We used to build ships, but now we take calls…

The title comes from the front page of the G2 bit of the Guardian from a few years back. It was the caption to a photo showing rows and rows of people in a call centre. The article to go with it was about the decline of heavy industry (ship building, in particular) in the North East, and the boom in call centre work due to the common liking for a Geordie accent. It’s stuck with me and I was reminded of it today. I apologise if this turns into a waffly ill-informed bit of nonsense – it’s partly my trying to exorcise something.

I left my last company for many reasons, one of which was the product I was working on was increasingly being marketed as a job killer. We were even asked to look in the local paper for the right kind of job adverts and our slimy sales and marketing people would phone up and invite the potential employer to buy our kit instead. 🙁

The job I’ve got now is largely neutral ethically – it doesn’t save lives but it doesn’t put people out of a job either. The company I work for is now looking into putting more automation into call centres, which is what reminded me of the G2 thing and the job killing. I shan’t go into this in any detail because it’s likely to be boring to outsiders and also I don’t want to worry about intellectual property.

But the general point (yes, there is a point) is technology, automation, rubbish jobs and so on – nice and precise (I did warn you this might be waffly). I think the best I can do is to fire out a load of questions, as I definitely don’t have solid answers to them. Any thoughts you have would be very welcome as I’m wrestling with this and have been for many years.

Is the UK always going to have a set of jobs that unskilled or low-skilled people can do? I.e. as automation (and even outsourcing and so on) mops up one kind of low-skilled job, will technological advances, changes in society and so on always create a new one? I’ve heard it said that if just banking lost all its computers, then it the entire working population of the country would have to start working for the banks to sustain the kind of banking we have now. I’m not sure how true this is, but true enough I suspect. Some of the jobs that computers do now have never been done by people, or at least haven’t for so long that we don’t notice it any more – large companies don’t have rooms full of computers adding up on machines (by “computer” I mean the old sense, which was “a person who computes”). We don’t have banks of typists any more as most people who produce documents do so themselves on a word processor. So far I can’t see a lack of jobs, but am I ignorant, and will the supply of jobs continue?

Are we always going to have unskilled people, and do we want to? This is the politically sensitive one, but is linked to the first one. If there is always going to be a need for unskilled people, then will there be enough people to meet that need? Are our society, our education and welfare structures, rigged to maintain this, and is this fair? The head of my sixth form was a very interesting man, who said that the traditional education system in this country mirrored the classical division of society into three: the intellectuals (good brains), the soldiers (good hearts) and the labourers (good hands). I hope that any teachers or ex-teachers reading this can give me chapter and verse about this. Given that we fortunately don’t need large conventional armies any more, do we still need the people who used to be no more than cannon fodder? Or, putting it less snobbishly, do we still need people to be like that?

The late night student debating point is this one – the big question about what potential does a given person have, can we all be super-stars, or are some people more equal than others? I don’t pretend for a moment that all young people should go to university – if I want a new boiler put in I’d much rather have someone skilled in plumbing than someone with an Oxford degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Someone who has problem solving skills, spatial awareness, physical dexterity and skill, the relevant practical bits of physics and chemistry and not someone who can tell me where Keynes got it wrong.

Before I get too glum or my head explodes with the enormity of it all, I am grateful for a little flash of Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A society got fed up with the useless third within itself – the telephone sanitisers and so on and cooked up a huge hoax that convinced everyone that some massive calamity was about to fall on their planet, and that they must all abandon it in 3 massive spaceships. The ‘useless’ third went first and eventually settled on another planet (the rebuilt Earth, I think). The other two thirds never had any intention of leaving as they were in on the hoax and stayed put. They got their just desserts when they were all wiped out by a very nasty disease from a particularly dirty telephone box. 🙂