A-Infos (en) Shock of the new and mediocre

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Albert Shore discusses here how the 'New Labour Party' here
in the UK has got it all wrong in its policies relating to
job creation. Prefering to import ideas of welfare to work
it seems to have forgotten basic principles.

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SHOCK OF THE NEW AND MEDIOCRE


A local union branch secretary in Rochdale claimed last
week that the council is using kids 'on the cheap'. Ken
Mercer of the Transport & General Workers' Union says
senior housing bosses on Rochdale town council 'hoodwinked'
shop stewards into accepting the use of jobless youngsters
to renovate council properties on the cheap. 

A while ago the council got rid of fourteen full-time
qualified painters, leaving just four in the building
services department. After that, Mr Mercer says, "they have
been using private contractors, but now plan to use these
youngsters and it has got to stop". 

Mr Mercer told Freedom last week that he was worried by the
compulsion element of the schemes being brought in, like
the British 'workfare', New Deal and Welfare to Work. He
claimed: "this is appalling; it is exploiting unemployed
youngsters". He also argued that councillor.s on the Labour
controlled council were being misled by their own offices. 

"The kids", he said, "think the work experience will help
them get proper jobs. What a lot of rot. All the council is
doing is using them as cheap labour". 

Kenny Mercer is right to be concerned. Proper tradesmen are
played-off and made redundant, 'cowboy' operators thrive,
the young jobless are increasingly used as cheap labour. 

HOW THE STATE STRANGLES WORK SKILLS


In the 1960s I was involved in apprentice strikes and
campaigns to improve training standards and abolish the
tendency to use young apprentices as a source of cheap
labour. But at least then there was some light at the end
of the tunnel. At the age of 18 the apprentices would
become an 'improver' and it would become less easy to use
the lad as labour. Ultimately the lad would have 'served
his time' and would be accepted into the community of
craftsmen. 

But today there seems to be no guarantee that the lads and
lasses on a 'work experience', Youth Training Scheme or the
projected New Labour 'New Deal' and 'Welfare to Work' will
benefit in the same way. Mr Mercer says: "To stand any
chance of getting a proper job they must have CITB
(Construction Industry Training Board) accreditation - a
pass showing they are bona fide tradesmen". 

Mr Mercer does admit that the local authority does give a
good theoretical training, but that doesn't stand the
youngsters in good stead either to do or get a proper job
or trade. 

We must wonder if what is happening here to the young is
not an indication of a deeper decline. In 1939 Ludwig
Wittgenstein observed: "We are living in times where a good
tailor knows within a fraction of an inch how to cut his
cloth. But you and I may live to see that art lost too.
When people just don't know what to wear. Just as in modern
architecture, they don't know in what style to design a
building". 

The problem with the decline, if not the disappearance, of
the craft apprenticeship under the Thatcher government is
that theory and practice seem to have become fragmented.
Wittgenstein once remarked "physics is what physicists do".
It follows then that plumbing is what plumbers do,
carpentry is what carpenters do, and toolmaking is what
toolmakers do. Done properly, these various 'doings' are
highly skilled procedures, no less than that of physicists,
chemists and astronomers, requiring what the psychiatrist
Maurice O'Connor Drury claims are years of apprenticeship.
The snag is that the learning of these trades has become so
cock-eyed that the theory, as Kenny Mercer's account of
youth training in Rochdale seems to imply, has become
disembodied from the 'doing' or from the practice. 

This, according to Maurice Drury, "is as if a man should
memorise a musical score without understanding that it was
meant to be performed". This disembodied theory, learning
of trades, under the modern system is deadly in that one
learns the 'language of the craft' without mastering the
skills it is meant to mediate. 

For generations the language and theory of each craft was
passed on on-site on the job. This, I suppose, is what
happened in the studios of the renaissance artists, as it
did in the English guilds and among the stonemasons, up to
the recent industrial craft apprenticeships. To communicate
its skills from one generation to another each science
(craft), Drury insists, "develops its own technical
language". One must learn this language to join in the
activities of a trade or science, but to join in these
activities and learning the 'language game' means going
beyond the text book and the classroom. 

RUPTURING
THE TALENTS OF THE TRADE 

The consequences of this rupture of the activity of doing
the job, with its inculcation of the trade's tribal
language, from what Kenny Mercer calls "good theoretical
training devised by some modern local authority education
department only to ultimately offer up to the young
recruits a certificate to say that they have completed the
course" is all too evident. It seems we are nearing the end
of a shameful saga of a society which glories in civic
ineptitude and whose institutions passionately pursue all
forms of mediocrity to give us a building industry full of
contractors recruiting dabblers, do-it-yourself men,
'cowboy operatives' and soon, Ken Mercer implies, callow
kids to produce pre-fabricated constructions and
breeze-block paradises. The result of this is there for all
to see, as Richard Girling pointed out last month in The
Sunday Times: "don't we all know our best towns have been
desecrated, that planners and architects given their head
by indolent, stupid or self-interested town councillors
have spread the ugliest rash of buildings to have appeared
in England since wattle first met daub?" 

The destruction of the traditional trade union apprentice
system under the Thatcher government can only make this
worse. Ken Mercer and other trade unionists perceive this
but I can't see how the modern apprenticeship under New
Labour can improve things. 

The reason is that what Wittgenstein called the 'stress of
life', which existed in the special craft languages of the
shopfloor and the building sites, has been systematically
bled dr,v. The tribal trades have been struck dumb.
Wittgenstein discovered these special languages employed by
builders while working with 'brickies' and designing his
sister's house in Austria. 

The loss of these languages of the traditional trade union
apprenticeships has left us with deformed, dumb operatives.
Educated into ineptitude by bodies like Rochdale Metro
Training, to get a certificate which says they have
finished a course which Ken Mercer I claims gives them "a
good theoretical training" but nothing more. 

So in the modern apprenticeship of New Labour, we have the
final twist in the saga of the 'division of labour'. But
this is perhaps a false name. John Ruskin in The Nature of
Gothic writes: "It is not, truly speaking, the labour that
is divided, but the men - broken into small fragments and
crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of
intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a
pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of
a pin or the head of a nail". 

And what is the result of all this? Morbid thinkers,
degenerate art, shabby buildings and miserable workers.
This, readers should be aware, is the natural outcome of
the havoc imposed by ignorant governments on the handicraft
culture, which to some extent trade unions kept alive in a
small way through pride in craft and quality of work. Ken
Mercer, and the Transport & General Workers Union, are
fighting a rear-guard action against the culture of the
cretins of local and national government. 

Albert Shore 

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