Job anxiety is hanging heavy in the sultry summer air. The desperation of being unable to find work is no longer confined to characters such as Yosser Hughes, the Liverpudlian tarmac-layer in TV drama Boys From The Blackstuff.
His plea to ‘gizza job’ resonated in 1980s Britain, the decade when, according to Andy Burnham, the UK economy began to go wrong.
Forty years on, the person whose life unravels when they lose their job is just as likely to be a formerly well-off female high achiever.
Someone, perhaps, like metropolitan fashionista Stacey Duguid, who wrote a lacerating piece in this newspaper about her fruitless struggles to find work.
Her experience struck a chord with midlife women who say they are being thwarted by AI bots throwing out their CVs for being the ‘wrong’ age and sex.
