Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
I admit I did not follow this thread closely, what I'd like to know, where the EXTRA jobs are coming from for these targeted people? Eva I would like to share my concerns about an apparent contradiction in the UK Employment Zones approach. Reform of active labour market measures in Canada and the UK in the 1990s has involved increases in targetting (but not money), by which I mean the number of discrete programmes aimed at those with distinctive needs (youth, the long term unemployed, older labour force participants, etc). This creates a rigidity when administered on a regional basis. When administered at the local or regional level, the administrators have a specific budgetary allotment for, say, youth, and a different allotment for the aged, both of which are pretty much set. If one locale (zone) has more youth unemployment than unemployment among older workers, too bad; they must spend the allotment as budgeted and programmed. In this context, the UK Employment Zone proposals (if I'm reading the proposals correctly) show promise, for they allow localities the flexibility to reallocate funding according to needs - budgetary decentralisation with a small measure of local policy discretion. But wait, what about all these other conditions? Those over 25 and are classified as long(ish)-term unemployed (over 1 year) are targeted - a slight claw-back of decentralization. A minimum amount must be spend on certain key targeted programmes - a restiction on policy making capacity of the zone. Project success stories will be replicated across Britain, whether they are suitable to other regions or not - a reduction in local flexibility. And what happens when the central governments wants to target another class of labour market participant? Budgetary centralisation and a reduction in local policy discretion, that's what. In fact, this is the cycle that has taken place in Canada: (1.) demands for more flexibility come from local programme offices of the federal ministry; (2.) budgetary allotments between programmes are made more flexible; (3.) new demands emerge for another targeted programme, such as youth; (4.) central level of government demands such-and-such amount spent on the new initiative (or package of iniatiatives), and local flexibility is reduced. With the Blair government embarking on an on-going redesign of the welfare state, the likelihood of new targeting measures seems very high. What this boils down to is one question: are these local experiments to create ideas for redesigning of the larger system, or are they pilot projects in decentralisation of the entire system? (Surely, the maintenance of a small and perminent cadre of priviledged zones is politically unsustainable as backbenchers lobby behind the scenes for special status for their own constituencies.) This is an either-or proposition, each with its own perils, for making compromises between the two creates an overly complex system - a state that active measures sometimes seem prone to gravitate towards. The Australian scenario would be the risk: programme targeting becoming so complex and success so difficult to monitor that, eventually, those held accountable get fed up with the unwieldliness and chop the system down to size. Thank you for your attention. Cheers, Peter Stoyko - Peter Stoyko Carleton UniversityTel: (613) 520-2600 ext. 2773 Department of Political ScienceFax: (613) 520-4064 B640 Loeb Building V-mail: (613) 731-1964 1125 Colonel By Drive E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ottawa, Canada, K1S 5B6Internet: http://www.carleton.ca/~pstoyko -- On Tue, 21 Apr 1998, Michael Gurstein wrote: -- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 19:51:41 +0100 GMT From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: UK Employment zones: will they work? UK Employment zones: will they work? Zones d'Emploi britanniques: marcheront-ils? The Blairite solution to poor prospects for employment is to identify parts of Britain where these problems cluster and then concentrate resources. Smart. Will the policy work? Employment zones are areas where the usual national programmes for the unemployed will be ditched in favour of running trials of local initiatives. The five areas chosen to pilot the scheme all have high concentrations of the long-term jobless. "Employment Zones will give communities the flexibility to devise local solutions which best meet local needs," said the Employment Minister, Andrew Smith, when he invited bids for zone status last September. Plymouth, Liverpool, north-west Wales, south Teeside and Glasgow began running their
Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
My compliments to Peter Stoyko for his very acute observations... I'ld like to add a few comments based on my current and direct experience at the "labour market measures 'coalface'" here in Cape Breton and rural Atlantic Canada where the needs are the most acute and the options are the most limited. On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, peter stoyko wrote: Greetings all... I would like to share my concerns about an apparent contradiction in the UK Employment Zones approach. Reform of active labour market measures in Canada and the UK in the 1990s has involved increases in targetting (but not money), by which I mean the number of discrete programmes aimed at those with distinctive needs (youth, the long term unemployed, older labour force participants, etc). Most of the current Canadian government labour market measures appear to be focussed on youth (19-30). There are a variety of internship, job creation, and employment support programs with that age category as a stipulated condition. There are several problems with this from my particular context. The most notable is that we have a significant lack of unemployed folks in that age category as most have left the region (and most other rural areas) seeking education, training and employment opportunities in more urban areas. That doesn't mean that we don't have unemployment (still at 20% or so, about the worst in the country) but that our unemployed are in the 