Aibu for being increasingly worried about the job market?

[gymboe]

another threat of redundancy here. Business not going well and to be honest we are full steam ahead with AI.

a quick search in my large town in south of England:

• 5 x nhs jobs (4 of which I am not qualified for and one is really terrible pay as just three days per week)
• school jobs: just three and very low pay
• our high street is mostly made of charity shops and vape stores. Retail doesn’t offer what I want.
• a big employer now hardly owns any office space. There are just a few jobs. I’m not qualified.

I do have a degree but found myself in a specialised account/client mgmt type role. Pays around £50k.

10 years ago there were loads of these type of jobs, decent salary even if you had to start low, good career progression, hundreds of them and tonnes of temp agencies. And the nhs had loads of admin jobs. Not to mention school jobs being plentiful.

where the hell have they all gone?

this is a huge issue. Massive. I’m really worried.

Sorry I didn't give you a full answer to this. Many employees refused to return to the office after Covid. They taught their employers that their jobs could be done from home. They are still busy teaching employers that the jobs can be done from home. But once they've got that firmly established, that makes it very worthwhile for their employer to move those jobs to a country with lower wages. I've got two friends now with employees in the Philippines and they say they are more productive and more motivated as well as being cheaper. It was the obvious outcome of insisting on working from home.

Not an absolute rule at all. I worked from home for ten years before the pandemic and still do. It's always going to depend on the specific industry and the specific role. Also, I think you're slightly insulting the intelligence of the people who run businesses by suggesting that they only woke up to the possibility of overseas staff when some of their current staff started working from home in 2020, so it's all the fault of the employees. I know businesses that lost work to overseas firms going back to the 2000s and they had no wfh staff at all. The defining factor was the people overseas spotting the opportunity and offering their services cheaply, and UK employees weren't protected even though none of them worked anywhere other than in an office.

@Imdunfer agreed - you can also pay them far lower than someone working in the office in the UK. Whether a UK employee works from home or not makes no difference to that.

I have worked in the kind of jobs that are now being placed overseas. Outsourcing was all about large groups of people in manufacturing or service operations, not individual professionals.

Covid coincided with an absolutely massive uptick of online meetings, which had previously been both difficult and expensive. Zoom became a household word. Online meetings became cheap and easy. Covid proved that a lot of work could be done without being in an office.

That triggered a rising wave of employing small numbers of individual professionals in areas like coding, analysis, marketing who were not resident in this country. This is a recent phenomenon at this scale.

Regarding blaming anyone, I was telling people who were refusing to return to the office when requested to after Covid that they were teaching their employer that they could employ the cheapest capable person from anywhere in the world. I was told I was talking rubbish, yet that's exactly what's happening. Covid was the biggest teacher but not the only influence.

A lot of people work hybrid! My partner and I both do it, we are at our workplaces 2 days a week and 3 at home. I struggle with driving the dark as I have unlit rural roads between the town where I work svd the one 15 miles away where I live, headlights are a killer and I appreciate not having to go in every day of the week. Likewise my partner has a 52 mile round trip to work in not great roads and I like having to worry a helll of a lot less about him.

Plus there would be logistical issues with either of us being in work 5 days a week - my open-plan office would be too noisy if every team was in everyday to take the calls I have to take, if I had to go in everyday it would cost me £5 a day to park. My partner's hospital simply doesn't have enough office accommodation to have everyone in and nowhere near enough parking, if he can't get a space he gets a £43 fine for having to park on a verge or roadside on site.

Nobody refuses to return, managers and workplaces realised that there's a better way of life. The roads are already congested in many places, imagine everyone abandoning WFH arrangements.

I'm not talking about hybrid and other people have refused to return.

Figure on the 6 o'clock news tonight, hospitality fell by 0.3% in October. Everything to do with costs, nothing much to do with AI or automation, those effects are on the way.

If people are losing their jobs elsewhere due to AI or worried they might, then they don't go out as much.
Also, in many of places i go too, there is online ordering, an app, less staff needed, its why these things exist.

Alcohol is also extremely expensive in the UK, cheaper to drink in.

Unfortunately, food inflation hits hospitality very hard, its hard to justify £18 for chicken burger and chips.

Then there are, as you keep reminding us, increases to wages but if there isn't, then less people can afford to eat out....
People who rent are paying out around 50% of their take home salary in rent, they wont be eating out much, esp if they don't get significant pay rises.

Energy is a huge cost too, its needs sorting out, we have for several years now, had the most expensive Electricity in the developed world.

You've left out staff costs.

You mention food inflation, but staff costs are generally a higher proportion of the cost of delivering a restaurant meal than food costs. For organisations employing young people, staff cost inflation is way higher than food cost inflation.

Yep. Hospitality isn’t due to Ai it’s due to Labour policies.

Its approx 30% each for both, with staff costs just edging it and i did mention staff costs.. wages etc.

