The Baby Boomer Generation (15 page)

With so many men being put out of work and traditional jobs becoming harder to find, more and more families were turning to the woman of the house to become the main breadwinner. During the period from 1980 to 1985, more than 1 million women joined the workforce. Whether the men could have done any of these jobs is questionable because different types of jobs were now being created. The country was moving away from manufacturing and instead developing service industries. There was a large-scale movement of jobs away from cities and into outlying areas where new business parks were being built. This was often done by firms looking to revitalise themselves while making the most of new technology and cutting costs. We were producing fewer British goods and importing more foreign-made products. Employers were looking for people with good presentation skills and brainpower to fill the new jobs in banking, retailing and telemarketing. There was also an increase in professional recruitment jobs and in market research companies. Often, women were found to be better suited to these types of jobs, especially jobs that required direct communication with customers. In the main, women were still being paid less than men for doing the same job but these newly created jobs gave women the opportunity to close the gap and in some cases they were paid the same as there was a fixed pay scale for the job. Women were at last getting into occupations that would provide them with long-term careers. These new jobs enabled them to gain the knowledge and experience they needed to qualify for promotion into managerial positions. Women with ambition were now beginning to be taken seriously in the workplace.

An ever-increasing number of businesses were also using what were called mainframe computers to maintain records and process work. These machines were still very large and they needed to be housed in special environmentally controlled rooms and managed by trained computer operators. Computer workstations began to appear on individual desks during the 1980s but most of these were only capable of drawing down information from the central mainframe computer. The information was transferred onto the mainframe by staff trained in data processing. At this time, many firms were also still using the old-style, punch-card system, which involved specially trained keypunch operators, invariably women, inputting information onto small thin cards using card-punch machines. Big firms had huge rooms specially designed to accommodate large numbers of card-punch machines. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, key punch operating jobs were plentiful and they were considered to be good and secure. Despite the widespread use of business computers and the increasing amount of modern office equipment like the fax machine, large numbers of people were still employed for clerical work and open-plan offices filled with typists and accounts clerks were still the norm for much of the 1980s. As we moved through the decade, however, more and more typists and punch operators were ditching their old IBM Golfball typewriters and card-punch machines to retrain as word processor operators, and more and more office correspondence was being dealt with by these word processors. In 1986 we saw the first Microsoft Windows operating system being used in Britain. This was considered a marvel at the time but it was slow to catch on here. The introduction of word processors into offices was a major problem for women returning to work after a career break to bring up a family or whatever, because they were not familiar with modern office equipment and procedures. Many had left office work a few years earlier when manual typewriters and clipboards were still the norm. Although a great number of these job seekers were still only in their 20s and 30s, in the modern-day office of the late 1980s they were regarded as dinosaurs and a lot of them found it very difficult to get back into office work. Many had to sign-up for night school courses to get retrained at their own expense.

The stereotypical workplace image of yesteryear when women were cast as typists, Girl Fridays and tea ladies was slowly disappearing and we were seeing increasing numbers of female bosses sitting behind the executive desks. We were becoming used to seeing women in powerful positions and more and more workers were having to adjust to working for a woman for the first time, something that the older generations in the 1980s must have found difficult after years of male dominance at their place of work. Some workers did have difficulty adjusting to women giving the orders, and this was not just the male workers. Some women struggled to adapt and confrontations were not uncommon, with accusations of women bosses being tougher and more demanding than their male counterparts. Perhaps there was some truth in the old adage that women had to be tough to succeed in business.

Whether by choice or otherwise, some baby boomers started their own families in the mid-1960s when they were still teenagers. In the early 1980s, many of these 1960s babies were leaving school and looking for work in the most difficult job market for fifty years. Of the 3 million unemployed, 1 million were school leavers. The poorer areas of the inner cities were particularly hit by the early 1980s recession and the spiralling levels of unemployment. In some areas there was already long-standing local unrest, sometimes due to racial tension between residents and police. In April 1981, things got out of hand and boiled over in the streets of Brixton, south London when rioting broke out and large numbers of vehicles were burned and shops damaged and looted over a three-day period. At least 364 people were injured in the riots, including 299 police officers, and eighty-two people were arrested. Following on from the Brixton riots, in July 1981 there was a ten-day period of rioting in various towns and cities around the country. Many of these riots were also sparked by local racial tensions and the disturbances were mostly in areas that had been hit hard by unemployment and recession. The worst of the riots was in Toxteth, Liverpool in which 468 police officers were injured and 500 people arrested; shops were looted, at least seventy buildings were burned out and about 100 cars were destroyed. July rioting also took place at Brixton in London, Handsworth in Birmingham, Southall in London, Hyson Green in Nottingham and Moss Side in Manchester. There were also some smaller incidences of trouble in Bedford, Bristol, Coventry, Edinburgh, Gloucester, Halifax, Leeds, Leicester, Southampton and Wolverhampton. There was a lot of racial tension and social discord but many observers believe that unemployment, boredom and imitation of events elsewhere led to much of the copycat rioting, and for some it was just an excuse to go out looting other people's property.