30-50 age category--laid off steelworkers, coalminers or fishery related workers. The absurdity thus is that we can't "fill our quota" for some of these programs because we don't have enough unemployed in the right categories. We received some funds to develop an occupational health and safety (OHS) web-site. We decided to link it into OHS at Sysco the local steel plant which continues to verge over the edge of bankruptcy and closure. We wanted to hire (and train in the technical skills required for the project) currently unemployed steelworkers (and we had suitable candidates lined up). We were told that we would be in violation of the contract if we were to hire these folks (who apart from anything else had the content skills we were looking for). Rather we had to search around for young people to put on the contract even though several of them were already employed at least part-time doing other things. I had half a mind to pursue this absurdity through the Human Rights (agism) channel and would still do so if someone wanted to offer some free legal support. This creates a rigidity when administered on a regional basis. When administered at the local or regional level, the administrators have a specific budgetary allotment for, say, youth, and a different allotment for the aged, both of which are pretty much set. If one locale (zone) has more youth unemployment than unemployment among older workers, too bad; they must spend the allotment as budgeted and programmed. In this context, the UK Employment Zone proposals (if I'm reading the proposals correctly) show promise, for they allow localities the flexibility to reallocate funding according to needs - budgetary decentralisation with a small measure of local policy discretion. The reality of decentralization is even more dislocating than you are suggesting. In practise most work support program funding has been decentralized to local offices and individual case workers. What this means is that any project or proposal which is broader than the catchment of a local case officer is almost impossible to pursue and similarly any project which is more skill intensive than the experience or training of the individual case officer (viz. anything beyond unskilled labour for the most part) is almost impossible to get supported. Both of these limitations has the direct result of eliminating financial support for employment development for virtually any knowledge or skill intensive activity (ie. the roughly 40% of the economy where virtually all new jobs are being created) without the most intensive of lobbying. But wait, what about all these other conditions? Those over 25 and are classified as long(ish)-term unemployed (over 1 year) are targeted - a slight claw-back of decentralization. A minimum amount must be spend on certain key targeted programmes - a restiction on policy making capacity of the zone. Project success stories will be replicated across Britain, whether they are suitable to other regions or not - a reduction in local flexibility. And what happens when the central governments wants to target another class of labour market participant? Budgetary centralisation and a reduction in local policy discretion, that's what. In fact, this is the cycle that has taken place in Canada: (1.) demands for more flexibility come from local programme offices of the federal ministry; (2.) budgetary allotments between programmes are made more flexible; (3.) new demands emerge for another
Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
On Thu, 23 Apr 1998, Eva Durant wrote: I admit I did not follow this thread closely, what I'd like to know, where the EXTRA jobs are coming from for these targeted people? Eva Exactly the point made by Ken Clarke - the former Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Keynesian, even if on the extreme right of that position. He pointed out that the present Chancellor - a gloomy Scotch nerd called Brown - had produced a budget in which there was no macro-economic content whatsoever. The only UK macro-economic tool still available was determination of interest rates - a one club golf bag - but Brown had given this club away to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, the membership of which includes a US citizen who is a former CIA employee ! Far from there being any kind of Keynesian stimulation of demand, the policies of New 'Labour' are so attractive to international capital that the pound is rising inexorably and the result is that exporting manufacturing industries are laying of labour. At the same time local authorities, which could very usefully create lots of rather good jobs in social care and environmental management, are under cash constraints (those imposed by Clarke and endorsed by Brown, Clarke is no angel here) and are actually reducing their employment. The subsidies being paid to employers to take on the unemployed are quite likely to lead to a churning of the bottom end of the labour market with no net increase in employment whatsoever. David Byrne Dept of Sociology and Social Policy University of Durham Elvet Riverside New Elvet Durham DH1 3JT 0191-374-2319 0191-0374-4743 fax
Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
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Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