I appreciate wage costs are an issue but without wage rises, staff cannot eat out either.

Pub Restaurant closures etc have been going on for years, its nothing new & hospitality inc things hotels, tourism, concerts the lot, not just meals out.

Interestingly, the UKs top 100 restaurant groups, saw profits jump to 18% in 2025....

The UK’s leading restaurant groups have reported recovery with profits rising 18% to £365m and turnover climbing 19% to £12.9bn in 2025. Growth is fuelled by fast food and casual dining chains, while investment in technology, delivery partnerships and menu innovation has helped operators adapt despite wage and tax increases

So much for Labours policies!

The obvious outcome of being a human is that businesses whose only motive is profit will seek to cut you out of the equation at every opportunity. Why even bother to pretend they would behave differently if it weren’t for x, y and z? It is self-evident from the acceleration of atrocious customer care as companies moved to overseas call centres and bots that could never answer actual questions that modern global business cares nothing for a captive audience and only wants to milk humans for cash but otherwise keep them at arm’s length.

The UK’s leading restaurant groups have reported recovery with profits rising 18% to £365m and turnover climbing 19%

Turnover rising, profit rising slower in a sector which typically has very slim profit margins is not a good sign, though.....

18% profit rise? Come on, that cannot be dismissed so easily, esp as you seem to want to blame Labour for everything!

Yet well run businesses are increasing profitability and as they say, are using AI too!

Yes some like to blame current policies but off shoring has been going on for years, as has people going to zero or low tax regimes, doesn't always work out though.

Ask M&S if out sourcing IT was a good investment.

I did smile though when i read about a couple who left the UK to avoid tax, didn't do their research, needed to return for healthcare on the NHS and were heavily charged for it.

It's an 18% rise on profits on a 19% rise in turnover. That's a reduction in profit levels in an industry which operates on very low margins. If you run a business, that's a concern.

So as we scramble more to keep affording what we used to be able to afford, surely a vicious circle develops? There is a thread about the cost of hairdressing. My own yoga teacher recently put her prices up to cover rises in venue fees. They have to put their prices up but for some people, that nudges the cost above what they are willing and able to bear.

You also see people trying to work more, to cover costs of living, and having less time to do hobbies. All these things then make those businesses harder to run and more likely to fail.

AI really doesn’t help. So you have more unemployment across job sectors and income brackets- it isn’t limited to the young or the low-paid, as this thread demonstrates.

Pensions will become unaffordable soon (the pensions currently being paid out), but that’s something of an elephant in the room.

At what point does the government start to consider alternatives like universal basic income?

What other alternatives exist (palatable ones, rather than the Hunger Games sort of scenario)?

You re clutching at straws! why? Turnover up, profits up... yet for you, thats doom and gloom.
Its across 100 companies, not one company.

2024 Profits of £308m in 2025, the year the UK was "supposed" to go into terminal decline, profits up - £367bn, marginally below the record highs recorded after the pandemic.

I was always very pleased when things went well under the Tories, but it appears for some, whatever happened under Labour, its all bad.

Because if you've ever actually run a business, it really does matter if percentage profits are falling, especial if you are operating in a low margin business.

Like many left wingers, you focus on the figure of millions of pounds of profit. It doesn't matter if your business makes millions or billions of pounds in profit, a drop in profit from 3% to 2.9% is a warning bell you need to listen to.

The problem.is, when teams are made really lean you don't have time to 'carry' a trainee whilst they learn. It's not right, but if I have to get stuff done with less people than I need as a manager, I need those people to know what they are doing.

This is how its been for most of history. The period from post WW2 to this century was an anomaly.

Look up the creation of villages and the patchwork of rights that people used to enjoy. Equality is not just a modern dream.

Look up the creation of villages and the patchwork of rights that people used to enjoy. Equality is not just a modern dream.
In fact it was the creation of the early modern state, the commodification of land and then the Industrial Revolution that really drove inequality. People (inc me) have a tendency to pick on one spot in time and say this is the norm. It wasn’t, but there has been a constant rejection of gross inequality through human history.

Yeah accept the figures are across 100 companies...

These companies saw a rise in profits, up 18%, they 've not seen a drop overall, that are you on about?

Your re also arguing that higher profits, 18% higher, across an industry, are somehow wrong.

Like many right wingers, you focus on anything at all to paint the current Govt in a poor light.

You've spent most of the entire thread saying how terrible Labour have been for the hospitality business (which includes tourism, which has fallen off a cliff) i'd have thought a reasonable person would be pleased some sectors are doing well.

But predictably, no.

Yes, but inequality seems to be how the cards fall 'naturally ' ( thank you capitalism) and we have to fight to make things more equal, rather than the other way round.

Industrial revolution has a lot to answer for. I was in a museum recently and an 8 year old child was employed in a mill ( forgotten exact date )working 70 hours / week for pennies, the equivalent of £8 in today 's money. Presumably to buy a few potatoes for the family....