The limiting walls of limited minds: (un)employment in the UK

Sue Tapply
WVoN co-editor

We have had trouble at WVoN this week trying to find a story about the high rate of women’s unemployment in the UK.

Only the Mirror and the Daily Mail ran a full article devoted solely to the matter. However I found elements of their stories unacceptable, so I vetoed the use of them.

The Mirror said the unemployment figures for women is the highest since Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minster from 1979-1990), and that most new jobs “went to workers from overseas”.

However, the article gave no qualification of the “overseas workers” statement and seemed only to be a call for one-way tickets.

The Daily Mail referred to female joblessness being caused by cuts in the “bloated State workforce”.

Maybe by this they meant the overpaid fat cats and ridiculous pensions, maybe it just meant that someone objected to the Labour government’s method of job creation.

No story I have yet seen has covered the current absence of job creation in the UK under the current government.

I have not yet seen anyone putting two and two together and working out that the current government has no job creation policy and therefore someone has to be not receiving an hourly minimum wage, holidays, national insurance and a pension – and so women are being ‘sent home’.

A friend mentioned the short story called The Yellow Wallpaper recently, in which, put briefly, a woman goes mad from loneliness.

Look at statistics of housebound women on anti-depression medication and how happy women sent home – and indeed under Thatcher, men – have been.

And look at marriages ruined by the overworked “man of the house” always in theory at least at his desk or out on business in the other world, and not being in the “home”, the nightmare place of isolation or in-home entertainment.

There was once, before Thatcher and the destruction of thought, a dream, based on research – by whom I can’t just now recall – that the average human works their best for 22 hours a week, therefore it would be logical to organise people to work 22-hour weeks.

Working these hours, it was said – even then, when technology was only a young spark of change – would also provide enough actual work places for all, given that then, as now, some people work that much in one and half days of their five-day week and slogged weekend hours.

Some people now, don’t forget, do the work of three – so proudly! They are then quick to complain. First about how tired they are and second about the impoverished and unemployed.

There was also, once, an idea that everyone should have a basic amount of pay, say £30,000 a year.

This they would spend keeping other people employed and themselves in a fit and healthy state to work and to spend in their leisure time.

It would employ people and keep the world of invisible money going happily round and round.

Something the current jobseeker’s allowance of 60 or so pounds a week can not.

There do seem to be people who actively plan to isolate and impoverish an increasingly large portion of my country’s population.

And I don’t know which is worse, for them to plan it or for them to be too stupid to stop it.