There were other noticeable tensions starting to fester on our streets in the 1980s as we began to observe a new and more sinister street scene developing in our major cities. We witnessed a growth in what was called the ‘cardboard jungle', with a huge increase in the number of homeless people on our streets, especially in London, a large thriving capital city that was seen as a prosperous haven for discontented people from every corner of the world. Gone was the pleasure of taking an early evening stroll along the high street to do some window shopping. All of a sudden, a multi-ethnic mix of vagrants began to commandeer shop doorways for use as their sleeping quarters and the rancid smell of urine wafting up from pavements became a common airborne odour to passers-by. Shopkeepers were faced with having to wash down and disinfect their shop entrances before they could open for business each morning. Crime-related drug taking involving traditional street drugs was an ever-growing problem but there was also an increasing trend of glue sniffing among young kids. They were now sniffing all kinds of solvents including aerosols and household cleaning products, even nail varnish remover and cigarette lighter fuel. It was an extremely dangerous trend and young kids were accidentally dying through solvent abuse. We had always been used to seeing the occasional tramp or beggar walking the streets in our towns and cities, but immigrant beggars, often clutching a young child, were now accosting us in the street and there was also a new breed of home-grown professional beggar who could afford to dress in designer clothes. Some of these so-called professional beggars were said to live in the suburbs and commute into the city each day as if they were going to work. Some were even seen getting into good quality cars at the end of the day and driving themselves home. Ruthless foreign nationals were known to be using gangs of Fagin-like children to pick pockets in busy public areas. Gangs of extortionists were using a new style of threatening behaviour to extract money from motorists in the form of ‘squeegee men' who would approach cars at traffic lights and smear the windscreens with dirty water then demand money from the driver. Major road junctions were littered with intimidating flower sellers weaving their way through slow-moving traffic carrying armfuls of flowers and trying to sell small bunches to anxious and gullible motorists. The British public were already fearful of possible terrorist attacks and bombings, and we were now beginning to feel threatened and unsafe going about our everyday lives, even just walking the streets.

By the turn of 1982, we were beginning to emerge from the two-year recession; inflation was coming down and was now below 10%, compared to its peak level of 22% in 1980. It continued to fall and by spring 1983 it was down to 4%, a fifteen-year low. Despite the pain of recession and the on-going high levels of unemployment, Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government were re-elected in the 1983 UK general election. It was the most decisive general election victory any political party had enjoyed since Labour's landslide win in 1945. She was now able to confidently proceed with what was called ‘Thatcherism' and implement her ‘Thatcherite' policies, including the curbing of trade unions' powers and the privatisation of major utilities. British Telecom was the first in a series of big state-owned utilities to be privatised when it was floated in November 1984, with 50.2% of the shares of the new company being offered for sale to the public and BT employees. There followed a large number of floatations in the later part of the 1980s including British Gas (1986) with the ‘Tell Sid' advertising campaign, British Airways (1987), British Airports Authority (1987), British Steel (1988) and the Regional Water Companies in England and Wales (1989). Such privatisations continued throughout the 1990s and beyond, and they included the Regional Electricity Companies (1990), British Coal (1994) and British Rail (1995–97).

Margaret Thatcher featured prominently in events of the 1980s as you would expect with any prime minister of any political persuasion, but Margaret Thatcher was not just any prime minister; she was our first female prime minister and she was proving to be the strongest leader we baby boomers had seen running the country in our lifetime. The British public had chosen a tough and decisive prime minister with all of the qualities needed to move the country forward from the darkest days of the 1970s, sort out our economy and get the country back on its feet. Some may question her methods and achievements but she was certainly a tough and decisive leader. People from coal-mining areas will remember her for the tough stance she took over the 1984–85 miners' strike and the subsequent closure of coalmines. Many of those who belonged to the coal-mining industry will blame her for destroying their livelihoods, breaking up communities and turning their villages into ghost towns. However, there was never going to be an easy outcome to the miners' dispute. The National Coal Board was heavily subsidised by the British taxpayer and most mines were unprofitable. Despite the subsidies, British coal was said to be costing more than coal could be bought from other countries.

Thatcher was also committed to reducing the power of the trade unions. She managed to shrink the authority of the militant union bosses with tough new laws requiring pre-strike ballots and an end to ‘closed shop' policies, and the unions would now also be held responsible for any illegal strikes. She introduced measures to bring down the high cost of state welfare and control benefit abuse by tightening the rules for welfare state benefit and carrying out more means testing. Her priority had been to get inflation down and she expected private employers to create the majority of jobs. She encouraged people to stand on their own two feet and not expect the state to be a universal provider.

Before becoming prime minister, Thatcher was known to the general public as ‘Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher': the woman who did away with free school milk in 1970 when she was secretary of state for education in Edward Heath's government of the time. As prime minister in the 1980s, she made more fundamental changes affecting children's education, including replacing GCE O levels and CSE exams with new GCSE examinations, and abolishing all forms of corporal punishment in state schools. Some might say these changes added to the damage already done by the Labour government when they began dumbing-down education and discipline standards in schools during the 1970s. The combined effects of these policies would lead to serious repercussions in years to come when education and discipline standards would be seen to be broken and it would be recognised that we needed to go back to basics. Possibly the most controversial thing Thatcher did while in government was introduce the short-lived Poll Tax in 1989; more formally known as the Community Charge, it replaced the traditional local authority rates system with a single flat-rate tax for every adult. Huge numbers of people either refused or couldn't afford to pay the new Poll Tax, which made the tax impossible to police because of insufficient numbers of police, bailiffs, courts and prison cells. The feeling against the new tax was so strong that its introduction led to Poll Tax riots in towns and cities across the country, especially in Central London. The nationwide fury and condemnation of the Poll Tax, especially in the north of England and in Scotland, contributed to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher the following year. Even her most loyal supporters thought she was showing signs of grandeur exceeding her position when following the birth of her first grandchild in March 1989 she announced, ‘We have become a grandmother.'