To think people in decent jobs don't realise how hard it is to get a second crappy job..

[ssd]

I keep seeing comments on the tax credits threads about tc claimants needing to work more, like its that easy.

I can imagine if you have kept up your job since having kids due to either being able to afford childcare or having that and a mix of free family help, then you will be earning a decent enough wage and there might be overtime at your organisation, or at the very least you will be on set hours/days...so if you wanted overtime you'd know when you were available to work.

I can imagine thousands on tax credits arent in this position. I work part time and have been trying to get a full time job, or at least another part time job that would fit in with the job I have.

Its bloody impossible and trust me, I'm trying!!

Full time jobs are very rare, round here its all part time job requiring full time flexibility...so they offer you 20 hours a week and expect you to be free all week to fit around them, this makes it impossible to have 2 part time jobs

So for every poster saying "work more", please consider this isnt as easy as you'd imagine.

Strawberryfield12

You have barely scratched the surface when it comes to childcare and working. Juggling both a career, multiple jobs, the demands of running a household, a child who may or may not be clingy/needy/a non sleeper/have behavioural problems/learning disability in the future etc single parent or not its hard.

Not to mention the difficulty when school starts. Reception classes here have 3 weeks of transition hours. Afternoons first, then mornings then lunchtime then all day and they are not allowed to go to the breakfast and/or afterschool clubs until their hours are FT. There goes all your annual leave.

You are in that sweet spot of first child, maternity leave and not quite grasping how stressful it is regardless of a whether your job is FT or PT. Its hard and mother's in particular get the raw end of the deal when it comes to careers, training and there, quite simply, not being enough bloody hours in the day to do everything before something gives. Usually its your career that will take the hit.

I despair at you naivety.

Going back to the OP - i didn't realise that employers were able to muck employees around so much with working hours and last minute rotas - this is wrong and hopefully will get resolved when the tax credit cuts finally come in.

StrawberryTea you being offensive and personal doesn't minimize my value and self-esteem. Bye!

Yes betty10 I don't understand how people manage that at all. I worked PT for several years when the DC were small but was lucky not to be in a 'shift' type job. If I had have been, with a rota like that, I would have had to resign.

Maybe heavy blanket childcare subsidy is the way forward, as a PP suggested.

so they offer you 20 hours a week and expect you to be free all week to fit around them

A lot of very entitled people still don't get this even though it gets repeated over and over.

StrawberryTea you being offensive and personal doesn't minimize my value and self-esteem

Says the poster who told a crowd of perfectly well qualified parents to get a degree

Well, sometimes to make a point we have to share some of our personal experiences

And it's worth listening to the personal experiences of those who have dealt with specific situations you haven't yet faced (juggling work and childcare), rather than assuming that you already understand it by virtue of having experienced different work situations which were demanding in other ways.

I did a full-time PhD alongside several simultaneous part-time jobs. It was very hard, and I was very tired. But it still didn't make me an expert on fitting work around childcare responsibilities, because that's a different kind of hard.

A childcare subsidy would be nice! It is a better idea than tax credits.

I read somewhere childcare is on average double that of EU and has been going out of control since the 90's which needs to be looked at.

OurB, good post.
In London we have so many people (immigrants from the EU) happy to live illegally 3 or 4 to a room etc or on a friend's floor because graduates starve in Spain and can get jobs at minimum wage in London that you don't quite get the true market effect you might see as tax credits are removed. We have had 10 years of pretty stangnant pay in the private sector across the UK.

For the first time in the last year I have started to see job ads locally (outer London). I walked up from the tube station the other day and looked at teh windows of each shop and about one fifth acually had job ads in the windows. Obviously some were just things like hair dresser junior but you could tell it was hard to find people to take the low paid jobs or a bit harder than it used to be so they need the window adverts. Go up to areas of the NE where I came from and you won't see that at all. There are just not the vacancies or money or growth yet as the Northern Powerhouse is not really getting going as steel works and the like go from bad to worse.

I suspect we are seeing a slight rise in professional salaries at long last in London too after a very very long time when graduates got less, not more than those who went before them and as some professional jobs are currently short of people and cannot find enough (because of short sighted lack of hiring and training in the recession).

I used the Handy app/website in the summer for cleaners. Every single person was a recent immigrant with English almost so bad they could not understand things like the vacuum cleaner is here.

I can understand the childcare costs though as nursery staff can only look after 3 children of which each child pays £4.50 ish per hour? Out of that the nursery has to pay all the running costs and the staff members hourly rate + make a profit.

