Employment isn't a simple matter - the numbers hide complex picture of poverty, precarity and the need for opportunity

The government's favourite fallback when criticised is to turn to the employment figures. Theresa May pulled the figures out at last week's PMQs, saying that she noticed the opposition leader hadn't raised the subject with her.

But the government's excitement about those figures is hard to square with the reality of life in this economy for ordinary workers.

The fact that the dominant corporate culture in Britain sees it as a viable strategy to lay off thousands of workers in 'restructuring', explains a lot about how most of the people in poverty in Britain can be in work - suffering in poverty despite having paying jobs.

Employment may be high, but big questions remain about the quality of employment. Retail may not be work that produces the greatest satisfaction, but it does provide opportunities for those who need them most - like a ladder to management experience and the stability that can provide.

The latest threat to that slender social mobility ladder is the restructuring happening at Tesco, where unions are afraid that as many of 15,000 jobs are going to be cut, some two dozen per store - more job losses at the firm, that follow on from some ten thousand others lost in the last four years.

Uncertainty and precarity are becoming the norm. Average wages remain below what they were in 2010. Income equality in Britain continues to decline. And amidst these pressures, the welfare safety net has been diminished. This is the pattern that lies hidden behind the employment figures.

Over time, of course employment won't stay the same. Some kinds of work will disappear and others will replace them. Perhaps, over time, work itself will change beyond recognition - to no longer be the 'work to live' system we are familiar with. But it will change.

It isn't good enough for Conservatives to preach innovation, to preach flexibility. That approach is leaving people with no stability and rising anxiety. Trapped in a precarious working life that isn't rewarding people. There has to be a better way.

Brexit looms, hovering menacingly over everything, threatening to diminish workers rights and job security, ordinary people need reassurances about the future. The old ladders to prosperity for working class people are being kicked down.

It's no good talking up the figures when thousands are facing layoffs. What people need is to be able to depend upon practical support when they lose work, and the same as they try to develop the skills to find a new path forward. To know that there are paths they can take, opportunities for a stable life.

That means more intervention and more guidance. More communication, to let people know where the paths are and what people will need on those roles. This is only the beginning of what is needed, but in a time of crisis you have to deal with the emergency first.

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?

Disability: Whether physical, mental or learning, it's usually our society that makes individual circumstances disabling

Photograph: Wheelchair Parking from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

It isn't radical to acknowledge that our society, our infrastructure and the way we work, is built around the lives of non-disabled men. The experiences of women are testament to that: basic biology is often treated as an impediment to society's orderly functioning.

The same kind of exclusion is experienced by people with disabilities. This is even reflected in the language of disability, which has clear markers of being written from the point of view of 'able-bodied' men, complete with assumptions made based on the uncritical acceptance of how society is shaped. There are, of course, cultural and historical reasons for the way these things have developed.

However, change has been slow and inclusion still feels far away. And it's that failure to build otherness into our society that defines disability. The report this week into the government's failure to adequately fund school places for those children with special educational needs just exposes how much of an afterthought disability still is in societal decision-making. That's a sorry state of affairs.

This government has made big promises on inclusion but obstacles remain. It is easy to see the barriers to people with physical disabilities just by looking around you. Some of them are very literal. Steps are a big factor. Ramps and lifts still look like add-ons - with issues like the need for manual assistance, space for manoeuvring and limited access all the result of physical disability access being an afterthought.

For people with mental illness and learning difficulties, the impediments are often harder to see - less obvious than the conflict between wheels and stairs which is, nonetheless, still far too often overlooked. The needs of people with mental health problems are various, but often include things like quiet, routine and structure. In a working world growing increasingly loud and irregular, making accommodation for these needs is treated like a drag on efficiency.

A 'flexible' working environment is the buzzword of the moment, but all of the flexibility must come from the employee. Compassionate support is hard to find in a system of precarious work, that keeps people on edge, scrambling for uncertain shifts.

The public sector is not free from criticism. Funding for disability has taken a hit under austerity, with a harsh welfare regime, and even funding for school places for students with special educational needs has been critically inadequate.

All people, disabled or not, want independence. To get around without assistance. To be confident and seen as capable. To that end, successive governments have promised an 'independence revolution', to radically improve social inclusion. That project has not been completed. There is so much more work to do.

We must think carefully about our society: how we frame work and making a contribution; how we approach inclusion. People can live full lives with a full spectrum of conditions and circumstances. But only if the society they live in does not disable them, by failing to built support and inclusion into their framework.

The reality of austerity Britain: work and life are now poor, precarious and uncertain

People gather in Manchester to march against austerity past the Conservative Party Conference 2017.

The reality of the Tories' austerity Britain was exposed in the figures released last week. Those figures revealed that wage growth remains poor at 2.2%, barely above pre-crash levels and falling behind consumer prices rises, with inflation now at 2.9%.

But what do these figures tell us about the big picture of austerity Britain?

