AIBU to think this is a 'Get on your bike' moment from the Government?

[chomalungma]

Apparently there's 8 million economically inactive people in the UK.

Ok - so some of them are students, carers, long term ill, SAHP etc...

So maybe 20% of them are probably capable of work.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/19/immigration-firms-will-need-to-train-more-uk-workers-says-priti-patel

So that's good because there are going to be loads of vacancies to fill in the UK and UK workers will have the advantage.

Let's hope the jobs are in the same place as the economically inactive people are...or will it be a 'Get on your bike' to get a job future for people - regardless of house prices and the practicalities of moving to the job.

Certainly going to be an interesting few years.

That's the kind of thing I don't understand about upping minimum wage (although morally I think it would be a good thing).

If I sell +++ punnets of strawberries in Tesco for £1 each, I can employ xxx people at £5/hr to pick them.

Now I have to pay £10/hr, meaning the strawberries cost £6 per punnet. Now I sell virtually no strawberries and everyone gets paid £0/hr because everyone loses their job and I go and find a more profitable business, because I likely don't care about my workers as if I did I would already have been paying them properly??

What am I missing?

I guess the other option is I now pay you £10/hr as a fruit picker, which means that everyone who was currently on £10/hr wants a pay rise as they consider they're worth more than a fruit picker, so everyone's wages rise proportionately. This means everyone can keep paying the £6 for strawberries and I stay in business, but my workers are still the poorest in the U.K. and now everything costs more. How are they better off??

OH's cousin would fall into the economically inactive bucket as a SAHM. But as her husband is stinking rich I doubt she will be forgoing spending summer at their Italian villa to pick strawberries.

Half of all newjobs go into the South East, despite only having 1/3 of the population

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/21/almost-half-of-all-new-jobs-in-england-are-in-south-east-report

Nobody is going to move across the country to be a care worker. Nobody is going to give up social housing and reliable benefits for a six week fruit picking job. Most people don’t want to move - they have friends, communities, children in school, elderly relatives who need support, etc. That’s why immigrants are vital - they’re flexible on location because they have no ties and are happy to take short contracts if they’re only here temporarily.

Lots of unemployed people want jobs. But they want proper permanent jobs in their area, with decent salaries and maternity leave and sick pay etc. That’s not what’s on offer here.

And much less than one third of the housing chomalunga!

The benefits system needs to be updated to make taking short term jobs easy. Online submission of worked hours and update of money with immediate effect would make it more attractive. Submitting details, suspension of benefits, a six week wait while benefits are recalculated is clunky and stops anyone taking jobs that are a) sporadic b) low paid. In this day and age it should be easy to submit, get benefits immediately adjusted up/down. Proof scanned in for verification.

Housing needs sorting so that moving is easier. Private renting takes a lot of up front money. Social housing needs addressing so need is met. There would be the opportunities to swop/exchange then. We swopped to move 18 years ago. It would be much harder now, it was hard enough then to get a good swop.

Pringlesonthetable

A bonus for hard work would be an incentive!

I agree with the technology now to change benefits and allow workers to take jobs elsewhere.

Most of these fruit lockers used to be done by students. My own teens struggle to get summer jobs because they aren’t yet 16. New laws make it harder to employ them due to paperwork and insurance.

Is it? It might be for some people - but I am sure there are many people who would like to stay in the area they grew up in and in the community they are a part of.

That and they have children settled in school. My teens will have exams soon and there is no way I'm moving anywhere for any job.

YY GreenTulips

My own teens worked in pubs, initially picking up glasses/plates from the garden, then waiting, then kitchens from 13. Eldest is a chef now. Shops wont take under 16 and in a lot of cases under 18 these days. They expect full flexibility.
Transport is another issue for adults. I travel for work but it actually wipes out what I got extra by getting promoted.

Schroedinger's unemployed. Otoh employment is at a record low because our wonderful Tory government, otoh there are 8 million people who are just crying out for work.

They will of course include people like my friend who was denied PIP because the assessor reckoned she could cook and clean for herself: she is unable to do anything except lie flat on her back so I imagine she'd have to suspend a stove upside down over her couch. Perfect candidate for getting on her bike and picking some strawberries.

I'm loving this. The Great British Public voted for this and are now all horrified that the changes in immigration they wanted means that they may no longer be allowed to exploit foreigners and get them to do the poorly paid, undervalued jobs they dont want to do. No threads of outrage about families being split up or people forced to live 3 to a room in some London slum, or modern slavery when it meant you could have a cheap weekend break, or cheap strawberries, or your car hand washed for a fiver eh ladies?

