Every morning before starting work, Neil Miller, head gardener at Hever castle
in Kent, takes a stroll around the grounds before they open for business. He
admires the rows of Italian statues, and takes pride in his immaculate rose
gardens before stopping for a moment of reflection by the boating lake.
It is a far cry from his former job in the City. Miller, 43, spent more than a
decade working in the insurance industry. He enjoyed a life of long hours,
long lunches and exotic holidays. He was made redundant from his job as a
Lloyd’s of London broker in 1993, an experience that changed his life.
“At first I was devastated,” he said. “I didn’t think I could do anything
else. My job had been everything to me since I left school at 16. I worked
in the City during the era of success, when we worked hard and played hard.
We used to go out for lunch at 12.30 and have five or six pints over lunch
before heading back to the office at 4pm.
“But in hindsight, being made redundant was a blessing in disguise – it freed
me. It allowed me to discover my true passion for gardening and the
outdoors. I can now honestly say that I love what I do.”
The recession of the 1990s is no longer a distant memory. Last week official
figures revealed that the number of people on unemployment benefit had risen
by 75,000 in a month, the fastest rate since March 1991. Last week more than
1,300 people lost their jobs as the furniture retailer MFI closed for good.
The total number of unemployed rose to 1.86m and is now forecast to reach 3m
by 2010. The assessment by Professor Danny Blanchflower, the Bank of
England’s labour market expert, was gloomy: “Where is the light at the end
of the tunnel? I can’t see any.”
But need redundancy be so bleak? On Friday Gordon Brown insisted that Britain
would become a “beacon of hope” amid the turmoil of the global economy
because of its “fighting spirit” and can-do attitude.
Is he right? Can a recession ever really provide cause for optimism? And how
long will it take Britain to recover?
FEAR is understandably the instinctive reaction to being laid off. In the
queue outside the Jobcentre in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, last week
the mood was desperate. The line also reflected the increasingly
middle-class face of unemployment, with a string of highly qualified former
managers, engineers and technicians looking for work.
Ron Chew, a 57-year-old former managing director, lost his job six months ago
when his metals furnishing firm folded. He said: “I’m not looking for a
high-powered management job, even though I’ve got accountancy
qualifications. I just want something to keep the wolf from the door.”
But according to Michael Sinclair, a psychologist based in London who counsels
redundant workers on a daily basis, once people get over the immediate shock
of being laid off, the experience can be both liberating and empowering.
“Initially people are not aware that redundancy can be one of the biggest
opportunities of their lives,” he said. “They feel nothing but trepidation
and anxiety because their identity is so bound up in their jobs. But these
are often the same people who a few weeks earlier were moaning about how
worthless their jobs made them feel, punching out numbers and making money
for someone else. They don’t realise that being redundant can be a chance to
reassess their lives and think creatively about what they want to do.”
This is true even for people with decades of experience, like John Fish. When
he lost his job as director of an exhibitions company in 1992, he turned
fear to his advantage. Within days he decided to start up an exhibitions
company of his own. He said: “I went home to my wife and said, ‘Either I
give it all up or we have a chance of doing something very special’.”
It was undeniably tough. He set up his business at home, where he and his wife
worked 14-hour days from their garage. His business now runs the holiday and
travel show at the Glasgow and Manchester convention centres.
“After three months of sitting there just telephoning and telephoning, you
start worrying,” recalled Fish. “The combination of fear and excitement is
amazingly powerful – excitement because of what you’re doing, fear that it
might go wrong. I look back and think: how on earth did we do it?”
In the financial services sector, which is one of the worst hit by the
recession, the fear factor is reduced by generous severance packages. When
Adam Hayes, a 27-year-old former junior trader at Citigroup, accepted
redundancy in September, he was given a payoff worth nearly half of his
£60,000 salary. He is now using it to pursue a career as a graphic designer.
He said: “Trading floors are always aggressive places, but with the credit
crunch it was becoming particularly intense. The hours were getting longer
as things got more desperate. In the week I left, Lehman collapsed and we
were all at work until 2am trying to work out which of the bank’s assets
were exposed. People were coming in at weekends and evenings. It was
unpleasant.”
Hayes now works five days a week as a shop assistant at Harrods department
store in central London, and spends the other two at Chelsea College of Art
and Design. He has moved into a smaller flat to cut costs. He believes the
sacrifice in lifestyle has proved worthwhile. “It’s using a completely
different part of my brain. I haven’t thought about numbers in a long time.
I’m sleeping better and I’m feeling happier.”
A side effect of the wave of redundancy is a boost for the state sector,
particularly teaching. This year the Training and Development Agency for
Schools held three one-day seminars at Canary Wharf, attracting nearly 400
people, many from the City.
