Getting it right whilst still being spectacularly wrong

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Once upon a time, I found myself trying to drive through a major investment in IT with the intention of improving the productivity of software development in the company where I worked at the time. Somehow, I had to persuade the big boss that the investment was going to produce the returns to justify it, and it wasn’t an easy task. Partly, that was because of the difficulty in measuring productivity in the first place. In principle, ‘productivity’ is easy enough to calculate. It’s simply a question of dividing output by input: the more output you get from a given number of person-hours/ salary costs, the more productive the team is being. Whilst the input is easy enough to measure, the output from software development is a much more difficult task. ‘Lines of code’ is a simplistic approach, but any experienced coder (using the tools available in the 1980s) would know that the number of lines of code required for a given functionality is variable, depending on skill, knowledge and experience, and that some of the best coders wrote fewer lines of code to achieve the same result. Obviously that didn’t mean that they were less productive; generally it meant the reverse. And then, how about accuracy? If the working definition of an operational piece of software is code with all the obvious errors removed, how do the remaining errors (and there were always some, in those days at least) impact on productivity? But the difficulty of measuring productivity was only part of my problem; the biggest part was convincing said big boss that we couldn’t just stand over people with whips (almost literally what he said to me) and force them to work harder, thus achieving the desired improvements whilst avoiding the capital spend.

This week, Liz Truss, who clearly comes from the same school of management as the afore-mentioned big boss, has proved that even the most obtuse politician can sometimes get something more or less right. She is right to draw attention to the poor level of productivity in the UK economy, and right to point out the regional variations in productivity, which appear to show that London has the highest productivity levels. She has, however, rescued her reputation for ideology-led ignorance by getting her diagnosis (people outside London don’t work hard enough), and her solution (bigger whips) so spectacularly wrong. We should be seriously concerned that someone so divorced from reality could ever get anywhere near the levers of power.

The main driver of improved productivity is investment, and the reason that the UK has such a poor level of productivity compared to most other developed economies is because there has been such a low level of investment in recent decades. That in turn has been led by an emphasis on short-term profits, cost-cutting, and asset-stripping. A UK economy which used to be led by people who knew what producing and selling stuff was all about has been replaced by one where everything is about short term returns; a Conservative Party which used to be in tune with productive industry now dances to the tune of the hedge funds and private capital asset-strippers. For sure, profits can be increased in the short term by stripping out costs, leveraging balance sheets, reducing standards and bearing down on the terms and conditions of employees (maybe even by wielding bigger whips), but the extent to which that is possible is limited, and the longer term damage caused by a failure to invest is immense. That lack of investment, in turn, is a direct result of modern Tory ideology, whether applied by Thatcher, Blair or whoever – and the problem doesn’t go away by simply doubling down on the ideology. Or improving whip manufacturing.

The regional differences aren’t all they appear either. That takes us back to the first of the problems I referred to earlier – how to calculate output, in order to measure productivity. There’s a useful explanation here of the three different ways of calculating GDP (which should all produce the same answer), and one of those simply adds up the total of wages and profits in the economy. One of the consequences of that is that a CEO based in London and paid £2 million per annum ends up contributing the same to total output as 50 widget makers, each paid £40,000 per annum, employed in his company’s factory in Wales, despite the fact that the CEO, personally, produces precisely nothing. Since London is often the location for head offices and senior staff, it will almost inevitably appear that London therefore has a higher economic output per head than the rest of the UK – but much of that ‘output’ is, in effect, simply being transferred (some might even argue, ‘stolen’) from elsewhere in the UK. What Truss is telling us is that the widget-makers of Wales (and elsewhere in the UK) add little of value to the economy, especially compared with the bankers, head office staff, hedgies, speculators, and gamblers of London. Truss and her Britannia Unchained colleagues are arguing that the problem is that the widget-makers are just indolent and need a damn good kicking; a rational economic analysis would be asking whether we’re really valuing different economic activities in a sensible way.

Criminalising the bullied

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One of the problems faced by the first capitalists with their mills and their machinery was the pre-existing work culture amongst a largely agricultural population. The idea of working the same hours every day all year round was a strange one to a population used to the idea of working when things needed to be done, spending longer in the fields in the summer and staying indoors more during the dark winter months. In time, the idea that ‘work’ required regular hours on regular days in a regular location became so deeply ingrained that most workers – to say nothing of most employers – now find it difficult to conceive of an alternative model.

