The disappearance of the old big industries such as mining, iron and steel production and ship-building have had another effect. Many jobs have been created to 'regenerate' the old industrial areas and make them pleasant places in which to live. The government has tried to develop new specialist industries and big, colourful cultural centres. Not all the schemes have been successful, but multiple efforts to clean these cities fundamentally - cleaning the slums, the streets, the rivers, the canals, the parks, the wasteland, the ruins of industrial collapse - has stimulated much more enthusiasm and employment within them.
As manual workers have become a smaller part of our working population, the previously 'semi-skilled' labour market is now devoted to 'service' jobs: work in retail, restaurants, hotels and other tourist services, in all kinds of 'care' work for people who need help, and in jobs intended to make our lives cleaner, safer, and more pleasant. (A question hanging over Britain's national economy is whether we can sustain this high level of service jobs without actually manufacturing more things and creating wealth in that way.)
What kinds of jobs are available in Britain for people with higher education? Are they different from 'Russian' jobs? ' Many jobs for university graduates or people with some kind of professional training are basically similar to yours in that they are necessary and established in all developed societies. For example, we, like you, need - in no particular order - teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses, small businessmen, big businessmen (a different kind of person), managers at various levels in organisations, accountants, civil servants (people who work for the ministries, putting policy into practice), local government officials, politicians, researchers, publishers, architects and planners, journalists, computer specialists, policemen, lawyers. As a proportion of the population we probably have more social workers (employed by the local authority to deal with all kinds of social problems in their area) than you in Russia, more specialists in environmental work, including work on ways to ameliorate climate change; more experts concerned with the preservation of all our old, precious buildings, our towns and our landscape; more voluntary and charitable workers (see Part 6, chapters 2 and 3); more counsellors, advisers, support staff, liaison officers between this organisation and that; more journalists, investigators, searchers-after-truth and searchers-after-trouble.
And if you want exotic jobs you can strive to become a lighthouse keeper or a tree surgeon or a stonemason or a poet laureate, or give up formal work and join the men and women who search for flotsam and jetsam on our sea shores after high-tide.
What about behaviour at work? If you still dare to believe in the information given to you in Soviet and Russian textbooks, we live in a world of strange rituals and stranger formality. Those oddities disappeared decades ago except for a very few professions. In offices we tend to work in open-plan offices, including managers working with those whom they manage. We are usually expected to go to work in 'smart informal' clothes, which means something clean which is not jeans. Employers are very conscious of their 'image' in the world of work: for example they will often grant time off to their employees for doing voluntary work or they may go for a drink in the pub with those employees without any sense of special status. Our patterns of work become more varied from month to month: working from home at least one day a week is commonplace, as are arrangements like 'flexitime' (flexible working hours). In Britain we have a huge range of part-time jobs, most often done by women, and most often from choice. In fact there is plenty of evidence that more part-time jobs would be welcome, provided they offered the same benefits as full-time jobs (such as holidays and maternity pay).
Businesses are not usually very hierarchical; directors and managers like to talk about 'the team' and 'close co-operation among our colleagues' and 'support for our staff when they need it'. There is little of the individualistic 'cut-and-thrust' of American businesses. However, when things go wrong, the finger is pointed at a particular individual. At this point teamwork seems to break down. In general, the British try to establish an atmosphere of responsible friendliness, in which employees are not always looking over their shoulder, terrified of being watched and criticised, but on the other hand are willing to admit their mistakes when mistakes happen, so that they can learn and do better. Not all companies manage this kind of atmosphere, but it is what most of them aim for.
Punctuality in almost all jobs is important. (I have the impression that Russians are much less strict in this matter.) But for the employees it is not really a question of 'I must be punctual!' People who wander in late or who forget to turn up to meetings are rapidly refused the possibility of promotion and can be dismissed. So one advantage of flexitime and other arrangements whereby people can work at times which suit themselves is that the chronically unpunctual can still get their work done - by staying much later or by completing it at home.
Earnings are one way of measuring a job - but although people need money, they care about other matters too: job security, responsibility, freedom to work in one's own way, a friendly atmosphere, and status. Different jobs offer different combinations of these advantages so that conditions of work which seem wonderful to one person can seem unpleasant or distressing to someone else. The British work longer hours than most people in the European Union, and most of these 'extra' hours are unpaid overtime. (Official overtime should be paid at one-and-a-half times or twice the standard rate.) No-one exactly knows why so many British workers are reluctant to go home when they have completed their official hours. Is it because they wish to demonstrate how good they are? Or is it because they don't want to go home? Or is it because they feel they can't go home until the manager goes - and the manager won't leave until his manager leaves...? Or is it that they love the job so passionately that they cannot bear to leave? In 2009 this is still a strong trend but not quite as strong as it was - as if it were beginning to dawn on people that leisure and relaxation and 'being at home' were also worthwhile and important.
We do not know how many people in Britain work at two or three jobs as many in Russia do. If you have an official fulltime job, the hours, as I have explained, are long, and you will find it extremely difficult to take on second job unless it involves very short hours. With part-time jobs, flexi-time and working from home, a culture of doing-several-jobs becomes both practical and (possibly) lucrative. People tell me that unofficially many more people are working in this way in Britain than the figures suggest. What I do know is that we have far fewer teachers in schools who rush around from job to job, partly because their hours are long and fixed, chiefly because their salaries are reasonable and fair.
We are also bottom of the league when European holiday entitlements are compared. The European Union in 2009 has a law that all employees should have a minimum of 20 days of paid holiday excluding national public holidays. Britain has only eight public holidays and is not going to raise that 20-day minimum. So in 2009, if you are working in Denmark you get 39 days of paid leave, and if you live in Britain you get 28 days. The other EU countries come between. (We are all in a much better situation that the USA which has no legal entitlement to paid holidays, and in practice, an average of 10 days for the full-time employee.)