Reinventing the Welfare State. Ursula Huws
hit with the requirement to pay tuition fees as well.
Not only did this generation suffer right through their education; once educated, they also entered a labour market in which the concept of a job for life had vanished. Apart from a lucky few, there were no apprenticeships or protected graduate trainee positions to be applied for. Suddenly, they had to compete, not just with the contemporaries they had been schooled with, but in a global labour market, with similarly qualified workers from all over the world. Without experience it was almost impossible to secure a decent job, and without employment it was impossible to demonstrate experience. The only solution to this Catch 22 on offer to the majority was ‘work experience’ – an unpaid internship that was supposed to confer ‘employability’ (in the process further undermining wages and conditions for the lucky workers who were actually paid).
The punishment of this squeezed and neglected generation, now in middle life, was also, of course, a punishment for their baby-boomer parents, though the young were encouraged to think of their elders as a privileged generation with interests opposed to theirs, on the one hand blocking the career ladder for ambitious juniors at work, on the other, a demographic time-bomb representing an unsustainable cost to the state and an impossible burden on younger generations.
CONCLUSION
We can conclude that, in the six decades since its establishment, the post-war welfare state has been transformed in character from one that, albeit to a limited extent, achieved a modest redistribution from capital to labour and provided a universal set of social protections, to its opposite: a state that redistributes wealth from labour to capital and, far from providing a safety net for its most vulnerable citizens, actually drives them into destitution if they fail to conform to its increasingly punitive terms. This transformation has been achieved under cover of an ideological subterfuge, with blame for misfortune being deflected onto other workers, or other groupings within an increasingly fractured working class. Different sections of the population have been played off against each other, while corporate interests have been rendered invisible, with the institutions of the welfare state playing a crucial role in the hidden transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
If we are to envisage positive ways forward, there is a need to look beyond these institutions and take a long hard look at what has actually happened in the labour market. Is it still even appropriate to think in terms of a ‘core’ workforce of organised workers and a peripheral army of casual workers waiting to take their place? This question is addressed in the next chapter.
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