One of the few ‘benefits’ of the pandemic has been to challenge that concept of ‘work’. Whilst many tasks still require a physical presence at a set location (although increasing use of robots and AI will reduce that number over time), what the pandemic has shown us is that with modern technology at our disposal an awful lot of work does not require that workers are in a set location or even working set hours. Some employers are even seeing this as an opportunity to reduce office costs (and improve staff morale and motivation) by no longer requiring physical attendance on a regular basis. Others are in a state of near panic, so tightly bound by the old paradigm that they don’t understand how they can ever manage people without physically policing their activities.

As we know from ‘Britannia Unchained’, the idea that workers are essentially idle is not only the strong belief of many employers, it is also rife at cabinet level. From their perspective, they work hard and deserve the rewards that go with that; the rest of us are born idlers who need to be kept in line with clear rules and firm discipline. It’s part of the explanation which Raab and others have repeated for those Downing Street ‘gatherings’ – these were people working under extreme pressure and needed the relaxation, whereas the rest of us (including front line health service workers) needed to be kept in line and observe the rules. They seem to genuinely believe that preparing for, and debriefing after, press conferences is more exhausting than simply looking after the sick.

Anyone who has ever considered the question of productivity in relation to much office-based work knows how difficult a concept it is. At its simplest, productivity is simply output divided by input, but in many – perhaps most – office jobs, ‘output’ is difficult to define and measure. Lazy employers therefore fall back on measuring the easy part – input. Or, as it’s otherwise known, hours worked. They even build up a bureaucracy around time keeping, with a host of rules and exceptions, in order to train their staff to work by the clock. No surprise that many end up presiding over a workforce of clock-watchers as a result. They’re measuring completely the wrong thing, of course – output is far more important than input. Most of us who’ve ever worked in an office will be able to think of at least one person who’s worked long hours without producing very much (or even who has done more harm than good during the hours worked!), as well as someone else who’s managed to appear totally on top of his or her job without ever staying after the end of the day. For employers measuring only input, ‘working from home’ has left them feeling threatened and vulnerable. Instead of asking how they can assess what their staff are producing, or even think about how to encourage a culture of wanting to be productive, they’ve resorted to using fancy monitoring software and demanding that staff return to the office prematurely.

The decision of the Welsh Government yesterday to introduce fines for those who go to work when they could be working from home is very badly targeted. Whilst the objective (reducing contact) is the right one in the face of the pandemic, fining workers who are bullied and feel threatened by incompetent employers who are unable to manage a workforce other than through monitoring their presence in the workplace is merely adding to the pressures on the individuals. It’s taking the easy option – just like those employers who only measure input – rather than the difficult one, which is about encouraging and helping employers to find new working methods (or, as a last resort, fining those who don’t). At a time when the people of Wales have shown, in general, an amazing willingness to act collectively and follow the leadership of Drakeford and his government, criminalising people who are in fear of losing their jobs because of the actions of bad employers is intensely counter-productive. It’s a surprising lapse in judgement from a man who has generally been seen to be doing a good job.

Update:  The First Minister has subsequently clarified that there has been some misreporting over this issue, and the intention is not to punish those attending their place of work, but to support them by providing a solid reason for them to refuse a request from their employers. It's a welcome clarification, although it says something about some employers that their staff need to be threatened with prosecution in order to persuade them to behave reasonably and lawfully. There is also a danger, of course, that announcing that there is, in effect, no intention ever to actually fine anyone might serve to weaken that protection. Still, not enforcing laws seems to be the in thing when it comes to Covid, as we've seen with certain parties... 

Do the Tories understand capitalism?

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It might appear a silly question, given that the Tories are generally regarded as being the party of capitalism, but some of the things they have said and done recently give rise to more than a vague doubt about the answer. And that’s not just a question about Brexit, legion though the examples might be in that regard.

One of the key features, allegedly, about market capitalism is that it promotes innovation. Sometimes that innovation is purely the result of intense competition, but at other times it’s a response to changing market conditions or external shock. In any event, according to the theory, the most innovative businesses will thrive as a result whereas those adhering to outdated business models will go to the wall. The idea that those working for those failing companies should be left to their fate is an uncomfortable one for many of those of us opposed to unregulated capitalism, but for the enthusiasts, it’s a necessary and indeed desirable feature.

