Job market is awful

[Flowerpowerz]

I work in pharma (general field) and the job market is horrendous. I’m seeing a huge trend towards AI which is not surprising. Perhaps more concerning is the massive uptick of offshore partners aka shipping work out to India because they are cheaper than people in the uk and USA. I have several friends in several related companies (technology, IT, coding) that have lost jobs due to this. They are being expected to share knowledge with their Indian colleagues before their redundancy kicks in.

I have honestly never known it so bad. My linked in is a sea of “open to work”

is it just me or has anyone else noticed these trends? It’s worse than ever

But given that housing costs are so high, and it needs to support families as well as individuals, it would need to be quite a lot of money to meet a basic standand of living. That everyone would get. I don't see how it could work.

There is no way a UBI could cover rent.
The only possible way to introduce UBI would be to make it a very basic standard (as you say), i.e. each adult would get the current single person's adult rate of Universal Credit - because according to logic that is currently considered enough to meet an adult's needs.
But it is not enough to afford rent or children, so there are separate payments for these. Ideally there would be no private rental sector to speak of, everyone would be offered LA or HA social housing to rent, and UBI would cover this rent so no need for separate HB, but we don't live in such a world.

There is no logical reason that UBI has to go hand-in-hand with a flat rate of income tax. That just benefits those who have high incomes. If anything, there would need to be more income tax bands at the higher levels to pay for UBI

Anyone who wants to have more that just basic UBI to live on.
Obviously.

Haha, no.
Living in a van would be like those Chinese coffin apartments to me.
Home should be somewhere you can stretch out and relax... not just a literal bed space with a bit extra for your belongings.

I would always have a job, regardless of universal income

Young women in the UK, as a group, are disproportionately likely to hold views which, imho, are incredibly destructive to women and society, they are highly intolerant of difference, which subsume individual thinking into group orthodoxy with punishment of dissenters. I am dreading these young women gaining power if they maintain these views. All polls show they are going in a different direction to all other groups in society in their political thinking. And not in a good way, in my opinion.

I only assume it is because in the short term the tax receipts will go down and politically that would be terrible. Long term it will pay off as firms start employing and investing in their businesses but a week is a long time in politics.

Yes it will be expensive, so it won't be introduced for a long while yet.
But when tens of millions more are unemployed, it will be introduced to remove the admin burden.
Most of the admin is checking that people who are unemployed are looking for work properly, and checking that people who are ill or disabled have medical evidence. Remove those two requirements and the admin is considerably less.

The admin for child benefit now is minimal, so this would be similar for UBI (which would replace child benefit, and it would be re-instated for all children).
Those with lifelong severe disabilities that don't change over time would not need checking regularly either - just an initial confirmation of the condition.

HB admin would remain, unfortunately, because we have failed to provide social housing at a low rent for decades.

I mentioned that I was talking about the whole Earth. What do you think about young women in other countries?

Countries where there is more of a gender balance in Government are doing well in many areas

Imagine Mum, Dad and 2 adult children getting 60k a year for doing nothing.

How would you change it across the whole Earth though?
Plenty of places where women are oppressed - who and how exactly should implement new systems of power in these places?

They wouldn't be doing nothing, they would be consuming.

We all need to think about how we can change it. When women are stronger across the world, we are all stronger.

I can't personally change it for every woman in the world, but I think about it and I try to do something.

I've donated money to Malala's fund for example- her fund helps girls to access education

What I don’t understand is the whole point of the system is to ensure the majority have employment so they have money to pay into the economy and to pay tax to support the vulnerable. And jobs to keep us busy.

It seems now the end goal is profit. If there are no jobs a few will be vastly wealthy and the majority in poverty and bored. Plus there won’t be anyone to buy their goods and services so what’s even the point. Also the few vastly wealthy and the majority crushed into poverty does t generally end well. Look how that turned out for the French in 1789.

The government has a lot to answer for. Huge increase in regulation (employment rights act) and cost to hire people (min wage, national insurance). Then they wonder why youth unemployment has sky rocketed and the grad market is in the doldrums plus huge reduction in vacancies generally. Until this gets fixed expect things to keep getting worse - more tax rises coming in the October budget. But it’s ok cos Andy has cut bus fares to £2 (where they were when they took office) and given us all £45 off electricity (even though the price cap is increasing by around £150). They take us for fools - and now the proposal is an extra 1.8% levy (tax) on earnings above £6500 to pay for social care. There’s never any discussion about cutting spending is there from this lot. Just looking to tax people more. And then they wonder why businesses don’t want to hire people - the economy is not growing and Labour have no plan to get it growing (hopefully the fake solicitor now in charge of the Business Dept will have a think about that!)

I used AI to tell me which sectors have the most vacancies.
Healthcare & social care – highest demand and long-term shortages.
Technology & professional services – strong demand for digital and AI-related skills despite a softer overall hiring market.
Education – persistent recruitment needs, especially for teachers.
Construction & skilled trades – demand remains high in many occupations despite overall vacancies easing.
Logistics & warehousing – steady hiring driven by retail and e-commerce.

Every time we use AI to accomplish something; are we strengthening AI and contributing to our eventual downfall?

Yes. We are also outsourcing our brains and deskilling ourselves.

If the majority are in poverty and bored, and have no realistic prospect of changing their circumstances, that's a great recipe for increased crime, anarchy or revolution.

That’s what I said. The French had a revolution and guillotined the ruling class that hogged all the resources. Musk take note.

Plenty of people work as volunteers today, doing charity work for free. Plenty of people love their jobs and relish having a purpose through work. There will still be a cohort of society who would do anything over not working at all. There will still be highly paid human roles, controlling the AI, robots and the systems. I think before UBI or UHI we will see the shift towards shorter working weeks for many sectors, 3 day weeks will be common in the next 18-24 months.

It’s also going to be a good 4/5 years before people are comfortable having a robot carer or nurse so many jobs will stay human centric out of necessity for the human touch initially. Let’s not forget that the new world we’re entering is going to be filled with an abundance of new opportunities just as the internet brought with it influencers, online retailers and service providers, new careers will blossom.

I always wonder why house repossession figures are so low when apparently so many people are out of work?
If I was out of work I’d be out of savings in a few months. How do people manage to pay their bills?!

I'm wondering that too. You can get a mortgage interest loan if you are out of work but it's only for a limited time.

Anyone out of work, how are you coping?

If UBI became reality perhaps a fair few people would choose to work fewer hours and have more balance. So more people might be able to work.Sort of along the lines of a job share type scenario but not quite the same. People could choose to work more hours obviously depending on the outgoings they have or choose to have etc. Less chance of burn out in some roles too. I am thinking healthcare as that is my background work wise.

Not all of unemployed people are paying mortgages.

Also repossessions are the highest they’ve been for a while according to the most recent figures:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj0e0jjz88ro