The second extract from Lee Rotherham’s Ten Years On explores life for the workforce in 2020. What is the lot of the workers of Britain?

Ashley Grayson is one of those whose been taken on at Gentle Breezes. He’s a school leaver who decided that university wasn’t for him.

Ashley is happy with his job and his prospects. ‘We’re doing well here, and I’m learning the skills to manage in business.  And if I want to earn more, to buy something really special, you know, like a new TV for my Mum, or to meet a big bill, I can put in the overtime.  When things go really crazy here, I don’t mind doing a whole weekend.  It helps us keep on top of the job and this year Nikki, my girlfriend, who’s at college, and me went to Miami rather than Ibiza.  Nikki says I wouldn’t just be able to do that if I lived in Strasbourg, say, or Milan.  She says there you’re not allowed to do more than forty-eight hours a week and they’re even thinking of lowering that to forty-four.  If you do, you – and your boss – are breaking the law and there’ll be plenty who’ll chase you for it. So no one wins.’

He tells us Nikki herself has her eyes on a year at Nantes improving her French.  The programmes that allowed British and foreign students to spend time overseas didn’t come crashing to a halt in 2010, which was hardly surprising considering that so many exchange programmes took place with countries that weren’t in the EU anyway.

Talking to Ashley it’s clear he knows and accepts that no one these days can expect to have a job for life. ’Our employment regulations aren’t the same as theirs are now,’ he says, ‘I’ve heard they put the emphasis on keeping jobs rather than building new ones. What that says to me is that when things get tough, in downturns, EU businesses – and especially small businesses, where most jobs are created – are  far less able to adapt. They can’t just go onto short time or lay off people for a few months in order to cut costs and weather the storm.’

He’s right, of course. EU politicians still haven’t learnt the lessons of the last recession, where shocking numbers of new small business folded because they couldn’t adapt to the economic climate. Unable to bend, they snapped. That wasn’t just bad for the people who owned and ran the companies; it was catastrophic for the employees. A blind and self-centred policy designed to preserve the pay and privileges of workers actually resulted in hundreds of thousands of them losing their jobs and queues of school leavers not being able to get one.

In Britain, unemployment levels initially rose quickly but then recovered with far greater speed. Moreover, our businesses soon found themselves far more able to compete in world markets, especially in contrast with those countries where governments decided to subsidise massively the key state industries, rather than force them to get round to the structural changes other countries made in the 1980s. In other words, taxpayers there have been, and still are, paying higher taxes to support big industries which were exporting products overseas, providing cheap raw materials for workers in other countries to manufacture at a competitive profit. The whole system was messy on the eye and heavy on the wallet – but it’s not like that in Britain.

Mike Harrison is in charge of HR at a retail chain with a head office in Peterborough.  He makes the point that now, in 2020, HR professionals don’t have to take account of the constantly-changing and increasingly politically-motivated policies to which Brussels subjected UK employers in the early years of this century.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he says to us, ‘the new arrangement with the EU hasn’t meant setting up some wicked Dickensian regime where we can exploit the workforce and just ignore their side of the deal.  That’s just not the way successful modern companies do business anyhow. But we do have a government that writes recruitment, employment and reward policies that suit the British economy, taking into account both its strengths and weaknesses, and that also fit in with our own culture and way of doing things.’

He goes on to emphasise that there has to be a balance between what is right for and fair to employees and what the business’s other interested parties need.

‘Not the least of these, by a long chalk, is the Tax Man.  Don’t laugh.  We in the private sector generate the revenue this country lives off.’

With a half-resigned sigh, he can’t resist telling us about some of the things he sees going on in the EU, things he’s just glad he hasn’t got to justify any more to his directors; things he thinks are destroying the balance he’s just been talking about.

‘They’re bringing in rules requiring companies to employ a percentile of staff who’re under 21, over 60, and the disabled.  I mean, how do you make something like that work in practice?  Brussels has implemented a wide package of provisions eked out of the Social Charter,’ he says. ‘Over there they’ve had a massive leap in court cases where employees have demanded legally-sanctioned wage rises for what they claim is menial or unpleasant work, exploiting laws that were originally drawn up to ensure fair pay for the same job. Parents, including men, have won increasingly absurd cases under legislation relating to family rights, allowing them to knock off work early whenever they want.  There was even one over-protective mother who won the right to leave work to check up on her child at school. Plus there are the other, associated, problems. They brought in new regulations to govern time spent in stressful locations, but the devil was, as ever, in the detail.  There were rigid requirements for breaks when working while seated, which no one could make work.  Oh, and there was absolute chaos on building sites when people clocked in at different times. At least they reversed that quickly after it came in 2017, but they’ve  still got nonsense like all that new freedom for  sympathetic striking, and this beats the lot, a legal requirement that a jobseeker’s entitled to  vocational training in a subject of their choice. Apparently someone successfully insisted on being trained  as a Buddhist nun.’

So British business is once again a success story.  Back in the EU, Health and Safety, is one of a list of plagues that have generated a celebrated nightmare. Still, if nothing else, H & S has spawned a well-paid, outspoken and highly certified growth industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people across the EU. Some of the brightest minds in Europe are global leaders in creating warning designs intelligible across borders, alerting people not to spill hot water.   At least that makes one area in which British companies have real European competition.