Staff shortages are now a national crisis

[Confusedofbritain]

Staff shortages across many sectors is now a national crisis surely? I’ve given up expecting anything of this government, but why isn’t Labour beating them with a stick over this?

Some examples which affect me personally….

• Can’t go on holiday due to cancelled flight, cause by lack of ground staff.
• I work for NHS trust and we have closed a ward due to c 50% vacancies. We have plenty of money but can’t spend it. Now competing with other trusts paying increasingly high golden handshakes.
• Tried to book restaurant for Tuesday birthday. Not possible as all places shut Monday and Tuesday due to short staff (esp chefs).
• Poor service when we do go out. Staff look frazzled.
• Can’t get a builder to do an extension. Often not bothering to quote. Builder friend can’t keep labourers and brickies. Paying increasingly high wages but getting poached.
• Window fitter quoted me 2x higher than 2019 (for a much smaller window!) probably because they’re so busy and can’t increase capacity due to lack of staff. So prices have gone up by 100%.
• Long delay in discharge for father from hospital, due to long waits for care package (caused by staff shortages). He was in hospital a lot longer than necessary and declined hugely as result.

It’s largely caused by Brexit, partly people retiring or changing livelihood during Covid…:.but why wasn’t this anticipated and what are we doing about it?

I want to see posters EVERYWHERE encouraging people to consider NHS careers. It’s a rewarding career, but impossible to cope and keep going with so few staff. We are escalating to NHS England constantly, saying we need a national solution. It’s beyond critical, but I’m not confident that there is a national drive to sort this out.

The economic and social consequences of ignoring this massive structural issue will be disastrous!

Yes that sounded good

Do they no longer exist?

Why aren't we able to retain staff, like teachers where do those teachers who leave every year actually go?

Back to previous careers - many of our frirned have tried it as HE sector has it's own issues and then found conditions so bad they either go back or try something else.

Many sectors have issues with retention - acedemica has aging departments in some subjects but carrer pogression has been made harder. Permanent positions are often not untill early to mid 30s when people have children and other halfs have carrers and moving round counrty is so much harder.

I don't think it so much expanding university numbers it's lack of clear career progression across the board -many careers/job areas progression onwards or adequate training are none existant. On top of that many areas have worsening work conditions and increasing responsibility and pay hasn't kept up.

Thers been an massive eroding of jobs for life but also investment in employees it's hardly surprising that people swap josb and sectors trying to get the best deal for themsleves in reponse.

What a waste. I would love to find a French conversation group to improve my French. Could she offer something like that?

She's a single parent. Those groups tend to happen in the evening, and don't provide a steady income. She tried doing children groups but the pandemic killed her business

Have to agree

But the current government has cut education funding for years. There is no funding for things like career guidance. I've taught for 20 years and never seen school budgets in such dire straits. It always baffles me why a wealthy country would seemingly not want a well-educated population, for all the reasons you state, but actions speak louder than words. I think it must be deliberate. Keep the masses uneducated so they won't challenge you and rely on a privately-educared minority to do all the influential jobs. It won't work though as the independent schools are largely not churning out doctor's, vets etc.

Yes it's a real shame

It’s not a straight forward fix though.

move been looking at nhs jobs for years but they all require training/qualifications I don’t have. Nor can I afford a £10k + pay cut.

It is deliberate - we need a certain number of children failing (or how would we establish grade boundaries). Sally Tomlinson is a good one to read about this.
To the poster who mentioned sandwich degrees - we now have apprenticeship degrees - your uni fees are paid for and you get experience and a wage. Highly competitive to get onto - easier to actually get into a top university it seems.
Blair years - I am no fan of Blair but he was trying to create a fair playing field and create workers for a developing knowledge economy. My 32 year old is a success story of that era - I was an 18 year old single parent when I had him. Money was ploughed into schools (particularly London schools) and there was a real sense of that if you want to go to uni - you can go. In the present day - a degree, 2 masters, a career with a ridiculously responsible job for the gov, student loan paid off - nearly paid his mortgage off - above all he enjoys his job.
I think we have to also remember here that low pay and workers rights are not addressed as capitalism requires exploitation to realise surplus capital.
Finally (grammar schools) I live in a grammar school area - they work for predominantly middle class parents who pay for their children to be tutored to pass a test.

DD decided not to go to university thank goodness. She has an EU passport due to her heritage, applied for it as soon as Brexit was mentioned. She was bullied by certain teachers at school because she found it difficult to conform to the standard formula for essay writing etc. Still, she did well in most subjects, speaks 4 languages and writes professionally as part of her job. Lives in an EU country and is likely to remain there.
Education here is so controlled and teachers are constrained and inspected and monitored to excess. I don't think anyone benefits.

