December 13, 2024

Fit for work?

Labour and their social media cheerleaders assume anyone can work if they just make the effort. It's not that simple

The news is full of a steady drip about the government's attitude to people who aren't in work, and my own migration from the old ESA1 onto Universal Credit has given me a very personal interest. For now, they're trusting the assessor who declared me unfit to even think about working, but those news reports mean I can never completely relax.

The attitude of the government, backed up by the media and the loudest voices on social media, is that everyone should be either working or desperately wanting to work. Those who are unable to work are, in the most generous approaches, being "written off", an injustice those in government are eager to rectify. On social media, the judgment is harsher. We are empty eaters, living as parasites on society, and we need to be forced to work under threat of destitution.

In support of this attitude, people like to claim that everyday activities are proof of all the skills required for a job. "If you can tweet," they say, "then you can do data entry." And it's true that I have the basic physical and cognitive skills to do data entry. But having the skills to perform a task is not the only requirement to be able to do it as a job. You also have to be able to perform it to the satisfaction of someone willing to pay you.

To begin with, I can tweet from my bed. There was a brief period at the height of Covid restrictions when people were allowed to do things like data entry from home, but some combination of commercial landlords' interests and managers' need to keep an eye on the workforce has pretty much eroded that now. To work once again implies to be present in a workplace.

Even when working from home is accepted, employers expect it to take place within regular business hours. If my energy levels are highest at 3AM, I can do my posting then and sleep until noon, but few if any employers would allow an employee to work that pattern.

Being in a workplace involves other skills too, ones that never appear in a job description except perhaps under the vague umbrella term of "professionalism". The unspoken rules that govern socialising with colleagues are completely outside my skill set: the best I could manage would be polite aloofness, and that would require constant effort. And I wouldn't even manage that if I encountered one of the many people who interpret, "my pronouns are he/him" as an invitation to discuss my genitals or secondary sexual characteristics.

These considerations are mostly moot for me in practice because even applying for a job demands skills I don't have. Faced with an application form, my brain is wired to find ambiguity in the simplest of questions, at which point my anxiety chips in to convince me that failing to correctly guess which meaning was intended could lead to me being declared fraudulent and banned from ever applying again. Perhaps I could get through the form with extensive support, but then I would have to pretend to be a sane human being for the duration of an interview, another skill I don't have that nobody seems able to teach me.

When support is offered, it's far from extensive. As a single parent, I trusted my advisor at the Jobcentre and shared my concerns that being unable to balance work and my responsibilities to my daughter could leave me worse off than if I hadn't sought work. The only response was to be told I was "overthinking". Now, my mental illness does tend to make me consider things in a lot more detail than a sane person would, but some of that is an important precaution when relatively minor setbacks can send me into crisis. In any case, since I can't stop overthinking just by wanting to, it's not particularly good advice.

I considered self-employment as a way to avoid having to submit to an employer's judgment, but self-employment requires a whole other set skills that I don't have. Without the knowledge or the confidence to sell my products, I turned to the Jobcentre small business advisor. Her advice, verbatim, was, "I can't make people buy your products."

After that, I gave up on work, at least in the sense the government and media understand it. I have volunteered on and off for various charity shops, and I've done a little over six months in my latest stint. I get to enjoy all the psychological benefits of going to work and being part of a team, but I don't have to convince a boss that I'm good value for my wage, because I'm not getting one. If I can only manage four hours each week, that's completely acceptable, and if I can work another four at short notice, I'm treated as having gone above and beyond. There's not too much stress and I feel that, in my modest way, I'm making a contribution.

But the same people who like to extol the dignity of work don't consider that a worthwhile contribution. I'm not covering my own living costs, so I'm nothing but a scrounger. The fact that I can work for four hours a week might even be taken as proof that I could work for forty if I could just get off my backside and make the effort.

Considering how much rhetorical importance they place on work, it's surprising that they don't seem to understand what it entails. Or perhaps it isn't so surprising. The dignity of work as a rhetorical device is easily separated from the realities of work as a human activity. Condemning "scroungers" and tossing in a few platitudes about supporting those who want to work is a lot simpler than bridging the gap between what I can do and what employers would pay for.