- Endless touting now of ‘work-life balance’ has become an irritant
- Country we live in today was shaped by the decade of Madonna and Maggie
- We could do with an injection of their energy
Watching Madonna in concert at the O2 last week made me think about economics in the eighties and not just the music. Yes, I probably should get out more, but bear with me.
Madonna has never been the greatest singer, but she wholeheartedly embraced the eighties culture of aspiration.
Love her or hate her, she worked for her success, and is still doing at 65, dancing on despite a big blue leg brace.
But the work ethic Madonna embodies is in danger of evaporating post-pandemic.
Governments have learned some lessons from that era. Politicians are rightly anxious to avoid the brutal effect of job losses on individuals and communities that was inflicted 40 years ago.
‘Lunch is for wimps’: Michael Douglas played crooked financier Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street
Back then, UK and US central bankers were desperate to tackle inflation, as they are today. According to the monetarist doctrine of that time, large-scale unemployment was a price worth paying to bring inflation back under control, a stance that would be unthinkable now.
This hammered the former industrial heartlands of Britain and America, including Madonna’s birthplace of Detroit, which was hit by the car industry collapse. The ethos now is for greater support, as we saw during Covid with the furlough scheme.
Worries of widespread job losses in the pandemic have been allayed. Employment has remained high. It is not quite clear how high, as we reported in the Mail on Sunday yesterday, because there are two sets of official statistics and they diverge by up to a million people. But vacancies are plentiful, in a welcome contrast to the eighties.
The downside is that employers are suffering from staff shortages. This is pushing up wages and hampering economic growth.
Lots of jobs and the expectation of a safety net is also breeding a culture where work is in danger of being devalued.
Everyone from Elon Musk to the Bank for International Settlements has pointed to a weakening of the work ethic. Fear of unemployment, a constant threat in the eighties, seems to have vanished almost entirely.
Again, this is positive, provided it does not tip over into entitlement. But an assumption jobs are freely available lies behind the inability of employers to persuade staff to return to the office rather than carry on working from home. Bosses are too scared to order employees to, in case they quit.
The UK’s labour shortage is partly due to the ageing population and long post-Covid NHS waiting lists. It also seems to have become socially acceptable to lack ambition and denigrate work.
If the eighties mantra of ‘lunch is for wimps’ from the film Wall Street went too far, the endless touting now of ‘work-life balance’ has become an irritant. Work is not separate from our ‘real’ existence, as this phrase implies, but part of life.
The eighties were a decade of division and economic upheaval. While UB40 sang about the one-in-ten left jobless after steelworks, mines and car plants closed in the North and the Midlands, London was bursting with money and ambition.
Big Bang in 1986 transformed the Square Mile into a thrumming global hub. Now, in a trend no-one seems to have the will to prevent, the London stock market is seeing an exodus of companies.
The capital’s status as an international financial centre is draining away by the week and the reaction is inertia.
The country we live in today was shaped by the eighties, the decade of Madonna and Mrs Thatcher. We could do with an injection of their energy.
