Thread by @ChrisBrosnahan

While basically everything is wrong with Giles Fraser's idiotic piece, one bit that got lost in the middle of all the sexism and nostalgia-wanking was his misunderstanding of the modern workplace.

He writes about people changing jobs regularly as if it's been created by demand, entirely driven by arrogant digital nomads, who don't want any ties and think they're citizens of the world.

This is pretty common. Treating the gig economy like it's grown out of a desire by people to avoid being tied down.

The general change from 'job for life' wasn't driven by a desire to be on a permanent gap year. It's been driven by automation destroying jobs and a lack of loyalty by employers.

One thing you'll see a lot of HR/people-management experts talk about is how young people are less loyal to employers than ever before. But they never talk about how employers are less loyal than ever before.

If it's cheaper for a corporation to move and let go of everyone who worked for them, they will. If it's cheaper to keep roles paying the same, refusing to keep up with inflation, they will.

The idea that employers reward loyalty is nonsense. That would be too expensive.

We rarely talk about the recession 11 years ago and the effects it had on society. And businesses responded by cutting people. The number of redundancies at the end of the 2010s was phenomenal.

We now have a generation entering the workplace that has grown up watching their older siblings and parents being rewarded for their loyalty with unemployment.

It's always, always framed as 'young people have no loyalty' and never as 'employers have done nothing to gain their trust'.

I used to work with a people-management 'expert', whose two biggest talking points were:
- Young people and their lack of loyalty
- How the wealthy being lumped together was unfair

He would go on and on and on about how young people lacked loyalty. He was a shareholder in the international corporation he worked for. He'd been there for decades, guaranteeing himself a job way past his relevancy.

The company was sold. He voted for this to happen, because the shares he had meant he made a fortune from it.

You know what happens when companies merge? Redundancies. He went into the meeting where this was announced, barely able to conceal his glee because he'd just found out how much money he was going to make.

He talked about how this was great news for the future of the organisation, while avoiding the redundancies conservation as much as possible. 'Yes, there would be some' he acknowledged, 'but we have to look at the positive side'.

Meanwhile, another colleague of mine was a young guy. Totally devoted to the place and an absolute sweetheart. Also great at his job. Always over-delivered. Always in early and stayed late.

Yeah, he was made redundant two months later.

I was also made redundant but I was already heading out the door. I'd seen the writing on the wall already.

But that was how the kind of 'expert' that talked about how 'young people today are less loyal than ever before' was. Because it's easy to talk like that when you're part of the decisions about people's jobs.

Young people don't lack loyalty because they're ruthlessly self-focused, or because their dreams are pop-up avocado-and-beard sandwich bars. It's because employers have never valued them less.

If your job can be automated, it'll be automated. If it can be run cheaper abroad, it'll be moved abroad. And if someone younger can do it cheaper, they'll be hired.

That's the gig economy. That's hot-desking. What young people don't need is wankers like Giles Fraser telling them that the real problem is their lack of values.

But I'm sure that as someone that's worked for the church since 1993, the year Bjork's debut album came out, Giles Fraser has a deep understanding of the modern workplace.