Greetings all... Let me thank Michael Gurstein for his thoughtful response to my comments. It rings true to my ears. Let me take this opportunity to add a few additional notes. On Thu, 23 Apr 1998, Michael Gurstein wrote: [snip] From what I can see, in Canada we have the worst of both worlds. We have national program stipulations which introduce absurd rigidities locally (for us), and we have almost complete local decentralization which makes us subject to the training and skill set of case officers and local managers with no knowledge of or sensitivity towards any of the areas where new opportunities for employment creation are emerging. (cf. my recent posting on WiNS2000). [snip] The labour market in Canada is so regionally specific that national design and even national standards make little sense. What works or could work in Cape Breton bares little or no relation to what could work in Southern Ontario or rural Saskatchewan. In that sense decentralization is useful. But to have the degree of decentralization which has been recently introduced while having virtually no capacity for research, analysis, longer term planning, or staff upgrading is a recipe for disaster. I tend to agree, for the (soon to be devolved) federal system is organised around two conflicting forces. On the one hand you have administrative decentralisation. An Human Resources Development Canada official was bragging (at last summer's Social Policy Conference at Queen's) that HRDC programme administration is the second most decentralised in the country (after Quebec's). The decision to decentralise in this way is informed (according to my interpretation of public servants' comments) by the fashionableness of "new public management's" decentralisation credo and programme evaluation evidence that suggests that decentralisation of active measures works better. But it is not totally decentralised, for on the other hand you have a high level of policy-making centralisation. This retention of decision-making power in the National Capital Region is informed by our Westminister model's policy-making centralisation convention (handmaden to politicians wanting new targeting) and the paradoxical desire, on the part of public servants, to implement more lessons from programme evaluations (of which they have accumulated over 25 years worth). The result: the system Michael Gurstein describes in Cape Breton. This is an important lesson for Blair, for a look at his government's administrative structures in the wake of the Next Steps reforms - according to Colin Campbell's interviews of British public servants - shows that this type of problem beleaguers the British state across-the-board. In other words, it is a state cut in half. At the top you have policy wonks wanting to test new ideas all the time (e.g. Market Testing) and at the bottom you have management drones charged with the duty to "manage", but must continuously react to new demands coming from the centre. UK Employment Zones, to return to the original topic, are a reaction to this - more discretion to local managers. Or are they a result of this, with all of the claw-backs and the promise of implementing success stories? This seems so very schizophrenic, and unfortuneatly for Blair, dangerously complicated. Thank you for your attention. Cheers, Peter Stoyko
Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
A real difficulty with the degree of decentralization that is going on is that success in employment creation in the current economy is going to require more sophistication, more knowledge of the larger world and larger economic forces, more capacity to link the local with the regional, the national and the global rather than less. The more decentralized decisions become, the less "worldly", the less "plugged-in" (by and large) are going to be those who are making those decisions. Mikeg On Thu, 23 Apr 1998, peter stoyko wrote: Greetings all... Let me thank Michael Gurstein for his thoughtful response to my comments. It rings true to my ears. Let me take this opportunity to add a few additional notes. On Thu, 23 Apr 1998, Michael Gurstein wrote: [snip] From what I can see, in Canada we have the worst of both worlds. We have national program stipulations which introduce absurd rigidities locally (for us), and we have almost complete local decentralization which makes us subject to the training and skill set of case officers and local managers with no knowledge of or sensitivity towards any of the areas where new opportunities for employment creation are emerging. (cf. my recent posting on WiNS2000). [snip] The labour market in Canada is so regionally specific that national design and even national standards make little sense. What works or could work in Cape Breton bares little or no relation to what could work in Southern Ontario or rural Saskatchewan. In that sense decentralization is useful. But to have the degree of decentralization which has been recently introduced while having virtually no capacity for research, analysis, longer term planning, or staff upgrading is a recipe for disaster. I tend to agree, for the (soon to be devolved) federal system is organised around two conflicting forces. On the one hand you have administrative decentralisation. An Human Resources Development Canada official was bragging (at last summer's Social Policy Conference at Queen's) that HRDC programme administration is the second most decentralised in the country (after Quebec's). The decision to decentralise in this way is informed (according to my interpretation of public servants' comments) by the fashionableness of "new public management's" decentralisation credo and programme evaluation evidence that suggests that decentralisation of active measures works better. But it is not totally decentralised, for on the other hand you have a high level of policy-making centralisation. This retention of decision-making power in the National Capital Region is informed by our Westminister model's policy-making centralisation convention (handmaden to politicians wanting new targeting) and the paradoxical desire, on the part of public servants, to implement more lessons from programme evaluations (of which they have accumulated over 25 years worth). The result: the system Michael Gurstein describes in Cape Breton. This is an important lesson for Blair, for a look at his government's administrative structures in the wake of the Next Steps reforms - according to Colin Campbell's interviews of British public servants - shows that this type of problem beleaguers the British state across-the-board. In other words, it is a state cut in half. At the top you have policy wonks wanting to test new ideas all the time (e.g. Market Testing) and at the bottom you have management drones charged with the duty to "manage", but must continuously react to new demands coming from the centre. UK Employment Zones, to return to the original topic, are a reaction to this - more discretion to local managers. Or are they a result of this, with all of the claw-backs and the promise of implementing success stories? This seems so very schizophrenic, and unfortuneatly for Blair, dangerously complicated. Thank you for your attention. Cheers, Peter Stoyko Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. ECBC/NSERC/SSHRC Associate Chair in the Management of Technological Change Director: Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking (C\CEN) University College of Cape Breton, POBox 5300, Sydney, NS, CANADA B1P 6L2 Tel. 902-539-4060 (o) 902-562-1055 (h) 902-562-0119 (fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ccen.uccb.ns.ca
Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
Employment zones are a local pilot application of the Blairite programme of welfare to work, modelled on the US precedent. They seek to achieve full employment but without assigning any power to workers which might result from that. Full employment is very contradictory for capitalism. On the one hand it is an enormous social regulator. It legitimizes the system and also avoids the problem of the devil finding deviant acts for idle hands to undertake. On the other, given an effective trade union movement, it empowers workers at the point of production. Welfare to work in the contemporary UK with a trade union movement weaker than it has been since the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1829 is all about social control and not at all about empowerment. To the extent that it does improve workers wages, by tax credit schemes, it does so by a horizontal transfer within the working class from real middle income earners who have had limited real gains from the growth of the last twenty years, and does not touch the incomes of the top 10% who have collared the bulk of that growth for themselves, indeed it is probably the top 5% - capitalists and their lackeys like Blair. By the way we have a long experience now of 'zone' strategies in the UK. The one common element is that the people who live in them have bugger all power in determining what is to be done. It is done to them, not by them. As for that hero of the working class (which he left long ago) Prescott, I will reproduce here my grandfather's (a real seaman) doubtless prejuidiced views on ships stewards, that berk's former profession - he regarded them as dirty in their persons and their habits and liable to steal from their messmates. Not much changes does it ? David Byrne Dept of Sociology and Social Policy University of Durham Elvet Riverside New Elvet Durham DH1 3JT 0191-374-2319 0191-0374-4743 fax
Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
I can't speak to the details of the British case. Here in Cape Breton, Canada the notion of a development zone makes an enormous amount of sense. In fact, the availability of a development agency with some funds and some discretion specific to the region is one of the major resources available to the region to help overcome some of the de-development that has been going on here for the last 50 years or so. I tend to agree about the need for local accountability over these resources. In a context of overall resource scarcity, access to resources in a small region (zone) becomes enormously tempting to a variety of actors and tends to be used to pursue political rather than (?) development agendas. The danger of course, of development zones, is that they tend to prop up or perpetuate a local lack of competitiveness (lets not talk about the overall structure of the "market" economy at this point) which, when the props are removed as they inevitably will be, leads to local economic disasters.. Live by politician's largesse and die by politician's fickleness. What a "zonal" approach can do (at least in theory) is allow for an integrated strategy to optimize the development of local resources or local "clusters" or local activity hubs which when the props are pulled may, just may, have some chance of surviving on their own. Without an approach like that regions like Cape Breton with its 200,000 or so population (reducing at 1% a year) don't figure on anybody's political, economic or programmatic agenda. Additionally, a good part of the problem for Cape Breton and I suspect for a lot of other left-behind regions is its "dependency" relation as a "periphery" to an expanding, self-confident, power centre political/economic/administrative hub (in our case the designated "growth pole", Halifax). Initially as an act of policy, all development was concentrated in Halifax the "growth pole", with the notion, I guess, of "trickle down" (although the likelihood of even a "trickle" over some 300 miles and a major historic/cultural/religious/geographic divide should have seemed even to regional development economists of the orthodox persuasion rather unlikely). What the "zone" approach does (could do) is to wrest from the incredibly centrifugal grasp of the "growth pole" a degree of activity/resources/attention to focus on development within the zone rather than the pipe dreams of "spin-off developments" propounded by swivel chaired economists. I won't say that it works, but there is at least some chance of it working and the alternative strategy doesn't, from here, work at all. Mike Gurstein Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. ECBC/NSERC/SSHRC Associate Chair in the Management of Technological Change Director: Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking (C\CEN) University College of Cape Breton, POBox 5300, Sydney, NS, CANADA B1P 6L2 Tel. 902-539-4060 (o) 902-562-1055 (h) 902-562-0119 (fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ccen.uccb.ns.ca -- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 11:40:06 +0100 (BST) From: D S Byrne [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Michael Gurstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: futurework [EMAIL PROTECTED], Canadian futures [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd) Employment zones are a local pilot application of the Blairite programme of welfare to work, modelled on the US precedent. They seek to achieve full employment but without assigning