I don't see much of an erosion of rights for workers. Employing people is far more costly now than it has ever been, making people redundant and sacking them (after an initial period) is as difficult as it has ever been. Ever tried sacking a useless employee that also happens to be disabled? That's not a procedure I would wish on anybody.
I think that what has changed more than employees' rights is their expectations. Generation Special Snowflake and their "deferred success" at school, 50% attending university (having the obvious effect of lowering the value of a degree rather than increasing the value of an employee), an over-inflated safety net that causes people to believe they are owed something from life, abolition of learning trades pre-16..... All of this has led to a workforce of people that believe they deserve before they've earned. That's the real danger, and I genuinely don't see how we can fix it any time soon.
Employing people may be costlier now than it has been in the past. But, those people are less likely to be unionized than at any preceding point in the last seventy-odd years, have fewer social welfare outlets to rely on than they did prior to the recession, are only covered by an increasingly overstretched and underfunded NHS and already work in a country with weaker individual and temporary worker protection measures than the OECD average (sometimes drastically - I believe, as of 2015, the OECD's index of worker protections placed the UK second-bottom - on an average indicator scale of 1 to 6, the UK garnered a score of about 1 across the collective, individual and temporary employment protection measures, in comparison to Germany at 2.5, France at 3 and Turkey/Portugal as the leaders with 3.5). Only the United States has fewer relative employment protections - again, going by OECD data. And this is ignoring the dramatic developments in worker abuses at the bottom end of the scale - the Sports Directs, the Hermes' and the other employers increasingly relying on zero-hours contracts and other measures to shaft people only looking for a decent day's work at a decent day's pay. Emotive, if not necessarily completely representative, cases - and cases which could set very real precedents for the future.
And the erosion of rights is very real - the Trade Union Act and its new restrictions on striking is only the most public recent example of this, but there was also the dramatic extension of the time period of employment needed for an unfair dismissal claim against any employer, the restriction of employment tribunal claims by the implementation of fees, the drastic reduction in the number of days required for collective consultation by any employer prior to firing 100 or more employees simultaneously, and a range of other smaller measures packaged into the Tories' various regulatory reform bills over the years. Worse still will come, when the EU's worker protections cease to apply to the UK and will need to be substituted by what the Tories presumably think workers should be entitled to - which it isn't illogical to assume won't be anywhere near as extensive as what the EU thought workers should be entitled to.
As for that whole 'generation snowflake' thing - firstly, again, you're chastising the wrong people for it. People attended university for the wrong reasons, no one's disputing that. But the problem didn't come from the universities - their function was, and is, to pursue knowledge and educate people interested in studying humans as we think ourselves to be, the world as we perceive it to be, and the universe as we believe it to be.
The idea that universities were to become job training centres came from companies too greedy and self-interested to do that sort of job training themselves - they thought they could outsource that job to universities and then reap the benefits later. Again, privatizing profits and socializing costs.
Germany went the opposite direction - their university enrollment rates are actually lower than the Western European average because more than half of all German students choose to join apprenticeship programs that are jointly funded by employers and the government. After four years of on-the-job training (paid for by the employer) and classroom learning (paid for by the government), they are usually guaranteed a job with the company they apprenticed with.
There are considerable downsides to this system - people become too specialized in one narrow avenue of employment that may not have value later on in life, and that specialization often starts as early as 11 or 12 years old (when students are advised to choose between academic or vocational streams based on their aptitude). And people have far fewer choices at various stages in life due to the regimented nature of this system.
But, at its heart lies an idea that the universities are not meant to be conveyer belts for corporate employees as much as they are meant to be bastions of intellectual and experimental pursuits, questioning and leaning. If the companies want employees, they pay up and train them themselves.
You presumably want people to follow the German system and get out of universities and into vocational training - your efforts would be better served telling companies to establish mass training and recruitment programs, because they are the ones who have skimped out on their responsibilities in the UK.
Not the kids, who (as I keep mentioning) are the most intelligent, well-read, broadly educated and capable of any generation, ever - just by dint of going through universities at a rate their forebears couldn't manage. Not the universities, who quite rightly don't want to become employee conveyor belts shorn of any intellectual purpose or tradition. Not the government, which earnestly believed that education was a right and legislated to preserve that right - 'education' here meaning far more than 'being moulded into the ideal employee'.
The companies that shirked their social responsibilities, as too many companies unfortunately do all the damn time, are the ones you should be blaming.
