Here are some stories you do not hear every day: a shelf stacker in a supermarket ends up as the company director on a pay packet of £3m a year; a schoolboy working in an airline office becomes executive chairman of an international fleet; a trainee in a regional department store eventually takes over as chief executive.
These are the biographies of Sir Terry Leahy, Sir Michael Bishop and Stuart Rose. And they have more in common than an astonishing rise from shop floor to corporate stratosphere: their successes were partly predicated on making good use of changing technology.
Tesco’s and Marks & Spencer’s core businesses have been revolutionised by automated stock systems and online ordering, and aviation has been transformed by computerised navigation and booking. But the irony is that the very technology that helped these three to succeed may be preventing others from following in their footsteps.
Forty years on from a young Stuart Rose toiling in his Quaker boarding school, I found myself sitting in a packed conference hall in Brighton, where Tony Blair was presenting his landmark leader’s speech last week. A central theme was the need for greater social mobility — “opportunity not for a privileged few but for all, whatever their start in life”. What he did not mention is that social mobility in the UK appears to have stalled.
Today’s aspiring CEOs are finding it much harder to work their way up from the bottom than the generation before — poor children born in the 1970s were 30% less likely to improve their position in society than those born in the 1950s, according to research by the London School of Economics. Those who enter the top jobs today are more likely to have been born into wealth than a generation ago. In 1958, 34% of children born to parents in the top 25% according to income stayed in that bracket as adults. Among those born in 1970, that figure rises to 43%.
As the packed crowd of workers and wonks listening to Blair tittered in appreciation of a joke about iPods — “how quickly has the iPod entered the language and the reality of our lives” — I wondered how many of them realised that it was the introduction of that little white box and its electronic ilk that is partly responsible for the devastating decline in social mobility in the UK.
Further research by the LSE has shown that new technology may be, perversely, making it more difficult to move up in the world: the gadgets designed to make our lives more comfortable and fulfilling may also be damaging our careers. It is not just that we find new word processing programs confusing, or are superseded by teenagers who somehow know how to work PowerPoint by instinct alone: Manning argues that computers are fundamentally changing the structure of work in Britain.
The idea is simple. There are some things that technology is good at and some things it is bad at: microchips may be able to make chess mincemeat of Kasparov and send electronic postcards from Pluto, but they still cannot compete with a two-year-old at piling one toy on top of another.
Computers are formidable when repeating the same precise task ad infinitum, but they simply cannot stack shelves, serve coffee, clean tables or cut hair. And at the other end of the skills spectrum, their strategic plans tend to lack strategy and their advice hardly deserves the name: technology cannot think, for now at least.
Over the past couple of decades, this has meant that computers have replaced people in jobs that require precision and routine. Importantly, these jobs were generally skilled and relatively well paid — try assembling car components in a factory or typing a hundred words a minute on an IBM Selectric without making mistakes.
These tended to be middle-ranking jobs that people worked their way up to; but technological advance has meant that work like this is increasingly consigned to the economic graveyard. Who needs a pool of typists when a personal assistant with a laptop and a printer can do the same job 10 times faster and at a hundredth of the cost? If a robot can build a car, who needs to pay a highly skilled and unionised factory worker?
Perhaps surprisingly, this has not led to greater unemployment: the economy has kept growing, and this means that we need more people to do the jobs that technology cannot. Crucially, these are at the top and bottom of the labour market — stacking shelves and running companies. Microchips have divided and conquered, taking the middle of the labour market as their plunder.
The scale of the shift has been staggering; it partly explains why manufacturing employment has fallen and services have risen. But it is far from finished. Over the next decade technological change will continue to carve up the labour market.
According to the Institute for Employment Research, jobs at the top and bottom will keep on growing: there will be 21% more professionals by 2012 than there were in 2002 and 48% more people working in customer services. But the middle ground will carry on shrinking: there will be 24% fewer secretaries and 31% fewer skilled metalworkers.
Last year’s photo exhibition of women in the workplace at the London Metropolitan University tells a similar story. The serried ranks of typists and clerks have given way to multitasking PAs and telesales staff with nowhere to go.
But what does this mean for society? A seemingly obvious impact is that inequality may be harder to stop: the gap between the richest and poorest can expand as more “lovely” and “lousy” jobs are created and the number of merely “okay” jobs gets smaller. Although this trend has had little impact in some other countries, it may partly explain why inequality rose so quickly in Britain during the 1980s and early 1990s — decades which started with American Psycho executives preening around their fax machines and ended with e-mail as part of everyday life.
But there are subtler effects too — ones that are no less important but easily missed. As the Institute for Public Policy Research argued earlier this year in Social Justice: Building a Fairer Britain, many of these middle-ranking jobs are important stepping stones in people’s careers. People like Rose succeeded because they could work their way up organisations, learning as they climbed.
But as the pool of these jobs shrinks, there may be less and less opportunity to flourish for those who start with few skills — and government may have to work harder to help those who start off disadvantaged to prosper. Admittedly there will be some expanding careers that do offer opportunities, such as nursing and care assistants. But the onus will still be firmly on government to make it easier for people to update their skills throughout their lives.
Mike Dixon is a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research (www.ippr.org.uk)
