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!

if you work full time you should be able to afford a place to live and to put food on the table for your family, it’s that simple really, otherwise why work??

A full time minimum wage job does not provide enough to afford a family sized home and support a whole family, nor should it be. There needs to be a collective shift out of this mindset that minimum wage should be enough to raise a family on, because it isn’t and never will be.

Minimum wage jobs are for students, youngsters living at home, single people or people who only need to provide a supplementary income to their household. They are not for people who expect to be able to have their own home and raise a family. If people want more than the very basics in life, then they need to earn more than a very basic wage.

BUT, the main reason we can't book is that restaurants are rammed. Locally they are still running two sittings, one early and one late, and you have to book weeks in advance, and they are not shut, ever

But the usual agitators are whining and talking about national crises everywhere😳

Unemployed single mum, several kids, never had a job. Low IQ, almost illiterate unable to complete a job application

She can work as a cleaner, simple.

So.... all those disabled people who have been medically deemed unfit and too sick to work should miraculously self-cure and get a job? Or live in abject poverty?

The Europeans went back to Europe because of Brexit, and also the rise in anti-Europe rhetoric making them feel unsafe and unwelcome. For example I know a German lady who moved from UK to Bulgaria because of Brexit. A lot of Polish builders and plumbers have left.

The pandemic didn’t help either, some workers in UK found themselves unable to get to work because of months of lockdowns, so they moved back to their home country instead and didn’t bother to come back.

Ironically I know a lot of recently-arrived Ukranian refugees in UK who are desperate for work but (just based on what I’ve personally seen) the women who managed to escape Ukraine early while the roads still worked, find their way across Europe, successfully navigate bureaucracy, and find a decent UK host, are mostly from
middle class professions in Ukraine. The women I have met are accountants, bankers, headteachers, musicians. They do not know how to do a minimum wage admin job and they are looking for ways to use their current qualifications and skill sets instead.

This. My employer has allowed someone who has just come back from maternity leave to work flexibly when her baby is sleeping and when her husband is back from work (obviously not all jobs are suitable).

Employers will have to be more flexible now which is a good thing for mothers. If we still had unlimited immigration my employer would not need to do this and a new mother would be unemployed.

@Swayingpalmtrees Yes, I could pick fruit, clear glasses in a pub, clean an office, change beds in a hotel, stand on a packing line, do admin in a school, work in MacDonalds, sit entering data all day...

(and in the past I have done four of those things)

But guess what? Nobody wants me. I'm over 50, I don't have a local accent and frankly sound quite prissy, I have no experience of Managing My Time With Competing Deadlines, and I don't know the SIMS software. Oh, and my last employer "reference" was over a decade ago (covering 12 months, with another decade to go earlier than that).

I'm educated to degree level and I don't have caring responsibilities, addictions, mental health issues or a chaotic lifestyle. If I'm finding it impossible how are some of the long-term unemployed described upthread supposed to change things?

I mean, never mind the pay levels, if employers are really desperate for people they need to start accepting that they have to actually train us.

They do not know how to do a minimum wage admin job

What do you mean they 'don't know'?

It isn't that people think it's OK for others to sit on their arses claiming benefits while others work hard to pay their taxes.

It's that you're massively over-simplifying the situation. You present it as a numbers game - x many unemployed people and x many jobs. You seem not to understand that the skills required by those vacancies doesn't necessarily match the skills or capabilities of those who are out of work. And it isn't as simple as training people up - not everyone can be trained to do everything. It isn't an easy fix like you seem to think.

I’ve been out of the nhs for a long while, and would be super interested to learn more about this, if you could point me to good resources?

No one ever wants to talk about the real reasons!

1.26 million being paid to stay at home
A bloated and mismanaged NHS system we simply can not afford
A sense of superiority that no one can work as a cleaner/waitress etc as they need a 'suitable' job for their many talents that is largely unfounded
The pandemic has made lots of people lazy and complacent
The retirees prefer being in the garden to the many voluntary jobs/part time work they were doing, which has probably become rather thankless
Not to mention the half arsed customer service we are getting from someones back bedroom whilst they are gaming

Lol of course @Swayingpalmtrees has a problem with people WFH too. This has to be satire.

