Ian McMillan: Once upon a time, in a land far away, we had jobs

Don’t go! Stay and listen to my tale. It won’t take long…

Too late. They’ve scuttled off to their Xboxes and their smartphones and their iPads.

Well, you can’t blame ‘em. After all, who wants to listen to an old bloke going on and on about a mythical golden era when it was all fields round here and jobs grew on trees and you could go to the pictures and have five pints afterwards followed by chips and mushy peas and still get change from a jam jar and a threepenny bit that you’d made yourself from a corned-beef tin?

That’s the curse of being a grey-haired one; you’ve seen it all before and, worse than that, you know just what it looks like.

You’ve seen the way that a lack of work can erode the confidence of the young and leave them rudderless and aching with unfulfilled promise.

It happened in the 1980s, it happened in the 1990s, and it’s happening again. But just because it’s happened before doesn’t make it any easier to understand: we’ve just had news of the highest jobless total for 17 years and the thought of all those people without jobs to go to still has the power to fill me full of a low, growling despair.

And the terrible fact is that a lot of the ones without jobs are the young ones who’ve not had a job yet, not experienced that brown envelope moment, or whatever the modern equivalent is.

You see, I remember when I worked with my soft white poet’s hands on a building site in Sheffield in the late 1970s.

I earned £70 a week, more if I did a Saturday morning, and I really enjoyed getting that brown envelope on a Friday afternoon and opening it and working out what each note and each coin represented.

That tenner was the morning me and Arthur spent unloading all those bags of cement from that wagon. “We’ll have thighs like Garth!” Arthur said, gasping. Aye, Arthur, maybe.

That fiver was those hours I spent stacking bricks in the pouring rain with Arthur. “We’ll have gills like a fish!” Arthur said, wiping a drop from his nose. Aye, Arthur, perhaps.

And that 50 pence piece was the trip I took to the chip shop on the Friday dinnertime for everybody’s fish and chips (and mushy peas and scallops and pies and bread-and-butter and curry sauce and fishcakes and sausages and pasties. And a pickled egg for Arthur) and I could touch all the money and know that it represented a reward for work done, for sweat sweated, for bruises got and for scars won.

My Uncle Charlie worked down Houghton Main pit and they always used to pay the miners with coins when he was a young man; but then when the pound note came in he didn’t know what it was because he wasn’t too good at reading and writing.

He assumed it was some sort of receipt so he threw it on the fire. My Auntie realised his terrible error and tried to pluck it from the flames, but it was too late and they were on bread-and-dripping for a week. And Uncle Charlie didn’t even like dripping.

It always amuses me that we still talk about the flabbergasting wages of footballers in terms of a weekly wage: £50,000 a week, £100,000 a week, £200,000 a week, as though these pampered young men queue at a hatch every Friday and a bloke with a ledger hands them a brown envelope the size of a fridge-freezer and they stagger away with it to their flash cars.

Then at home they empty the envelope onto the table and say, “Well, that £10,000 represents that shot I fluffed on Saturday and that £5,000 is for the time I spent doing press-ups in the gym and that £30,000 is for the 90 minutes I sat on the bench the other evening, gazing into space and texting my mates”. Work done, you might say; sweat sweated, bruises got and scars won.

That’s what these jobless young people are missing; that sense of satisfaction when you’re rewarded for your effort.

The wage, the salary, the stipend, the honorarium: the dosh in the hand for the job well done. The sense of tiredness at the end of the day because you’ve lifted things or counted things or filed things or rung people or held a ladder while somebody painted.

The sense of worth that all human beings crave. I know there’s an argument about whether you hold a job down or a job holds you down and I know that labour is only dignified when it’s properly rewarded but now, more than ever, we need new thinking, we need Plan B and Plan C.

And maybe we need Plan J: for jobs.