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| Response: Yes, today's workers have less freedom, but it's not all grim Any measure of job quality must look at many factors including pay and working hoursIn his article on the grimness of contemporary work, Aditya Chakrabortty has done a great service in highlighting the worrying trend towards declining autonomy and growing standardisation in work (There's a good reason why so many of us no longer like our jobs. There's not much call for thinking these days, 31 August).As he says, on the evidence of successive skills surveys, people really do have less freedom to do their job in the way they see fit than they did 20 years ago – something that has occurred across all occupational groups. Its decline throws a certain light on all the managerial talk of empowerment.But Chakrabortty then uses this insight to claim that "our jobs are getting worse"; that more people's jobs are becoming "McDonaldised – more routine, less skilled"; that technology deskills; and that outside a small elite who have "permission to think", more workers stand to be "farmed off to regional offices in eastern Europe or India".Autonomy matters. Its decline should trouble managers and policymakers. But it is a counsel of unwarranted despair to believe that everything is getting worse at work across the complex trends of the labour market.Any reckoning of job quality needs some framework of what "good work" might look like. There are different definitions, but job security, pay, working time, intensity, the relationships between colleagues, the development of skills, the sense of fairness in a workplace, the degree of interest work affords – all these are critical, alongside autonomy.Basing one's view of work on autonomy alone is a bit like rating a company on its share price performance: a useful piece of information, but too narrow on its own. A more nuanced picture might note that long-term job insecurity (as opposed to short-term, recession-induced job insecurity) is not notably worsening over time.Most people gained financially over the last decade (unlike in the US, where average incomes have been falling), albeit unequally so. Average working hours have been nudging down. However, work is much more intense and stressful; investment in skills is patchy and lots of people feel overqualified; and, as the article rightly says, people are more tightly controlled. But perhaps most important of all, until 2007 there was almost record employment: the ability to move to a better job is one of the most important ways of making work better.Chakrabortty declares technology to be the source of employees' declining control over their own work. Yes, but. Technology enables some workers to have greater control over when and how they work (eg homeworking, flexible working). It enhances the work of others and makes work more productive. However, it can also deskill by transferring human knowledge to software packages that workers must then follow (thus also enabling more offshore outsourcing).Overall, though, skill levels are rising and "good jobs" at senior levels of the labour market are growing faster than "bad jobs" at the bottom. The agony of modern work is that, having upskilled the workforce, we have yet to find a way of properly using all the new skills.Work & careersPsychologyStephen Overellguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Pensioner finds two-metre anaconda in toilet A 73-year-old Polish pensioner was shocked to find a two-metre anaconda peering up out of her toilet bowl Monday in her flat in Wroclaw, south-west Poland, local police said. abc.net.au |
Research not jeopardised by staffing numbers A senior CSIRO manager says researchers at regional laboratories are doing administrative duties - but that is not neccessarily a bad thing. abc.net.au |
Facebook admits privacy breach Facebook has admitted that some of its applications have been transmitting user information to advertising companies. abc.net.au |
Guardian Style digested, by John Crace | Mind your language Grammar is the set of rules followed by speakers of a language, innit? By everyone except Guardian writersWelcome to the latest edition of Guardian Style, a book that will be as little read by Guardian journalists as the previous ones, if the number of inaccuracies in the paper are anything to go by.But for the rest of you who take an interest in the dustier reaches of the English language, I thought I'd use this space to highlight the changes the hacks are sure to ignore.Grammar is the set of rules followed by speakers of a language, innit? By everyone except Guardian writers, that is, so I have pulled together all the dreary grammatical stuff on commas, colons and split infinitives to the front in the hope – rather than expectation – that just one member of staff bothers to have a look before putting their complimentary copy on eBay.Over the years it has distressed me greatly to see that Guardian journalists consistently try to write foreign languages in a way that would be intelligible to native speakers. Quite simply this has to stop. Allowing the odd acute accent to prevent lame being read as lame is as far as I am prepared to go.It's time that Johnny Foreigner met us halfway. The day the Frogs stop calling the English Channel La Manche and call it La Manche Anglaise is the day I use a circumflex.Occasionally, however, I do bow to public demand. In the last edition I arbitrarily changed aeroplane to airplane. This triggered the largest number of complaints I've ever had. Three.So after several years of lengthy deliberation, I have concluded aeroplane is indeed the correct usage.it has also been said we go further than most in lowercasing words. this is because we are quite trendy and the designers say it looks better on the page. The only capitals that are therefore allowed are either those that aPPear for no good reason in the middle of words or when we want to deliberately annoy EE Cummings. By the way, much against my better judgment, I've been dragged screaming and kicking into the 20th century and forced to allow split infinitives in exceptional circumstances.Talking of which, new technology gives me a real headache.No sooner have I worked out whether or not to hyphen email – most definitely not! –than some Californian invents some newfangled thingy and I lose hours of sleep deciding whether a Blackberry is a BlackBerry. Someone has to worry about these things.I've lost count of the number of times we fail to differentiate between goths and Goths. Am I the only one to spot that one of them has a capital letter? But as long as our writers continue to get it wrong, I will continue to point out the error of their ways.Because I'm that type of person and I haven't got much else to do. I also intend to make sure we address Nick Clegg's wife correctly. Her name is Miriam González Durántez. Do not call her Miriam Clegg or Mrs Clegg. Though Mrs C is obviously fine.These are just a few of the excitements you will find in the new edition of Guardian Style.I will leave you to discover the rest for yourself. But before I do, I'm afraid I must introduce one sour note. Swearing has become commonplace in everyday conversation and Guardian writers have proved more foul-mouthed than most. Much to my dismay, we printed 705 "fucks" last year – 704 of them in the newspaper's digested read. For that my sincere apologies.John Crace's digested read appears regularly in G2LanguageJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |