Operation Phoenix 2: A study of living and working in a technological society

Abstract

I have made the point that the unidimensional approach leads to all manner of distortions, incorrect courses of action and innumerable blind alleys. It is a useful exercise to identify some of these major errors in unidimensional thinking in the immediate past. One of the biggest, for example, was encouraging the immigration of people from developing countries on the single criterion that they would provide a source of labour from which to fill menial and unattractive jobs at the lower end of the scale which were spurned by our own population. Here was to be the means by which lazy and unimaginative employers could refuse to face the challenge of change by picking up an entirely new supply of docile near‐slaves. This, of course, was the age of undreamed of prosperity in which we harboured visions of perpetual growth in the conventional economy. It was a situation based on the traditional view of economics. But it took no account whatever of social and human factors. There was the ready assumption that this underprivileged group would be prepared, for ever, to accept the status of second‐class citizens; their children, too. It didn't happen that way: the second generation saw themselves as equal in every way to the indigenous population and insisted on their rights as full citizens. And it happened within two decades — as quickly as that — leaving in its wake a problem of such dimensions that one inner city area of London achieved within that time a state in which one third of its total population were of immigrant origin.

Citation

Wellens, J. (1981), "Operation Phoenix 2: A study of living and working in a technological society", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 79-84. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb003823