Truss’s jibe at British workers shows that she fails to understand the problem
It will doubtless come as a surprise to British workers toiling in distribution warehouses, call centres or the NHS that Liz Truss thinks they could do with showing “more graft”.
Judging by comments made when she was chief secretary to the Treasury, the frontrunner to be prime minister thinks the UK’s economic problems are down to a working culture quite different from that in communist China.
Truss is right in one respect. The UK does lag behind many other western countries in the productivity league table. Across the G7 group of major industrial countries, the average worker produces 13% more an hour than the average British worker and the gap is getting bigger.
Official data also appears to show a divide between London and the rest of the country, with workers in the capital apparently 80% more productive than the national average. Truss suggests this is a mindset issue.
The idea, though, that the UK’s deep-rooted economic problems are caused by shirking or a lack of effort does not stand up to serious scrutiny. Britain has one of the most deregulated labour markets in the developed world and the average British worker puts in more hours a week than the European average.
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Monitoring and surveillance in many workplaces are intense, with disciplinary measures for those that fail to meet quotas. This is a country where management has the whip hand and, for the most part, workers are not protected by unions. To the extent Truss’s analysis was ever true, it harks back to a labour market that has long since disappeared – now replaced by one in which an army of gig economy and self-employed workers
Read more on theguardian.com
