This country as gone into terminal decline

[Carmes]

I have 2 young children in school.

I am becoming more and more anxious about what sort of jobs / careers they will have open to them.

I work for very large company with 10,000s of employees.

20 years ago whe I started work here there would be 100s of entry level jobs at any given time. These are jobs that don't require experience or a degree, ideal for a school leaver, and I know dozens of people who started their career this way.

Now there are maybe 10 jobs that would fit the same criteria.so. All the jobs have been offshored.
Now are the vacancies are for very specific technical skill set or experience.

This doesn't bode well for someone who has left school at 18'or even university.

We’re doomed Captain Mainwaring, doomed.

Information on here is really out of date, I think. I see people all over MN encouraging people to go into tech. Just google "tech layoffs" to see why this is terrible advice. The stock is going up but that doesn't mean the jobs are.

People keep talking about the jobs that "will be" lost to AI. Um, it's happened. Thousands and thousands of jobs are gone. Good luck getting a job as a graphic designer in 2025. It will be millions soon as admin is decimated (or in fact the inverse - nonaginated?). We are sleepwalking into this disaster.

When a steelworks closes it's on the news. Many more than this have been laid off in tech and "knowledge" and it's not covered at all.

I think the economic figures for Q4 will be very poor and likely we have entered a recession. Mortgage and borrowing rates are up adding further strain to personal and business finances. I imagine few businesses will be hiring next year due to uncertainty and the NIC increase. Whilst unemployment figures are low, they are bound to go up meaning more claims for unemployment benefits. Am sure the tax increases announced in the budget will not cover these so more borrowing required.

fiscal doom loop.

Interesting as my daughter has a skill that would travel well but how do these jobs work when you are in a different time zone (say like Australia 12 hrs ahead) with regard to meetings and general availability?

It is hard for parents to advise their children what to do at the moment. The biggest issue seems to lie in secondary schools. A lot of children are not leaving with the skills they need for the job market they are expected to enter.

In some areas apprenticeships are few and far between, the pay is abysmal and they are unable to live close by due to ridiculously high housing costs (even for a house share). At the same time, there are numerous jobs that are demanded a degree just to apply, so not having a degree is cutting you off from certain vacancies.

The current advice seems to be if your DC go for degree ensure it is a vocational one or to train for a trade following on from GCSEs. These are good suggestions but what if you DC is not cut out for a trade and is not interested in Medicine/Engineering. There is far less advice and it comes as not surprise that there is a rise in 18 - 24 year olds who are unemployed. The traditional industries that they might have gone into have been decimated and not replaced with anything.

It needs a radical rethink but no government is prepared to do the necessary as they would definitely be unpopular.

You think your comment devastatingly witty, but you've added the 'crying with laughter' emoji to ensure we all know.
Terribly kind of you to try and correct me, dearie, but you are in the wrong.

This. We have all been encouraged to blame everybody else. Someone upthread said it's better in America. Well, yes if you are willing to work stupid hours with zero employee rights, two weeks annual leave if you are lucky, etc.

The immigrants are the ones who will work. The hospitality industry and the agricultural industry has relied on them for years because they will do the work for minimum wage that, over time, generations have been brought up to think is beneath them.

Truth is, Britain isn't working because it doesn't want to. It wants mental health days, bespoke employment tailored to individual needs, not the needs of the company, flexible working, no anti-social hours, indoors with no heavy lifting.

And then we wonder why a person just off the boat has work.

Well, I’m anti immigration (not all immigration of course, but I believe we should have tight restrictions on who can come over to work and they should be net contributors). I certainly am not racist, having a multiracial family myself and I certainly do not make racist remarks. As for volunteering, what a stupid suggestion. I personally am working 50 hour weeks as it is, as a minimum. I’d have to give up sleep.

Carers deserve better pay. Much better pay. If pay was decent for carers, we’d have more people from the UK willing to train to become a carer. We wouldn’t have to rely on cheap labour from abroad. We’d also have better standards of care. Caring is a difficult job, my mother was a carer and what she had to do was beyond what most of us are capable of, certainly for people unrelated to us. What she was paid was frankly insulting. Immigration keeps wage levels low for jobs like this, increasing reliance on the welfare state and top-ups. Additionally the turn over of staff in professions like this is high.

Also, plenty of UK students do not get into University here to study medicine. They are rejected in favour of immigrant students, who have to pay the universities more money to study. There is I believe even a cap on UK students studying medicine, simply because they are too expensive to train compared to their immigrant counterparts.

DS is applying for medicine degree apprenticeship. Doctors will always have jobs but it is difficult to get in at the start.

Believe me there are absolutely tonnes of older people getting topped up by pension credit, often women who barely worked outside of the home or men who were self employed and didn't pay much in NI contributions. There are also huge numbers living in rented properties and getting all or most of the rent paid. As they get past 75 + most then end up on Attendance Allowance which hugely then increases the chances of them getting pension credit which again lead to all rent, council tax paid. I'm honestly baffled how we afford it. My colleagues keep saying something will have to change soon. One thing I am confident of though is that by the time I retire there will be nothing left !

