There's life after the job, even if you haven't a sausage

Next year’s graduates and/or school-leavers will be forced back to having to think and forage for themselves

THE MAN in the stained apron told us that he had learned the rudiments of sausage-making as a child while visiting his Irish grandmother somewhere in Co Wicklow. He couldn’t recall exactly where it was, but she had reared pigs, and during his holidays he had helped her to mix and make the sausages.

But it wasn’t until he left behind a 30-year career in advertising that he finally set up Biggles, a tiny shop that sells sausages in what’s become one of London’s fanciest neighbourhoods, off Marylebone High Street.

His workplace is simplicity itself – just himself and a couple of machines – one for mixing the meat and another contraption that takes it in at one end and feeds it out the other as ropes of sausages. These are lined up in a single chill counter, and behind is an oven he uses for cooking hot dogs. As he talked, a tall man in a pinstripe suit waited patiently for his Cumberlands, telling us that they were “the best in London”.

It was the bit about the 30 years in advertising that got my attention. The man worked through the heyday of British advertising – 70s London was the equivalent of 60s New York for sheer class and innovation, so think Mad Men but swap the sharp overcoats and Fedoras for polo necks and sideburns – but eventually he was happy to leave it all behind for a pile of pigmeat.

The idea that there is life after the office, or after the job, needs to be talked about right now. With downsizing and cutbacks rife, there’s an army of people out there who have put 10, 20, even 30 years into a job, and who are now out of work and in search of a future. We’re talking construction workers, factory workers, IT workers, people in sales and marketing, estate agents, architects, teachers, chefs, couriers, designers and middle managers, not to mention swathes of senior civil servants who’ve quit their jobs early to protect their pension entitlements – all looking for something new to do.

During a previous downturn, a rogueish property developer told me that when letting people go he would tell them that he was “releasing them” so that they could go and do what they really wanted to do. Nasty, yes, but there’s some truth to it, too.

It seems that even more of us are going to be “released” over the next year, with the Taoiseach predicting a further 80,000 job losses in 2010.

Lifelong careers are over, according to a friend made redundant last year, who, 80s child that she is, expected that if she worked hard and stayed loyal she could call her desk her own until retirement. Being let go initially meant that she could take long soaks in the bath and short breaks all over Europe, but she quickly buckled down to what she calls her “portfolio career” – a series of separate jobs and short-term contracts that keep her busy, but earn her a lot less. She has had to let go of the trappings of status and money, but the headwreck of office politics has gone too. Now she is happy to simply work.

It’s not just the recently unemployed who need to get started in new enterprises, but graduates who expected that their qualifications would guarantee them a well-paid job just as soon as they were ready for it, and who are now wondering where all the jobs have gone.

I know a lot of parents who, when you ask after their children, describe an educational Holy Grail, with this university degree followed by that diploma or doctorate, as their children take their time deciding what it is that they would really like to do. University courses proliferated to meet the demands of this generation of “can’t decides” who may now find themselves outpaced by younger, hungrier graduates.

Next year’s crop of graduates and/or school-leavers will be forced back to a more elemental stage of having to think and forage for themselves, their prospects of being absorbed by large organisations with good pay likely to be severely limited. We’d gotten comfortable with the idea of the big company or the institution, or the Government ministry being the apex of civilisation – workplaces where pay and conditions were guaranteed and everyone got looked after. Now, with cutbacks everywhere, it’s time for many to go it alone.

This may lead to a burst of entrepreneurship, but for that to happen, certain supports have to be introduced, like fast internet service countrywide. There is no earthly use in the Taoiseach talking about the Smart Economy when many citizens can’t even get e-mail. More importantly, the banks need to open for business. Right now they are not lending to anyone. They are hoarding their money, and seed capital is a forgotten concept.

If the Government is serious about getting Ireland back on its axis, it needs to get liquidity back into business, and it needs to encourage people to have new ideas they can sell, like the Irish granny’s sausages.