"MUSIC:" "What Difference Does It Make?" "by The Smiths" "For a happy life, there are some basic needs." "Someone to love." "Somewhere to live." "Somewhere to work." "And something to hope for." "Love, home, work, hope." "Beliefs - expectations - which have helped us define the health of British society for generations." "Now, there's an election coming and over a series of Panorama special reports, we're asking if politics and politicians can really deliver what Britain wants." "Tonight, I'll be exploring the changing world of work." "Ten million jobs that we do today in the UK are at high risk of disappearing - be made redundant - in the next ten to 20 years." "I want a career, really." "Not just work." "I want to be able to step into a job and for it to last a long time." "MUSIC:" "Liquidator by Harry J All-Stars" "I grew up in the 1970s." "The world of work looked very different back then." "MUSIC CONTINUES" "The typing pool and clerical work." "The mine and the factory." "All drove our economy." "It had more in common with Victorian Britain than the Britain of today." "This was the country my mum and dad came to from Jamaica in the early 1960s." "Why did you and dad come here in the first place, back in '62?" "So that the children... ..our children - would have a good start in life." "A good chance." "Mum became a brilliant dressmaker, making clothes for '60s fashion icon Mary Quant." "My dad, now divorced from my mum, was a shoemaker in Jamaica." "He earned a living here in a plastics factory." "We were brought up to think of work as the means - the door..." "..to get wherever you wanted to go." "By the early '70s, the security of stable employment meant my parents saw their fortunes rise." "They could afford things that would've been hard to imagine in Jamaica." "My dad's Morris Oxford - his pride and joy - was more than just a car." "How proud was he when he got the car?" "How proud?" "He had arrived!" "You're on a long journey and you had arrived." "MUSIC:" "Badge by Cream" "Job security for my mum and dad meant I could follow my dreams, too." "Of a life in a newsroom and not on the factory floor." " It's got to be 11:45." " Yeah, I think Mr Sumiri comes in at 12." "I've now been at the BBC for 27 years." "Here, like everywhere, jobs for life are no longer the norm." "A very good afternoon and welcome to the BBC News at One." "In the last 15 years, the number of casual part-time staff in BBC News has quadrupled." "Staff jobs like the one I landed in 1988 are harder to come by." "Jobs for life are probably historical and even careers for life." "It's behoven on anybody who's entering the workplace, or even in the workplace, to be planning their own futures, their own careers." "Nobody's going to do it for them in the future." "Work has given my parents and me what we want." "Can the politics of today deliver what the next generation wants?" "'We are currently the jobs factory of Europe." "'Our unemployment is tumbling..." "'Too often we're a country of low skill, low-wage, insecure jobs.'" "That's the political debate in a nutshell." "Full employment versus job security." "Today, the number of people in work as its highest level since 1971, when records began." "The good news is, in some of the sectors where the United kingdom leads the world - that's creative businesses, it's education, professional services, financial services, hi-tech manufacturing, pharmaceuticals - these are some of the best sectors to be in." "So, we've got some good fundamentals going for us." "But what about the lower end of the jobs market?" "One economist believes there's a new generation of workers who feel so insecure in their jobs that he's coined a new name from them." "The Precariat." "The Precariat is the most rapidly growing social group in our society." "And it consists of millions of people who are living "bits and pieces" lives." "A life of unstable labour and unstable living." "You have no narrative that you can give to your life." "I am becoming something." "I am something." "And in retirement" " I was something." "Zahera Gabriel-Abraham says that kind of insecurity dominated almost a year of her life." "She worked for Sports Direct in Croydon in 2013." "She was one of 17,000 staff employed by the company across the UK on a zero hours contract." "Which meant she had no say over the number of hours she worked each week." "What do zero hours contracts mean, do you think?" "How would you sum them up?" "Zero work if they choose for it, zero respect for people, zero dignity, zero freedom, zero voice." "Sports Direct is owned by the billionaire boss of Newcastle United, Mike Ashley, and has 418 stores across the UK." "The company gave Zahera a job, but she never knew what she was going to earn or when to arrange childcare." "You can come in at the beginning of a shift and they say, we don't need you, go home." "Before you've even started - don't clock in." "Or, in the middle of your shift, just say," "Oh, no." "We don't need you any more." "Go home." "And when she was ill, she says she didn't receive sick pay." "I, myself, was told - don't care what's wrong with you - you come in." "You start to feel very harassed, very bullied - very targeted." "700,000 people in the UK have zero hours contracts." "do they all feel like Zahera?" "I think we need to get it in perspective." "About 2% of the working population are on zero hours contracts and about 4% of jobs are zero hours contracts." "If you look at the interviews