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.

Much smaller in scale.

I doubt they have quite so many people making ludicrous statements like "I don't live in a free house, I have to pay my heavily subsidised council rent out of the free money I get from the government" though.

Three of my grandchildren under 30 are doing really well. Only one went to Uni. Two of the others are still in education, and the final one is disabled so that's a different issue altogether. Don't write the next generation off yet encourage them to look at trades and careers that are still needed.

The US has changed a lot since I lived there, but the welfare state in the early 1980s was limited to unemployment benefit for six months and food stamps thereafter. Casual work was available, paid in cash, but not an income you could declare to the IRS.

The difference between renting in UK and (pretty much) the rest of Europe, is that on mainland Europe, there are a number of protections for tennants and generally it is cheaper than a mortgage. Over the last 15 years, the Gov't has failed to properly regulate the rental market (and many other things too) and hence we have this massive housing crisis now imo.

But I don't think our younger generations want to be sparkies or plumbers. In many cases they don't really want to work all, they want a very good salary from the start but without having to put in the effort it seems to me.

But our productivity within the UK is pretty awful, even compared to some EU countries. On a different post the other day someone actually said "who cares about productivity?". This came from someone who, when working from home, did the shopping, went swimming and often went to the cinema. That's why, in part at least, we have become the "sick man of Europe," again!

We got a local plumbing business that was started by two young qualified plumbers. Five years later, they now employ twenty (?) staff, and have taken on apprentices. There are youngsters out there who do have the drive and dedication.

The UK is mostly the sick man of Europe again because of labour refusing to depart from the ridiculous pile of crap that Farage and Johnson dragged us into. The amount of red tape hindering trade with our closest neighbours is dragging our economy down massively. I don't care what they call it but they need to swallow their pride and get us back into the customs union and single market.

I met a bloke at a wedding who was a sub-contract tiler in his youth for ages, and then set up his own business in his 30s. By the time he was 55, he had built a business employing 100 people. And a plumbing business that did the same. These people are not sufficiently celebrated.

Do you not see any connection at all between what you allege here 'they want a very good salary from the start but without having to put in the effort it seems to me' and what you said in the post just above this?
Are you seriously saying that 'they', ? the whole generation of younger Milennials and Gen Zs are all innately lazy compared to the hardworking Boomers/ Gen X generations? Surely you don't actually think this?

Just to add @MyObservations, what do you think is meant by productivity and what has this got to do with one lazy person on a different thread who obviously doesn't do their job properly?

Good for them.

You're right, in part. But I'd make 2 points. First. Don't blame it on this Gov't (which I didn't vote for); they've only been in power for 6 months. Second, don't forget that prior that to BREXIT, much if the labour force came from mainland Europe. They've largely gone home now and very few young Brits are going into the vacant slots which is precisely why we are unable to build the number of houses this current Gov't wants built.

I don't blame Brexit on this government - that is very much a UKIP/Tory project- but I am frustrated at their complete apathy on the subject. Next to nothing has moved in six months. As for the workforce, you're right and this shows how little investment has been put into training homegrown skilled workers across so many areas. Both can be true: we should train Brits and remove obstacles to trade to revitalise the economy.

@SunshineOceanAndOranges I do and don't agree. Most small businesses provide local services in their local community, and the EU/Brexit is largely a distraction that raises costs and imposes burdens. If my neighbour, who is a tree surgeon, sells the logs to his local community to fuel their woodburners, the EU has no interest, until it starts telling him that they must be a standard length and weight. As a US politician once said (I think it was Reagan) the most terrifying words a small business ever hears are "Hello, I'm from the Government and I'm here to help you."

I sense we're in violent agreement 😉

IMO, the calls to rejoin the EU are deluded. I voted to stay in the EEC in 1975, but there was no vote in 1992 on closer political and financial alignment to create the EU. I am firmly pro the single market and customs union, and fervently opposed to politcal integration and government from Brussels. Look at the state of most of northern Europe and tell me that you want to add that shitfest to the shitfest we have concocted here already.

Of course not "all". However, in my experience, when talking to younger people I was surprised at the proportion who wanted to be rich and famous without any inkling of how that was going to be achieved. Maybe I was unlucky (or lucky perhaps) in the groups with whom I've engaged but, according to Gov't figures, we have more people not in work now than in 2019 (pre-Covid) whereas other European nations appear to be back to normal.

