Get Britain Working is totally missing the current employment crisis economy

I have one - pharmacy. Locum rates were approximately £23-26/hr 20 years ago. Locum agencies are now offering as low as £19/hr. With inflation the rate should be £40+ therefore a pharmacy graduates wage has halved.

This.
Never heard of a paramedic on a zero hours contract before.
Not knowing if you are going to get the shifts and afford to eat week to week is pretty stressful.

The person who described working in retail having different shifts each week that were often cancelled or cut short at a moments notice sounds pretty stressful to me if you have bills to pay as most of us do. Unable to get a second job because the first demands full availability to mess you around.

@GreyCloudsLooming snap!

I work in media. Eg: starting salary 35 years ago was 25k. It’s 25k or less now for the same job.

The FT had a thoughtful article about freelancing/self-employment for mid-career professionals sometime last week. I read along agreeing with it, until the end where it discussed daily earnings. I spluttered into my tea there: my daily rate in 2000 (for bit-work I didn't really want to do) was £700 then. Twenty five years on, the figure hasn't risen.

@GreyCloudsLooming What industry employing grads has halved wages? I cannot think of any. Certainly not the one DH was in.

As for parents: they guide. We hear of proud parents all the time but dc don’t get jobs. We need a review of HE.

This

Just seen the economic figures. Everything is worse than expected and September saw negative growth.

Who would have thought that raising taxes would not make good economic sense?

I'm lucky as I have a remote job I enjoy, but if I ever got made redundant I know I would really struggle to find anything locally. I can't move for a job as my kids are settled in school and also live with their dad 50/50

I don't know what careers to advise my kids to go into, everything looks bleak. People recommend trades but then I hear those are hard to get into. Also I worry about my daughter going to work alone for members of the public as there are some weirdos out there and each job she does could bring up unknown risks.

DS decided to move to the Southeast because that's where their desired jobs are clustered. A flat share opportunity came up via a friend. With some savings and rent help from BoMaD, it was doable. And happened. A year of casual work was punctuated by a few interviews and offers in hospitality (which they were escaping). Now six months into a new job with training on MW, it's going okay but BoMaD is still paying the rent, because £1700 pm after tax doesn't cover over £1300 pm in rent, food, commuting costs and bills. And that's one of the lucky ones!

I'd have to think very hard about moving city and signing up for a 6 month (at least) rental contract when I know 2 or 3 people who have been hired this year, worked 3 months notice, got 1 month into the new job and been let go due to costs.

And I definitely would not sell my house and move my family for one.

I think even in a relatively good job people would struggle to afford a small place of their own, to pay bills and and to live so it's not a very attractive proposition.

And you really are a paid stooge.

All the trusts in my area are freezing recruitment. I work in the hospitals -as they fall apart around us, the buildings are crumbling as much as the people - and I work with these young people you are lying about and lying to.

I hope the money they are paying you is seriously good enough to betray all the people of this country into slavery. Except it never can be and one day they will come for it and you.

Absolutely this! Society has its priorities wrong.

It's hardly surprising that no one wants to do care work - or indeed any of the low paid & low status jobs that need doing when those doing them are written off as failures, lazy, uninspired and that's without mentioning the pay that requires top ups to live and poor conditions - which then attracts more criticism from society.

We've created this issue by devaluing those roles, by making them unworthy and being critical of the morality of the people doing them, pay them poorly, treat them badly and then act all surprised when people steer away from that and go for the education and 'better' jobs that have been lauded as everyone's saviour. But rather predictably - there aren't enough 'better' jobs to go around and the low paid, low status ones that have been devalued still need to be done.
But so much easier to huff and puff about no one wanting to work than see that this a situation that had a very predictable result, and so we flog the dead horse, import labour to do these jobs while still telling those educated and in search of 'better' jobs that this is the answer.

(probably generating lots of lovely work for consultants)

I’m not sure the current govt will last that long 😁 Changes are only now at the proposal stage for most and there is so much complexity to work through - what happens to those LAs in on the verge of S114 merging with those that are solvent? There’s then a huge exercise in mapping roles across multiple authorities and deciding which roles are redundant, developing new working models across larger regions etc. I work in a large LA and we can’t even get an accurate report of who’s working for us in what roles as our systems are so poor! At the moment there’s not even agreement between LAs about how they want to reorganise - where I live (not where I work) there’s a small unitary sat within the geography of a large county/district model. The county has proposed something completely different to the unitary for future reorganisation.

Honestly it feels like so much resource is being pulled into reorganisation instead of allowing people to get on with the work they already have to do.

Did you check to see if the roles were internal only? My very large lical teaching hospital looks like it has jobs but they are 99p percent of the time only open to internal candidates ( due to job reductions, redundancies, restructuring etc)

Why do we have scores of foreign nurses on employer sponsered temporary visas when we have home grown nurses looking for work. Time to end the sponsered visas?

Yep

I don't think its just Covid. I think a lot of it is due to living through phones and online. Real worl skills aren't practiced and honed.

It is mismanagement by Government that has led to the current situation. Our energy costs are far too high because we did not forward plan enough. We all know they were told that we need nuclear and that was a Labour Government under Blair that also failed to plan. They also completely and utterly failed to regulate the housing market to keep costs down for all by managing supply and demand based on real life demographics.

To now sit back and say it is the fault of “employers” for not paying a living wage is rubbish. The US is growing because they have cheap energy and affordable housing and incentives for people to have to look after themselves.

Our entire political system is failing because it is bleeding hearts and trying to please everyone and ending up pleasing nobody. Businesses up and leave pretty quickly when they can and you can no longer conduct business in the UK in a reasonable manner.

You cannot pass the failure of successive governments onto private businesses entirely in a capitalist society. It is not a closed economy.
All they can do now is deregulate aggressively. Propping up the economy via the public sector is not going to work. Labour are all out of ideas.

What they need to do is strong incentives towards all remaining talent and deregulation. And ignore the naysayers and miserable people stuck in the past. But they won’t listen because they play according to the 1970s playbook.

It’s better that a gov doesn’t load up struggling companies with extra taxes.

Going by the mention of region and sector from another pp I’m not surprised the combination is causing difficulty.

Here there’s another problem, employees finding a tough market and companies shrinking.

Gov policy will impact on different ways, they can still all be negative.

I talk to lots of employers through our local Chamber of Commerce events. Loads are having difficulty with recruitment across a range of different sectors. Maybe it's geographical, but we are certainly not unusual in our area.