” “United Kingdom: American model

With a rate of unemployment of 5.1% and the number of unemployed regularly falling year after year (reduced by 5,000 last year), the UK seems to enjoy an enviable position. But Britain’s labour market, reformed on the US model during Mrs Thatcher’s years as prime minister, has characteristics very different from those of other European markets. There is a huge market in part-time jobs, many short-term contracts, and a situation in which female employment is growing and male employment declining. Some analysts maintain that the figures that the Labour government periodically supplies on the drop in unemployment are deceptive: they conceal a continual decrease in male full-time employment. It goes without saying that the British labour market, built predominantly around the services and financial sectors, with the severe penalization of the manufacturing industries, punishes the old “working class”, the workers once employed in the country’s industries. It’s especially in the northern regions that unemployment is having a very severe effect. The Thatcher reforms, embraced in turn by the Labour party, have favoured the middle classes. The powerful welfare system, comprising unemployment benefits, cheap housing and aid of various type for those without a job, has helped to reinforce a hard core of long-term unemployed, whom it is very difficult to get back into jobs. The appeals of the bishops. The Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has repeatedly urged that the presence of a substantial hard core of people without jobs, who represent a serious problem for society, not be considered endemic. In October 1996 a document entitled “The Common Good and the Catholic Church’s Social Teaching”, drafted by the Catholic episcopate, denounced the Labour policy, in essence that already adopted by Mrs Thatcher, of maintaining low the level of taxation on middle-class incomes. The bishops also spelt out the risk of encouraging in the unemployed a mentality of dependence on state benefits that curbs their spirit of initiative. The same denunciation was repeated in the document “Unemployment and the Future of Work”, published in April 1997 by the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, an ecumenical body that represents the Christian Churches of Great Britain and Ireland. This document, which the Catholic bishops endorsed, recommends a series of reforms of the labour market aimed at helping the unemployed get back into work. The Scottish bishops too, during the election campaign in 1997, rejected an approach that considers unemployment as a problem already solved. Citing the words of the papal encyclical “Laborem Exercens”, the Scottish bishops call unemployment “an evil which can become a real social disaster, whose consequences should not be underestimated”. Families at risk. “I think that the world of work today has become more competitive, more individualistic”, says Fr. Jim McCartney, founder and director of “Thomas”, a Catholic association that tries to reinsert into the world of work people on the fringes of society, young drop outs, the homeless, former drug addicts and ex-prisoners. Father Jim is not against part-time work and short-term contracts because, he points out, they increase the job opportunities available to those on the fringes of society, but admits that these solutions involve a considerable stress on those who have a family to maintain. “There is no doubt – he emphasizes – that the labour market in the form it takes today, with ever more temporary jobs, and with the tendency for people to move about continuously, often transmits a feeling of great instability and that has a negative effect on the family”. Father Philip Scanlan of the Catholic parish of St. Mary’s in Loughborough, a town of some 50,000 inhabitants in the Midlands, agrees with this diagnosis. “Part-time work, short-term contracts, and the tendency increasingly to employ women full time risk – says Father Philip – having negative consequences on the family. The authorities ought to take account of these aspects too in formulating employment policies”.