Or make a serious point? From yesterday's FT:
At the start of 2011, the 44-year-old single mother of two was working as a part-time liaison officer for Positive Steps into Employment, a project that helped unemployed people in Ashington, Northumberland, return to work. Ms Pattinson was employed on an 18-month contract, having previously been unemployed herself for 13 months.
The prject, run by Wansbeck Council for Voluntary Service, received funding via the local authority from the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, one of the first areas of public spending cut by the coalition. Thus, Positive Steps ended and Ms Pattinson was made redundant on March 31 this year. She has spent the time since then doggedly applying or jobs but remains unemployed, keeping up her moral with volunteer work - supporting volunteers working for an organisation that seeks to help the jobless.
Friday, 16 December 2011
Laugh or cry?
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25 comments:
And your serious point is? Just askin'.
Shiney
One of many serious points we could make is that if reasonably well motivated people like her can't get a job, what hope is there?
Also, surely, if the only jobs or even voluntary opportunities for unemployed people are those helping other unemployed people... the house of cards will collapse eventually?
Well, if we sought to maximise production - as opposed to trying to 'create jobs', jobs would follow. To do that we need to cut taxes and gummint spending. And in areas like the NE scrap national pay rates for state employees. Personally I'd scrap the legal tender laws and hopefully the NE would start making its own 'geordies' or 'mackers' or whatever.
And in her case, where is the Dad?
If the guvment stops any more spending, she'll never get a job.
Why not just allocate ALL the unemployed to employers for free (voluntary, private and public sectors)? Wage to paid by the state and equal to unemployment benefits. Work would be part time. It would be a non-inflationary way of raising employment, since the extra labour would cost employers nothing. You’d have to make sure employers did not displace existing employees with the newly available free labour, but I can think of ways of doing that.
The above would give rise to extra demand in real terms because, given constant demand in money terms and falling prices (or prices rising less fast than they otherwise would) demand in real terms would rise.
BTW, Lola is obviously a reet canny hinny.
Lola lived in the NE for three years. It's a great place destroyed by socialism. It's 'economy' is now 70% (?) state employment all on inflated wages.
Oh and Mrs Lola is a Geordie...
Gawd. You're married to Cheryl Cole?
I'm not sure about this talk of there being no jobs. My wife works in retail and wanted a change, so she applied to a few places. She had three interviews and was offered all three jobs.
OK, she's not exactly getting paid a stellar wage, but still...
Perhaps if the person in the story was willing to work in a shop, she'd find work sooner?
Jill - 'house of cards' about sums it up.
MW, you'd know; is there a posh economists' term for what my mother calls 'taking in each other's washing' - deliberately replacing necessary manufacturing with a service economy that depends on all of us paying for things we used to do for ourselves?
Funny how these centres of heavy state employment also happen to be Labour political heartlands.
Re NOPNS @ 12.30. Whilst I concede that La Cole is easy on the eye, thankfully she is not my wife.
OT
Does anyone have a subscription to Prospect Magazine?
There's an article by that old conman (and noted twat) Adair Turner that I'd like a copy of, and I don't want to pay 24 quid just for it..
"One of many serious points we could make is that if reasonably well motivated people like her can't get a job, what hope is there?"
Perhaps she can only take part-time work because of the kids. Perhaps it would be better if everyone acknowledged that in areas like the NE, there is almost no work for single parents and just let them draw the dole and get on with the far more important business of bringing up their kids without automatically labelling them as scroungers etc. Of course, this is yet another problem that CI would sort out.
Lola, I've got a sub to Prospect, what's the easiest way to grab it?
I guess she is doing what Dave Cameron wanted and being part of the Big Society now, for all the good it actually does her.
J, the house has collapsed in some areas.
L, cutting taxes etc always good, but to add insult to injury, recent UK governments have been merrily signing up to all these "green" measures which ensure that such industry as still exists up there all gets shut down.
DBC, that's not true. Nothing destroys jobs more than public sector over-employment .
RM: "You’d have to make sure employers did not displace existing employees with the newly available free labour, but I can think of ways of doing that."
Go on, explain how you'd implement all this. Strictly speaking, you don't need to worry too much about employers sacking existing workers unless they were very low margin, low productive workers, and the ones that get sacked would be immediately taken on again as 'freebies' anyway.
RA, I'm glad to hear it, but it is always much easier staying in work, or changing jobs, than it is finding a job after a period of unemployment.