any power to workers which might result from that. Full employment is very contradictory for capitalism. On the one hand it is an enormous social regulator. It legitimizes the system and also avoids the problem of the devil finding deviant acts for idle hands to undertake. On the other, given an effective trade union movement, it empowers workers at the point of production. Welfare to work in the contemporary UK with a trade union movement weaker than it has been since the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1829 is all about social control and not at all about empowerment. To the extent that it does improve workers wages, by tax credit schemes, it does so by a horizontal transfer within the working class from real middle income earners who have had limited real gains from the growth of the last twenty years, and does not touch the incomes of the top 10% who have collared the bulk of that growth for themselves, indeed it is probably the top 5% - capitalists and their lackeys like Blair. By the way we have a long experience now of 'zone' strategies in the UK. The one common element is that the people who live in them have bugger all power in determining what is to be done. It is done to them, not by them. As for that hero of the working class (which he left long ago) Prescott, I will reproduce here my grandfather's (a real seaman) doubtless prejuidiced views on ships s
Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
Greetings all... I would like to share my concerns about an apparent contradiction in the UK Employment Zones approach. Reform of active labour market measures in Canada and the UK in the 1990s has involved increases in targetting (but not money), by which I mean the number of discrete programmes aimed at those with distinctive needs (youth, the long term unemployed, older labour force participants, etc). This creates a rigidity when administered on a regional basis. When administered at the local or regional level, the administrators have a specific budgetary allotment for, say, youth, and a different allotment for the aged, both of which are pretty much set. If one locale (zone) has more youth unemployment than unemployment among older workers, too bad; they must spend the allotment as budgeted and programmed. In this context, the UK Employment Zone proposals (if I'm reading the proposals correctly) show promise, for they allow localities the flexibility to reallocate funding according to needs - budgetary decentralisation with a small measure of local policy discretion. But wait, what about all these other conditions? Those over 25 and are classified as long(ish)-term unemployed (over 1 year) are targeted - a slight claw-back of decentralization. A minimum amount must be spend on certain key targeted programmes - a restiction on policy making capacity of the zone. Project success stories will be replicated across Britain, whether they are suitable to other regions or not - a reduction in local flexibility. And what happens when the central governments wants to target another class of labour market participant? Budgetary centralisation and a reduction in local policy discretion, that's what. In fact, this is the cycle that has taken place in Canada: (1.) demands for more flexibility come from local programme offices of the federal ministry; (2.) budgetary allotments between programmes are made more flexible; (3.) new demands emerge for another targeted programme, such as youth; (4.) central level of government demands such-and-such amount spent on the new initiative (or package of iniatiatives), and local flexibility is reduced. With the Blair government embarking on an on-going redesign of the welfare state, the likelihood of new targeting measures seems very high. What this boils down to is one question: are these local experiments to create ideas for redesigning of the larger system, or are they pilot projects in decentralisation of the entire system? (Surely, the maintenance of a small and perminent cadre of priviledged zones is politically unsustainable as backbenchers lobby behind the scenes for special status for their own constituencies.) This is an either-or proposition, each with its own perils, for making compromises between the two creates an overly complex system - a state that active measures sometimes seem prone to gravitate towards. The Australian scenario would be the risk: programme targeting becoming so complex and success so difficult to monitor that, eventually, those held accountable get fed up with the unwieldliness and chop the system down to size. Thank you for your attention. Cheers, Peter Stoyko - Peter Stoyko Carleton University Tel: (613) 520-2600 ext. 2773 Department of Political Science Fax: (613) 520-4064 B640 Loeb Building V-mail: (613) 731-1964 1125 Colonel By DriveE-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ottawa, Canada, K1S 5B6 Internet: http://www.carleton.ca/~pstoyko -- On Tue, 21 Apr 1998, Michael Gurstein wrote: -- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 19:51:41 +0100 GMT From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: UK Employment zones: will they work? UK Employment zones: will they work? Zones d'Emploi britanniques: marcheront-ils? The Blairite solution to poor prospects for employment is to identify parts of Britain where these problems cluster and then concentrate resources. Smart. Will the policy work? Employment zones are areas where the usual national programmes for the unemployed will be ditched in favour of running trials of local initiatives. The five areas chosen to pilot the scheme all have high concentrations of the long-term jobless. "Employment Zones will give communities the flexibility to devise local solutions which best meet local needs," said the Employment Minister, Andrew Smith, when he invited bids for zone status last September. Plymouth, Liverpool, north-west Wales, south Teeside and Glasgow began running their own programmes in February. The schemes must all include training plans to improve employment prospects, business enterprise to help the jobless move into self-employment, and neighbourhood regeneration - work which
