Rory Bremner TV - The British at Work TV - Adam Curtis TV - Mokokoma Mokhonoana - John Kenneth Galbraith - Mary Wollstonecraft - Dean Acheson - William Shakespeare - Robert Tressell - Brian Clough - Simon Deakin & Gillian Morris - Obsolete 2016 - John Smith -
‘I’m just pleased to be on the employment ladder, even if it didn’t have any rungs.’ Rory Bremner’s Coalition Report, woman in café, BBC 2015
We were still in a era of full employment where government thought its main job was to make sure we all had a job. The British at Work: Them and US 1964-1980, BBC 2011
Keith Joseph toured the country translating monetarism into a political programme. The primary job of economics was no longer to create employment, he said, it was to reduce inflation. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box, BBC 1992
Employment is slavery. Workers merely have a choice over where to serve their daily eight-hour sentence. Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. John Kenneth Galbraith
Women have seldom sufficient employment to silence their feelings; a round of little cares, or vain pursuits frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense. Mary Wollstonecraft
I will undoubtedly have to seek what is happily known as gainful employment, which I am glad to say does not describe holding public office. Dean Acheson
At duty, more than I could frame employment,
That numberless upon me stuck, as leaves
Do on the oak, have with one winter’s brush
Fell from their boughs, and left me open, bare
For every storm that blows. William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens IV iii @263, Timon
As he grows older he will have to be content with even less; and all the time he holds his employment at the caprice and by favour of his masters, who regard him merely as a piece of mechanism that enables them to accumulate money – a thing which they are justified in casting aside as soon as it becomes unprofitable. And the working-man must not only be an efficient money-making machine, but he must also be the servile subject of his masters. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
The last time I was employed I rather got my fingers burnt. Brian Clough, interview David Frost 1974
The common law has traditionally been hostile to the collective self-organisation of workers, and it is only by means of statutory intervention, in the form of ‘immunities’ from common law liability, that a space has been created within which trade unions, in particular, may operate lawfully for the purposes of collective bargaining and activities associated with it, such as the conduct of industrial action and the regulation of particular trades and occupations. Simon Deakin & Gillian S Morris, Labour Law
It was not until the ‘legislative settlement’ of the 1870s that legislation lifted the threat of criminal sanctions from all but violent forms of behaviour associated with industrial action ... but the process was not completed until the trade dispute formula was extended to cover tortious liability by the Trade Disputes Act 1906. ibid.
Judicial intervention reached that point at which trade unions were regarded as akin to public or statutory bodies whose decision-making powers were subject to judicial review on grounds of ultra vires. ibid.
After the war, the Wages Councils Act 1945 was the occasion both for the expansion of the trade boards sectors into the service sector, and for a more general attempt to place institutional wage determination on a secure footing. ibid.
It was only with the advent of employment protection legislation in the 1960s and 1970s that the industrial contract of employment came to assume the importance which it has in the modern law. ibid.
The Labour government of 1964-70 took more direct powers in the area of pay restraint. ibid.
The Labour government of 1974-1979, in common with its immediate predecessors, failed to reconcile the tension between the traditional forms of state support for voluntary collective bargaining and increasing intervention in the economy through incomes policies. ibid.
A number of means, direct and indirect, were used to undermine national bargaining. ibid.
The narrowing of immunities and the ending of the blanket immunity of trade unions from liability in tort provided employers with many more strategic options than they had previously had for breaking strike resistance, and these were put to effective use in particular disputes, such as the Wapping and Messenger disputes in the newspaper printing industry. ibid.
The capacity of the UK economy to maintain full employment has been steadily declining throughout the post-war period. ibid.
Everyone knows something is wrong. That it’s been wrong for a while now. But the powers that shouldn’t be keep telling us that everything is going to be just fine. Obsolete, Truthstream Media 2016, Youtube 49.48
The economy isn’t just down, it’s imaginary. The middle class isn’t just shrinking, it’s dying. The wealth gap is astronomical and growing … Wages everywhere except at the executive level are stagnating … ibid.
When did freedom get replaced by freedom of choice? ibid.
More and more people are losing their jobs to what has slovenly been termed ‘technological unemployment’. ibid.
A system poised for collapse. ibid.
Davos 2016: World without work. ibid.
We reject the absurd double standard which encourages massive rewards for those at the top, whilst everyone else has to suffer pay cuts, longer hours, and fewer and fewer employment rights. It is the old Tory trick – one special rule for their elite, another for all the rest. John Smith