I'm bright, intelligent, computer literate, hard working and reliable.
I want a job with a certain amount of autonomy that I enjoy doing. I saw a supervisor role the other day that looked interesting, the salary was 10p more than minimum wage.
I live near Bristol, I'd retrain to work in an airport but they would have to pay enough money to cover my travel costs, make it worth my while doing the extra travel and pay me a decent wage for the privilege of having me work for them. They also need to have sensible work patterns with decent terms and conditions.

Do they do that? Not in my experience.

I'll keep doing my current job then as it gets me by.

Employers have yet to accept that they need to attract people to work for them, those that are struggling to recruit and getting a bad reputation for poor customer service are bringing it on themselves.

If the government bails them out because of their poor planning and organisation then that would be outrageous. They need to stop paying shareholders so much and invest it back into the business.

Yes airlines demand shift work and it is hard for families to work round this

I've just returned from a city break in Italy and the flight delays, and delays to baggage loading/unloading were significant, due to staff shortages. Even the pilot announced that if anyone wanted a job there are plenty available!

I agree a lot of EU workers have sadly left the UK, but also, and this may be a controversial view, I think there are a lot of people who liked being at home during Covid and now don't want a job where they have to be at their workplace every day - so service industries are buggered.

It was noticeable in Italy how attentive and hard working staff in restaurants, shops etc were. No shoddy service at all.

People want things for as cheap as possible, and part of that is cheap labour we have exploited previously isn't as readily available.

A lot of the people on the unemployment figures aren't long term unemployed at all. There is a lot of churn, where people sign on for a few weeks or months in between jobs.

As for those genuinely long term unemployed, plenty are like some of the people I encountered doing volunteer work for adult literacy. People aged 55+ with poor literacy who had done manual labouring jobs in their youth, but now couldn't do it any more but didn't qualify for disability and still had 10-12 years before they got a state pension.

Now even after they had worked on their literacy, they might be able to laboriously read a letter from the council, but they couldn't hope to work in a fast paced admin role.

Noone is going to employ these people. They are not up to physical work any more and can't cope with office work.

Yet some of those people who voted in favour of Brexit also benefitted from the cheap labour is

Yes that's a good point

AI is already in your house? I thought anything of that nature was still only for the very wealthy and a loong way off being affordable to many , either people or businesses..

AI isn't just futuristic fully-independent humanoids or similar. Common home devices like Alexa or Roomba vacuums use AI.

@Missillusioned
As for those genuinely long term unemployed, plenty are like some of the people I encountered doing volunteer work for adult literacy. People aged 55+ with poor literacy who had done manual labouring jobs in their youth, but now couldn't do it any more but didn't qualify for disability and still had 10-12 years before they got a state pension.

This really resonated with me. I have a trades freind in exactly this position. I helped him apply for a telehandler course through the job centre/UC because he can no longer be a bricklayers hodder due to old injuries and age but the telehandler role would mechanise & enable this. The job centre refused funding. It was around £1200 incl transport but he can't afford it himself as on benefits. There are lots of telehandler jobs but nope, UC won't fund it so would rather leave him on UC and local housing allowance at around 1k pcm. Madness. His literacy is not great either. He's been waiting for his driving licence for months so can get a delivery driver job but DVLA on some kind of go slow/ shut down. I despair🤷

Then the service industries need to start upping their game to attract people to work for them instead of wringing their hands and saying it's not their fault everyone is lazy because they prefer to wfh in a different area.
If some people have decided that they are happier wfh and they can wfh and that means there's less people available for service industries, then those industries need to value the staff they have got, and start looking at ways to make working in them more attractive than wfh, not bury their heads in the sand and ignore it. These industries work by exploiting people, and the general consensus is that if you don't like it you can get a better job - well that's what's happening, people have gone and got jobs that are better for them and there's less people to do the crappy ones - hardly surprising really.

Even easier ride for corrupt politicians and their pals, too.

Tell me about it. Our local vets are shut to new clients, we’ve been at the same dentist for years but they won’t see us until they can employ a new dentist. All the vets have a waiting list. Pubs are only doing food 3 nights a week.

I wish I had your incisive brain!

Just get those lazy arses off their sofas and into the operating theatres and classrooms, performing transplants and inspiring young minds.

Why did no-one think of that before?

I.26 mill unemployed, 1.26 mill jobs - Simples!

America is signing a deal to send Mexican refugees to Spain and Haitian refugees to Canada. That's innovative

Lol, I genuinely just spat coffee all over my keyboard there...

I have more chance of winning the lottery, that I don't enter, than I have of ever being able afford an Alexa.....let alone the reliable internet to run one... and that's assuming I'd actually want such a frivolous toy in my home.

Neither the Alexa nor the toy vacuum cleaner robot are taking jobs away though

I was in engineering for a long time in a past life... I saw the start of automation in factories .. now THAT took a lot of skilled jobs away and eventually killed off a part of the UK industry