A lack of jobs isn’t the issue in the UK – it’s the quality of them

There has quite rightly been huge attention paid to the positive contributions to our lives and living standards from the communications revolution, and in particular the mobile element of that.

We find our way through cities on public transport more swiftly and securely than ever before. We can monitor our health, wealth and, in some measure, our happiness every moment of the day. The mobile app revolution is astounding. They did not exist a decade ago. This year there will be more than one million mobile apps available for download. In macro-economic terms the new technologies seem to be starting to improve productivity in service industries, which is wonderful for that will be the key to the next generation having higher living standards than the present one.

But there is a dark side to the revolution and there should be more emphasis on that. There are two areas where concern should be focused: the jobs that are lost or under threat, and the quality of many of the jobs that are created.

We have to be careful about lamenting the loss of jobs for many of those that are going are repetitive and unrewarding. Many people regret the loss of coal mining jobs and the effect on the communities around the pits. But if we were starting again and coal mining was a new activity, would we really welcome the idea of people being forced to spend their working day in dangerous conditions underground, or the environmental consequences of the industry?

Likewise, if artificial intelligence undermines the routine work of paralegals sifting through piles of legislation, would that be so bad? Being in the typing pool wasn’t a great job either. Those of us who work as journalists are aware that our own profession is under threat from automation, but unless we can manage to write something better than that produced by a computer, we should perhaps consider thinking of something else to do.

The greater worry, it seems to me, is not so much the jobs that will go but the ones that are being created. There are some things that only human beings can do, and one of the lessons of the UK in the past five years is that a vibrant society can create a lot of jobs. We are still creating them now. Yesterday’s labour market statistics showed we had created more than half a million jobs in the past year, and employment is at the highest level as a proportion of the population since comparable records began in 1971.

So it is not the number of jobs that is an issue; it is their quality. Here again there are two separate matters. One is the status of the jobs – whether people are full-time or part-time and whether they are self-employed or employed. The other is the way, irrespective of their status, people are treated by their employer or contractor.

I suspect the second matters more than the first. There has been a surge in both part-time working and self-employment, but a large majority of the self-employed report that they prefer that status. That is a relief, because soon there will be more self-employed than people working for the government. Actually just about everybody in jobs now will be self-employed at some stage of their careers.

As for part-time working, while a minority report they would prefer to work more hours, the majority seem to be happy with their present working time. There is a problem that much of our legislation is built around employment rather than self-employment, and that will have to be tackled. But the issue is the appropriateness of legislation, not the job status.

The most profound concern surely is the way people in the new service jobs are treated. People in formal employment are protected; the self-employed are not. The reaction of many people is to say that the self-employed are really employed and should be treated as such. But if a majority of the self-employed prefer that status, this is a perverse response. Instead we need some kind of code of conduct in the treatment of the self-employed. Quite how this should evolve and the role of the state in the development of such a code is all for debate. Self-regulation is usually better than legislation. But however it is done, the harsh truth remains that there are well-publicised abuses of power in the gig economy and that is profoundly unhealthy for society as a whole.

This is not a new concern. Actually it is a very old one. But management by an aggressive algorithm is as unsupportable as management by an aggressive boss.