Why a good job is hard to find

For those looking for work in these troubled times, there is good and bad news. On the positive side, there are at last “British jobs for British workers” as migrant labour heads home. The bad news? The vacancies include meat packing, sorting potatoes, grating carrots, cleaning, and – the least bad options – working as a retail assistant or in a fast-food restaurant. In Spain, strawberries are being harvested by Spaniards for the first time in years. “Picking strawberries is the last resort, but it’s all there is,” said Jose Maria Gomez, a 29-year-old former construction worker, in The New York Times last month.

As one employment agency manager told this newspaper recently, a new type of job-seeker has emerged. “It’s what I’d call older, middle-aged people who have been in work for 10, 15, 20 years in one place,” she explained, “and now with the climate as it is, they are made redundant and are willing to take on anything. It is heartbreaking.” It is sad seeing highly skilled people being forced to take on semi or unskilled jobs. But while such work may be back-breaking, is it really “heartbreaking” as well? Having a good job – that is, interesting work in civilised conditions – is clearly preferable to having a bad one. But better a miserable job than no job at all.

So with unemployment rising just about everywhere, it might seem an odd time to start a debate on “good work”: what it is and to how create more of it. That is what the Smith Institute, a London think-tank, has done, launching a pamphlet* on the subject at a seminar last week.

But we should be thinking harder about good work, says David Coats, associate director of the Work Foundation, another London think-tank, and editor of the new pamphlet, because economic recovery will come, and business needs to be ready for it.

“It is difficult to imagine that employees will be attracted to work for a company that has acquired a bad reputation during the recession,” he writes in the opening chapter. The idea that “nice” and “nasty” strategies can be switched on and off according to the prevailing labour market conditions “has to be a mistake”, he adds.

Have jobs got worse and, if they have, is it the fault of managers? The evidence is mixed. Duncan Gallie, professor of sociology at the University of Oxford, presented last week’s seminar with evidence from the official British skills survey. Since 1992 the skills levels of employees has risen – indeed, sometimes to higher levels than those required by some employers. But at the same time employees’ freedom to take decisions and organise their work – “employee discretion”, in the jargon – has fallen. In Europe, Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands seem to have achieved both higher skills levels in the workforce but with greater employee discretion as well.

It would be easy to conclude that some malevolent or incompetent UK employers have been determined to frustrate the potential of their employees. But other contributors to the new pamphlet
are impatient with that characterisation.

“Believe it or not, most businesses act in the best interests of those they employ,” says John Philpott, public policy director and chief economist at the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development. Brendan Barber, general secretary of the UK Trades Union Congress, does not quarrel with that. Workers “often think their company could do better,” he writes, “but they do not usually think that that company is out to exploit them”. In any case, not everyone will share the same definition of what a good job is. “Good work is in the eye of the job holder,” says David Yeandle of the Engineering Employers Federation.

Managers are under pressure. They have too much to do, too little time to do it in, in a market that is unforgiving. They may understand perfectly well the enlightened argument for a less coercive and more accommodating management style. But then the next crisis emerges, the next deadline looms, and you see a reversion to what some people call the JFDI school of management. (The J, D and I stand for Just Do It.) But JFDI management achieves diminishing returns.

There is plenty of demand for good work right now. Worker unrest is rising around the world, with some employees staging sit-ins to try to protect their terms and conditions, while others – French, of course – have seized managers and held them hostage in recent weeks.

So, which is more important: work, or good work? The protesting workers are so desperate to keep their jobs that they will do almost anything to hold on to them. Their desperation stems in part from the realisation that any job they move on to is likely to be inferior, with lower pay and less job satisfaction.

Jobs are good, but good jobs are better. Managers should be trying to provide the latter. I am with the American psychologist Frederick Herzberg on this one. “If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do,” he said. How’s that for a mission statement to lead us out of recession?

*Advancing Opportunity: the future of good work, edited by David Coats, The Smith Institute

stefan.stern@ft.com

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