To ask whether we could ever go back to what it was like in the 50s-70s?

[myblueheav3n]

I mean in a financial sense more than anything, although I know it wasn’t perfect. I only have a very superficial understanding of it all, but as far as I can tell:

• Affordable housing, and a lot of social housing for those who couldn’t buy.

• Liveable wages for unskilled jobs and good opportunity to work your way up in whatever your profession was. Plenty of work available for young people.

• Education was worth a lot more, e.g. now a university degree is minimum for a ‘decent’ job, and not even that is really guaranteed either.

I had more but after thinking about it for a while they’ve slipped my mind In general it seems like it was better, and people who grew up during these periods generally did well for themselves.

I’m the first in my family to go to uni,not because my family were incapable. They were not encouraged, told it wasn’t for their likes of them,encouraged into other jobs.

We were a poor family in the 50s. If you lost your job you became homeless and children were taken into care. Housing was appalling for many people. Coal fires if you could afford the coal. Most of us scavenged for wood or rubbish to burn. No bathrooms and outside toilets. Landlords were often vindictive thugs.

The school system was brutal. Cane was used on both boys and girls as young as five. Women who were mistreated by their husbands had no recourse to the law.

Society is social you cannot extrapolate and only pick a few bits in isolation

@squashyhat

I don’t even know how to word what I’m asking, I have tried.

There was a channel 4 (I think?) tv show which did this as an experiment a few years ago. They took a few families with different circumstances (single mother, pensioner etc) and had them living according to 1950’s finances. I think the general consensus was that it was rubbish for anyone not lucky enough to be married to a decent person with a steady job. disabled, single parents, pensioners didn’t fare so well.

Let’s address the housing. Council housing was for the majority as they had no other options the security and tenure of a mortgage was denied to those who could afford it

Fixed council housing limited social mobility, you could not just relocate for another job or career progression as the other LA wasn’t obliged to house you. You largely stated where you lived

HeelsHandbagPerfumeCoffee Now private rented housing is the majority for most young people. I know which I’d pick.

I mean financial side, sure, women couldn’t have bank accounts, financial independence or maintenance for their children if their husband left them.

Women were shamed back into the kitchen after ww2, bye Rosie the riveter hello submissive Marilyn Monroe

And don’t be working class or disabled in anyway, or not white or gay or in need of any kind of extra help else you have to toil double hard or were left in awful conditions with barely any escape.

The cultural is too tied up with the economic, the social with the practical. They motivate and influence each other so you can’t say “oh I liked the things I’ve cherry picked and want to reinstate just those and only jusdge those things and not the negative” We’ve fought too hard for too long to entertain this kind of selective privileged nostalgia

Decent wages have been pushed down by the vast influx of "cheap labour " from abroad over the past 15 years. Why pay a decent, livable wage, when you can employ cheaper labour from elsewhere who to them is a better deal too.

@myblueheav3n you’re sanitising and revisiting a hard time period in a very mushy sentimental manner. You can’t chose to disregard social. The social reflects the milieu and prevalent views of a society. As typified by sexism and racism that was rampant and pervasive

The only way they contribute is the fact that there was less women in the workplace, it’s hardly as if racism meant there were more council houses or higher wages.

Racism, sexism, disablism and classism together made a huge difference to how many were in the workforce.

Also industries are different now- technology has taken the jobs of millions and meant we need a more educated workforce to do the kinds of jobs society has invented to keep us all going.

Could we build more council houses? Yes. Could we adopt other broadly socialist policies Yes.

But once the working class started voting Tory we’d had it!

I'm old, and I know a lot of people who managed to get decent jobs, careers and pensions without a degree, some of them are even women! Apprenticeships for trades were easy to come by, and unions were strong enough for zero hours contracts not to exist.
These days, we're seeing graduates from top universities with First class degrees not able to get a job at all. Degrees they had to take out loans for. Part-time unskilled jobs have largely disappeared - in London it's been difficult for years for teenagers looking for Saturday jobs, and you now need two earners to support a family in large swathes of the country.
On the other hand, things like clothes and electronics and food and energy are comparatively cheaper than they've ever been, and people have much higher expectations materially than they did back in the day. Our homes are centrally heated and we have inside toilets, and access 24/7 to the wealth of knowledge and entertainment that is available on the internet. Women have access to mortgages and the opportunity to be self-supporting. I recall when my parents split up in the late 60's , the bank would not agree for my mother to take over the mortgage on our home, even though she had been paying it single-handedly and was the only earner for some years before that. That was a policy decision, not an income-based decision.

