expected to have a good general education and the capacity to accommodate solutions to changing
circumstances. In more basic service jobs the formal level of skill is often low, whereas a high degree
of social skills is demanded.
Thirdly, we can to some extent relate changes in the form of employment to the larger process of
change that we are discussing here. Nobody can claim that full-time employment and steady work was
the norm in previous years. Where this has been the case, it has only been for a short period of time in
the history of industrial work and industrialism. As late as the between-the-wars era, different forms of
temporary employment contracts, including seasonal work, were still very common. In the post-war
period, too, whe