The skills they lack?

The comments of Anonymous (on the previous post):

"It's not skills they lack"
Disagree - given the constant chorus of complaint from employers about people with inadequate literacy and numeracy skills for starters.
Far fewer jobs for unskilled people than when Keynes was doing his stuff. If I recall correctly he favoured paying people to dig holes and fill them up again - how soul-destroying to be doing something with no purpose. There's a load of stuff which NEEDS doing but needs people with appropriate skills to do it!

deserve a full post in response rather than a brief reply.

There are tricks of the trade (you could call them skills) in even the most humble occupations.  My paternal grandfather died long before I was born but I understand from one of my uncles that he, my grandfather, was road sweeper, who demonstrated to him, my uncle, that short sweeps of a brush were more effective than long ones.

The point of this family anecdote is that many skills, even higher level ones, are learned, or at least honed, on the job.  As Anonymous concedes, “ [t]here’s loads of stuff that NEEDS doing” and I’m sure that it is this type  “stuff” that Keynes had in mind: digging holes and filling them up again was a last resort. Unfortunately, whilst consumer and investment demand remain low, much of this “stuff” is in the public sector: street cleaning, mending and maintaining the roads, adequate provision of care to the sick and elderly, sprucing up our parks and public areas, maintaining an adequate supply of decently-kept public lavatories.   

Until we have political parties prepared to campaign for a vibrant public sector and admit that if we want it we need to be prepared to pay for it, we shall  have to continue to live with “public squalor,” and be lacking in jobs.

The irony is, of course, that expenditure in the public sector, as Keynes explained  and which should now be as obvious as the effects  of gravity, would, through the multiplier, cause private sector demand to revive.  Instead our government, with Liberal Democrat connivance, cuts public expenditure.

Since many skills are acquired “on the job” it is a sad indictment of Britsh industry and commerce that they devote far fewer for their own resources  to training and skills development than do their counterparts in many other countries, and particularly Germany.  Much easier to farm the responsibility onto the public education, use  clever accountants to make sure they are “tax efficient” and so pay the minimum towards it, and then complain.

 Nor am I impressed by the “constant chorus of complaint from employers about people with inadequate literacy and numeracy skills.”  Just to take literacy for an example, from the owners of corner shops to international conglomerates employers never fail  to mangle our language when they think it will increase their profitability: the greengrocer’s intrusive apostrophe, or no apostrophe where one is needed (Lloyds Bank); ‘z’ instead of ‘s’ (beanz meanz Heinz);proper nouns beginning with  lower-case letters, (not least the masthead of the guardian, oh dear oh dear oh dear); merged names with intrusive capitals inthe middle ( PricewaterhousCooper); and the ubiquitous management speak at every level of production – both upstream and downstream.  And then they have the cheek to complain about literacy.

And, of course, when 47% of recent graduates are either unemployed, underemployed or employed in occupations well below the level of their qualifications, it really is a nonsense to blame them for “lack of skills."  Rather this is to fall for  the Tory con of blaming the unemployed for being unemployed, in the same way as right wing  perception management has succeeded  in convincing more than half our electorate that people on benefits rather than the bankers are responsible for the economic crisis.