One recent such external shock has been the Covid-19 pandemic. It forced many businesses to experiment with different working patterns and to employ already available technology to facilitate more flexibility. The best employers have seen the benefits of this for both themselves and their employees and are already looking to embed the new working practices in their future business models. Admittedly, it hasn’t been so easy for those employers who start from an assumption that they need to measure and rigidly control hours worked by their staff, none of whom can, apparently, be trusted further than they can be thrown, rather than consider productivity or output, but such companies are capitalism’s natural victims of innovation. However, it isn’t just the businesses adopting (or failing to adopt) new practices which have been impacted – as capitalist theory would suggest, there’s also been an impact on other companies in the wider economy. In this case, that includes businesses such as city centre shops, restaurants etc, all of which have seen a fall-off in footfall, and which are now facing the probability that they will never be able to fully recover. Market conditions have changed, and their scope for adaptation is limited.

The response from some Tories has been to demand that people must be forced to return to their offices in the city centres, as we saw from former Tory leader, Ian Duncan Smith earlier this week, in his case talking about civil servants. But to return to my opening question – does he understand the market capitalism he claims to espouse? Demanding that organisations return to working methods and practices which have been superseded by events in order to protect some old businesses which will otherwise be unable to survive in the new world seems to owe more to the thinking of Ned Ludd than modern market capitalism. The question for thinking capitalists (to say nothing of those of us who consider the system to be flawed anyway) ought to be about how we support people during the transition to a different type of economy, not how we resist changes which will benefit many as well as reducing carbon-expensive travel.

Sharing the benefits

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It’s more than 60 years since Parkinson came up with his famous law that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".  I’m not sure that it’s ever been scientifically ‘proven’, but for most of us it seems to have a ring of truth about it in many workplaces, in offices at least.  The underlying problem that it highlights is the difficulty in measuring the productivity of many activities.  In essence, productivity is simply output divided by input, and in a widget factory it’s fairly easy to measure both and thus assess productivity – it’s simply the number of widgets produced divided by person hours to produce them.  (In passing, it’s worth noting that that isn’t quite the way in which overall productivity of the economy is calculated, but that’s for another day.) 

In an office environment, however, measuring ‘output’ is a great deal harder to do, which is why many lazy employers don’t even try.  Instead, they put their efforts into managing the input side of the equation: controlling the hours put in by employees, managing sickness absence, dealing with a lack of punctuality.  There’s an underlying and unstated assumption that if they can maximise and control the input then the output will take care of itself.  It’s an invalid assumption, and in some cases over-controlling the input side of the equation leads to a disempowered, or even demotivated, workforce which feels, rightly, that management don’t trust them to get on with the job; and the probable impact of that on output (and thus productivity) is more likely to be negative than positive.

That’s something of the context within which the TUC this week called for a move towards a four-day week rather than a five-day one.  The BBC report tells the story of one company which switched to four-day working and found that they were achieving as much as they had before.  From simple observation over the years, I suspect that would be true of many workplaces.  ‘Presenteeism’ is a growing problem, and the number of employees who believe that they should be seen to turn up before the boss and not leave until after (s)he has gone home is far too prevalent.  It leads to some people working long hours involving what is often unpaid overtime, but I’m not at all convinced that it adds anything to output.  Instead, the Pareto Principle applies: staff achieve 80% of their overall impact in 20% of the available time; the remaining 80% of their time is taken up by often trivial activities having little overall impact.  Presenteeism merely adds to the time used for not particularly productive activity.

It’s not clear yet to what extent automation will replace much of the routine work undertaken by staff in offices.  Again, it’s easier to see the impact of automation in a widget factory.  I suspect, however, that most people are underestimating the extent to which technology will be able to replace much of the work currently done, as well as underestimating the rate at which that change will be upon us.  The TUC talk about sharing the benefits of technology with the workforce; reducing the length of the working week is one way of doing that.  It strikes me, though, as a wholly inadequate response to the impending changes which technology will bring.  The challenge is not just about sharing the benefits in the workplace, it’s about sharing those benefits more widely across society.  I suppose it’s close to inevitable that an organisation composed of the representatives of working people will be prioritising the interests of those working people; but there are a lot of people in society who aren’t in that category who will also be affected.  And that number is likely to grow.