that have been done by the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development - people who are on them - they're actually as happy as people who are in full-time jobs." "But do these contracts leave workers to shoulder the risk of economic uncertainty, rather than the firms that employ them?" "People in the Precariat have to rely very, very largely on wages for their income." "Whereas, other groups in society, they get pensions, they get paid holidays, they get more paid holidays and medical leave and things like that." "If you're in the Precariat, you don't get any of that." "Zahera says the stress of a zero hours contract became too much." "In the end I had to go to the doctor's because I was suffering panic attacks." "I was starting to suffer from the onset of depression." "It made me very, very ill." "Very ill towards the end." "Zahera began legal action against Sports Direct." "Zero hours contracts were on trial." "The company settled before her case was heard." " Hi, Elizabeth." " It's a moral issue as much as a legal issue." "We need to decide, as a society, what sort of labour market we want." "The one we've got is insecure." "It's employer led and it's about..." "We're creating jobs, but the quality of those jobs is poor." "And poor quality jobs means poor quality lives." "Sports Direct says there's no legal reason why zero hours contracts shouldn't be used." "But as part of Zahera's tribunal settlement, the company had to agree to produce clear written policies for zero hours staff." "Setting out sick and holiday pay entitlements and display them in all its stores." "EXPLOSION" "Sports Direct is part of Britain's working future." "Its headquarters in Shirebrook in Derbyshire rose from our industrial past." "Built on the site of an old coal mine, it was made possible by £21 billion of government money to help regenerate an area devastated by pit closures." "I think it's a tragedy what's happened at Shirebrook that on that pit site in particular that you've got this..." "You've got this organisation with zero hour contracts." "In its heyday, the Shirebrook colliery employed 1,000 people." "Fewer than Sports Direct today." "But to long-term local MP Dennis Skinner, it's about community as well as jobs." "This miners' welfare here where we're sat would have been full." "They would have had a turn on." "A singer or a local band." "It was standing room only." "The camaraderie - you couldn't buy it." "It was worth a guinea a box." "'Get a job in Britain's modern mining industry and get more out of life." "'Be a miner." "Ask at your local pit or Jobcentre.'" "But by 1984, the Conservative government felt it didn't need so much British coal any more." "If we allow these pit closures to take place, then we're going to see communities desolate." "It was a very dangerous... in many ways it was slavery at times." "800 yards underground." "When you think about the hard work and everything else, you have to equate it as well with all that wonderful togetherness." "We fought in 1984 for something more than coal." "Remember that." "Shirebrook colliery closed in 1993." "More mine closures followed." "This one is now a museum." "20 years ago, Michael Heseltine was a Conservative minister with difficult decisions to make." "The loss of jobs involved and the human consequences was daunting." "But it had to be done." "What did you hope would replace the pits?" "Had you given that much thought?" "Of course, I'd given it thought." "But I hadn't come up with a prescribed solution." "How could you?" "Because what I knew is that the collier, the face worker, they were people that would find jobs relatively easily." "But the communities was a harder problem." "When you live in a village what's connected to a mine, then what happens in the community happens to everybody." "In 1984, Alan Gascoyne was Dennis Skinner's right-hand man fighting to save Shirebrook." "I don't see where anything had brought the community back, or anything like that." "You know what I mean?" "There's a void - to me, there's a void between our age group and the younger end." "Sarah Riley, who's 19, lives in Shirebrook." "She wasn't even born when the pit closed." "She studied veterinary management at college, but for her, the town offers little hope of a career." "What are the job opportunities around here?" "Well, you've got sort of your takeaway jobs and shop jobs and things like that." "Like, just serving customers." "And you've got Co-op, your Aldi and things like that." "But there's not a job that is for a career." "Today, much of Shirebrook is in the top 20% of the most deprived areas in the country." "There's no jobs around here that pay a lot of money and I'd love to just work." "That's what I would like to do, sort of." "To then be able to get a house of my own, a car and start my own family." " That's what work means to you?" " Yeah, that's what work means to me." "What we all want from work hasn't changed, but the world has." "The biggest single thing that's happened in the last 30 years is that the global labour supply has quadrupled." "And it's an extra two billion - two billion people have become part of the global labour market." "And all the extra two billion... ..were habituated before to accept a standard of living" "1/50th of what any British person would have accepted as the norm." "Which is why companies moved manufacturing overseas." "That change in the global labour market has had devastating consequences for