Are we morally obliged to work ?

[Justthisonce12]

630,000 economically inactive people in the UK not claiming benefits. Early retiree’s I guess.

Hunt plans to tackle this and encourage work force participation to allow businesses to grow. ie cheap labour I presume ? But also preventing a brain drain.

Will be interesting to see how he plans to address this.

I can tell you why a lot of people who could work choose not to. Simply because the jobs available to them are shit. Unemployment and scraping by on benefits is better than being taken advantage of and disrespected.

I’m talking about employers who only offer zero hour contracts with no reliable hours or guaranteed income. At least benefits are secure!

Employers who give so few shits about their employees that they fiddle the paperwork so they don’t have to pay sick pay or holiday pay or pension contributions. Often they falsely claim the employee is self employed in order to avoid paying. Or they offer a rolling short term contract and terminate it for several weeks every summer in order to avoid the employee gaining any entitlement to job benefits or protections. Or they hire through an agency knowing full well that they take half of the employee’s pay, because it reduces their liability compared to hiring the employee directly.

And they pull tricks like not paying employees for time spent travelling between sites, or asking them to do unpaid overtime “you don’t have to but if you’re not willing to do it we’ll have to reconsider your employment”.

It’s all about maximum profit for minimum wages, and the employee isn’t valued at all. In fact the employer ties themselves in knots trying to prevent the employee gaining any legal entitlements. Because god forbid they have to treat their employees like people and offer them a reliable salary and support them when they’re sick!

If that was what you were facing in the job market, wouldn’t you opt out too? I blame the employers who don’t want to hire permanent staff and treat them like human beings. But mostly I blame the government which has failed to legislate to prevent employers taking the piss like this.

You've hit on one of the problems with data that has been measured over many years. If you change the criteria now from 16-64 to 18-65, or exclude students then the figures are no longer comparable to previous years, and often when changes like this are made, the government of the time is accused of "fiddling the figures" (which sometimes they are, but not always).

How?
Will anyone economically inactive and not on benefits be getting a letter summoning them to the Job Centre?

They must have raised it from 14 and from 55 at some point? So, just adjust again and put in a statisticians note that the measure has been updated to reflect current school leaver and state pension age…

The "west" as a whole has an aging population. We need a certain number of people to be working and paying tax to pay for the pensions of those that have retired. That's the system we have chosen.

If the people have earned enough money to retire early, surely they've paid as much tax and NI in that compressed timespan as other people pay by normal retirement age? In fact they will have paid more, because by compressing a lifetimes worth of working income into fewer years, they've paid more higher rate tax.

The poster would be correct if referring to those claiming state pension but most early retirees are not able to claim that as the state pension age is fixed.
Early retirees will be living on private pensions, savings, inheritances or other assets so this is not applicable

How can subsidising childcare do the state or the economy any good, when the premise of the question is that her time is worth less than the cost of professional childcare?

Subsidy won't make her labour worth more, and it won't make childcare cheaper. The only way subsidy makes sense is if your way of computing the benefit regards "subsidy" as money extracted from someone who doesn't matter, so it doesn't have to be counted as a cost.

It would be better to make childcare more accessible to all children and a wider scope of hours

I've said it before in a different context but I strongly suspect few people are motivated to work by a desire to give back to society. Work has to be of benefit to yourself and your family to motivate you to do it.

I don't need to work and have a full and active life (I do 5 hours a week hobby job) and when I did work got hideous amounts of grief from colleagues (in the NHS) who decided I didn't financially need to work and so was taking a job off of someone who did need to work!

You really can't win.

@bridgetreilly

I'm sure stats show that a fairly small proportion of economically inactive people volunteer. And almost as many people who work volunteer too.

And lots of people work and having caring duties too.

So, no. I don't think society relies on economically inactive people to fulfill these roles

Torn on this as first thought is that if people aren’t claiming benefits what’s the problem. But then if they haven’t worked for a few decades they likely haven’t paid enough tax / NI to justify all the services they use. I’ve no idea what JH thinks he can do about it though, it’s not like people will be told to stop using services if they’ve not paid enough NI

Well I work to live. I don’t live to work. I work part time and do get too ups but wish I didn’t have to. Single parent juggling work, childcare and a child with a disability.

I know quite a few on the school run who are SAHMs and who don’t claim as their partner earns a really decent salary. Another at my work gave it up because it was too stressful jiggling the childcare and she didn’t need the money.

But then we have people desperate to work who can’t due to the whole cost of childcare , inflexible jobs and travel.

Me and most of my colleagues in academic support roles.

I very much doubt anyone is actually doing that!

This

I enjoy my work and can’t imagine not working
My DH and I earn much the same which suits me
I believe I set a good example to my DC

I couldn't work full time for years for many reasons , I did very part time to fit in with the children and elderly parents etc.
Lots of women I know were in the same boat too.
Not everyone has childcare on tap either ; the ones I know whose parents / grand parents did the heavy lifting have faired much better too. They could carry on with their jobs

Problem with this thinking is define ‘paid enough in’? Someone like myself who paid higher band tax rates for years has already statistically paid in more than a low earner ever will or someone on benefits. I don’t have an issue with that but you can’t force people to work on the premise of having paid in. That’s not even how our welfare state works. The issue is what makes them
motivated to return to the workplace so the govt can continue collecting taxes off them beyond.

I work full-time and so the school run in the morning and again at 3.30pm. There are lots of jobs working from home these days, so it absolutely is possible to get one that will allow you to do that. It may not be easy, as there might be a lot of competition, but it’s not impossible.

My mum was part of that group for many years, she was a SAHM and didn't claim any benefits. Didn't mean she was work shy, far from it.
I don't think people who don't work or claim benefits as 'morally obliged' to work. Nor are they a drain on society, in fact quite the opposite

How does your dh manage to work when he has kids to pick from school?

How do you think the millions of other families who work outside of school hours manage?

@Schlaar

I fall into this category, It doesn’t work out financially to work and pay for child care. Other half has a job that puts us above the threshold for help and we don’t qualify for any benefits due to his salary. I have a couple of friends and family members in the same position.

I think for pension it’s a defined number of years, 30yrs or so. As said the other services don’t work like that, but guess that’s what JH’s thinking here is that there’s a set amount of people not working, not claiming benefits that could be contributing to the country, but aren’t, for whatever reason. I don’t think he can or will do anything to get some of these people into work, as they aren’t dependant on rules around benefits etc