John Connolly, the agency’s head of recruitment, is optimistic that the
growing number of unemployed accountants, analysts and IT workers nationwide
is providing him with a pool of highly qualified recruits who he hopes will
fill shortages in subjects such as maths and science.
“There are a lot of very well qualified people looking for jobs, and we offer
them something different,” he said.
Cathy Bryan, 38, made the switch to teaching nine years ago. In her twenties,
she enjoyed the life of a highly paid executive at a dotcom company to the
full. She earned £60,000 a year editing websites for magazines such as
Loaded and NME, before becoming strategy director for Excite UK, a search
engine. “It was a giddy time,” said Bryan. “I got caught up in the dotcom
boom and all that went with it. I was completely opportunistic.”
But in 2001 Bryan was made redundant by Excite UK and decided to retrain as a
school teacher. “For the first 10 years I had been working incredibly hard.
I wanted to change that and I suspected I would have a family one day,” she
said.
After qualifying to teach citizenship and history, she got a job at Eltham
Hill technology college, an all-girls comprehensive in southeast London
where she was initially paid £23,000 a year. She said: “At first I thought
I’d made a terrible mistake. I was still working incredibly hard but for far
less money. But by the third year I started to get the hang of it and get a
real buzz. Now I feel really privileged to work with these kids.”
Perhaps one of the most powerful emotions that drive people on to success
after redundancy is indignation: how dare they hand me a P45? “It gives
people a determination to prove themselves outside that particular work
environment,” said Sinclair. “Despite widespread redundancies people still
take it personally, and they certainly think they are worthwhile so there’s
a sense of ‘I’ll show you guys; I’ll push on.’”
In 2002 Andrew Johnson, now 35, became an executive of a multinational produce
company and moved to Portugal with his young family. Over the next 18 months
he married his fiancée, bought a house, fell in love with the country – and
was promptly made redundant. “I admit I felt very bitter about the whole
thing,” he said. “It was like being hit in the face; it was something I had
no control of but it completely devastated me and my family.”
He moved back to Hull and started a business of his own. After taking out a
£100,000 loan against the family home, he launched Living Salads, a company
that sells small trays of baby salad plants to supermarkets and restaurants.
The company now has a £2m turnover and contracts with several big
supermarkets. He said: “Redundancy is like being thrown into a swimming
pool: it’s a case of sink or swim. It was bloody tough, but we took risks
and it paid off.”
He is now competing directly with his former employer for business, a
challenge he relishes. “I can remember our first lorry going out with a load
of salads. I thought great, that’s X number of your customers I’ve nicked. I
still get a smile out of that every day.”
WHILE those made redundant now will find it more difficult to get bank loans
to set up their own businesses, given the crisis in the credit markets, the
blow of sudden unemployment is being softened by a burgeoning support
industry that wasn’t there in the 1990s.
Keystar Training, for example, is one of a number of firms offering workers
who are made redundant one-to-one courses where they can improve their
interviewing skills in role plays with actors hired from the West End.
Bobbie Lee, managing director of Keystar Training, said: “We monitor
everything from their body language to the way they dress, then give them
feedback. Many of the people we see haven’t been unemployed for a long time,
so they need to work on their presentation skills before they go to real
interviews.”
Catherine Roan is managing director of Careershifters.org, a site offering
advice to those switching jobs. “We have met many people who are not happy
in their work, but are afraid to move on,” she said. “We are now seeing that
because they are being forced to change, that fear is removed. This really
can be an opportunity to find a job that you enjoy.”
While many people will find the recession very difficult indeed, analysis of
labour statistics from previous recessions reveals that the economy is often
more buoyant than predicted. At the height of the recession in the early
1980s, the number of people in employment fell by nearly 2m to a postwar low
of 23.7m. Within just seven years, however, the economy was booming once
again, fuelling the creation of 3m jobs.
In the 1990s many economists predicted a “jobless recovery” with unemployment
remaining high for a prolonged period. The reality was that the low point of
1993 was followed by 16 years of sustained growth. By 1997 more than 2m jobs
had been created.
Jimmy Heselden was one of those put out of work in 1989 when the coal industry
contracted. The Yorkshireman bounced back better than many of his fellow
miners. This weekend it emerged that he paid himself £25m from the firm he
set up, Hesco Bestion, which makes blast walls used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For Miller, the gardener, adaptability is the key. “You’d be surprised at what
you can do if you’re prepared to change,” he said. “Here I am surrounded by
40 acres of gorgeous gardens, when 20 years ago I’d have been standing on
the platform waiting for the early morning train to London. This doesn’t
even feel like a proper job.”
