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.

The job market shrunk massively for my husband 2 years ago, with 70% of his industry unemployed. It's slightly better now but, according to the last set of figures, 50% of people in his his sector are still without work. In his case it's got nothing to do with a Labour government.

Opposite experience here. DH (in employment) has been job hunting for a while, vacancies have massively ramped up recently.
If your DH isn't seeing any vacancies he needs to broaden his search and apply for more rather than assume he shouldn't bother. He obviously won't get jobs he isn't applying for...
A bit daft to be blaming labour for trying to plug the gap left by the Tories.

Such denial @Digdongdoo. This has been caused by the policies announced in Rachel Reeves’ budget. All the employers who are laying people off and reducing headcount all said it would happen and now it is happening.

The OP is spot on. Labour have absolutely ruined the jobs market.

Yeah you're right. Far better we carried on getting into debt, crippling public services and letting wages stagnate. That was going so well before!

So Labour introduce a jobs tax, businesses respond by cutting jobs, and we're all supposed to blame the Tories/Brexit/Trump/Musk. Basically we're supposed to blame anyone but Labour. Only on MN.

Absolute bullshit.

It hasn't stuck at all, however much you try and wind people up with it. That is why you are getting called out on it.

That is a very ignorant (maybe naive is a better word) way to determine availability of jobs.

Many jobs on job boards aren't "real" jobs. Many are expired or no longer taking applications, others are from agencies who put up fake jobs for the sake of mining people's information and find new companies to recruit for, and then you have the rest.

Of which, it's then a lottery getting an interview and a job offer.

So your DPs income has been reduced for a couple of months and Labour have been in for 8 months. If everything was so great under the tories how have you got in a position where your roof and window are leaking and you have damp. Surely you would have been keeping up maintaining the home and saving if things were so great before.

That's not true.
I co-own a profitable business with 5 others, the NI raise will cost us a 6 figure sum.
Yes we can afford it but not without taking a reduction in our own profits.
We aren't making redundancies but will wait for people to leave and not replace

@Locutus2000 on every thread regarding Rachel from accounts it’s Rachel from accounts it’s stuck 🤣

This started way before labour came into power. And a lot of the effects are global.

That’s not the worst of it, they’re on track to ruin the fucking country!

@Needajobforspouse

Bollocks

Brexit did and this is the continuation of the consequences

Yes. In just 7 months they have apparently ruined the job market…

They have. I work for a huge company that is now cutting jobs and had imposed a hiring ban.

It's employer NICs to blame.

Labour are emotionally illiterate.

They certainly have. All of our approved headcount has been frozen following the employers NI increase. Rinse and repeat by the thousand across the country.

This ain’t Brexit folks, that happened a couple of years ago and Labour cannot pin it on that. This is Rachel Reeves budget. It is that alone, particularly the employer NI contributions that the jobs market just cannot cope with. Stop trying to spread the blame elsewhere. Rachel Reeves has destroyed the UK jobs market and we all know it.

Economically illiterate. It is blindingly obvious. They are crashing the economy.

You can really tell reading through this thread who actually works in the many impacted industries and who is just commentating from the sidelines. All those dealing in the jobs market know that Rachel R has trashed it and now we are all seeing hiring freezes and redundancies.

But for the labour diehards it is all lalala, nothing to see here, Brexit and 14 years of tories. Absolute bullshit. This can all be traced back to Reeves catastrophic employer NI policy. Everyone said it would happen but she knew best apparently

Rachel Reeves has capsized our bouyant job market. She should hang her head in shame, as should Starmer. They’ve only been in power for a few months FFS. This is appalling.

Exactly. This is what we are all experiencing. My firm has just cancelled 7 new headcount previously planned for 2025. Can’t afford
it any more.

Yep, they've undone all the apparently marvelous work the Tories did in 14 years in 7 months.

I'm not saying Labour are amazing by the way. Definitely not. But I'm honestly baffled by people blaming a party who have been in for months for things that have been happening (or at least on the cards) for years due to the actions of the party who had control of the country for over a decade.

It’s basic cause and effect @FiveWhatByFiveWhat. If you add expenses of 10% per employee OF COURSE businesses will reconsider their hiring plans. It is ridiculous to blame this on the tories when all the employees are screeching that they cannot afford Reeves unexpected NI increase. It smacks
of desperation trying to defend her brain dead policy.

I'm struggling to reconcile everyone's experiences with the data.

Unemployment is 4.3% forecast to tick up to 4.7% by the end of the year.

This is a historically low rate (10 years ago it was 6.5%, 2011 it was 8%).

Available jobs are also higher than the 10 year average, about the same as they were before the pandemic and 40% higher than 10 years ago.

Are we just feeling a shift from the strong job seeker marker post pandemic, which was a historic blip? Or am I missing something in the data vs reality?

I work for a huge global firm of insurance brokers.

We've made 10% of our office redundant and been told pay rises are stuck at 1% this year because of the rise in NI contributions.

Your huge global firm are doing what many other huge global forms are, using the NI increase to hide behind whilst they make cuts they have wanted to for years. The additional wage bill will be a drop in the bucket compared to what they pay shareholders.

The tiny firm I work for are going to have quite a considerable increase. There is no suggestion we will cut staff or pay. We will still be profitable, just less so than we were. The directors are the only shareholders, it will be their dividends that are affected. They will still get their full "salary".