An end to ‘beneficiary bashing’ Opinion
Iremember 13.5 per cent unemployment. I was raised in a Midlands industrial city in England in the 1970s and 1980s, and the impact of such high levels of joblessness on individuals and society is etched deep in my memory.
Recollections of that time have come back in chilling detail as the Treasury forecast doubledigit unemployment levels as a result of the snap depression caused by the lockdown designed to beat the coronavirus.
I hope New Zealanders in the aftermath of Covid-19 will be a lot kinder to the jobless than Britons were to each other in those dark days, when the haves blamed the have-nots for their plight.
I recall knowing the job status of all the fathers in the small street I grew up in. I recall knowing Mr Town’s job with the brewery was at risk, but thinking that it would be okay for the family because his wife was a nurse, so they should be able to cope.
I recall my father’s heavy industrial employer, which also employed two more men in the street, coming close to going to the wall.
They were frightening times. Being laid off often meant a long and mentally gruelling battle not only against financial hardship, but also a battle for hope and identity. Some people never recovered.
The horrors of the restructuring of the Western economies like Britain and New Zealand led to a surge in research on the effects of redundancy and long-term unemployment.
People’s physical and mental health suffered. Some became depressed. Some killed themselves. Let nobody pretend lives are not lost when economies experience sharp declines.
It became clearer how much of their sense of self people drew from their work. Many faced a hard time finding new identities.
Those who failed to bounce back were pilloried as lazy, or stupid, or were left with the impression they shaped up poorly against people from previous generations.
After rioting in London, secretary of state for employment Norman Tebbit told workers: ‘‘I grew up in the thirties with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking for it, until he found it.’’
Conservative minister Norman Tebbit displayed what many in Britain saw as a callous attitude to the unemployed.
Because of the prevailing lack of sympathy for the unemployed at the time among the ruling Conservatives, Tebbit’s speech was widely perceived as an attack on the jobless, and it’s the main thing he is now remembered for.
The memories of my youth have come back forcefully in recent weeks, knowing at my heart that losing your job as a result of Covid-19 probably feels as terrifying as it did in the 1980s.
Not being employed, not being able to provide for your family, not being able to contribute to your society, will not feel better because it happened in a bid to save lives.
So far the focus has been on wage subsidies, and keeping businesses afloat.
I hope that more help emerges for the newly unemployed, especially for those whose savings get eaten up as a result of the pandemic.
In a booming economy, many New Zealanders have shown little empathy for jobless people.
It will be a lot harder to blame the many jobless in the coming weeks and months for their plight, and serious thought needs putting into supporting them back into work to match the efforts and expense we are going to to help business owners open their doors again.
We need a national retraining plan, especially for the young and more mature jobless to better fit them, and their skills, to the future of our economy, and to replace the migrant workers who, to our national shame, we have had to import because we had too few people trained in core industries and professions.
I would look seriously at re-tooling the student loan scheme to fund some forms of retraining, and call on employers to lay aside their prejudices, which work so perniciously against the interests of older and younger job applicants.
I hope for a sharper recovery after lockdown ends than we saw after previous bouts of economic crisis, but to be frank, I am feeling quite pessimistic about that.
I also hope each of us shows empathy to those who have lost their livelihoods in the name of saving lives, and not revert to our old blinkered political tribes.
I hope New Zealanders will be a lot kinder to the jobless than Britons were to each other in those dark days.