I'd march for that. Despite being past the childcare stage. Something has to change. BreakingDad's stats sound all too believable.

Betty, Sainsbury's were recruiting for a new shop. I had a look to see if they had hours I could work around what I already do. The amount of hours were set (so no zero hours nonsense, which was nice) but the weekly times could change so impossible to work around my set-in-stone hours that I already have. And they are among the better employers as far as I can see.

Some days the starting times were before 6am, so no good for me as I rely on buses or walking. Some finishing times were 11pm and so no good as buses stop at that time and no way would I walk 3 miles at that time of night in the city. Also absolutely no good for anyone using regular childcare that stops at 6pm and doesn't start until 8am.

The other thing that shocks me is school hours! When i went to school i was there 8-6.30pm - i had breakfast and tea there - admittedly this was a private school, both my parents worked full-time. I unfortunately can't afford this for my DS and he will go to the local primary next September - was shocked to find out schools finish at 3.15!

Other Western European countries have a lot more help with costs betty, I think that's what he's getting at. The idea is that if you want parents in the workplace, which this government do, you have to put the infrastructure in to enable them to be there. Our beloved overlords seem to want it both ways, though.

I just don't get why they can't fix the hours on a job - am i naive?

I've just gone to google to look into it and found this - www.theguardian.com/money/2014/may/31/costs-childcare-britain-sweden-compare

That would be a very reasonable monthly childcare bill! before the 15hours came in i was paying £275 per week!

YANBU. It took me 2 years to get my job at 17 hours a week. Luckily they are fixed hours aswell. Oh I cant just work more because I cant find a childminder and the school clubs are shit.

Strawberryfield12 Can't Europeans clam tax credits etc? There's loads of Eastern Europeans living on my street (and in the general area) and it seems that the women don't work outside the home, in general. I don't know what hours the men are doing - quite long I presume.

Also, companies recruit from outside the UK... I believe they introduced rules to avoid this at one stage (2008ish?) but I've read of companies getting round the rules. Eg. by advertising jobs a couple of years in advance - so people in the UK are looking for a job now and don't apply, whereas someone planning to come here in future/for a short time would be happy to take a temporary job or plan ahead that far. So the company can say "No locals applied".

In addition, the immigrants I have worked with have been offered various "perks" eg. subsidised and crowded accomodation - fine for a young person temporarily, not as a long term solution. Bit like the "working hostels" in Australia that young Brits (and others) work at for 6 months or whatever. The same goes for all sorts of anitsocial/unpredictable hours type jobs, or seasonal jobs.

Employers seem to prefer immigrants because they are so committed tied to their job, but this is not a good thing, it means lowering of working conditions for all, based on what young fit childless people will do for a short time. And depending on the job, employers can have a warped idea of who's "best" for the job. The first nursing home I worked in was staffed mainly by immigrants and some of them were dreadful - they officially "worked" 60hr weeks, keeping the staff numbers up, but did so little actual work the rest of us were rushed off our feet (two of them would actually disappear and sit drinking tea - they didn't even get fired when found out!) I did far more in my 40hrs than they in their 60! But the home's owners just saw hours on a timesheet.

There's also places where the employers were once immigrants themselves and will give the job to someone they know or of the same nationality. This happens all over though - it's "who you know".

And in general, do people really just show up in the UK and get work? Are the people you're observing actually arranging employment before they get here?

ps. Most of this is off the top of my head, from what I know/have observed, I'm open to compelling evidence otherwise in a civilised manner!

Many British people used to live like this too

Many British people used to give their children laudinum so that they would sleep while they were away working, Many British people used to send their children to work in the mills and down the mines. Is that really a golden time?

Some people in decent jobs are obviously not there because of their ability to put themselves in other people's shoes.

*Strawberryfield12 Wed 28-Oct-15 09:46:23
Do you have any idea how much effort people in the "decent" jobs have put into to get that job? Usually it means long years and lots of money invested in education, after which you have to start to pay back the studies loan and are deemed a high earner for £44k a year, which if you happen to live in London hardly allows you for basic needs - tiny flat, food, transport - and for all their effort are penalized with high tax rate. And no, there is no such thing as paid overtime in those jobs! And they cannot even dream about such thing as tax credits after all the "doing the right thing" stuff.

If you cannot work more, you can always work smarter? Learn new skills which will grant the decent job and then you can be one of THEM lot.

