Working families £18k worse off than benefits claimants after budget

[shoelances]

This is madness. Can the last taxpayer in the UK please close the door behind them.

www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/households-on-handouts-to-be-18-000-better-off-than-families-on-modest-wages/ar-AA1RqxlQ

There are nearly 1million advertised jobs
with more just advertised locally

The point is there are jobs out there and people can apply for ones they are capable of doing

Of course they don't. Nobody does. Does that mean we all should just choose lot to work at all? Because we can't find a job that we would love to do?

I just don't understand your perspective to be honest. Somebody has to do the crap work that nobody else wants to do but we as a society need doing. Obviously most of us want to avoid it so people work really hard, building skills and experience so that we can find alternative (imperfect) employment. Common sense would dictate that this means that those without other options should do the work that's left that nobody else wants to do.

I don't know where you think we will get the slaughterhouse workers or carers from?

Care work always gets mentioned as a job anyone could do. That someone who is unemployed has no excuse to be jobless because there are always care vacancies. Not everyone is capable of care work, either physically, mentally, or they just don't have the right attitude. As @Frequency posted, people who don't want to be there are a detriment to both the colleagues and clients.

I had a relative who worked in a slaughter house. He turned to alcohol to cope (really common in people who work in them) and ultimately killed himself.

I actually loved care work. If I won the lottery, I would go back into part-time or I'd train to be a mental health nurse. A lot of the more experienced care workers I worked with also loved their jobs. It is not a job people stick to long-term unless they enjoy it.

The reasons I left were lack of steady pay, a lack of holidays due to staff shortages and a constant stream of incapable teenagers who did not want to be there being sent to work there.

Because it is a job with a high turnover of staff (in part caused by people being forced into the role by UC) they are constantly recruiting so what happens is the home is short staffed and you have to work 60 hours a week and forget about that holiday request being approved because it's not happening, then 3 months later, their newest round of recruits pass the training and they're over staffed so you get 24 hours a week if you're lucky, then the new recruits start to leave and you're hours creep back up to 60+ hours a week, rinse and repeat three month later.

You could fix care work by paying a proper wage and scrapping zero-hour contracts. Sending in incapable 18-year-olds is making the issue worse, not better.

Most people are capable of it though. The vast majority of people in fact. They might not want to do it and have a poor attitude but that's something we as a society need to manage. Some people have a poor attitude to all work and quite frankly think they're above it. These people need to be brought back to earth.

Again, I ask you, where do we get all these carers that need from then? Demand is only going to increase and importing people from abroad doesn't necessarily work for the reasons I have already outlined.

The care worker discussion is a bit odd.

Care work is one of the main jobs people on UC who work, are doing, albeit part time.

If you are a care worker and you do 20 hours of shift as a single parent. Its not always as easy to find 17 more hours as you first think. the 17 extra hours available might well be outside of normal childcare availability. A lot of care work is anti social hours. My mum did it and it involved driving house to house, very early in the morning till late at night, night shifts, weekends etc and she had to run her own car. She claimed milage but it didnt cover wear and tear.

Then people say, well dont be a carer then. But thats the job they have qualifications for and experience in.

They cant win they should do care work, but then when thier children continue existing outside of 8-6pm they shouldn't do care work.

Absolutely agree with your last paragraph. Our house could have burnt down during our summer holiday because a useless young woman coming in to care for my mum left the fire on one night, and myriad other cock-ups took place because she apparently couldn't be bothered to read the care instructions. It's a responsible job and you can't just throw any old so-and-so at it. My mum's care company seems to be seeing very high staff turnover atm due to this assumption any old Tom, Dick or Harry can do care work. I couldn't.

You are in the minority of people. We don't have enough people like you to fill the caring roles even if it was better paid and we got rid of zero hour contracts. None of my friends would like to be carers apart from the one friend I have that is a carer and loves it. It is a rare type of person amongst the general population.

Whilst care could be better paid, realistically it would never be able to be that much better paid because where would the money come from? Too few of us put aside enough savings to cover our care needs in our old age and the state has a ballooning debt so can't just start doubling carers wages and fund it with public money.

So instead we look at what can realistically be achieved with what we do have. Millions of able bodied people that are choosing to stay on benefits rather than to work in care and loads of care vacancies. Not every placement will work out and I'm sure we could offer people a range of opportunities in other shortage areas like cleaning. At the moment though people believe that they can simply opt out of doing the work they don't want to do and the government will pay them virtually the same (if not more) anyway. This cannot be right!

That is a huge shame. Sounds like the industry lost a valuable member of staff who loved their job. I have known someone else had to drop out of care work for similar reasons.

It is always a red flag to me when a certain place/industry has a high turnover of vacancies. The problem there lies with the employers, not job seekers. Make the job more secure, well paid, with better working conditions, and people will want to do the work.

How do we get the right people to be carers then in the right numbers? You say you couldn't do it, but of course you probably could. You probably just don't want to do it which is a different thing entirely.

