UK employers need to adapt and change

If you ever sit and wonder why Britain is the only Western country still mired in recession, consider the fact that the majority of the best-paid and most interesting jobs are still located in the south-east of England, specifically London. It’s one city. It’s absolutely ridiculous that the UK has almost completely failed to take advantage of the opportunities presented by technology over the past two decades to modernise employment practices and spread the load nationwide.

As a writer, I can work for anyone from anywhere and yet if I want the very best jobs I am expected to return to London and commute to and from an office every day. There is simply no need for employers to be as inflexible as they are. The bottom line is, a majority of employers don’t trust employees unless they can see what they’re doing every second of the working day. A Victorian approach to the worker prevails.

The issue our politicians utterly fail to grasp is that we have a nation now composed of one big dirty city with perceived-as-lesser cities below that ranked as Second Class, and below those there are thousands of Baggage Class towns and villages in which life is dead-end unless you have a deep abiding urge to be a refuse collector or a town hall clerk, or you’re retired and can enjoy at your leisure the sound of the wind whistling down empty high streets. Or you’re unemployed and likely to stay that way unless you relocate.

Writing isn’t the only profession that has no need to be chained to a desk at the other end of a train or tube line, of course. But I can write good copy for you whether you’re based in London, Toyko or San Francisco. I can write whether I live in a city, a town or a tiny hamlet composed of one church, three houses and a farm. Deadlines can be imposed, word counts demanded, quality assured.

Working from home is not lazy. It is not asking for trouble. Time was, they called it teleworking—and that was back in the days when modems offered speeds up to 56k and squawked like strangled cockerels on the rare occasions they secured online connections for a few precious minutes. What happened to kill the dream even as broadband was introduced and networking got ever easier?

So far in my current efforts to secure editorial work I have discovered that there are countless dodgy employers in Lancashire and Yorkshire who somehow get away with offering jobs paying less than the minimum wage. One position I saw advertised was offering just £3 for every 500 words. That’s disgraceful. Another expected 700 words to be produced on a variety of topics every half-hour from 9am to 6pm, five days a week. What’s more, many of these sweat-shop roles relate to producing deceptive copy for blogs that aren’t really blogs at all but are instead hard-sell marketing tools that, when end users engage with them, offer disappointment and anger.

Of course I won’t give up in the hope that there is one progressive employer somewhere in the north of England willing to have someone producing excellent work from home or, even less likely I know, with an office situated not so far away that I need to pack a suitcase just to attend meetings.

Home workers not only reduce the carbon footprint of any company as well as their own, but they are vital to building a strong economy fit for the 21st Century. Employers adopting an open and inviting approach to home workers also provide opportunities for the long-term disabled, parents of small children and those past the official retirement age to work. They don’t want to. They want young, fit bodies parked behind desks. As the population ages, these will be increasingly hard to come by.

This country’s employers need to change their attitudes but all we ever hear in the press is how we, the public, need to change ours. We were told at the end of the last century to expect a boom in home-working. It hasn’t happened. The workers are not to blame. And most of us are sick of London having it all. It’s not just unfair. It’s damaging to the nation’s prospects for long-term sustainable prosperity.

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