This!!!!
Covid hid the inevitable impact of brexit and now here we are. More jobs than people to do them with no clear way to change that.
There's a tory mp on radio now saying there is a shortage because the government have been so successful in getting people into work. It is shameful and deliberate misdirection.
She is arguing with someone who works at Gatwick who is telling her brexit is a massive contributing factor that the industry needs to increase wages and consider flexible working options ......yesh because it is so straightforward and wouldnt impact inflation, costs

Its infuriating

Boomers are retiring, they were always a larger population than other generations.

We are told there are too many people on the earth, yet younger generations aren't as big as boomers.

Tony Blair wanted half the population to have a degree. It's not their fault a lot of graduates had smoke blown up their arse that they were superior beings - to justify the students loans - and between that message being drummed into them along with social media strange ideas they are up themselves like no other generation before millennials onwards have been. We now have a theme - not all obviously - of immature narcissistic 40 year olds and under who think others and jobs are beneath them.

*More than 190,000 EU nationals left the UK, a smaller number than a year earlier when almost 260,000 departed. Many of those who left did so in the immediate aftermath of the first lockdown in March 2020. However, the number immigrating into the country fell by 100,000 to just over 180,000.

The loss of EU nationals was eclipsed by net migration from elsewhere. Four times as many non-EU citizens arrived in the UK than exited. As a result, total net migration stood at 239,000, only marginally less than the previous year*

So immigration hasn't necessarily fallen much, just that they are coming from elsewhere. They are working somewhere, where??

Yet DS 19 a student who lives locally to the area (so available all year round) applied for over 100 jobs and couldn’t get one for months.

Have you actually seen rental prices in London swayingpalmtrees My DD who is on £50k as a single woman, has barely anything left after she's paid her rent. So how the hell is someone on £10.50 an hour going to manage. No wonder there are vacancies.

The unemployment statistics also include all those who are unemployed by choice though. Not all are seeking work

Thank you artisan there are plenty of people 'choosing' to stay unemployed, and this has to change.

Sorry, I actually meant the opposite, that the statistics include those who don't need to seek work and are not claiming benefits, eg SAHP, those whose partners earn enough that they don't need to work, those who have a source of income outside work. There are not 1.26 million people who need to find to find a job.

Nothing has changed with Brexit. There are millions of settled status applications granted, over 5 million or so. Everyone who has ever worked and lived in the UK and wanted to stay was granted it.

Staff shortages and more complex that just blaming everything Brexit.

It's the low pay and the fact that it's better to stay on UC than to work.

I left the social care sector (Home Care Manager) years ago because of all the reasons and issues quoted as a problem now. This is fifteen years ago. Brexit was no such thing and staff retention will always be an issue, poor pay, conditions etc. We were not for profit and struggled to break even. People do not want to pay for home care. Care Home nearby only pay minimum wage for 12 hr night shift. I would never, ever go back. Labour/Conservatives have never got a grip on this.

Yes it is harder to get decent workmen but quality builders have always been in demand. Cue to the rise in DIY projects. We were quoted £9,000 for a new double garage roof. My dh and gs did it themselves and when they stripped it back, found rotten timbers which the roofers did not see and so the price would have been higher. It cost around £2,000 but was incredibly hard work. That said, all the roofers did quote.

Hospitality locally is offering higher rates of pay than the care sector. What a situation.

LOL

Of course, retired people are supposed ... to be working lol

NHS is too big even though we have the lowest number of hospital beds per 100.000people in Europe (same with the number of doctors etc...). Yep. That will be the reason...
WFH is of course the reason why you cant even fill the positions . Because the fact they are working shouldnt stop them from applying for other full time job (to do at the same time than their WFH job maybe?)