Some politicians talk about automation as though it’s similar to changes of the past, as a result of which many jobs disappeared but were replaced by new jobs and new types of jobs which hadn’t even been imagined previously.  They may be right, and if they are I may be worrying unduly.  I have a feeling however that the change we are now facing is of a different nature – even if new types of organisation supplying new types of services emerge, the potential is there for many of them to be automated too.  In theory, those who own the machines can produce goods and services with little dependence on employees, and the benefits of automation accrue to the machine owners.

Things aren’t quite that simple, however, and the advance of technology highlights the underlying problem with the capitalist economic model.  For those organisations adopting the technology first and moving away from dependence on human employees there are potentially huge advantages.  But if everyone does it, and there are no employees left, who has the money to buy the goods and services?  What looks good for an individual capitalist simply doesn’t work when applied to the economy as a whole.  That has always been the flaw in the model but continued economic growth has disguised it.  I paint an extreme picture to make a point, but unchecked automation with all the benefits flowing to the automators ultimately fails.  The TUC are right to argue that the benefits of automation should be shared more widely; if anything, their proposals strike me as being rather timid.  What they are suggesting is in the interests of the capitalists as well as the workers, but I don’t expect the capitalists to recognise that just yet.  There is a wider political question as well – what are politicians going to do to ensure that the benefits are shared rather than accruing to one group alone in the short term?  Merely assuming that there will be new jobs to replace the old looks is not just complacent - it’s more a dereliction of duty.

Choosing low productivity?

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By apparently preparing to announce its decisions on Wylfa B and the Swansea Tidal Lagoon in the same week, the government has put the two schemes into a direct and wholly inappropriate competition for support.  And they seem determined to come down on what is for me the ‘wrong’ side of that comparison by supporting Wylfa B and rejecting the lagoon scheme.

The financial viability of Wylfa B at the agreed price for the electricity depends on the assumption that the price is sufficient to allow the companies concerned to build and run the plant for some 30 years and then decommission it over a period of some decades and manage the waste in some currently undetermined fashion for the indefinite future, all at no further cost to the public purse.  I simply don’t find this in the least credible; it’s not the way that capitalism works.  A much more likely scenario is that the essentially unknown costs of future decommissioning and waste management will fall back on the government of the day – building Wylfa B creates a huge liability for the future.  That would be a problem for a country the size of the UK; it would be crippling for a future independent Wales.  Wylfa B fails the financial test, let alone the other problems associated with nuclear power.

Nevertheless, the flawed cost figures, built on such a wholly unrealistic assumption, seem to be the main basis on which the government is taking its decisions.  There are risks associated with both schemes, of course.  But the size and near certainty of the financial risk from Wylfa B dwarfs the potential risk from the lagoon scheme; it’s just being ignored.

There was, though, another part of what the Secretary of State said yesterday which attracted my attention, when he referred to the difference in the numbers of jobs created by the two schemes.  Specifically, he said "We are also looking at nuclear provision in Wales that would create 10 times more jobs in construction and more than a thousand extra during operation”.  I suspect that it’s a reasonably accurate conclusion; indeed, it may be an underestimate: he could have gone further and talked about the hundreds of jobs which will be required well into the future for decommissioning and waste management.

I wonder, though, whether he fully understands the economic implications of what he is saying here.  I can understand why any minister wants to be able to point at all the wonderful jobs (s)he has helped to ‘create’; but if we compare any two schemes with broadly similar outputs (whether in terms of KwH, numbers of widgets produced, or whatever), deliberately choosing the one which employs the largest number of people is tantamount to deliberately choosing the scheme with the lowest productivity.  I don’t have any problem with that as an approach; creating full employment is surely an admirable economic objective, and more important for me than maximising the efficiency of individual activities at the cost of reducing the overall size of the workforce, which is the likely outcome of increased automation.  I’m somewhat amazed, though, to see it coming from a minister in a Tory government which is generally obsessed with reducing the size of its own workforce in the interests of ‘efficiency’.

I can think of plenty of other opportunities for employing more people to achieve a specific output, but I somehow don’t see the government supporting them.  Somehow I think it unlikely that this is the start of a new trend. 

Blaming the 'marginalised'

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The offensiveness and insensitivity of the remarks made by the Chancellor to the Treasury Select Committee yesterday mean that an important point about the way in which productivity is measured and its importance to the economy is in danger of being lost in a barrage of wholly justified criticism of Hammond’s choice of words.  Describing the disabled as a marginal group in society was an open invitation for the attacks to concentrate on the man rather than the message.

