Get Britain Working is totally missing the current employment crisis economy

[myotheraccountsa]

Just read the BBC article about rate of UK unemployment up to 5% - the gvmt saying people should question the accuracy of this data, but also that it ties into their campaign to "Get Britain working".

I am mind blown. Are they not seeing what I'm seeing? This isn't an issue with people on benefits etc -

There's a huge new tidal wave of very highly qualified people who have been merrily working for all their lives, now made redundant or upon leaving theor jobs literally cannot find anything. There's a Mid-Senior level crisis all over LinkedIn - 500+ people applying for every 1 job. People searching for over a year with hundreds of applications, interviews, and getting nothing. Basically being told that nowadays the only way to get a job is through networking - it's back to who you know, not what you know.

And then the government act all surprised and like they haven't taxed businesses on workers to the point that they're cutting heads wherever they can? Or that they are oblivious to this and everyone should "get back to work" like it's easy for an ex-SVP to persuade the local chippy they're the ideal employee (even if they're desperate and would willingly work there).

Madness.

If you pay enough you’ll get the people you’re after. It will get to that point where price matches what you want, like anything in a market.

Pharmacies are closing left right and centre due to lack of funding but also cite a lack of pharmacists. This is so not true!! There is a lack of pharmacists who are willing to work for £19 an hour which is how low some places have got now. Why would you put yourself through 4 years of uni plus 1 year of training to work for that. There is so much responsibility and you have the risk of killing someone if you give the wrong drugs.

So next time you see your local pharmacy is closed because they couldn’t find a pharmacist that is why! They would rather stay closed than pay a decent rate to a locum. If you have any kids considering studying pharmacy, tell them to avoid as it’s not a good career move.

To be fair there has been a lot in the press around this recently. This article below is a general article on it, but around July when nurses graduate there was loads of articles. I dont think it was ever 'no jobs, none at all" but there was definitely an issue of no way near the number of jobs out there.

I think some announcement has been made to ease the situation for student nurses but I've seen more recent articles from Swansea student nurses worrying there are no jobs to graduate into next year. The BMA, Midwifery Association and Chartered Physiotherapist Society have recently campaigned to stop the freeze which is locking new entrants out.

https://healthcaretoday.com/article/nhs-recruitment-freezes-what-does-it-mean-for-the-industry

I can’t see local gov reform happening in the lifetime of this government, if at all.

Yes I don’t think the recruitment platform indeed helps. It floods you with unsuitable applicants. Indeed is 25 per day to advertise. Used to be £5 per day within last 5 years. Surely the govt could quickly and cheaply replicate a recruitment platform. But seriously. So many people can’t hold down a job. The support necessary to keep some people stable in work in really significant.

My area is becoming two new unitary authorities from April '27 and they held off a local election to push it through.

Well, yes. But in the real world, most employers have to think about costs and long term viability. There aren't many that can just write a blank cheque for everyone they employ.

Now, I've no doubt that someone will come back and tell me that, if we can't afford to pay salaries that will attract the right kind of staff, then we are just not viable. And perhaps they would have a point, as the model that has enabled us to attract the right staff for many years is no longer working - the pool of applicants is nowhere near as good now as it was. But from the conversations that I've had with other employers at our local Chambers of Commerce events, we are far from alone in finding this.

We find ways of managing, of course, and we continue to make things work for the time being, but the quality of applicants coming through is a significant concern. In the future, perhaps technology will provide some solutions, but in the meantime, it is a concern.

Agreed.
Dh was made redundant over 7 months ago and has applied for over 60 jobs. He's had 2 interviews and that's it.
He is trying so hard to get a job but just not having any luck! He's been working in his industry since he was 18 and is now 48 so has a wealth of experience.
UC doesn't cover the bills and we are literally hand to mouth. There's nothing in the pipeline. We really do not know what else he can do!

We are in the real world, and what you’re describing doesn’t tally with the numerous SMEs we know. Hence sector specifics having an impact.

Most employers cannot overpay if the clients won’t use them any more! As @MrsBennetsPoorNervesAreBack company finds, there’s a shortage of the right staff. Clients are not going to pay London finance rates for regional engineering solutions. You cannot over pay or you’re bankrupt.

But what has that got to do with anything? There aren’t jobs, even as a graduate or non-graduate.

In my industry, job wages have halved over time. It’s now minimum wage for a high-pressure full-on job that requires a degree, fluency in a foreign language, shift work, including at night and weekends and bank holiday. Many staff have degrees from Oxford or Cambridge and many have master’s degrees.

