The disappearance of high street retail jobs hurts working class most, taking away crucial ladder to opportunities

In the year 2000, the European Union issued it's Lisbon Strategy.The plan, under then President of the European Commission Romano Prodi, was to prepare Europe for the 'knowledge economy', in which the continent was to be the skill and knowledge centre for the world.

The advance of technology on the high street is part of what that strategy was preparing for - to transition to a position where low skill work was done by machines, giving people more time, education and training needed  to prepare for more technical and high skilled work.

The problem across Europe, including here in Britain, is that the expansion of skills, education and the opportunities to exploit them - necessary to making this transition work for the working class - hasn't happened.

Low skill work is going away, but it's loss is only hindering the working class. In the past year alone in Britain, twenty two thousand high street retail jobs have been cut. Many more are planned. With them, crucially, goes job and income security for the working class.

And it's not just shop floor work. Management positions are being lost too. With them goes the ladder that working class people could, in the past, have climbed towards greater opportunities with more responsibility and higher pay - the entry level access point to a well paying career.

Now. The decline of any particular market sector is not, by itself, a disaster - so long as opportunities for people to make a living continue to appear to offset the losses of security of work & income, and that ladder to opportunity.

However, the stats do not look great. While unemployment is at a forty year low, working poverty is high. Child poverty is high. Precarious work is high. Security of income is under threat at a time when pay has not yet recovered from the long post-2008 slump.

Moving to a knowledge economy is the right direction. But only if it takes working class people with it. Abolishing entry level work to reduce corporate bottom lines at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable is despicable.

Without a framework of education and training, and a responsive social security network - built around a reliable means of making a living and a flexible income guarantee for a volatile, and frequently 'gig' oriented, economy - the transition becomes a step backward, techology in the hands of business again reducing people rather than elevating them.

And elevation is the point. Liberation is the point. If technology is not going to free us, increasing our capacities and opportunities, then what is the point of it?

References

'"An agenda of economic and social renewal for Europe" the Commission's contribution to the Lisbon Special European Council'; from the European Commission; 28 February 2000.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-00-191_en.htm

James Graham's 'High Street woes hit 22,000 jobs in 2018'; on the BBC; 2 July 2018.

Patrick Butler's 'Record 60% of Britons in poverty are in working families – study: In-work poverty disproportionately concentrated in households in private rented housing as rising living costs bite'; in The Guardian; 22 May 2017.

'How have wages changed over the past decade?'; from Full Fact; 19 October 2017.