You know what amazes me in the UK?! There are thousands of locals moaning about not being able to find a job for months, but then arrives a guy from Eastern Europe with 5 words in English and ta-da in few days he has a full time job, one of those crappy jobs btw. Surely a person, who has always lived in the UK, is fluent in English, understand the local system and culture, should be having advantage over that guy?

I know I will get beaten up for my post*

Strawberry this was your first post.

You may find you have to eat your words when your DD is a bit older and you are finding the work/home balance exhausting so have to drop to part time. Or have to become a SAHM for any reason whatsoever. Or you're made redundant. And then your hard work means bugger all if there are no jobs going in your field - it just means you are overqualified for the jobs that don't pay as well but expect you to be on call for a potential 20 hours a week.

I wish you all the luck in the world, but other posters are right. You have one baby and are not back at work yet. It is entirely different working through university, even with a job and having to explain things at interview that make perfect sense than having a dependent and all the responsibilities that come with it!

strawberryfield I feel like you are being deliberately obtuse.

I'm currently 'retraining' as I'm at medical school but already have a degree. With the best will in the world this is only possible because: I happen to be academically able, my parents were relatively wealthy and supported me through my first degree meaning I can still access a student loan, and my husband has a decent and secure (though not overly well-paid) public sector job, with an understanding boss who allows him a lot of flexibility with childcare. Were any of those things, none of which are under my control, not the case, I would not have been able to contemplate 'just retraining'. As it is we barely make ends meet, even with me taking on cleaning jobs (harder to find than people seem to think!) and tutoring.

One thing that would help would be some sensible increase in regulation surrounding p/t contracts. British workers get astonishingly little protection compared with european counterparts.

Here a p/t contact has to be writing, specify the number of hours and you must get specific written notice of changes in your rota. And if you do more hours, your contract is automatically upgraded after a while to reflect that. It means p/t workers can easily get more than one job, as they know when and how much they will be required to work.

I am a graduate, and I once had a full-time job. I worked in a specific industry, which is all but dead, now. It was starting to struggle in the years before I had DS, but I was able to be flexible and I owned my own home on a relatively low mortgage. So I did a variety of freelance things - I could work nights and weekends and funny shifts because I was answerable only to myself. In the couple of years before DS was born I was working horrendous shifts for a company where I was also in charge of the other shift workers (and, actually, expended a lot of effort to accommodate some of my employees' childcare emergencies and other work - in fact, initially, when I got PG I thought: here's a job where I can juggle my own hours around my child...). However, this was in an industry where the bottom dropped out of the market quite suddenly and the company became unsustainable, so I was redundant at 6 months PG - not a good time to be jobhunting because who the fuck is going to take on a very pregnant woman?
I continued to freelance. Once DS was born I set up a small business and admittedly made a bit of a mess of it, but was able to carry on freelancing for several years. If not for tax credits, though, we would have starved. The trouble with freelancing (then, and much, much worse now) is that clients go bust/pay late/'forget' to pay for months on end, etc. I did Avon and Kleeneze, which made negligible amounts of money (you only get rich on those if you can pyramid-sell or you are the only rep in the area...) I did phone-sex work, I did market research, I did leaflet distribution, along with freelancing which was getting worse and worse in terms of payment as more and more of the industry died off or disappeared.

I now have a part-time job at a reasonable hourly rate (on paper - I work rather more hours than I am expected to invoice for) but again it's ad-hoc, not guaranteed as to how much work there will be in any given month, and quite often involves a mad scrabble for evening childcare (ie friends). And I keep freelancing, though everyone now expects the sort of work I do to be done either for 'exposure' or they are only willing to pay about a tenth of what I earned from the same type of work 15 years ago.

I don't know what's going to happen to us next year. I really don't. I can't 'retrain', I can't get more hours guaranteed, and I can't go and get a full time job because no one wants a woman over 50 with obsolete skills who is 'overqualified'.

I wonder how all the "I'm alright Jack" types with children in nursery, and the "Just work more hours in the convenient full time jobs or two compatible part time jobs which are so easy to get if you just try, and use all the affordable abundant childcare available" people feel about the fact nursery nurses are a group likely to be very hard hit by the tax credits cuts, unless they are seriously amended.

Perhaps the full time nursery nurses should make up the €1800 a year or so they are set to lose by working extra hours at night on top of their 40 a week in the nursery, even if that does mean a tired nursery nurses inevitably doing a rather less good job of looking after all our children.

I wonder if the increase in subsidised / free child care planned will be possible if all the nursery nurses read Strawberryfields inspired suggestion and go off and retrain to be stockbrokers and corporate lawyers and actuaries... :o