some of the UK's traditional manufacturers." "The shoe industry in Northamptonshire couldn't compete with countries like China." "The company once based here, G.T. Hawkins, earned the Royal warrant for their riding boots, but it didn't secure their future." "The company closed." "Another famous name almost went the same way." "12 years ago, with sales falling," "Doc Marten shifted all their manufacturing to China." "1,000 local workers paid with their jobs." "The area suffered terribly in the 1990s." "Lots of factories were shut down." "A lot of companies had moved all of their manufacturing overseas." "But for the company, competing on price alone wasn't enough." "Doc Martens were also out of fashion and in 2003, they faced bankruptcy." "So, they looked to the past to help secure a future." "The company looked into what they could do to make more of the Made in England product and the Made in England range and to make it its own special niche with customers who are specifically interested in paying a little more for a product that has that heritage." "They moved part of their manufacturing back to Northamptonshire and started employing skilled local people again." "It worked." "Steve believes politicians should do more to support British manufacturing." "I think it's important - whoever's in power - that they recognise that skills, the reputation for British quality, for British standards, is vitally important to this country and to its economy." "Rather than us just becoming a service industry country or a country that can't make anything itself." "An ambition many would agree with." "But in other parts of the Midlands, it feels as if the world has already moved on." "The forces of globalisation are just too powerful." "In the warehouses that line the M1, thousands of low-skilled workers are employed in the expanding logistics hubs." "Some of the largest in Europe." "Logistics - in simple terms, it's the process of moving things around." "So, it's the sinew, if you like, that joins the muscle of the economy." "Yusen Logistics represents the new globalised world." "It's a Japanese company dealing with Dutch stock, staffed mainly by Eastern Europeans." "Yusen employs 1,000 people in Northamptonshire." "Across the county, 45,000 are employed by the industry." "Roughly one in eight." "A lot of the more basic manufacturing or extractive industries have moved offshore." "Inevitably, the jobs that were associated with those... aren't." "And what they are associated with is getting their supplies of those products from somewhere else around the world into the UK." "Logistics is big business, but it often pays no more than the minimum wage, which, for some, has become a ceiling rather than a floor." "Across the UK, incomes today in real terms remain 2% below what they were in 2010." "Education used to be the route out of low-paid work, but education also needs to adapt to the new world order." "'The first Employee of the Month is Courtney Barraclough." "'Well done, Courtney.'" "APPLAUSE" "This school on an industrial estate in Northamptonshire is trying to teach its pupils the skills to take them beyond the warehouse floor and the life of low pay." "'The Employee of the Month for January is Tom Stringer.'" "APPLAUSE" "Well done, Tom." "Excellent." "Our experience here locally is that logistics does take in a huge amount of young people at a low level and doing quite manual jobs." "What we're trying to do is reverse that trend, making sure that we're developing the next generation of leaders, who can aspire to more than just going in at the bottom level and being swallowed up into this great vacuum of industry." "The Midlands Studio School is one of more than 30 across England." "They were set up under Labour and expanded by the Coalition." "They're taking a new approach to preparing young people for the world of work." "It's all very different from my day." "We're doing a nine-till-five day to get them ready for the workplace." "Their dress code is a business suit rather than a school uniform." "So, they feel as though they're going about their business of work." " Just check that it's tight." "OK?" " Yeah." "And crucially, one or two days a week, they go out to industry and get their hands dirty." "That's it." "That's your first one." "Our motto is to connect education with employment." "What we're able to offer is an opportunity to try those career paths in a sustained period of time." "So they can develop the relationships, they can become an employee." "It's fantastic going into some of the companies and seeing our learners saying, I'm not in tomorrow, sir." "I'm off to work." "Joe Widdowson, who's 17, and 16-year-old Eleanor Roden both want to be mechanical engineers when they leave school." "I'm glad I came here because now I've got the experience." "I can say I've done this, I've shown that I can do it." "So, I've got that little bit ahead of people who went to a different college and didn't get that placement." "Going out in the workplace, that side of it is incredibly helpful and without that, I don't think I'd be able to get that experience to get into a degree." "Their future and the generation that follows will be increasingly dominated by automation." "People replaced by machines." "'Today, the engine is more powerful, 'but manufacturing has remained unchanged." "'It's made from 3,550 individual components." "'Which are milled, ground, cast and forged 'in Cosworth's Northampton factory." "'And