Working in the construction sector I'm not sure I'd completely agree. There are still a lot of eastern european guys working in the sector but I think many are now settled here for years. What I do notice now working on HS2 in Birmingham is the huge number of Asian men working in construction (Indian, Pakistani, etc). Obviously this speaks to the demographics of the area (e.g. majority of youths now being in the 'British non-white' category) but I also encounter a lot of fairly recent Indian immigrants (often Sikhs) who have come over and are working for Sikh companies.

My boss is a Sikh as are the bosses of the other two hauliers providing trucks to the plant I work at. The batcher (who makes the cement) is a Sikh. The other batcher is British Jamaican as is the technician. Every single driver is of Asian descent. The only white guy onsite is the plant manager who isn't in most days as he manages three plants (ours is the biggest and provides 50% of the concrete to the big HS2 site in Brum).

I've also worked at the competitor that provides the other 50% of the concrete as my boss has trucks in there too. Of the other two hauliers at that plant, one is Sikh run and the other a small white family business. So at two of the three biggest concrete plants in Brum, 4/5 of the hauliers are Sikh.

At HS2 the 5-6 gatemen are literally all African/British Jamaican as are about 75% of the banksmen. The technicians are mostly Pakistani and Jamaican with a few English lads. The only majority white team is the piling team who travel up from London for the week and they're proper cockney geezers for the most part.

The other big concrete plant (which my boss also has trucks in) is resourced by the same Sikh hauliers from the other sites and also a couple of Romanian owner/drivers who just have 1-3 trucks each, one of which they drive themselves.

So, I guess this is a long winded way of saying that I still encounter a huge amount of ethnic diversity at work. Obviously it's going to be more than in an office environment as perfect written and spoken English or a degree isn't hugely important, but I haven't really noticed a big impact from Brexit tbh. Mainly just that the wages have gone up due to demand which has been a good thing for many of us as cheap labour isn't great when wages have stagnated in parts of this sector (especially haulage) in the last 20 years. I haven't actually checked the figures but I've read a few times now that the driver shortage is slowly reducing which suggests that more people are opting to take that career path.

As above, my boss is a Sikh and we have two Sikh drivers, two Muslim drivers, a Greek, a British Jamaican, two white English guys, and a Brazilian/Italian guy.

I'll leave it to you to look up what productivity means. As to the comment by "one lazy person ..." It was surprising the amount of support she had, with other contributors also adding the non work things they did when WFH. Albeit they were in the minority on the whole thread, it was a sizeable minority.

It sounds well run to me @SidhuVicious . Maybe not as DEI correct as MN would like though.

My friend is renting in a shared house with 6 other couples and it's £900 a month just for her. Of course house sharing is a thing.
But in 2016 in the exact same area I had a lovely 2 bedroom house next to the station, with a double drive and large garden for just a hundred pounds a month more than that.

"Mainly just that the wages have gone up due to demand "
Hooray! That's good news 😊

Interesting and helpful post. My comment on the BREXIT was really to highlight the issue in the domestic building industry. Here we have a new Gov't with a desire to increase house building but according to reports, there aren't enough tradesmen or women to meet the Gov't demand. Prior to BREXIT a good deal of them came from E Europe.

I don’t know typical salaries in the UK so can only speak for here (USA). Salary really depends where you live in the USA. California (CA), New York City and such have such high wages that they seem like a dream to most of the rest of the country. They often pay double or even much higher than similar jobs elsewhere. I live in the southern USA where salaries are some of the lowest. However, here doesn’t seem bad to me. In CA and most other liberal cities housing, eating out, etc. is like from some other planet (I.e.,unbelievably high). Where I live you can get a relatively new 1700-2000 sq ft home with 9 -11 ft ceilings, central heat and air plus upgrades on a +1/4 acre lot for $230,000. (In CA and similar high paying areas you may make a great salary -2-3x what one makes here -but you may have to share a 800 sq fr pad with others because housing is so ridiculously high -as an old friend of mine does who lives in CA). Since my career was in education I can factually state that our local starting salary for teachers is around $41K, though it tops out at $57,000 with maximum years experience unless you add additional degrees. Don't know if that is high or low compared to the UK. Here, people often leave their doors unlocked (I’m not recommending such, just making a point that the high crime you probably hear about is mainly in our huge liberal cities). We can walk the neighborhood at night and life is rather pleasant. Don’t know if this compares poorly or favorably to UK.