The state of the nation

[Forestgate]

What is going on? Crime everywhere..police not interested as not enough staff

Nhs crumbling as not enough staff

Supply chains crumbling not enough staff

Crops rotting not enough staff

tramsport and airline chaos not enough staff

Benefits rising - jobless rising ... all since people got a taste of furlough.

Surely a good chunk of unemployed people can be put to use somehow before they are given access to jobseekers etc

I thought unemployment was down?

l don’t see a connection between furlough and unemployment. You are implying that the unemployed are lazy because they may have been furloughed. Nice assumption🤨

Don’t be a dick

And we are in this situation due to 12 years of austerity. Not because people were furloughed. Apart from the airports who chose to sack their workers.

We've found a Tory

And l can tell you this.

If l was unemployed l wouldn’t be picking fruit. Not because l didn’t want to help the farmers, but because this is a result of Brexit which the government are responsible for.

So you can shove your fruit picking where the sun don’t shine imo.

not enough money to EMPLOY staff......theres a difference between that and simply 'not ENOUGH staff

Have you heard of a little thing called Brexit? That may have had the tiny side effect of crushing opportunity, infrastructure etc?

If you actually looked in depth at the job vacancies right now these are usually low paid part time jobs which aren't enough to live on. The majority of vacancies are cleaning, caring and hospitality roles all poorly paid, part time and unsociable hours.
People on universal credit who take on a low paid job still get hounded to up their income to avoid the benefit cap and yes there are jobs out there but not enough to live on.
Stop reading how many job vacancies there are and maybe look at the actual job, it's pay and then understand these jobs can't support people

So you're happy to accept that those from the EU will do jobs for less than British workers?

Race to the bottom?

12 years of Conservative rule may have something to do with it?

Yes, life here is so desperate, that today several hundred people risked their lives, crossing the channel on inflatables to set a single foot on our island. And tomorrow several hundred more will do the same, etc..

If you want people to do something, all you have to do is change things to enable them to do it.

It would be very simple for British workers to take up some of those jobs - all it would take is for the great British public to let go of their paranoia about people trying to claim benefits thy weren't entitled to, and change the rules back to allow people to work and claim at the same time. Its how the benefit system used to run decades ago, when we used to pick fruit.
The farmer would sign a book to say we had worked that week. We'd present it at the job centre when we went to sign on and we wouldn't get any dole for that week.
If you want us to train as nurses, all you have to do is bring back the bursaries and childcare.

If you want rail staff stop charging rail staff for their safety training and just train them to do the job. Pay the people who push the food trolley round a proper wage and not £1 per shift.

Its not fucking rocket science.

Could you pay for housing, food, utilities & transport on a low paid, temporary, zero hours contract? Working conditions have been made impossible. People had it better in the last century. Who would have thought we'd go back to Dickensian conditions? And now the reliance on gas and petrol, just to be. My grandparents and parents had a better quality of life.

Er, yes. The cost of living in Romania is a lot less than in the UK. Minimum wage here is a reasonable salary in Romania. Guest workers were very happy to come here to do some jobs we didn’t fancy. Do you want your kids doing those jobs? I thought not, just other people’s kids.

Essentially, you want Europeans (usually eastern Europeans) to come to the UK to do jobs you feel is beneath you?

Nice(!)

Some farmers have already started using droids for planting, sowing and weeding. Your kind of attitude increases the rate of automation which will become more efficient over the next few decades.

Then where will you be if you struggle to find a job in future?

Better to take the opportunities available today rather than ignore them.

I'd rather we offered a decent visa and fair wage for people to come rather than let the crops rot.

Other jobs can also be attracted from overseas by a fair wage and visa but we need a proper targeted recruitment drive to get these highly trained workers and we also need to start training British people by offering free degrees for the jobs in high demand.

That's how I would
Tackle it.

Side effect of brexit and not a good one.

Always happens after long term Tory rule. The Pandemic has just brought a lot of things to a head at once.

You know, you can explain why you think the OP is misinformed, instead of name calling like a 12 year old.

Brexit was sold as making our lives better, not worse.

I don't think it's that people think these jobs are beneath them - it's that the salaries are not enough to survive on, so they hold out for something that pays more. The disparity in pay in this country has become unreal. For example, a person earns 20k per year on a full-time job. Another earns £100k per year. The 20k person will be struggling to live alone, that's for sure.

Looking at this holistically and people (mostly women who still do the more poorly paid jobs in order to fit around the children) are heading back to where they were 60 years ago - trapped in their abusive/bad marriages because they can't afford to run a house alone on a full-time salary. And yes, we do have benefits designed to top up these pathetic salaries, but wouldn't it be better to increase the minimum wage so that it didn't need to be topped up with benefits? Make people proud to do those jobs.

Makes me so cross - we're all just blindly putting up with this.

The government are relying on the wealth of the baby boomers to trickle down the generations as the baby boomers start to die off, but once that wealth is completely diluted, I think that's when the reckoning will come.

Systematically cutting and underfunding services for 12 years will do that. Never mind, people still want to come here on dinghies though, as if that’s the only determining factor for a decent state of affairs. The usual race to the bottom empty heads coming on early.

Maybe they all went and got themselves better jobs as is often insisted upon by many as a cure for low wages not being enough to live on and the conditions appalling?

The fact that there would be a shortfall of people then to do those jobs, and they're jobs we need done bypassed most preaching about how people need to better themselves, be inspired, stop being lazy and choosing to work in jobs with a low wage.

And now there's 'not enough staff' in the essential, low paid services we need - because they're not choosing those jobs.

Maybe it's time the huge profits made by some companies and the tax we pay to be put to good use paying people decent wages for these services that we rely on so they can actually be provided? Instead of being directed into already overstuffed pockets?

But nope, can't have that, let's blame furlough for making people lazy instead.

🙄

So fruit picking is beneath you and unemployed Brits, but good enough for Poles and Bulgarians? That's a similar argument to all those anti Brexit folk in places like Richmond, Surrey who were whinging because Brexit meant that couldn't get cheap cleaners and gardeners.

The government have kept it quiet but that have brought back the temporary agricultural worker visas that were in place before the 2004 EU accession so don't worry.

Similarly I suspect the government created the rumour a while back that the petrol pumps were not able to be filled up quick enough because of not having enough lorry drivers anymore, which then caused panic buying, which meant the pumps did run dry, and very quickly the government passed a quick new law allowing EU lorry drivers back on temporary visas, and none of the people who previously would have complained about 'them' taking 'our' jobs complained.

What is wrong with fruit picking as a job? When I was at uni I really wanted a fruit picking job in the summer as I was totally self-financing but there were non available due to some kind of overseas recruitment/landlord/employment agency scam going on. Basically the jobs were ONLY available to eastern Europeans, who were bussed to the farms, accomodation was 'included' so that they were crammed into HMO's, 'rent' deducated from their meagre salary etc. It was a massive scam. I would imagine there are plenty of students happy to do these jobs?