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.

Is this shown by data? @Babadookinthewardrobe?

Financial services job outlook for 2025 is 'cautiously optimistic for growth' as of 5th Feb

Tech and IT job market is forecast to be 'solid but unspectacular'

What areas are being badly hit?

Financial Services is my sector @ThinkAboutItTomorrow. We are all on recruitment freezes following the budget. These are jobs with prospects
ad training that have now been pissed down the drain. HGV driver jobs do not compare.

Where on earth do you get your data that “financial services is cautiously optimistic” @ThinkAboutItTomorrow. We really aren’t. Ref CBI, ABI

It'll be the most recent hiring intention surveys. I haven't delved into them but did see it reported that the FS sector is increasingly optimistic

www.staffingindustry.com/news/global-daily-news/uk-financial-services-firms-boost-permanent-and-project-based-hiring#:~:text=Hiring%20intentions%20in%20the%20UK's,shortages%20continues%20to%20be%20felt.%E2%80%9D

Well that’s not translating to the coalface @OneLemonDog. I‘m in a FTSE 100 FS company and we’ve had our 2025 headcount’s cancelled as have our peers. Not sure how we can cope with current headcount but we have no choice.

It was from a site call. Alwaysfinance. No idea if that's a decent source. Michael page said the outlook was mixed.

I couldn't find any doom and gloom apart from an article from last January.

The ONS recorded financial services job vacancy growth of 4% in the last quarter of 2024 vs the year before....

I'm not meaning to be arsey it's just the story being told here isn't reflected in the data.

A hiring freeze isn't the same as redundancies and if you're going to struggle in 2025 on existing headcount surely that means growth is good?

Whilst you are in a terrible position, I know many people that have been made redundant and also had struggles finding the 'right' job (and by right I mean with the exact salary and title expectations as they wanted) and this was within the year before Labour got in to power.

The redundancies I know of were made in sectors that have been reshaped by the way COVID impacted these sectors and a lot of money was pumped in to departments that were no longer sustainable after the world moved back in to the new normal.

I neither voted Lab, Con or Ref and I completely agree with you. The combined brainpower of the incumbent Labour party know slightly less than bugger all about economics.

Quite. I run a business with my DH and we're not afraid of hardwork, we've had no holidays for the past 14 years (working 51 weeks out of the year). The increase in business rates for a just out of the city centre unit plus NI increase, plus utiliities increase means it's just not worth our while to keep going much longer. If you take on all the stresses that go along with running a business, naturally you expect there to be decent financial benefit otherwise why would anyone bother?

I live nowhere near the UK and I've heard her referred to as Rachel from accounts many, many, times on MN. Maybe you would be better concentrating on the real issues rather than something so petty.

As a pp stated politicians are prone to being given such names by the general public, it shows what people think of them. Good politicians don't have quite the same issues.

Although after her new expenses situation the new name doing the rounds is Chancer of the exchequer 🤣

They've fucked up the weather, too, it's been cold and damp for weeks here.

But Labour policies have made things WORSE! Repeating ad nauseam that the Tories were crap just doesn’t cut it.

They've fucked up the weather, too, it's been cold and damp for weeks here.

@LakieLady do you think their policies have no effect?

Yes, businesses do need to be encouraged to invest and become more productive… But whacking them with up to 10% extra costs from NIC and national living wage in one year isn’t the way to do it!

There will always be lots of business both small and large who will take the opportunity of something like NI / NMW / employment costs to cut staff or to freeze pay rises etc.

Just like when we see things like Brexit / Ukraine, so many companies increasing prices way above the impact of the former as an excuse. See food inflation in supermarkets for an example of this.

It's a good way of deflecting profit before people ethos and to try and scare existing staff into accepting crap pay and conditions or customer/clients expectations.

An example of this is the horror show of trying to get customer service from household names like John Lewis / HSBC.
Chat bots or hours on the phone trying to get through to someone reading a script or with absolutely no pleasantries or people skills let alone customer care. I'm sure those companies will be blaming someone else for this level of service.

Yes, this straw man that those who are criticising Labour are just looking to make Labour the scapegoat for everything that’s a bit shit is just plain stupid…

I voted Labour. I really wanted them to succeed and take this country forwards… I really want a reason to be happy with them, but their policies are taking us in the opposite direction.

No they haven't.

And in the same way people exaggerate their experience on CVs to get jobs many tweak them so they don't look 'over qualified '.

Your dp needs to stop banging on about his masters or whatever he's got. It isn't going to land him a job in the bakery at Morrisons.

Write up a new CV and do a few courses. I went through learn direct, had a job within a month and I'm still there 3 years on.

The reason they’ve changed how they do customer service is that if they did it the way you (and I expect most of us) would prefer, they’d have to put their prices up…

And, when push comes to shove, we prefer lower prices to outstanding customer service! If we did value customer service over lower prices, and would pay for the privilege of outstanding customer service, they’d provide it.

Your post shows you have zero understanding of supply and demand, and how these type of businesses work.

Just like when we see things like Brexit / Ukraine, so many companies increasing prices way above the impact of the former as an excuse. See food inflation in supermarkets for an example of this.

This just bullshit and shows you haven’t a clue how a market economy works. If Supermarket A were to say “look, war in Ukraine! We need to put prices up!” when actually there’s no need, Supermarket B would just say “we’re keeping the prices the same - there’s no impact from the war!”, and customers would go to Supermarket B, and Supermarket A would be less competitive, lose customers and lose profit.

The current Labour business policies are so anti small business it's laughable. It's so incongruous for any government to push net zero policies which hit the poorest in society the hardest and simultaneously cut opportunities for British businesses to prosper. They need to pick a lane. If businesses can't manufacture goods in the UK for a decent profit, of course we're going to continue to import from China etc which does nothing to help the environment!

And Brexit did nothing to damage small businesses! Now that was laughable, all the lies, mismanaged that got exactly the opposite of the lies that were told.

No. The Tories screwed the jobs market. Labour's NI increases are a useful excuse for firms that want to make lay-offs and/or freeze recruiting.

Yep

As of 2023, the broad consensus of economists is that leaving the EU has had a substantially negative effect on the UK's economy, which is expected to be several percentage points smaller than it would have been if it had remained in the bloc.

This has a big impact on recruitment does it not which we will just be seeing round about now.