Their London and their times - Getting by in 70s London
Working in the caring professions
Lily wants to become a social worker so that she can make the world a little less unfair. She has an idea, which she is as yet too embarrassed to say out loud in any of the seminars, that social workers can help energize their clients, assisting them to become radical opponents of the social policies that have made them into social work clients. Neil is really getting into the profession because it is not anything else.
“I want to empower the poor while you don’t want to help some firm make a profit and certainly don’t want to be an accountant,” she summarized to Neil, usefully she felt.
There were four attractions to public sector professional positions in the ‘70s and ‘80s. First, they signaled a commitment to progress and to caring for others rather than to corporate profit.
Second, these jobs offered exceptional job security, guaranteed index-linked pensions, and strong union protections. Public sector workers were sheltered from the economic shocks and soaring inflation of the times. Trade unions representing civil servants and public workers wielded significant collective bargaining power, ensuring that public sector workers had strong backing in disputes over wages, working hours, and conditions. Although nursing salaries were lower, the profession carried a stronger sense of a historic and honorable vocation, with structured on-the-job training, guaranteed hospital accommodation, and a profound sense of camaraderie.
At the same time, the professional status of these positions was being strengthened – more social respect and more attractive career paths.
Finally, there was also the pragmatic point that social work and health care services were growing as the reforms required the recruitment of large numbers of qualified staff. There were many vacancies.
For unskilled workers in care homes and hospitals the situation was very different. The ‘80s saw the early signs of marketisation with increasing contracting out of services and a move towards less comprehensive employment packages. As an example of the latter, many care workers were classified as local authority manual workers during this period and wage caps and inflation caused their pay to fall from two-thirds of the national average in 1974 to just 45% by 1983.