The man who dresses Britain’s middle managers in beige chinos has declared the country’s entry-level job market a catastrophe. Lord Wolfson of Ashtead, chief executive of Next, has warned that the number of roles for fresh-faced, dewy-eyed hopefuls has plummeted by a staggering 80% since 2018. This, he claims, is a ‘dramatic’ harbinger of a broader labour crisis. But let us not panic. Let us instead pour a stiff gin and examine the entrails of this particular turkey.
Wolfson, a man who could sell a polyester cardigan to a penguin, points his bony finger at the National Living Wage and rising employer National Insurance contributions. These, he says, have made it too expensive to take a punt on a teenager with a GCSE in Minecraft and a dream. Instead, firms are turning to automation, which never asks for a pay rise or spends its lunch break weeping in the toilet. The result: a generation of school leavers who will begin their careers in the Gig Economy, delivering overpriced avocados on electric scooters while algorithmically monitored for signs of slacking.
But wait. Is this not the same Lord Wolfson who has presided over a retail empire that treats its warehouse staff like human batteries for a machine that demands ever faster fulfilment? The same Next that has replaced human checkouts with self-service kiosks that bleep angrily at pensioners? Yes, the very same. It is a curious kind of corporate clairvoyance that laments the disappearance of jobs while enthusiastically throttling them.
Yet let us not be too harsh. Wolfson is merely the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is wearing a three-piece suit and complaining about the price of birdseed. The truth is that Britain’s labour market has been on a steady diet of austerity, Brexit, and technological disruption, and it is now vomiting up a generation of young people who are overqualified and underemployed. The Bank of England has already warned that the economy is ‘not in recession’ in the same way a man who has been shot in both feet is ‘not dead’. Entry-level jobs are the oxygen of social mobility, and we are watching the patient turn blue.
So what is to be done? The government, naturally, has a plan: more tax cuts and a cracking speech about the importance of hard work. Meanwhile, the opposition proposes a tax on robots, which would do precisely nothing except make the robots angry. And Lord Wolfson will continue to sell slacks to the nation while simultaneously pulling up the ladder behind him.
In the end, the crisis is not just about jobs. It is about the soul of a country that once believed in the dignity of honest work. Nowadays, the only thing honest about the labour market is the price of a gin and tonic at the Wetherspoons near the job centre. Cheers.
