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 think there are a lot of early retirees who think or feel as though they’ve earned their keep and thus the right to sit back and claim their pension, when the reality is that the tax and NI they paid during their lifetimes didn’t even cover the services they and their family used, let alone decades of a state pension. Which isn’t an attitude I’ve much time for

Using your logic no-one would ever be entitled to state pension as their tax and NI didn't cover it. Fortunately the state has made the deal with pensioners that if they pay into the state system for a certain amount of time they are entitled to that pension.

And I bet you'll claim yours when the time comes. You can say thank you for the 45 years of tax I paid and am still paying to educate you and your children and give them healthcare in your own time. I'll have been paying tax for a lot longer than I'll be claiming pension, that's for sure.

Would rather we target those on benefits who can work and I don't care if thats only a 1000 , its still a 1000 more people with better life prospects

I'm 51, fit and healthy and have no intention of returning to full time work. I do cash in hand work when it suits me. If we didn't have that ridiculous lockdown, then I would still be in full time employment paying an awful lot of tax!

I think the only issue is that some people retiring early will have underestimated the cost, won't have a big enough pension, and may find themselves destitute in old age.

Even if you own your own home, repairs and upkeep are expensive, and you also need to estimate the cost of inflation over the years.

I retired at 64, completely burned out, no way could I work any longer.
I have an NHS pension and private pension so I managed until my state pension kicked in.
I do volunteering as and when I can and don’t feel I owe anyone anything. I have paid tax (and NI) since I was 15, I pay tax on my pensions.
I’m lucky and I appreciate where I am but no way at 69 am I going to be going back to work!

People are always paying taxes anyway do early retirees etc , every time they pay vat etc its a tax paid , c tax etc

Of course people aren't morally obliged to work if they can support themselves. Good for them that they have seen that the workplace simply doesn't care for them, and sees them as a unit of production, and they can resist that if they have the money to do so. Most jobs are very boring and not even highly valuable to society. I think the experiments with a four day week in Nordic countries to provide better work-life balance deliver much better job satisfaction and happiness. I like to work myself (mid-fifties) as I like my job and it keeps my mind active, but if I hated it, I'd be the first out of the door. It's immoral to expect you to do otherwise, given you never know how long you will live or whether you will see retirement.

Thing is, there is nothing like the resources available to honour these pension obligations globally. People are being promised things that can’t physically be provided when the time comes to call it in.

You're entitled to 6 months of the jobseeker's element of Universal Credit based on your National Insurance contributions (assuming you paid them).

So that they are forced to pay more tax.

@wherearebeefandonioncrisps
That's how I understand it , several in my workplace who refuse overtime as it affects there UC .

Exactly my view too.

It's definitely an interesting moral dilemma.

The OP is right that hunt seems to want more people in work because that equals cheap labour.

Industries like hospitality have run off a cheap surplus of labour for years. Suddenly hospitality is massively understaffed but for some reason many businesses are yet to twig onto the fact that they need to give better terms than minimum wage, 0 hours contracts, and no sick pay, in order to get staff. Hunt seems to want to flood the labour market again so employers can keep treating employees like crap rather than improve net contributions by facilitating higher wages which will translate into more income tax.

630,000 are in addition to the 600,000 claiming UC, these are financial independent people who arent in the benefits category nor the state pension category.

Unemployed people won't pay no tax at all as some people seem to think. No income tax perhaps and I do appreciate that for most this is the biggest proportion of the tax they pay, but there's tax on all sorts of things. If they have inherited money, they are likely to have paid inheritance tax, if they drive they pay road tax, VAT on all sorts of goods and services and it goes on.

Personally I do feel a morale obligation to work mainly because I don't really have any reason not to, plus I actually enjoy what I do but I don't think it easy to have generalise because there are so many individual complex reasons.

The whole "work coach" idea is really just a version of that Tory MP telling people struggling to afford the basics to get a better job. It doesn't address the underlying problems at all but just turns a societal problem into an individual one- the issue isn't that we've screwed the economy so much that you can work a 40 hour week and still not be able to heat your home and put food on the table, it's that you, the worker, aren't trying hard enough 🙄

On the question of the moral obligation to work- no, there are many ways in which people contribute to society other than through paid work.

I think I misconveyed my point. There are many people in retirement who appear to think they’ve built up some kind of giant pot of their personal NI contributions sitting there in some kind of government coffers earmarked for “their” pension, which puts them a cut above the benefit claimants they see as layabouts; without acknowledging that their contributions actually paid for (or rather, very often didn’t cover) the services they used during their working lives.

I’m sure I will claim a pension, but I won’t criticise people on UC as I do it because I’ve paid for what I receive whereas they haven’t.

I understood it as trying to get some of those on lifestyle choice UC into the labour market, not forcing retirees back into work? I don't think anyone is morally obliged to work, but we are morally obliged to contribute positively and if we are able to support ourselves and our families. We all pay tax on where we live and what we spend, which is a positive contribution

10,000 warm bodies required at sizewell for example

Jeremy Hunt would probably install the Hunger Games if he could. No there is not a moral obligation to work.

To be clear, we were born into an insane system where the earth is being strangled and we live a destitute life without money. It's not the way humans were designed to exist. If the world was as it should be, with nature abounding, our moral obligation should be to hunt, cook, protect, etc, for our community. That's it.

Whatever the current situation, making a Tory's life easier by slaving away in the business world for years longer and perpetuating this shitty situation, is not something anyone should feel obligated to do, morally or otherwise.

Well I will be very happy if tackling this means I can have two children in nursery without handing over my entire monthly take home pay.

There are no after school clubs at my kids school. Local childminders typically pick up from one school (usually the one they pick up their own child from). Nobody seems willing to pick up from my DCs school because they have staggered start and finish times, so DD4 gets picked up at 3pm but DS7 doesn’t finish till 3.30pm. I’ve looked for a childminder without success. So now I’ve started looking for jobs that will allow me to pick up the kids myself, but unsurprisingly there are very few and only in certain fields (like IT- I am not qualified in IT). If my childcare problem was solved I would happily go back to full time work.

If people aren't working and aren't claiming benefits how on earth can they be forced to work?
I'd like to have enough so I could stop working too!

Looking for an easy, well paid job?

Get yourself appointed to the House of Lords....
£323 per day attendance allowance just for turning up, plus travel expenses and highly subsidised restaurant facilities. No electorate to vote you out either - so a job for life.
Maybe Hunt should start there if he wants to make some savings?

No one is an EARLY retiree if they're drawing their pension

Obvs 🙄