The UK is anxious to create a high productivity economy which offers highly paid, relatively secure and intellectually and emotionally rewarding employment for a high proportion of the national workforce. Current policies in this area are, in part, founded on two critical assumptions. One is that globalisation and economic change are inexorably pushing us towards the desired outcome. The other, is that the state role in promoting change should largely be confined to increasing the supply of skilled labour. Neither of these assumptions is entirely correct.
There is little evidence that we are currently moving to a world where all jobs demand a high level of formal skills, or which are interesting or well rewarded. In fact, our labour market is following US trends, and is polarising, with growth at the top and the bottom, and with the middle (skilled manual) level jobs being 'hollowed out'. As the Research Report of the DfEE's Skills Task Force concluded, "between now and 2009 we expect there to be over 2.5 million job opportunities in semi-skilled personal service and sales occupations and nearly 2.75 million job opportunities in unskilled operative and elementary occupations". To put it another way, the 21st Century still demands quite a lot of people who can flip burgers, collect refuse, clean your house, mind your kids, wait table, care for the sick and elderly, clean your office, guard your buildings/cars/airports, serve behind the counter or at the checkout in stores, or pull your pint.
Nor are there strong signs that employers are adopting the kinds of high performance, high trust, high involvement work organisation that might transform the quality of working life and improve economic performance. The DTI's recent Workplace Employee Relations Survey indicated that, throughout the UK, the proportion of workplaces that could be described as having in place a high performance work systems model was perhaps as low as two per cent.
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