The point here is a discussion about skilled labour and key workers. There had already been a lot in the news about skills because the UK’s new post-Brexit immigration policy is going to be based on the skills a person brings to the country.
On the surface that sounds like a good thing but think about it for a second and you’ll probably have the same questions that I do. For a start, the implication of that premise is that the future of the UK’s prosperity will depend on skilled immigrants, while the low-paid unskilled work is done by (according to Home Secretary Priti Patel) the UK’s eight-million ‘economically-inactive’.
Think about that for a moment. Surely, our ambition as a nation who used to lead the world in just about everything and which still has some of the most-respected universities, should be to fill our skilled-labour vacancies with our own skilled labour? Should we not have the ambition to give every single child in the British education system the opportunity and the challenge to build the most skilled workforce we can – something that’s even more important when you live on a tiny island.
For a government still in its first six months to roll over and build a strategy based on imported skills shows an embarrassing lack of ambition and understanding of what makes for a successful economy.
But more than that, it also reminds us just how out of touch with actual society most of these politicians are.
Because the other thing absolutely wrong with the skilled/non-skilled labour debate is that there is no such thing as unskilled labour. And the one thing we are learning from the current Covid-19 pandemic is that ‘skilled’ workers and ‘key’ workers are very different things. Try telling a hospital cleaner, currently making the difference between Covid-19 wards being open, hygienic and safe for staff and patients that their job is unskilled or not ‘key’.
Two weeks ago, I had a bloke come round to install my TV on the living room wall. He’s a handyman, making a living out of the small odd-jobs that halfwits like me can’t do without half-demolishing the house. On paper, drilling a few holes in the wall, screwing on a bracket and hanging the TV is not especially skilled labour. But the care and attention that this guy brought to the job was lovely to watch. Not only did he measure and treble-check everything to ensure the TV was absolutely central to our sofa and level to the tiniest fraction of a degree, but he also made up some new, shorter cables (including those very fiddly digital cables that connect your smart TV box to an internet router) because he wanted the final installation to look like something out of a magazine.
The finished job is superb and, absolutely the work of a highly-skilled worker. And that’s the issue – what we consider to be unskilled labour is, in many cases a euphemism for ‘badly-done-labour’. A similar example could just as easily be the care workers or the seasonal fruit pickers, both singled-out under the new immigration proposals as unskilled labour suitable for the Government’s 21st century equivalent of factory/cannon fodder.
I’m absolutely certain it is possible to look after old people in nursing homes very badly and use no skills or empathy whatsoever. I’m equally certain that if you put me in a field with a sharp implement, a wonky basket and a line of as-yet-unharvested brussel sprouts to chop down, I would do that pretty badly too.
But, I’m also absolutely certain that there are some care workers in some care homes who have phenomenal caring skills; able to show empathy, subtlety and patience to make their patients feel comfortable, dignified and in safe hands at a time in their lives when others are feeling unwanted and vulnerable.
Ask yourself the question; when the time comes for your parents to be looked after in a care home, or when it’s your time – confused, lonely, terrified and desperately trying to cling on to the memories of when you had respect and dignity – would you prefer to be looked after by a team of people respected and rewarded for their exceptional caring skills and professional attitude or are you ok for the care industry and government to define its workers as unskilled and recruit accordingly?
Me too.
And equally, I’m sure there are fruit pickers and vegetable packers who can wield a semi-sharp blade on a line of brassicas and swirl through the task with practised skills that would be the envy of any hobbyist gardener.
Social skills are very definitely skills. Care skills are so obviously skills it is unbelievable that anyone could think otherwise. Practical skills like the TV-hanging handyman are skills and the ability of a taxi driver or bar tender to persuade a ‘larger-than-you-intended-to-give’ tip by simply being friendly, helpful or an sympathetic listener is every bit as much of a skill as the Company MD negotiating a big contract – it’s only the context and the situation that is different.
The problem we’ve developed is becoming a society that values academic skills too highly because they are easy to measure.
I’m a beneficiary of this. I’ve made a good career out of using my head, but I’m hopeless with my hands – always have been. Both of my dogs have immense social skills and the ability to make me laugh, cry, do anything they want me to and be even more devoted to them than they are to me. But they both have zero conventional ‘intelligence’ and seemingly no DIY or engineering ability at all.
Defining a person as skilled or otherwise is demeaning and patronising. It tells us more about the flaws of the bosses than the workers. It’s not about the job you do, but how you do the job.
So is the challenge for post-Brexit and post-Covid-19 Britain to learn new skills or a new mindset and should the real discussion here be about how we change our education system to better prepare, inspire and empower our children to understand that the value of doing a great job goes far beyond how much profit your employer makes?
What if we decided as a nation that the people who teach and prepare our children for their adult lives are quite clearly (and very obviously) the most important workers in the whole of society? Just supposing we paid our teachers as much as our footballers, what chance that the teaching profession would employ and retain the absolute best-of-the-best because those teachers (and parents, and pupils) would understand the importance of what they do.
And, if our teachers became high-profile, highly-paid, aspirational, almost-celebrities how many of their pupils would be working their socks off for the chance to be just like them?
Can you think of an argument against a nation investing every single penny possible into every single kind of education? Imagine a system when those who showed an aptitude for pretty-much-anything got the best opportunities to develop alongside others who were destined to be engineers or chefs or scientists or carers?
Skilled labour? I should flipping say so.