all the parts are hand-finished.'" "Cosworth have been making high-performance car engines in Northampton for half a century." "In 2015, they're racing ahead with automation." "'The main tools of the trade are still the knowing eye and finger." "'And a mental note of the myriad little parts 'that make the engine go.'" "It's a far cry from the days of the dirty fingernails and overalls." "This is a factory, but it looks more like a lab than your traditional shop floor." "Not an oily rag or spanner in sight." "On top of here we have a tool system, which you can see just coming towards us now, which carries very precise cutting tools and delivers them to each of the machines just in time for the machine utilising the tool." "Cosworth are retraining their people to drive the machines that replace them on the factory floor." "It doesn't remove the humans - the robots will only do what they're told." "They won't replace the thought process and the design that's behind it." "But what they do is they do it repeatedly." "So, instead of a guy sitting at a pillar drill drilling it, he's in the back room designing it and designing how he wants the end product to look like." "What we've done is we've lifted the people up, in terms of their skill set." "And we need them to be there." "Without that skill set, this stuff... it's a glorified Xbox machine." "People are rising to the challenge of automation at Cosworth." "But the same can't be said for other jobs we take for granted." "Management consultants Deloitte have been working with Oxford University tracking the impact of technology back to the turn of this century." "We were surprised by the results and we found that more than half of secretaries' jobs have disappeared in the last 14 years." "The same for travel agents, same for librarians, same for counter clerks." "Rapidly advancing technology could mean even more jobs disappearing in the future." "Many more." "We calculate that 35%, so about a third, of jobs that we do today in the UK are at high risk of disappearing, being made redundant, in the next ten to 20 years." "And to put a bit of context around that, that's ten million UK jobs." "Does anyone understand what the impact of losing ten million jobs could be on society?" "I think everything we're seeing says that this is a second Industrial Revolution." "But we don't know how quickly and how well society can actually respond to those changes." "Do we need to put the brakes on it?" "Is that possible in a competitive world?" "The answer is, of course, no." "But success will depend on how well we adapt and how well we train the people we keep." "25 years ago, there were no new people being taken on in this industry." "There's a definite skills gap." "There's people who've been in the industry for 20, 25 years' experience and then there's nothing up until we started our apprenticeship four years ago." "So, the apprenticeship scheme's been critical" " to the success of this company?" " Absolutely." "The manufacturing side of the UK business couldn't have grown without an apprenticeship scheme." "It's important because too many young people are out of work." "Currently, 740,000." "Fashion graduate Zillah Sinclair is one of the apprentices at Doc Martens." "Going to university, the idea is that you're going to end up with a higher paid job - more of a career path." "But I think because there's so many young people coming out of university with these higher education, there's just not the jobs for them." "Zillah considers herself one of the lucky ones." "She feels her apprenticeship will stand her in good stead for the future." "I'm learning." "I feel like a sponge." "I'm just absorbing absolutely everything and there's still so much more to learn." "You know, I'm just excited to get on with it." " And excited to be employed?" " Yes." "But can jobs like this be anything other than minority occupations these days?" "I wonder, given how the landscape of work has been transformed since the 1960s, would my parents have still come here from Jamaica today?" "Would you have still made that journey if the world of work potentially could have been as precarious as it actually is now?" "I don't think I would." "Because..." "I think... it would be a case of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire." "And, at least, in Jamaica there was sunshine." "Many, however, are still coming." "Net migration last year was 298,000." "It's the opportunity of work here that's a big part of the pull." "We have more people employed than in the history of our country and we have now got rising real living standards." "Which is all to be welcomed." "Record numbers of people in employment is to be welcomed." "Especially so soon after a deep recession." "But is it only part of the picture?" "Has the great jobs recovery come at a cost?" "I think most people would say there should be some sort of civility and decency at the place of work, just as in the rest of your life." "And we're fast becoming a society that is casting it aside." "Me and Alan have seen something different." "Globalisation and technology have broken the back of so many British industries." "They've created opportunities, as well." "But it's left us with a tension between full employment and job security." "Britain wants both." "But achieving this balance is going to be a major challenge facing whoever enters Downing Street in May." "Next week, John Humphrys on whether politics can give us something to hope for."