We need a more dynamic economy that can help workers by allowing them to move where they can best use their skills.

When discussing dynamism, innovation, and disruption, and whether free trade or technological progress drive them, the conversations are often framed around protection: they are concentrated on helping those left behind.The frame accepts that disruption and dynamism are good on average but assumes also that we need to manage and treat both with a degree of suspicion. It assumes that we should not work immediately to maximize dynamism.

In the context of workers, the debate is typically framed around whether we need a state-funded retraining program to re-skill workers who lose their jobs due to various causes, including trade from China, or whether we need to redistribute revenue from London and the South East to places hard hit by economic shifts. I am a realist on that question. I do not pretend that a more dynamic economy is a completely, unalloyed good; there are negatives. It is painful for both the owner and the employees when businesses close. And in the case of communities that rely on a single business or industry, closures can shift entire towns or regions. But I think we have overcorrected too much; we have started to treat dynamism with too much suspicion. We underrate dynamism and overrate stasis, even though stasis harms workers and the least well-off the most while dynamism leads to economic growth.

Recently the nonpartisan campaign group I work with, Britain Remade, partnered with the trade union called Community. In the context of dynamism, we often think that trade unions’ role is negotiating economic disruption when it appears on the horizon. Unions figure out how to decrease harms to workers by securing member benefits, for example, or finding ways to mitigate layoffs caused by new technology. But there is another aspect: the biggest risk to many unions and the workers they represent comes from an inability to build and an inability to make building easier. We surveyed many of Community’s members on issues that affect their lives, and a few ranked very highly, including housing and energy costs. We found that eighty percent of respondents, for example, said that they were not heating their homes as much as they wanted to, due to high energy costs.

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