Pringlesonthetable

That’s true. DD applies for 4 hours Saturday jobs only to find it was a ‘0 hours’ contract expecting up to 40 hours a week.

I wonder how some businesses stay afloat.

Here's an interesting fact that I never knew, that was in the telegraph a couple of days ago -

We’re used to being told that machines are coming to take our jobs. But we have the opposite problem: a low-waged, low-productivity economy where too much is done by hand. In Sweden, the robot-to-human ratio is twice what it is here. In Germany, it’s three times. In South Korea, eight times.

I find this astonishing, that because we have imported so much cheap labour that we haven't invested in machines... Surely this has got to tell you that something has been wrong with our immigration system for a long long time. It's like in Communist China where it was cheaper to use a human than a mule to plough fields etc.

This just shows that you just don't need as many immigrants as we have, you need some but not as many. It has to change.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/02/20/care-homes-wont-like-come-end-cheap-labour/

I am interested where all the people who post about leaving the country are planning to go. Many countries have strict immigration criteria and unemployment is a major issue in parts of the EU. DH has family and friends in France and Spain and none of them are finding it easy.

The country is sliding into disaster under the Tories but people don't seem to be joining the dots. There's no way companies are going to give up the huge profits. They should but they won't. They will just find some other way, what's the betting the big wigs squeeze the government into loosening employee rights 'for the good of the economy'.

Yes @Noconceptofnormal, in Japan they are working on a robot to care for the elderly and disabled. Perfect. Then none of the rest of us need go near them.

porcupine why do you see that as a bad thing? Isn't it good to have robots that help older people maintain independence for longer. By the time old, I'd prefer a robot to change my incontinence nappy rather than having the embarrassment of having a human do it, and if I can buy robots that mean I can live longer in my own house then that's great news.

The article talks about machinery to do the below, do we really think so little of immigrants that we think that they should do a boring, monotonous job that a machine can do?

too many companies used cheap workers as a substitute for investing in more efficient factories. There are robots nowadays that gut fish, send parcels, pack food – all standing ready to liberate humans into better-paid jobs. But not so many of them in Britain.

Nobody is going to move across the country to be a care worker. Nobody is going to give up social housing and reliable benefits for a six week fruit picking job. Most people don’t want to move - they have friends, communities, children in school, elderly relatives who need support, etc. That’s why immigrants are vital - they’re flexible on location because they have no ties and are happy to take short contracts if they’re only here temporarily

I do have a slight issue with this. These immigrants have partners, children, elderly relatives, homes and lives. The difference being that they ARE willing to come over here for 6 months or a year, as our minimum wage is way above what they can earn at home. I know. We have employed many for my Mum as live in carers. They are amazing, but often very, very sad, and miss their families terribly.

As an interesting aside, the EU is trying to introduce an "EU Wide" minimum wage to discourage movements of workers from East to West. It is not going well, and would still be below our current rate.

Iirc those migrating are younger and less likely to have children than average. Which would make sense.

Because somehow Noconceptofnormal I dont think the loneliness and isolation felt by many elderly people as they become confined to their homes with only the tv for company is going to be made better by taking away that tiny mite of human contact they get under the current system. Yes you can programme a robot to come up with a few trite phrases about having slept well or it being a nice day, but it's not the same.

There could be robot care for babies as well. No need for nursery workers then.

Shops wont take under 16 and in a lot of cases under 18 these days
This has a lot to do with child protection laws, DBS checks, separate changing facilities for children, child employment permits, limited working hours... Most employers can’t be bothered, they just hire someone over 18.

Which I get. Those things are taken much more seriously now than even a couple of decades ago, notwithstanding that some employers find the cheaper labour useful.

Students!

Make the courses shorter but with longer hours, so there's time to send them out into the fields to pick cauliflowers in November.

I suspect some of those higher robot to human ratios are due to those countries still having significant manufacturing industries, for example in Germany. In many cases those robots are replacing good jobs that paid well.

The kind of low wage jobs that will need filling in the UK are much more difficult to automate. I heard a lot of Leavers talk about getting robots to pick fruit, but it's actually very complicated to automate that (see here: www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/20/592857197/robots-are-trying-to-pick-strawberries-so-far-theyre-not-very-good-at-it?t=1582293229936)

Robots taking care of the elderly or ill is many years away.

And is this really an improvement? Going through all the pain of Brexit just so that you can have robot workers instead of human workers?

A robot workforce is expensive, and then you will still have lots of low skilled Brits without jobs.