Productivity is a simple enough concept at the level of any individual enterprise – it’s a mathematical calculation of output divided by input, or in practice the value of the goods or services produced divided by the number of hours worked by employees to produce that output.  That doesn’t necessarily match what many might think of though.  Certainly it means that ‘productivity’ can be increased if the same output can be produced with half the workforce; but it also means that ‘productivity’ can be increased by simply upping the price of the product, as long as the labour costs remain the same.  But does that really mean (in terms that most of us can relate to) that the workers have suddenly become more productive?

Using the same measure scaled up for the economy as a whole brings other problems.  Dividing the GDP of the UK by the number of hours worked by all employees of all organisations certainly provides a ready measure of something, and if all countries are measured in the same way, it provides a handy basis for comparison.  But it does also mean that an economy which adds lots of jobs at low pay rates for small increases in overall GDP will appear to be losing productivity compared to other economies which do not follow that path.  It doesn’t matter that the overall GDP of the country has increased, whether measured in absolute terms or in terms of GDP per head. 

On this measure, it doesn’t matter that there are more people in work and fewer on benefits; a measure of productivity per hour worked will react in the ‘wrong’ way to an increase in employment in jobs which only add marginally to overall GDP.  Note that – and this is why the Chancellor was so wrong in the way he made his remarks – it doesn’t matter who the people doing those jobs are; it’s not that the people doing the work are in marginal groups, it’s the low-paid low-output nature of the jobs which are being created which is the problem. 

More important still is how we respond to the situation.  If productivity as currently measured is the prime driver, then it could actually be improved by closing down marginal enterprises, and cutting the numbers employed in the less marginal enterprises.  Total GDP would fall, and GDP per head in the economy would fall, but ‘productivity’ would apparently increase.  That merely underlines the fact that ‘productivity’ as currently measured is a poor tool for judging overall economic success.  None of that means that the low level of productivity in the UK economy compared to others isn’t a problem.  It means, rather, that we need to look at what else can be done to improve the situation, rather than blaming marginal groups or even marginal enterprises.  It's a question about what sort of economy we want.

We could start by looking at the performance of those companies which are sitting on large sums of cash rather then investing them.  I’m sure that some of them would argue that the uncertainty caused by Brexit is a reason to hold back on investment.  They’d be right up to a point – but this is a phenomenon which long preceded Brexit.  It’s a failure of capitalism to serve the needs of the community as a whole rather than the greed of the few.  But it’s much easier for a Tory Chancellor to blame those he regards as ‘marginal’ than to look a lot closer to home.

Wants and needs

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To listen to the voice of the ‘business community’, one might think that one key element on the road to full employment and economic growth is as simple as freeing business from ‘regulation’ – and in particular, allowing them to pay lower wages, have staff work longer hours, and limit employees’ rights as much as possible.  I can see how any individual business would see all of those things as enabling it to produce more for less and thus increase profits. 

At first sight, it’s no surprise therefore that the collective voice of business expresses this sort of view to government.  It should be though, because what individual businesses want, in order to compete against each other, isn’t necessarily what the economy as a whole – and all the businesses in it – really need.

The approach is grounded in looking only at the cost side of the equation, and only from the narrow, micro, point of view.  It’s a natural tendency, because costs are easier to control, but it isn’t the whole picture.

On the income side, businesses actually need customers with money to spend and time to spend it.  I sometimes wonder if every individual business trying to reduce its own labour costs to gain competitive advantage isn’t making the implicit assumption that the consumers of their products and services will be the ‘overpaid and unproductive’ staff of their competitors.  In effect, attacking pay and hours to compete only works as long as everyone else doesn’t do the same thing.

There is another implicit assumption being made as well, which is that as some businesses become more ‘productive’ and thus free up labour, then other businesses will expand, or be started, to take up the slack.  That’s an assumption which underlies the whole economic policy of both government and opposition.  And, albeit with a greater or lesser degree of success at different times, it’s proved a valid assumption, to an extent, over the long term. 

The fact that it doesn’t currently seem to be happening doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t happen in due course, but it is at least possible that, this time, it won’t.  What happens then?  What’s Plan B?

The government and opposition alike would have us believe that the lack of investment at present is down to a failure of banks to lend.  And I'm no fan of banks, but there's a danger that they're just a soft target.  There is plenty of evidence that a lot of businesses, particularly the larger ones, are sitting on enormous pots of cash.  That would mean that it’s not a lack of cash which is holding back investment, but a lack of opportunities to invest profitably.