McH, I don't know. I don't know many posh economist terms.
R, yes there is a correlation. Industrial areas vote Labour, even long after they've stopped being industrial.
B, agreed, CI would sort out a lot of things.
PA, tee hee.
Yup. Im willing and able to work, but cannot find it. So what is stopping me? We all know right. Lola gets it. High taxes, high property prices. Abolish both. Job done. People would just start working again. Production would take off.
Labour doesnt need protection (jobcreationism). It needs freedom.
Were making in roads at Tent City. People who 8 weeks ago were calling me a commie or infiltrator are now talking to me as if I had never heard of homeownerism.
Let them discover it themselves. The best way.
Nobody's talking about overemployment .
Just a certain number of jobs in things that people can't do themselves: educating children ,fighting fires,building roads ,filling potholes in the streets and keeping them well-drained and lit- all things that the private sector makes a balls of ,or provides at even greater expense and subsidy like the railways.Dunno what all the right-wingers on here are complaining about.They've got their way: public servants being sacked by the hundreds of thousands just ready for the private sector to swoop down and save the day.
The fact that it has n't is what the original FT quote illustrates.
On a patriotic note: I was born into a mixed economy where the two sectors complemented each other and made up for each others' deficiencies.When were we conquered by the USA at its most right-wing fundamentalist?
Mark/Rational Anarchist
From HR Magazine:-
According to a survey of 240 CEOs of SME companies by utility price comparison website uSwitch, 22% intend to hire new staff, but only 2% would actively seek to recruit public sector workers.
That's what's happening, but you won't hear it on the 6 O'Clock news... private sector employers just aren't willing to hire ex-public sector employees.
Having worked in a public sector IT department for a few months, I would simply not hire from the public sector unless I personally knew the person. There's some good people in the public sector, but there's far too many useless, workshy, entitled, inflexible people as a percentage to risk hiring them for my business.
Not sure that the "private sector reluctant to hire/adamant it won't hire" former public servants is really new news - I distinctly remember a Digby Jones TV outing of a year or more back when he made the same point ... of course these days, following the last 25 years of unashamed revolving door opportunism the upper reaches of the public sector are increasingly filled by private sector, ahem, secondees, who come in and display their expertise at securing more and more work for their employers under the banner of contracting out and so on,; whilst the self same employers hypocritically pontificate about how terrible it is that the public sector spends so much money and how it ought to be cut back - but not the bit that they and their company shake down from the public purse obviously ...
DBC: "... educating children, fighting fires, building roads, filling potholes in the streets and keeping them well-drained and lit - all things that the private sector makes a balls of..."
Well, notwithstanding that the government doesn't have an unblemished record in all those things, I actually agree with you.
Now, if you go to the bother of adding up the number of front line people doing all those useful things in the publlc sector, you get to about two million. Let's be generous and double their number for back-up stafff, cooks and cleaners and so on, that gives us a target figure of four million.
There are between seven and eight million on the public sector payroll, tell me, what do the other three or four million do all day long?
JT, fair point. I assume you are referred to not hiring from the three or four million "unknowns". If it came to hiring a nurse or a doctor or an ex-copper or serviceman, then having worked for the government would not be a problem, would it?
Anon, another good point. The government spends more money on such corporate welfare than it does not public sector salaries/pensions. About one and a half times as much. That's where the really big savings are, if they really wanted to make them, which they clearly don't.
Mark,
If it came to hiring a nurse or a doctor or an ex-copper or serviceman, then having worked for the government would not be a problem, would it?
Correct. Three things about such people:
1) They have to actually face the
public, so to a large extent, have a grasp of things like service (more than people working in admin departments with phone line separation from the public).
2) They have measurable and often rare experience. Companies who do things like investigations are full of ex-coppers. A lot of good teachers quit in the late 80s/early 90s because of rich salaries in the private sector.
3) If you want to teach or be a nurse, chances are you're going to work in the public sector. That means that there a complete spectrum of quality, where in fields like admin, traditionally the public sector was where the useless buggers went because of lower salaries.
JT, thanks, yes, that's exactly what I meant.
Richard Allan - Can you get a pdf of it and send it via mw's email address, please?
Generally. I am a small buisness. I want to employ a trainee/technician and I'd also like to take on an experienced bloke. The former is not happening directly because of tax and regulation, and the latter will not be a public sector person - most are useless and don't know what hard work is.
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