Consider Theresa May's response when confronted on issues like poor wages - unemployment is falling. Whenever the PM is confronted, she turns to the unemployment/employment figures. The trouble is, you can't just say that employment is in itself a fix.

Especially when it evidentially isn't the case. Britain might have it's highest recorded employment and lowest unemployment, but what do we know about the quality of life that is providing? What we know, is that working poverty is now very high.

There is no essential truth that employment fixes people's problems or empowers them. Work can only bring liberty under certain conditions.

And austerity Britain is a land of precarity, where social security has been replaced with - or perhaps, outsourced to - uncertain and scarce low paid work. All of which is now threatened by automation, and pits ordinary people against each other in long applicant lists.

This is only heightened by the flaming wreckage of the welfare system. People in need are left without support, and in mounting arrears, for a month and a half when claim out of work support - a situation the government are struggling to even convince there own party to support.

Inevitably, Brexit comes into this. It is important that the ideological case behind leaving the European Union was never made clear. But it's argument for 'freer trade' and less regulation, is a pitch to go further down the road on which we currently travel - to a place of permanently less surety or stability.

But why would those who have campaigned so hard for Brexit want this?

Pete North, Editor of LeaveHQ, blogged how - what he himself described as - the long, painful years of austerity still to come, will in fact be a price worth paying (by ordinary people whose lives would be left in tatters) to accomplish a kind of vague social change, that displayed for more ignorance about young people than any comprehensive thought on the subject.

The governments of David Cameron and Theresa May have pledged a more compassionate conservatism, that takes care of those most in need, while being responsible with the public finances. They have been failures on both fronts.

None of their measures have delivered on even one of these aims. The debt continues to climb. Meeting deficit targets is still delayed. All the pain of austerity and ordinary lives dropped in uncertainty, and the government has nothing to show for it - neither in the public finances or in producing a compassionate society.

Seven years of Conservative government has been a diastrous experiment. It's time to get off this road and find a new way forward.

Progressives need to find an answer to precarious work, because conservatives back its rise and it in turn fuels the Far Right

The headline figures say unemployment is down, but they cover the fact that welfare is being replaced only with precarity. Photograph: Job Centre Plus by Andrew Writer (License) (Cropped)

In the breakdown of the Leave Campaign's victory in the Brexit referendum, and also that of Trump, the impact of globalisation has been afforded a central role. The shifting of work overseas, and only precarious opportunities at home, has fed fear and hostility.

Even a brief look at the political situation, as it stands in Europe and America, reveals that the main benefactors of the crisis have been anti-establishment populists and the Far Right nationalists and sectarians - from Grillo to Le Pen, from Spain to Eastern Europe.

With that in mind, the employment figures released by the government make interesting reading. The topline is, in a time of meagre of opportunities, likely to be praised: unemployment has fallen to a new low, as more people find a way into work.

But the headline covers up three important facts. First, that 15% of those in employment are self-employed (BBC, 2016). Second that, including the self-employed along with those on zero hours and in temporary jobs, some 20% depend upon precarious work (Booth, 2016). And third, social mobility has stalled in an increasingly tiered society, with the gap between the well-to-do and everyone else growing (Sellgren, 2016).

The impact of this shift has been to reduce the possibility of finding a secure and stable housing situation, career paths and job progression stall in the face of no opportunities, and in all, people can no longer expect to live a better life than their parent's generation.

Even with that damning assessment, the Tories have still found it possible to celebrate the shift towards ever more precarity (Stone, 2016). Damian Green, the Department of Work and Pensions secretary, called the shift away from stable hours, holiday pay, sick pay and pensions an exciting moment, praising the "gig economy" staffed by the "everyday entrepreneur".

The only possibility of finding excitement in these figures comes from an ideological viewpoint that reduces human life to little more than wage labour, and sees innovation only through the prism of strife, competition and exploitation - with social life, enjoyment, fulfilment or self-improvement as petty distractions.

But, as the rise of the Far Right is showing, people do not share that view. If work offers no rewards and doesn't lead anywhere, but to a never ending grind, then work is not a path to liberation but a prison. And that creates an opportunity for others to offer a way out - and to offer scapegoats.

People want more autonomy and elevating them, educating them and giving them more responsibility is idealism at its finest - but not at the cost of their basic life security. But nor should people have to cash in their autonomy, their liberty, in exchange for the promise of succour.

It is the job of progressives to offer a road on which stability and autonomy are wedded and sustainable. To build, not just an alternative view of the economy, but one that includes a path forward, with ongoing improvement of conditions and lessening of burdens built into it.

As the British Liberals of the 1920s put it:

"We believe with a passionate faith that the end of all political and economic action is not the perfecting or the perpetuation of this or that piece of mechanism or organisation, but that individual men and women may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

The aim for progressives must be to have an economy that serves people, not the other way around, and works towards their liberation.