Tag Archives: work

I have been going to the gym. Seriously. For about a couple of months now. I'm doing weight training for the first time in my life, and cardio exercises, including - wonder of wonders - short bursts of running. I'm even paying for a personal trainer. It's a shocking extravagance, but I'm likely to find any excuse under the sun not to do my workouts unless I have someone telling me what to do and shouting at me if I don't do it. As one of my school reports said, "Frances does not enjoy...

We have a crisis of work. The secure, well-paid jobs of the past - many of them in manufacturing - are disappearing. What is replacing them is insecurity and uncertainty. Low-paid, part-time, temporary and seasonal work. The "feast or famine" of self-employment. The so-called "sharing economy", where people rent out their possessions for a pittance. The "gig economy", where people are paid performance by performance - or piece by piece. "Piecework", we used to call it. Perhaps we...

A career and a job where one does economically and socially useful work is an important part of any successful, healthy and wealthy society. But more than this, it gives people an identity through the job that they have and a social dignity lacking in long-term unemployment.There are of course a lot of difficult, boring, dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs that have to be done, but a technologically advanced society like ours can use its inventive genius to create more and better machines and...

At Prime Minister's Questions the other day, Jeremy Corbyn produced a case study of a working single mother who would suffer a substantial real fall in income due to tax credit cuts despite the NLW and tax threshold rise. In response, David Cameron claimed the new National Living Wage and tax threshold rises would mean that working people on low incomes would be better off by 2020. Who is right?The National Living Wage will improve earned income for a high proportion of families. The...