I have no idea when you grew up?

But you must have read new article on it being very much in decline

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/moreadultslivingwiththeirparents/2023-05-10

But there will be more job losses to come as some sectors (eg law) are slow to invest in tech.

Your contributions ran out 20 years ago.
Pensioners are being subsidized by everyone else. Pensioners account for nearly 60% of health and state social security expenditures.

It has. I'm thankful I have no kids. When I'm out, I'm out.

Most of us have paid enough - in my case, 44 years of full NI and tax contributions, so yes, I am entitled to my fcking pension.

Just do the maths on a population level, take the emotion & entitlement out of it, pensions are paid forward but the problem is when the generations behind are shrinking.

A state pension is say 230k for 20 years. So just to pay for that you need to earn 50k a yr for 22 yrs (10k a year in tax & NI). But what about the cost of your education, healthcare, transport etc & most people don’t earn that much & those that do not for so many years….

How many people will be due to retire?

My adult kids are thinking very carefully about the pros and cons of having kids. Global warming, the number of kids being disabled spiraling etc, lack of jobs and costs of housing are all factors.

Yes. The City which funds most of the country is in decline. It started with Brexit, those that hung around had made plans dependent on the govt/budget outcome. The net result is it’s the biggest decline of the city in over a decade and many going to NYC and offshoring.

Many people fall back to the public sector. We will always need teachers, nurses, etc. Without a functioning private sector to pay for it all then the job losses will have to come from state as well as welfare reform and cuts.

Redundancies are happening and pipelined as a result of the budget - in the private sector. Growth has stalled and our economy is shrinking. People are about to get a short lesson in the results of over taxing to the point of taking less. I mean, even a 5 year old who plays theme park builder games could tell you that. Not our chancellor, apparently.

People have been saying, bleeding hearts, off you fuck, etc to the people funding the country. The issue is, they now are. As well as taking all of the jobs with them to their new offices abroad.

Apologies - I meant the specific country.

I’m not in the UK but nowhere else have I heard so many people not being able to work, at all, because of mental health. It’s astonishing.

Or that it is actually cheaper to not work and be a SAHP rather than to pay for childcare. What a fucking trap that is.

But yes, keep blaming the immigrants. Because that will solve your problems.

This isn’t how state pensions are structured.

Your NI and tax contributions did not go in a pot to be saved to pay out when you retired.
Your state pension income and the cost of all the public services you use is paid by current tax payers. Of which there are not enough, relative to the cost of the pensioner demographic and the non working demographic.

An aging population was forecast. The increase in life expectancy has been somewhat greater than expected. What has been comparatively unforecast is the rise in the acuity of healthcare demands of the aging population including dementia, and the rise in the non working population of working age who are on sickness benefits.

@MikeRafone I’m not sure how I confused you? I never said more young people didn’t live at home? I said it’s hard to save up a deposit when also paying rent? Plenty of young people do rent rooms & even when living at home some adult dc have to pay rent. Deposits are also a lot higher now and rents are too. You can disagree though 👍

It's not so much the actual work they do, WillowTit, as their attitude towards it

The British attitude to an unwelcome situation is all too often "Typical isn't it, and why isn't someone doing something about it", whereas the usual approach to the same over there is "Okay, what are we going to do about it"

It's called self determination and taking responsibility, both things which are getting increasingly lost in tthe UK

Edited because I forgot to add ttheir home ownership is actually greater than ours - 65% as opposed to 52% last time I checked, though of course in such a massive country it varies wildly by area/state

It can be very difficult for people and has been in the past. Three of my grandfather's brothers left England for Canada (and one became a US citizen in the 1930s). My uncle (a doctor) and his wife emigrated to Tasmania in about 1969. My children's father's cousin emigrated to Australia with 4 children in about the 1980s - his work relocated him so that is why that was done relatively easily. I suppose we have always had a lot of people leaving.

At the moment it is peak popularity for the UK however - we are now second only to the US in terms of number of net lawful immigrants - 900,000 a year coming to the UK. We have 18m more people than when I was born here and there are 8 billion on the planet so there are certainly a lot of humans on the planet and a lot seem to want to come to the UK and that is not even including the 36,000 on small boats from France in 2024 including 4 boats on Christmas day with 450 people on them. We are very popular and nothing seems to stop that.

I don't think arguments about pensioners particularly help. My parents died in their 70s as do most people in our family and my father worked full time to age 77 and died at 79. I will probably work until I die as my state pension at age 67 if I reach that age will, after a lot is taken from it in tax just about cover power bills and council tax only and I gave my savings to my ex husband (I earned more so he got more than half on the divorce), the children for housing and cashed in pension at 55 for children's housing and to give HMRC a massive chunk for the useful things the state does with money.......

Whether the country is going to the dogs as has been said for generations who knows? I suppose we can do studies comparing life for various people in the UK with other places to get real data on those issues. I will stay. My children and grandchildren are here and like the 1.2m who come here to study, work etc every year I think it is the greatest nation on the planet.

If people have “payed” for their pensions why do they think the entitlement age is moving out & will likely increase further? Despite no increase in healthy life expectancy!