Employment matters
Written by John MacphersonI listened to ‘serial social entrepreneur’ Colin Crooks talking on the BBC Radio 4 Four Thought programme last week on how bad unemployment in the UK really is and what can be done about it. What he had to say was insightful and also really inspiring.
A couple of excerpts below, and you may read the full transcript of the programme here or listen on iPlayer here:
Let me tell you about a man I know….I’ll call him Ralph. When he hit 40, he realised that he’d wasted his life between drink and prison. He couldn’t remember the last real job he’d had. Worst of all he was barely on speaking terms with his teenage son. But now he wanted to change things. As a kid he’d loved bikes so he volunteered to fix them at a local project. As the service caught on he became more confident and took more responsibility. The bike repair service went from strength to strength and soon he was on the payroll and after a while, his young boy started coming in after school to learn as well. Ralph says this was the first thing they’d ever done together and that their relationship had been transformed since he’d got the job. In about 6 months, Ralph had gone from being almost unemployable to being a great Dad and a highly respected workshop supervisor.
I learned the hard way about what this means. I gave a man called Victor a trial as a van driver. On his first day I went in the van with him (I only had one van! So I had to make sure he could drive it properly!)) and for the first five pick-ups, I read the map while he drove. On the sixth job just outside Paddington station, we got back in the cab and I asked Victor to read the map. He refused. I told him he needed to find his own way around. He stubbornly declined to take the A-Z and I insisted it was part of the job. Then suddenly he hit me. Just out of the blue – “smack, smack” in the head. In the cramped space of a van cab, we started grappling with each other – him enraged and me stunned and bewildered.
Eventually, Victor calmed down and we sat there panting and staring out of the window. My head ached, my ear hurt but fortunately, nothing was broken. After a while, I asked Victor “Can you read?”
“Naw” he mumbled.
We finished the round in silence. He drove ….and I read the map.
As you can imagine Victor didn’t get the job. But my experience with him partly explains why we don’t realise how common illiteracy is. He’d kept it hidden for years and he was only found out when he’d been completely trapped.
Author — John Macpherson
John MacPherson was born and lives in the Scottish Highlands. He trained as a welder in the Glasgow shipyards, before completing an apprenticeship as a carpenter, and then qualified as a Social Worker in Disability Services. Along the way he has cooked on canal barges, trained as an Alpine Ski Leader & worked as an Instructor for Skiers with disabilities, been a canoe instructor, and tutor of night classes in carpentry, stained glass design and manufacture, and archery. He has travelled extensively on various continents, undertaking solo trips by bicycle, or motorcycle. He has had narrow escapes from an ambush by terrorists, been hit by lightning, caught in an erupting volcano, trapped in a mobile home by a tornado, kidnapped by a dog's hairdresser, rammed by a basking shark and was once bitten by a wild otter. He has combined all this with professional photography, which he has practised for over 35 years. He teaches photography and acts as a photography guide & tutor in the UK and abroad. His biggest challenge is keeping his 30 year old Land Rover 110 on the road. He loves telling and hearing stories.