Labour have ruined the job market

[Needajobforspouse]

My spouse was made redundant in November, has done some bid work since then (e.g zero contract parcel delivery) but not enough to make up his old salary. He has job alerts and this week there was ZERO jobs advertised that meet his qualifications.

Nobody is hiring.

I work for an SME, and I am also at risk and in bad health. Not enough for PIP etc but enough to make me unreliable (recently diagnosed as immunocompromised).

Not even the local supermarket is hiring, and they won’t touch my DH anyway as he is massively over qualified (I know a supermarket manager and they don’t take on over qualified people as they are “hard to manage” and don’t stay long term.).

yesterday our car broke and we used the last of our savings for a new one, my roof is leaking. My bay window is leaking and I just feel like giving up.

just dreading this year of shitty government policies that pick on the middle income earners and penalise us, is this life? Because if so I hate it.

also where are all the jobs?! Literally zero here in northern England.

I voted for them, but let’s be honest, Labour are trashing everything. 🙄. But, the other parties are just as bad. 🤷‍♀️

You absolutely can blame the Labour government for the job market shrinkage. You can 100% lay it at their door. Employer NI contributions and changes to employee rights from day 1 of employment are what has caused this. Rachel Reeves has caused it. She is the reason we now have a hiring freeze at work.

Anybody who pretends this isn’t completely the fault Reeves’ budget is delusional or pretending. Fact.

Quoting for when they slash welfare soon. It’s going to be tough…

@HelloMrBond as much as I agree that Labour are making some poor decisions you need to stop with the Rachel from accounts thing. She has a master's in economics which makes her considerably more qualified than many of our chancellors. It just sounds like sexist crap.

Several million pounds at my organisation - a not for profit social care provider. Again, redundancies and site closures are underway, unsustainable contracts that we make a loss on are being handed back to local authorities and we'll end up helping fewer people. Ironically, the government will be getting back more in extra NI than they claim to have put into social care as extra - so don't expect to see the social care situation improve.

I think the job market was tough even before Labour (who I voted for), but I agree that the increase in NI contributions for employers, and a general lack of confidence in Reeves who is making one poor decision after another, have made things even worse.

Labour should have gone into the election keeping open the option of raising income tax and vat. They were scared that the Tories would have pummeled them with negative messaging and voters would have shied away. So ...we got NI raises instead.
There has been an abject failure of investment across the board in the UK (private and public sector) for decades, it's crippling productivity and growth. That plus Brexit, COVID, Boris and Truss means we are a poor country with a few very rich people and an aging (so expensive in public service terms) demographic. Everyone is going to have to pay more tax and we need to move more of our share of GDP to wages from profits (too much extractive profit seeking nixes investment and productivity).
The NI raises weren't the best shot selection but they believed they were boxed in....

I have to chuckle at those trotting out “14 years of tories” have caused the labour market crisis. This is not true. They cocked up in many ways and I did not vote Tory, however the job market contraction was caused by Labour’s employers NI and employment law from day 1 changes.

The job market (predictably) fell off a cliff as a direct result because employers can no longer fund their hiring plans. This is exactly what has happened at my place - previously planned headcount have been cancelled following a review after the labour budget.

Labour have caused it and what is even worse is that any informed and objective analysis of Reeves’ proposals demonstrated that this is exactly what would happen. She completely ignored the evidence and now the country’s job market is shot to pieces.

Big hand for R Reeves and Labour. It is impressive to have destroyed a buoyant job market in just a few months.

@Smok3Scr33n sadly when you hurt the wealthy they vote with their feet if you don’t have the wealth creaters you have a big problem
@mantaraya Rachel from accounts has lied and embellished her cv which has no grasp on reality atall hence the mess we are in now she was customer service for 5 years 6 months not an economist for the best part of a decade 🤣🤦‍♀️

Are you serious? Just imagine 14 years of this. We’re only 6 months in and it’s been awful.

