AIBU to think redundancy crisis is not getting enough media coverage?

I feel like this about back when jobs were advertised in newspapers. I saw and applied and got jobs that I would have never come across in a key word search for jobs.

Supermarket jobs are hard to get unless to know someone! The online tests are ridiculous especially when you know the people who managed to pass the tests. Aren’t either going to be helpful etc or won’t have time to help!
My DD already works in a supermarket but failed the M&S online test! She is actually a team leader!! Yet you shop in M&S there are no staff on the shop floor and one poor sod looking after at 20 self service tills!!

Not sure about AI. I recall the argument over computerisation in the late 70s/80s.

Without wanting to crap on the “told you so” party too much, there are a lot of “first to go to uni” types affected by this now who have first hand experience of what happened when automation and globalisation came for working class jobs because we watched it happen to our parents. Now it’s happening to us too.

I’m not seeing more redundancies than I would consider the norm in private sector IT/education industry which is where I am. It’s ’that Time of year’ when they start getting ready for reforecasting the budget, q4 efficiencies to meet the year end targets and restructuring to appear as attractive as possible to private equity investors.

I was talking about people over state retirement age. A lot of them are working because they need the money, so fair enough.

But some are working because they want to.

did You read it?

“The Home Office scheme allows registered employers to recruit workers from overseas who meet a certain skill level. The rules were tightened in July 2025 to restrict the scheme mostly to graduate-level employees who would be earning at least £41,700”

“More than 100 of those businesses were added to the skilled worker sponsorship list after the rules were tightened. Being on the register does not mean applications for individual visas would be approved.”

Often people don’t make the cut at interviews. There might be so many midwifes but if they don’t reach the required scoring they won’t get the job.

The actual stats show redundancies are not at a high level compared to recent years. But lets not let the facts get in the way of anecdotes Redundancies - Office for National Statistics

You’re right, that’s happening because there’s an entire new overlord class of venture capitalists who buy companies, asset strip them, then work to “capture” their customers so they’re locked in and milked for more revenue in exchange for a rapidly degrading service. Get rid of the workforce, give customers a worse experience, tell the investors (who are increasingly other VC overlords) how great it’s going.

The really terrifying bit is that AI isn’t delivering anywhere near the measurable benefits to justify the biggest capital investment in history it’s become. It makes Tulip Mania look relatively sane.

God help the CEO who goes all-in on AI to run things, then finds the costs of using the tools going up and up and up because it’s time to make the investment back. Those companies will then be the “captured audience” being milked while getting an ever-worsening product, but having let all their skills and experience go they’ll have no choice but to let it happen.

Can confirm redundancies are being made in the discretionary spending sector. My partner works for a huge employer (ready meals, sandwiches, pasta salads, pasties, etc). 10% of staff are being culled across the board so that includes managers, IT staff and factory floor.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj639rx147eo

No one gets a visa to work in a vape shop.

I thought the same when I saw the power outage in the North pop up!

And there has never been the consistent investment in former mining/industrial communities to rebuild, whole communities with no secure forms of decent employment. I too am empathic, but no one was loosing sleep over those losses.

I used to work as a contractor. We all knew that often agents just invented jobs as they just needed to gather in CV’s and mine people for information. As you become more experienced it becomes easy to tell which is a real job and which is just a fishing expedition.

@NorthYorksNews

One of the issues with it is it doesn’t capture the large amount of unofficial employment in hidden economic activity

Nor do the unemployment figures capture people who are simply not working, i.e. early retirement etc and not claiming benefits.

There are jobs in AI Entry Level Ai Job in London (with Salaries) | Indeed United Kingdom https://share.google/nqrl5fu4ea8hliEOc

In fairness I sat in many meetings with NHS bureaucrats and they always bought and astonishing number of people along and then half the meeting would go buy while they debated things among themselves. So based on what I saw there was definitely some bloating

Really??? So older women who are 60 and have no other income or support, and won't get a pension until they are 67 are supposed to give up their job in favour of who exactly? And once they've waited through the statutory period for people who give up their jobs they can claim benefits, and we can all bash them again for scrounging.

It was in the news today, lots of people were getting visas to come and work in vape shops/corner shops

I am at risk of redundancy and most likely will be made redundant in a couple of months. Yes it is everywhere. My brother in law was made redundant last July and just managed to find a new job last month so a whole year of no employment and his new job is a massive pay cut.

My cousin has also just been made redundant in June and a friend was made redundant last October and still has no job.

I agree OP that all you hear about is youth unemployment.

It’s incredibly worrying and I have had many sleepless nights over this. I do think AI is a tsunami heading towards the workforce and think every single politician is burying their head in the sand over this.

Funny you should mention war; it's not always what it used to be, and all an enemy has to do is shut down the internet to cause utter chaos

Out of interest, exactly what use is AI then?

It's different this time. It's impacting middle class professionals and their university educated children, so it's a 'crisis'. I was brought up in a Yorkshire mining area and you are right, nobody gave can shit about whole communities devastated by unemployment. Not just miners but all the sectors that relied on their wages, same with steel, same with textiles. But we were told it was an inevitable restructuring and modernisation and 'get on your bike and go and find work'
This is no different, just impacting different people. I'm empathetic by nature and do have some empathy for the current plite of AI takeover of jobs, but there was little empathy from the educated middle class when it wasn't them, as per usual, tbh.

The majority of NHS redundancies are actually in ICBs, which are critical decision-makers in how to spend the NHS budget locally. ICBs were restructured in 2023/24 with a 30% budget cut, and are currently restructuring again with a ~40% budget cut. So taking into account the mass redundancies of a couple of years ago as well, it's actually well over 12-13,000 job losses just in ICBs, before you even get to considering NHSE. But it's fine because Wes Streeting called us all "unnecessary bureaucrats" to feed the media narrative that all forms of management in the NHS are bad. 🙄