Two young relatives have finished degrees in nursing and physiotherapy. The nursing one can’t get a job at all, and the physiotherapist is the only one of her large group of physio friends who got a job.

I talk to lots of employers through our local Chamber of Commerce events. Loads are having difficulty with recruitment across a range of different sectors. Maybe it's geographical, but we are certainly not unusual in our area.

It’s better that a gov doesn’t load up struggling companies with extra taxes.

Going by the mention of region and sector from another pp I’m not surprised the combination is causing difficulty.

Here there’s another problem, employees finding a tough market and companies shrinking.

Gov policy will impact on different ways, they can still all be negative.

It is mismanagement by Government that has led to the current situation. Our energy costs are far too high because we did not forward plan enough. We all know they were told that we need nuclear and that was a Labour Government under Blair that also failed to plan. They also completely and utterly failed to regulate the housing market to keep costs down for all by managing supply and demand based on real life demographics.

To now sit back and say it is the fault of “employers” for not paying a living wage is rubbish. The US is growing because they have cheap energy and affordable housing and incentives for people to have to look after themselves.

Our entire political system is failing because it is bleeding hearts and trying to please everyone and ending up pleasing nobody. Businesses up and leave pretty quickly when they can and you can no longer conduct business in the UK in a reasonable manner.

You cannot pass the failure of successive governments onto private businesses entirely in a capitalist society. It is not a closed economy.
All they can do now is deregulate aggressively. Propping up the economy via the public sector is not going to work. Labour are all out of ideas.

What they need to do is strong incentives towards all remaining talent and deregulation. And ignore the naysayers and miserable people stuck in the past. But they won’t listen because they play according to the 1970s playbook.

I don't think its just Covid. I think a lot of it is due to living through phones and online. Real worl skills aren't practiced and honed.

Yep

Why do we have scores of foreign nurses on employer sponsered temporary visas when we have home grown nurses looking for work. Time to end the sponsered visas?

Did you check to see if the roles were internal only? My very large lical teaching hospital looks like it has jobs but they are 99p percent of the time only open to internal candidates ( due to job reductions, redundancies, restructuring etc)

I’m not sure the current govt will last that long 😁 Changes are only now at the proposal stage for most and there is so much complexity to work through - what happens to those LAs in on the verge of S114 merging with those that are solvent? There’s then a huge exercise in mapping roles across multiple authorities and deciding which roles are redundant, developing new working models across larger regions etc. I work in a large LA and we can’t even get an accurate report of who’s working for us in what roles as our systems are so poor! At the moment there’s not even agreement between LAs about how they want to reorganise - where I live (not where I work) there’s a small unitary sat within the geography of a large county/district model. The county has proposed something completely different to the unitary for future reorganisation.

Honestly it feels like so much resource is being pulled into reorganisation instead of allowing people to get on with the work they already have to do.

(probably generating lots of lovely work for consultants)

It's hardly surprising that no one wants to do care work - or indeed any of the low paid & low status jobs that need doing when those doing them are written off as failures, lazy, uninspired and that's without mentioning the pay that requires top ups to live and poor conditions - which then attracts more criticism from society.

We've created this issue by devaluing those roles, by making them unworthy and being critical of the morality of the people doing them, pay them poorly, treat them badly and then act all surprised when people steer away from that and go for the education and 'better' jobs that have been lauded as everyone's saviour. But rather predictably - there aren't enough 'better' jobs to go around and the low paid, low status ones that have been devalued still need to be done.
But so much easier to huff and puff about no one wanting to work than see that this a situation that had a very predictable result, and so we flog the dead horse, import labour to do these jobs while still telling those educated and in search of 'better' jobs that this is the answer.

Absolutely this! Society has its priorities wrong.

And you really are a paid stooge.

All the trusts in my area are freezing recruitment. I work in the hospitals -as they fall apart around us, the buildings are crumbling as much as the people - and I work with these young people you are lying about and lying to.

I hope the money they are paying you is seriously good enough to betray all the people of this country into slavery. Except it never can be and one day they will come for it and you.

I think even in a relatively good job people would struggle to afford a small place of their own, to pay bills and and to live so it's not a very attractive proposition.

I'd have to think very hard about moving city and signing up for a 6 month (at least) rental contract when I know 2 or 3 people who have been hired this year, worked 3 months notice, got 1 month into the new job and been let go due to costs.

And I definitely would not sell my house and move my family for one.