Nearly 1m young people out of work

[Starfeesh]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62gzl2yl24o

AIBU to be concerned that a life on benefits seems to be a viable option, and glad Labour are bringing in compulsory work placements?

But there's already a point at which doctors will advise the parents they should hold their premature/ill baby and enjoy the hours they have left rather than attempt to treat. It's a heartbreaking thing to have to do but there is still a cut of where treatment would be prolonging the inevitable for a few days. That doesnt mean anyone should be taking a pillow to newborns face. This is also why I don't like people tying the legal abortion limit to faetal viability because it introduces too many external incentives to what's already a very difficult situation. I think introducing likely future ability to pay taxes to the decision matrix.is even more gruesome.

On the other hand my friends daughter was born at just over 21 weeks and is a healthy teenager now doing GCSEs. And will probably pay lot sof tax in the future. As will a lot of babies modern medecine saves. The few that survive but can't work aren't the problem with the economy.

But in this case it wasn't nature that knew best. It was the midwife apparently.

Doctors and midwives today will still tell parents if there is no hope for their child. They won't lie and give treatment they know won't work. The difference is, parents won't be lied to and told it was a stillborn. They are allowed to hold the baby usually and that's thought to be better for closure/grieving.

That isn't so much a story about changing medical treatments (those are significant) but about a change in the relationship between medical professionals and patients. The idea of a midwife believing they had the right to play God like that and lie to the mother is terrifying.

This!

I was a very prematurely born baby in 1981, three months premature and weaned off heroin, 2lbs which at the time was quite tiny.

Fortunately, I was extremely lucky to get the last available bed in the NICU at King's College hospital, so it was the forefront of modern treatments for premature babies. My consultant was the pioneer of NICUs, Mr Gamsu, who described me to my adoptive dad as a "miracle of modern paediatric care ".

Yes, my care probably cost thousands. So did other babies' care.

But my adoptive parents wouldn't have the same situation if nature had taken its course and known best.😢

Or indeed if a serial killer midwife had been at your birth as the other poster nostalgically described.

Absolutely agree. And, just to add a bit of extra emotion to it, my dad also said when he went to the hospital to see me, there was a strike on at the time. He was going towards the picket line and said "I'm here to collect my premature baby to adopt her" and they all parted like the Red Sea to let him through 🥲

Oh that's so lovely.

There are plenty of jobs. Some people are getting used to the idea that they don’t have to work as the government will look after them.

The number of job vacancies in the UK has tumbled to the lowest level in five years, research suggests, falling to levels not seen since the pandemic.
The number of jobs being advertised slid by 3% in January to 695,000, according to the job search site Adzuna, marking the first time advertised vacancies have dropped below 700,000 since January 2021.
Graduate jobs fell below 10,000 for the first time since Adzuna began tracking this in 2016.

‘It’s soul-crushing’: young people battle to find any work in bleak jobs market
Read more
The research comes days after official figures showed unemployment in the UK had risen to a five-year high of 5.2%, at a time when wage growth is slowing and concerns are increasing that young people are bearing the brunt of the slowdown in hiring.

The fall in the number of vacancies marked a continuation in the downward trend seen during late 2025 and showed a 16% slide compared with last January and a near-20% fall since six months earlier.
It highlights how sharply job opportunities have shrunk since mid-2025, as employers have reined in their hiring in the face of increases in national insurance contributions and the minimum wage announced by Rachel Reeves in her last two budgets.
The extra cost of labour for business also comes as some companies are prioritising investment in automation and artificial intelligence tools rather than recruitment.
This trend has particularly affected young jobseekers, at a time when unemployment among 18- to 24-year-olds rose to 14% in the final three months of 2025, the highest rate in five years, or nearly 11 excluding the pandemic, adding to concerns that Britain is slipping down the global youth employment league table.

Difficult when you have a benefits system that says the opposite!

Did you not see the recent report that we currently have the historical lowest ever number of graduate job vacancies?

Have you not noticed all the empty shops, pubs, guest houses etc - the kind of place that used to take on youngsters whilst at school/college which was often their first experience of the working life?

I heard rumours that some MPs want to stop UC to youngsters living at home.

It where I live, no and there are plenty of jobs being advertised here too.

There are 'plenty of jobs' being advertised where we live, too. Lots of pubs, shops, cafes, garden centres, sports/activity centres etc that all advertise jobs and employ youngsters.

The problem is that there are quite literally hundreds of applications for every job. So yes, for each job vacancy (assuming it's actually a real job vacancy) there will be one lucky person who will get a job. But the other 499 won't. And so on and so on.

The reality is that there might be 'plenty of jobs' but there are far more people wanting jobs than there are jobs to go around.

and why is this so?

Not because Labor increased NMW for said youngsters, NI for employers, business rates for businesses and introduced Employment Rights bill making it super hard to fire employees? Let's think who's hit hardest? High tech/Law/banking? or retail and hospitality who are traditionally first jobs for many youngsters?

Why did Labor do this? right, to feed unions and ever growing welfare.

I passed 2 places within a few hundred yards with help wanted signs up - get a shitty job anything because it’s far easier to get work when you are in work.

Even if you think about retail, and supermarkets, self checkouts mean far fewer jobs available (and one person - probably on min wage- being pulled in 10 directions to help each person having an issue)
More pubs and restaurants have apps to order food = less waiting staff

There’s a difference between jobs being advertised and there being enough jobs to go round. If competition is high , no one is going to hire the 16/19/20 yo with no experience are they? Never mind the whole 0 hours contract scandal.

How do you know no one is applying for them? People get shitty jobs every single day. The problem at the moment is that for those two jobs you might have 10/20 candidates.

Can a 39 year old with a huge career gap apply?

Asking for a me friend.

There was a 'shitty job' (washing up in a pub kitchen for a few hours a week) advertised near us recently. Ideal for a young person you might think. No need for any experience, just need to be prepared to work hard and be reliable, great starter job etc etc.

56 people applied.

Including much older people with lots of experience who were just desperate for a job, any job, any shitty job.

56 applicants for one shitty job.

It's bonkers.

It's very easy to apply for jobs nowadays. You just click. It might be better if we went back to the old way of filling in application forms by hand, in order to filter out candidates who can't be bothered.

Alot has changed in 40+ years.

It really is terrible, my ds has just got his first art time job and this is after several months of trying, excellent exam results and a lot of extra curricular volunteering / hobbies as well as my encouragement ...I could not believe how much time and effort was needed and I really now have some understanding of why there are so many jobless young people out there, there needs to be incentives to employ young people, for all our futures.

Hilarious. Obviously you've never had to apply online for a job recently! Most organisations use third parties/agencies, and use very convoluted application processes. It's certainly nothing like simply uploading your CV! Some take hours as they force you to enter every single qualification separately, i.e. input fields for date, exam board, subject and result for every qualification. Same "info in separate boxes" for each past employment, hobby, voluntary activity, etc. Then when you get through the core data sections, there are often "aptitude" tests, i.e. multiple choice questions etc. Some even have online tasks like games - such as one similar to "The Cube" where you have to press a key exactly the moment the cursor hits a particular item on the screen - which is impossible to do - the "test" is to see how many times you try before you give up, so a test of patience/resilience. It can take a few hours before you even get past the initial stages before you move onto the online/remote interview/live answers stages.