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Labour is trying to force ever more people into work when AI, recession, and the demise of the jobs best suited to those with disabilities means there are ever fewer jobs available. When will they wake up to reality?
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This is the transcript:
Where are the jobs going to come from inside the UK economy?
I ask the question for two reasons.
The first is that the government is insisting that a great many people who are now on some form of disability benefit should, in the future, be forced to go to work because the government is planning to remove their benefits, which will give them no choice but do so, but that presupposes that there are jobs for those people.
And then there are a whole host of other people in the UK economy, not in disability situations, but who are maybe in marginal employment situations who are finding it increasingly difficult to find work, whatever their age, because their jobs are being threatened by AI, or the simple obsession amongst employers to increase productivity at all costs, which obsession is reflected in government employment practices, which therefore reduces the number of jobs available for people to do.
This simultaneous move by the government to force people into employment whilst at the same time they’re demanding increased productivity in the public services, which is reflected by a demand for increased productivity in the private sector, coupled with the introduction of AI, which is undoubtedly going to cost a great many jobs in the UK – particularly in admin sectors, where many of the people who might be forced back into employment who have previously been on disability benefits, might have looked for work – creates an absolutely explosive situation with regard to the future job prospects of a great many people in this country.
Quite simply, it does not look as though there will be enough jobs in the long term for the people who are fit and well and looking for them, let alone those who are in more marginal positions through no fault of their own, because they have some form of disability, which has previously been assessed by the government as sufficient to require benefits to be paid to them, but which will now not be paid, which therefore means they will have to look for employment instead.
Now, I don’t know how this is all going to end up because I’m not clairvoyant and nor is anybody else, but the situation I’ve described is undoubtedly real.
There are going to be fewer jobs because of AI. This is indisputable. I spoke at an accounting conference within the last week on this point, and there was nobody who said otherwise. Every single software vendor I spoke to was talking about how they could produce software using AI to reduce the amount of admin time that is going to be required to process, for example, basic accounting data – precisely the sort of job that in the past people in more marginal employment situations like those who might have disabilities would have done because there was some degree of flexibility around such tasks to allow them the scope to tailor the work to suit their particular needs, but that won’t be available.
And that’s my whole point. If we are in a situation where the types of work that were particularly suited to people where there wasn’t a great deal of time pressure, so they could therefore have days off if it was necessary or work flexibly or have moments in the day where they could not work because they needed a downtime to deal with some situation that had arisen with regard to their wellbeing, totally reasonably, but were overall able to contribute – if those jobs aren’t there, then they’re not going to be able to work.
And for the other people who are struggling to find work, let’s be totally honest, the skills that are necessary for them to be able to find work are not being taught.
It is an absolutely ridiculous situation that in the UK present, people come out of school with no idea how to do any form of accounting.
They do not know how to do any form of budgeting.
They do not have the basic skills to actually undertake many of the routine tasks that are undertaken in an office, including writing an email in so many cases. They might be able to analyse the poems of the 19th century. They might be able to prepare some form of mathematical formula for a simultaneous equation, but could they actually prepare a spreadsheet to present their ideas in a way that an employer would want? Very often, I would question that, and this is what worries me.
Nor, and let’s also be clear, are young people and indeed older people, prepared for the absolute challenges that living on the minimum wage imposes on so many people. And it is minimum wage jobs that we’re talking about by and large here, that requires the most extraordinary financial skill to juggle the finances of a household so that it might just survive.
I read a recent review of the finances of poorer people in the UK economy and it was estimated that in some cases, households which were living on minimum wage – quite possibly two people on minimum wage – were doing up to 150 transactions a month between members of the household simply to make sure that the right money was in the right place at the right time to pay the bill that was due with the highest priority, having already juggled the system to make sure that others could be delayed until there was more money available later on.
This is actually quite extraordinary financial ability, which is not being reflected, but which is possessed of these people, but which cannot be translated into a workplace experience because there is no certificate in it, and that’s what an employer wants.
So, we are in the most difficult of situations right now. The government is deliberately forcing people into the workplace. It’s callous in its approach. You don’t exist unless you are a worker according to the Labour party. They say they are only interested in the interests of working people. So, if you’re not a working person, you don’t count.
Whether that be because you’re young, because you’re old, because you have a disability, because you have caring responsibilities, whatever it might be, the only people who matter to them are workers. You must be an economic unit of production or you have no value as far as they’re concerned. Hence their approach towards disability payments, which I absolutely condemn.
But the problem, as I say, is wider. We are facing a job crisis in this country, which is going to get very much worse very soon.
It’s already hitting young graduates who cannot find jobs in their chosen sector. For example, try to find a job in an accountancy now, and you’ll find there are many fewer than there were because employers are not now seeking graduates to undertake accounting tasks because they say, quite simply, that those tasks have been de-skilled because of AI, and therefore they don’t need those people – people that we have been training people for jobs that do not now exist.
That is going to become so common and therefore the generic skills that I’ve just talked about – how to manage the person’s own affairs so that they might be available for work – become ever more important.
So, what’s going to happen unless the government gets its head around the fact that we have to look at the world of work in a very different way and very soon because it is being transformed by new IT and AI processes? They are going to be floundering with a benefit system that cannot match reality and an increasing level of unemployment where people are being penalised through no fault of their own because they cannot find a job.
We could be back with the Victorian attitude towards those who are poor. There will be the deserving poor and the undeserving poor, and the vast majority of people will apparently be undeserving.
We will end up with the workhouse scenario again, where those who are undeserving will be forced into some form of labour, perhaps in exchange for their benefits, but which will be wholly unsuited to their needs and those of society.
We have to rethink this.
We have to rethink it very quickly and we have to get it right or the social consequences of the failure to do so will be staggering.
Labour appears to have no comprehension of the job tsunami heading its way in the sense that there are going to be many fewer jobs available. It either has to wake up or it’s going to fail us all very badly.