@CherryCherries

It’s not the fault of the immigrants, it’s the fault of the chancer business owners who were looking for any excuse to maximise their own profit at the expense and excuse of “cheap labour”

Just look a Jeff bezos for example. Can you really say he’s just a poor billionaire that can’t afford decent standards and wages for his employees?

I think it's good to think about what we have lost , what has changed for the worse

I know many people of my age who qualified as accountants, civil engineers, social workers etc by leaving school after A-levels and getting jobs where they could continue to train while they worked. One of them went on to become CEO of a large local authority.

These days, you can only follow these careers if you get a degree and shedloads of debt. Bloody sad, and puts a lot of bright kids off.

There are apprenticeship/work-based routes into pretty much all those fields. And many others. You can get a degree essentially for free while being paid right now as an apprentice.

You're living in a fantasy world. You've hugely romanticised a period you know almost nothing about. Time can't go backwards; we are never going to start paying people to do unskilled manual jobs ever again because you can't uninvent automation. (And try being one of those unskilled manual labourers and getting injured on the job, or just ageing - what do you think your safety net was like?)

My Husband as next of kin had to give permission for me to have an operation for appendicitis. He was not allowed to be present at the birth of our children .

I was not allowed a bank account. I could not get a mortgage. I was paid less than men for doing the same job.

Jeez - why is everybody answering a completely different question to the one the OP actually asked?

It would take a sea change in people's attitudes towards wealth and entitlement, which I just don't think is possible now. The media and successive governments have conditioned us into thinking that looking after yourself and your family also means shitting all over everybody else.

I grew up in a council house,poor area. Whole Scheme in disrepair, we got repairs when it suited the Council. To the extent you got what you were given.

It looked like a terribly drab era.

In business, (and I don't own a business by the way,) if you can cut down your wage bill then you will do so. I you can pay people less, who are willing to do so, then you're going to take that option. The UK has had that option and took advantage of it to the full. The downside is wages have hardly risen enough to live on for folk, but again, if people from abroad are willing to work for less, people will take advantage of that..

I do understand what you’re saying about things being so entwined @HeelsHandbagPerfumeCoffee but so what, now maybe as a woman I can have an alright job— but everything is so expensive I’ll just be able to scrape by paying my rent and bills unless I get married. And that’s after having gotten a degree. People before me in my family did not have degrees and did significantly better than I did with nowhere near the effort put in.

I grew up in a council house too.
We had ice inside the windows in winter.

Council housing wasn't all it was cracked up to be (excuse the pun), but those houses still shouldn't have been sold off.

All that was good in the 50s - 70s was built on the back of women's subservience & free labour. It was only 'good' for men. I blooming well hope that we don't go back to it.

Liveable wages because of low aspirations - as many in blue collar jobs could not afford or expect:
Holidays, even UK
Cars
Telephones - by no means everyone had a landline
New clothes when fashions changed
Imported foodstuffs
Washing machines

I remember the days when there were few restaurants around because no-one could afford to eat out, fewer shops in general. A calculator or typewriter would be unaffordable to most families. No central heating, limited hot water. Entertainment options at home tv, books or handicrafts.

In the late 70s when I left school, unemployment was very high. University was only for the cream of the sixth form, others went to the polytechnic. University education was valued because it was rare and relatively few could achieve it.

Women’s wages were often not liveable. I’ve met women who married because it was the only way of escaping abusive parents. Unmarried nurses, for another example, lived in the nurses’ home, they couldn’t afford to be independent. Getting pregnant in order to get a council house was another symptom of this dilemma.

I do mourn the collapse of socialism and the privatisation of the publicly owned industries, but that is a Conservative project, nothing to do with the era we live in. Other countries have managed public services and public welfare much better.

@rollinggreenhills

Erm... no.

Getting married and you're a woman? That's your resignation then. Bye bye career. Oh, hang on - what career? You were only working for pin money anyway.

My mother worked all though the later 60s and the 70s as a married woman. Depended on the employer.