Most people are capable of reading care instructions and caring for someone. They might not be the best carer in the world but ultimately they could do it to a reasonable standard.

A few posters have said that part time working should not be allowed, but your point proves that part time is sometimes all there is available, be it due to caring responsibilities or the nature of the job.

If you are in a job where you don't know what hours you are doing week to week, you can't get another that slots around your non-existent rota. So you end up doing less hours (but still have to put your life on hold in case more hours are offered), get a UC top up, and then get berated on here for being lazy and not working more.

Only. So you really think 1in3 families have disabled children?

40% of families impacted by the two child cap has someone with a disability within them. They therefore are eligible for uncapped benefits.

It's similar in a way to DH's job in hospitality. Next week, he'll be working 60 hours but come January? His work will likely be closed 2 days a week due to how quiet it becomes and then around March, it will slowly start to pick up again and eventually will go back to regular hours.

He stays because he likes the job but also because shift work suits our family well and it's fairly flexible (just not in December).

The answer to that would be where’s the father? He should look after the kids. The taxpayer is not the de facto parent

I do agree zero hours contracts should be banned as they are totally unfair for workers

My mum enjoyed care work but it is a real mix of skills. You need a strong stomach and you need to not mind being abused verbally. You see upsetting things, so staff need support to help process those things as well.

Imaging in some settings where you build professional but warm relations with families and clients, like a teacher does, but all your clients die with 2 to 5 years Its quite tough!

A lot of roles only offer part-time work because it is beneficial to them. My friend owns a local shop, and she will only take people on part-time. She doesn't have enough hours available to have 2 full-time staff and 1 part-time; instead, she has 3 part-time staff and one ad-hoc/cover worker.

If she had two full-time staff, what happens is that when one of them wants two weeks' holiday, the other one has to work 7 am-11 pm 7 days a week, and she found most people can't do that because they have a life/family/care commitments outside of work. Small businesses have that very valid reason for only employing part-time/zero hours workers, but the likes of Asda and Tesco, who also do the same thing because it suits them to have more workers on fewer hours, don't have that excuse.

This is why I say that most people could do it but most wouldn't enjoy it. That's why we have a staff shortage but why you recruitment from abroad isn't that difficult. If it was a rare set of skills then it would be difficult to find people no matter where you looked. If it was a matter of motivation then it obviously is easier and that's what we are seeing with the apparent 'success' of foreign recruitment

It should be, but you know its not. We can punish women and children for men's short givings but id rather not.

We simply have to hope that the father is at least paying tax to contribute a bit to his own children. They say men contribute much more tax that women overall, so perhaps the good men are subsidising the rubbish ones they can sort it out amongst themselves.

I’ve read time and time again on this site women having multiple children with an obvious feckwit of a father and to be honest they should know better. But that said relationships do break down and fathers then wander off and shrug off their financial responsibilities. The government should be using some of these increased taxes to sort this issue out because the lack of financial support from the father is then landing on the taxpayer who is having to step into the de facto parental role. In many cases the reason why children are in poverty is because the fathers don’t pay up but it is the taxpayer who get the brunt of people’s anger when it is them who actually step up.

I dont know if recruitment from abroad is easy. Its partly a bigger pool of people. Its the whole world! and some of the motivation is how far our currency goes back home, so we cant ever recreate that bit.

I do actually agree that if terms and conditions were much better, it would be a more desirable job and many people are capable of it, but I cant see how to achieve this cheaply.

I don't think it's a terms and conditions issue. People have used the analogy of hospitality and I think it's fair in terms of zero hour contracts, antisocial hours and low pay. There are still lots of people willing to work in the sector because it's intrinsically more desirable work. I would choose a job in a restaurant over a care home any day of the week. Most people would. That's the problem we have. The work is undesirable yet hugely in demand. We do need to effectively push people into the sector.

It was easy to sponsor someone from abroad to come and work in care in the UK. You didn't need any evidence that they were particularly good at the role or had a specific skillset. Since July rules have been tightened though so we will see where that takes us when we can no longer import our carers and need to rely on our own population to care for our vulnerable people. I still stand by the fact that nobody will do these undesirable jobs unless they are incentivised sufficiently. This will involve some carrot but also a lot of stick. It's too easy now just to choose to stay on benefits and not work.

Try reading this = its by someone who knows how these things work

https://benefitsinthefuture.com/lies-damned-lies-and-the-telegraph/

It’s not just the pay - it’s not nursing as such - your patients are not going to be restored to health.

In the pil’s nursing home for example there were just heaps of people with absolutely no capacity. Just sitting, being fed, being hoisted and needing to be changed. The carer profile was increasingly sub-Saharan men. I can’t imagine that they were loving the work but they were the ones prepared to do it.

Do some posters imagine that all care workers should be cheery capable kindly women bustling into work every morning and loved by one and all? In your dreams.