Yep, I've been a partner in our practice for 12 years we have maintained/ grown consistently until a few months ago. We are typical of our industry - not hiring. Its labour policies that are doing it.

That’s bullshit. The idea that a business which can’t just magically absorb a NLW and NI increase that totals 10%+ in the current economic environment isn’t viable is as insulting as it is ridiculous.

It presumes that businesses are all making massive profits that are currently being syphoned off by mega-rich owners…

Yes it's easy to see when you speak to others. Same here likely a different industry

Absolutely @OneLemonGuide. The idea that business can wave a wand and absorb the NI increase is ludicrous. The poster suggesting it is just as naive as Reeves, but unfortunately the useless Reeves is chancellor. We could do a better job via a MN thread committee FFS!

The wealth creators are the millions of business owners out there who have risked and invested their own money to develop businesses… the vast majority of those wouldn’t be caught up in any wealth tax if that tax was focused on the 0.01% of the very wealthy (net worth over, say, £50m), most of whom are non-doms anyway, and whose assets are physical based in the UK (property etc) so can’t literally remove that from the country.

I have always voted labour. My husband works in recruitment. These changes have had an immediate impact on the number of jobs available for people, he says. My friend owns a small café and he said the changes are crippling his business.

I think some people see any businesses as large capitalist behemoths which can be drained of money without consequence. However, many of them are just run by ordinary people trying to keep afloat. It is pretty depressing.

@TieredCafe and there you have it labour supporter husband in recruitment it doesn’t get much clearer than that

I am not sure if your grammar is off. Are you saying my husband is a labour supporter? Because he very much isn’t!

You're certainly right about the supermarkets. Although it was before Labour. A two year contract office job I had ended and I was finding it difficult at the time to get another so took a zero hours job at one of the big supermarkets (through an agency). This was in 2021. When I started there were lots of other zero hours workers there too. By 2023 the work had completely dried up and there hasn't been a single vacancy for agency workers in any of my local supermarkets since. When I go into the one I worked in (now as a customer) the shop floor is almost empty (skeleton staff) and not one is agency. The only thing that is sometimes still available is night staff.

It’s all very well saying there’s loads of jobs online but most are unsuitable for one reason or another.

Agree. This is highly misogynistic. How many economics degrees has Jeremy Hunt got? No one even questions his background or qualifications to be Chancellor. Or Kwasi Kwarteng for that matter.

Sorry - but I know 4 different people who have worked in marketing since leaving uni, 2 in London, one in the midlands and one in the north and they've all consistently said for the last 15 years that its an unstable industry and people get laid off etc a lot compared to other industries - there's not a lot of marketing jobs compared to other industries and a lot of competition and has always been the case. I don't think any of them have worked for less than 4 employers in those 15 years. I was under the impression that this was just the nature of the game, as it were- not sure how this could be blamed on Labour. Happy to be corrected if I am missing something here, as it's obviously not my industry personally

I agree. They tied themselves in knots with their ' no taxes on working people'. They should have taken the only policy the Tories had 'Tax cuts' and challenged it. They should have pointed out that tax cuts means no money for public services, no money for roads, police, social services etc. They didnt . They have taken a sledgehammer to crack a nut. If they wanted to ensure large corporations were paying their fair share of tax, they should have dome more to close the loopholes. If they wanted to stop the likes of Jeremy Clarkson and James Dyson parking their money in farmland to avoid Inheritance tax, they should have done that by keeping working farm machinery IHT free ( or something like that, I dont know enough about it) Now they cant backtrack on the narrative that they are trashing the economy and killing British farming.

Thats bullshit. Zero hours type jobs - probably, yes. Professional jobs - definitely no.

@TieredCafe my grammar is terrible I agree
shd read
you’re a labour supporter
your husband in recruitment
you are both seeing that it’s a mess

Rachel from accounts has stuck because she’s completely and utterly incompetent and she is a massive liar. Her Cv is a joke not one shred of truth in it it’s stuck because she’s completely incompetent it’s not misogynistic all politicians have names mostly deserving