The political assumption is that any Plan B would essentially revolve around either public authorities investing in infrastructure, or else cutting taxes to put more money in people’s pockets so that they can go out and spend.  The evidence suggests that, of the two approaches, the former would be more effective, even though any jobs created are likely to be of temporary duration, partly because putting more money in people’s pockets at present is more likely to lead to a paying down of debt than an increase in spending.

However, if we assume for a moment that putting more money in people’s pockets would actually work, why the assumption that the only way to do that is to reduce this tax or that tax?  Paying higher wages by sharing the rewards more equally could potentially have the same effect, as could employing more people to reduce all the unpaid overtime worked by an increasingly stressed labour force.  (That would also give people more leisure time to spend the extra money as well.)

Reducing productivity and paying higher wages is counter-intuitive, of course.  We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that ever increasing productivity and cost reduction are inherently good things, just because they seem to make sense at the micro level.  But at the macro level, they only make sense as long as the assumption that something else will take up the slack remains valid.  Otherwise, those increases in productivity have to pay for the unproductive slack.

In that case, a real and radical Plan B involves a fundamental re-think about the basis on which the economy is run, and a move towards a more co-operative rather than competitive approach.  An economy, in short, which is built around the needs of the whole of society rather than around the wants of the minority.

They used to say that ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for America’, but it seems to me that, in economic terms, ‘What’s good for the whole is good for the parts’ is much more likely to be true in the long run than ‘What’s good for this part is good for the whole’.

When is a job not a job?

Tweet The answer, of course, is when it’s ‘created’ by politicians.  The only ways that governments can directly ‘create’ jobs are by increasing public expenditure and employing people directly, or by establishing profitable state-owned enterprises.  Neither the UK Government nor the Welsh Government seems likely to do either of those things any time soon, so claims that they are creating jobs need to be treated with considerable caution.

That didn’t stop both governments launching schemes yesterday under which they are both claiming to be creating large numbers of jobs.  I wouldn’t seek to deny that both schemes have their merits; but I don’t think that the headline claims stand up to examination.

Perhaps it’s partly down to my definition of what a ‘job’ is.  For me, if a government claims to have created 10,000 jobs over its life, then, all other things being equal, I’d expect there to be 10,000 more people employed at the end of the government’s term than there were at the outset.  For governments, however, creating 10,000 jobs seems to mean that over the government’s life, 10,000 people will have had a job at some time or another, not necessarily concurrently, and not necessarily for any length of time.

So the Welsh Government’s scheme, headlined as creating 12,000 jobs for young people over three years, actually boils down to 12,000 people having a six month placement at some time during the next three years.  There is – and can be – no guarantee that a single one of those people will still have a job at the end of the placement, or that there will be any more people in work in Wales at the end of the three years than there are now.

Then we have the UK Government’s scheme.  The numbers look more impressive but when one compares the size of Wales and England, they really aren’t that different in scale.  And, again, there’s absolutely no guarantee of any jobs at the end of the programme.

One supporter of the UK coalition, Peter Black, gamely tries to draw a distinction between the two schemes under which the UK Government has got it right and the Welsh Government has got it wrong.  But there are more similarities than differences between the schemes; both are based to a significant extent on extended periods of work experience.  The underlying principle, that of making people ready for work and putting them at the front of the queue is the same.  And the underlying failure of both – that they do nothing to ensure that there will be any jobs for which to queue – is the same as well.

Chris Dillow has an interesting piece today when he suggests that, regardless of what governments do, we are in for a lengthy period of sustained high levels of unemployment, based on the fact that the level of economic growth needed to avoid that is simply not attainable.  It’s a depressing analysis, but he makes a good argument for the prediction, even if it isn’t one which he or I would wish to see fulfilled.

I’d even argue that, in trying to get more people into the labour market by encouraging mothers back to work and by forcing older workers to wait longer for their pensions, the government is actually making the task of attaining full employment harder, not easier.  Add to that the continued drive for increased labour productivity, and the availability of ever-larger and cheaper work forces in other countries, and the task starts to look well nigh impossible.

A more radical approach would be to share more evenly both the work available and the rewards for performing it, in a fundamental re-think of the way our economy works.  I’m not expecting to hear either government produce proposals for doing that though.  Much easier to just recycle claims about ‘creating’ jobs and hope people will believe them.