When we follow through the history of particular industries and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is possible to forget that the old skill and the new almost always were the perquisite of different people… Even where an old skill was replaced by a new process requiring equal or greater skill, we rarely find the same workers transferred from one to another… The rewards of the “march of progress” always seemed to be gathered by someone else.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
More than thirty years have passed since my father was visited by the first of several stretches of unemployment that were to haunt his life, and the lives of those who loved him.
He was a travelling timber salesman — the Willy Loman of a workshop world that still ran on thick and tight-grained boards, fragile and exotic veneers, the seasoned planks and beams that were his stock in trade.
Self-educated, his bookshelf held the novels of Alistair McLean and Isaac Asimov alongside Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, J.A.C. Brown’s Techniques of Persuasion, Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People.
His psychology of selling would be shared with me on long drives between boat yards and building sites, the workshops of the customers for whom he was also listener and entertainer.
But changes in the psychology of selling did not destroy his livelihood. The makers of reproduction furniture folded. Fibreglass replaced well-varnished timbers in the boatyards. The economics of business consolidation eliminated the need for competing sales teams. Technology, competition, and demography made him redundant.
My father’s experience of unemployment in the early 1980s was hardly unique, but it was singular.
Laid off timber reps were not heroic enough to mythologised as labourers, nor skilled enough to write their own legend and embalm their misfortune with sentimentality and social significance.
But when we talk about the creative destruction of creative industries like journalism, there is a human cost, and — like my father — it’s lonely and easily forgotten.