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Politics

Solving unemployment and improving quality of work

8 replies

Jamjarlid · 20/07/2025 21:58

Yeah a bold claim. But I don't know why it isn't standard in every industry that people do 2, 10 or 20 years at the 'coal face' at the bottom of the ladder before doing management, regulation, sales (other jobs related to the industry)

I worked in social care (providing care to elderly disabled people in the community). It was standard that (for want of a better word) working class people stayed doing front line work their whole career (exhausting and damaging to health as exhausting and so poorly paid) and middle class people (again for want of a better word) swanned into management and all the cushy well paid physically easier to do peripheral jobs helpline etc. without ever having done front line care.

This has the effect of making the industry run like s**t because the people with the experience are not in a position to use that knowledge so it goes to waste. Instead people with no clue run and ""support"" the industry in peripheral roles.

Another effect is it is a massive disincentive to get a job when it will literally take years off your life doing a job at 55 only a 25 year old should be doing. In my local city there is a 10 year difference in life expectancy between the poorest area and the richest area. Yes other factors but expect this feeds in a lot.

Don't tell me people 'like front line work' yes some may but really everyone from the same 'class' happen to all like poorly paid, physically demanding work where their decades of experience are ignored and count for nothing.....OK.

Please don't tell me this is what apprenticeships are for. Much more than a few apprenticeships this should be accepted as a fact of work life and should apply to more or less everyone in every industry as far as possible with obvious exceptions like preference, disability etc.

This would improve every industry (and probably society) and the employment and health profile of the nation. Tell me I'm wrong or tell me why we don't do this.

OP posts:
Noras · 21/07/2025 06:09

I don’t think that anyone ‘swans’ into a middle class job.
Many so called mini class jobs such as accountancy or law have young people working at the coal face as paralegals or trainees. That work involves intense mental concentration, huge exposure of moaning clients, studying on the job and really low pay eg minimum wage or slightly above.

I do t think that being worn out occurs just because of the physical nature of a job. Stress is a huge killer. It can lead to poor physical health and mental health issues. Many professionals are stressed and burnt out .
I think that in the professions these days the stress levels are acute. People are subjected to mor regulations, more appraisals and more challenges to drive forward businesses. Pay dor some on the professions is low on context of all their educational achievements. Many in the professions work like battery hens hooked to their laptops for 8 hours and barely having time to pee. They are told to record x amount of hours which is unrealistic and challenging.

Spirallingdownwards · 21/07/2025 06:17

Tell me I'm wrong or tell me why we don't do this.

As you have given us 2 options here. I will go with the simplest.

You're wrong.

Earlybirdtweetiepie · 21/07/2025 06:20

I agree in care sector to do on the ground work first. It builds that connection to the people at heart of it, it gains the perspective of those in need of care. If you go straight into the office or background roles there is that level of emotional detachment from the people at the heart of it. (I began as a personal carer) I think one of the issues at the moment in care sector is the actual caring about the families, individuals, many decisions wouldn't be implemented if you could see the impact first hand.

I don't think this may be the case for every sector though, but in care sector many decisions can be life or death and our connections, feelings can influence them a lot.

THisbackwithavengeance · 21/07/2025 06:28

I agree with you that managers should have done the job of the people they manage if only for a short time.

But not everyone wants to be a manager. I don’t. I enjoy front line work. I look at my manager’s job with her endless, pointless meetings which achieve nothing or reinvent the wheel and the legions of bullshit emails (which I delete) and think I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.

I’m old as well.

Pennyforyourthoughtsplease · 21/07/2025 06:34

Erm ... I absolutely agree that senior managers should know what people do at the 'coal face' and maybe they should even do that job for a week, but to suggest everyone should move up the ranks is ridiculous and undermining people's skill sets, strengths and weaknesses. There's a reason some roles are technical, some are with people etc. And ideally people should be skilled and have the skills for their specific role.

Meadowfinch · 21/07/2025 06:37

When universities were only for the idle rich, that was how it worked. Every worker started off at the bottom and worked their way up.

However, it won't work now because a lot of jobs are so specialised.

My first job was in an IT consultancy in the 80s. I worked as a techie on intelligent gateways to migrate data from legacy systems like ICL to modern (for the 80s) databases. The core technology had only existed for a couple of years. People who'd put in 20 years at the coal face would never have seen it.

We were recruited because we were recently out of university, at 22 & 23 having been submerged in the latest theory, our comprehension skills were fast, we knew there wasn't a manual and most of it needed to be worked out, coded and tested as we went along.

You'd have to send a 50yo back to uni for three years before they would know where to start, which would be prohibitively expensive. And I'm not sure most 50yos would be keen on studying 50 hours a week for three years.

The need for those skills had gone by 2000 because all the old systems had been migrated and technology moved on. The whole thing existed for less than 20 years.

Ritasueandbobtoo9 · 21/07/2025 06:41

I don’t really recognise this. A lot of managers in care work their way up or have done care work before or when they were at university. They may become disconnected later but often know exactly what the front line looks like.

Meadowfinch · 21/07/2025 07:04

I still work in tech but within a different industry. I'm recruiting an apprentice. I can teach them everything I know in terms of the processes and techniques we use now, but I'm looking for someone who has an interest in modern video and photography, because they will bring skills that I don't have.

The most interesting of our applicants edits Tiktok clips for fun. I doubt I would find a 50yo with those skills. Youth brings valuable new ideas and new approaches.

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