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.

It's officially 5% but I think they are massaging the figures. They also don't count various groups who are not actually working or working very little. If you look at the chart you posted, it was around 5% just before the GFC. I fear that we are there now. Once employers start to cut staff, they tend to all do so at once and suddenly just after the recession starts. Look at how quickly the rate rises.

There's one fundamental word missing from your answer.

Yet.

They said that with computers. The reality is that computers took loads of jobs. The trends this thread is asking about began 20 years ago and have already affected hundreds of thousands of lower class people. It’s why so many have given up and feed the drugs and porn trades.

Those optimistically proclaiming that there will be ‘new jobs’ need to ask exactly what the human needs driving them will be. The only growth industries for years have been the aforementioned drugs and sex, landlording, and a bit in the poverty industries, but the superrich have already declared that they won’t keep paying for that.

Good luck all. I’ve been asking this question for 20 years and had noaa answer beyond the growth in billionaires and idle rich landlords. This is Britain and it does not care about the people.

I tried to find a gardener this summer. Gave up as people either didn’t reply to messages or came out to see it and then never gave me a quote. It’s just a regular garden with bushes to prune. I gave up and continue to do it myself. Have those struggling to find a job considered gardening?

Cleaners and gardeners are nice to haves and most people do their own. But not many folks can install their own boiler or electrics. Or build a house or fix a roof. The trades will continue to do well as the middle class degree educated suffer.

What is amazing is how quickly it happened. Post Covid everyone was posting on here saying “wfh is forever- it’s an employees market!” and they were right- Labour market was so tight right across the board- 3 years later it’s just gone to shit.

YADNBU
I just cannot believe that no one in Westminster can see the trouble that's coming down the line, jobs are already being lost to AI and absolutely everything Labour are doing is making things worse.

It's utterly rubbish for everyone, but if Gen Z can't get entry level jobs, how will they be able to do jobs the next level up?

It was always going to happen. The temporary tight jobs market was caused by massive money printing in response to the pandemic. Unfortunately, there is no real growth in the economy and taxes keep rising...

Trades will be the new middle class. And given some of the current pricing they already are.

There are loads of industries desperately short of people and they aren't at risk of AI.

Plumbing
Carpentry
Electrician
Bricklayers
Roofers
Builders generally

Where i live (south east) you cannot get a tradesman for love nor money and the ones that exist are working 8 til 4 family friendly hours and making decent money.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5pr3q6lrpo.amp

Was just looking for a link to a story I saw about a politician waxing lyrical about AI "simplifying" the property sales market, and came across this which I feel is infinitely more terrifying.....

At least you can see this chap isn't "real" and he's being naively optimistic and transparent about it, but I'm beginning to wonder if one day we'll discover that all the super rich have actually been fucked off to Mars for several years and we're just funding their deep fake AI avatars / online performances.....

So from what I can see part of the shortage is due to a lack of training opportunities ( ie ability of people to get work experience/ apprenticeships). I’m not sure if the reluctance of people to take trainees on is a desire to keep the market tight or if trainees are a massive pain in the arse or what?

They are at risk of obsolescence though. Through technology, not AI. Automation and self build.

We hoped it would be an employees market. As always some people took the piss wfh. Even now when I am out exercising I am amazed at the number of ‘young’ people who are jogging / cycling / walking the dog and some do whatever whilst on a work call.

Businesses needed smalller premises and then had a lightbulb moment about whether they actually needed people.

I doubt it will actually ever be able to do all solicitors' work, to be honest.

Yep. It's still in it's infancy.

When I compare what I could use AI for three years ago compared to now...well, it's almost unrecognisable. It's improved scarily quickly.

Give it another three years we'll probably all be going 'OMG do you remember when we actually had to check the output for accuracy?! How bizarre!'.

Nope, financial services but I work across sectors and redundancies / offshoring is happening everywhere.

Unemployment rises every time we have a Labour government. I'm sure they mean well, but their policies simply don't suit the UK.

Unemployment is very low overall at 5%. I grew up in the NE under Thatcher and unemployment was 25%. That is high!

Unemployment for 16-24 year olds is 15% which is a problem. Apprenticeships have fallen by a massive 40% in the past decade and we now have way too many graduates and too few young people with vocational skills. The govt has announced a lot of new apprenticeship schemes and lately plus vocational V levels. This will filter through but it’ll take time.

As per my previous post, unemployment is low - 5% is low.

I’m a 5ft 3 mother of three. I need to do school drop off and pick up. And be around for all the kid stuff. I’m in my 40s and I just can’t see me retraining to be a roofer or an electrician 🤣 even if the sector interested me, I’m not what they want… and can I afford to train up ? Not really. I’ll be honest, I hate AI. I don’t want to be involved with it, I don’t want to lean into it. I’m not interested. I like it the way it was in early 2000s

Same, I’m also physically disabled, which means all physical jobs are off limits to me. I fear for my family’s future.

Unemployment is just people looking for work. How many drop out of actively looking?

Youth unemployment is over 15%. The jobs AI is currently taking are mainly the lower skilled starter jobs. Currently.

Its probably the latter. Although its not that they are necessarily a massive pain in the arse they just make mistakes, have to be told things several times, have to be supervised, just like we all did when we started out. There seems to be a reluctance to tolerate it as much now. I do think part of the problem is that we have become wedded to immigration. Its all very well saying 'we need people to do the jobs' but those people either come ready trained or are taking low paid entry level jobs and, as was said above are perfectly happy to work all hours, living in an HMO. Why bother training new staff or investing in staff at all at the bottom end when there is a ready supply of people willing to pull all hours (some of it illegally-people on care visas working in corner shops and as delivery drivers, visa overstayers etc for lower less than minimum wage). I say that as a child of immigrants. There were huge numbers of low skilled workers let in by the Johnson government that just cannot be absorbed in an economy that is stagnant. Some were on spurious visas in the first place, many no longer work in the jobs they came here to do but the immigration system is something else that is falling apart so no one did anything about it.