MCFC Wirral
Well-Known Member
So get them off benefits and in to work.
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Cheap foreign Labour
- Thread starter blueinsa
- Start date
ganganvince
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I agree but not a popular opinion on here.So get them off benefits and in to work.
Mr Kobayashi
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 1 Oct 2020
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Bring more drones in.
Raise the minimum wage.
The wealthy buy more houses.
Raise the rents and take away just how little the poor had.
Rinse and repeat.
One is already one too many.
So get them off benefits and in to work.
I agree but not a popular opinion on here.
This issue we have is the minimum wage is literally often worse off for these people that actually claiming and being in benefits and that’s the issue, going to work has to pay and pay properly so that it is t even a thought for anyone that a life on benefits is the best option.
dronefromsector7G
Well-Known Member
Lol thanks I needed a laugh. Was talking to my mum and her boyfriend about there being 2.5m long term sick. My mum’s boyfriend told me his mate turns up pissed on purpose at his PIP assessments.So get them off benefits and in to work.
MCFC Wirral
Well-Known Member
Most of the people I know on benefits exist but that’s it. They have little nice and can go nowhere. It’s not a life I’d want.
Fred_Quimby
Well-Known Member
There are plenty of vacancies around here, mostly field work or food prep factories. Unfortunately there are few unemployed around here. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, it could be said that if they are not working they probably can’t. Lots of people unemployed in areas where the jobs are to far away to get to.Educating and training people is expensive and hard to put into effect. Employers see training as a drain on the bottom line. The government sees it as unaffordable public expenditure.
It's much cheaper to import the necessary skills. You cannot have it all ways. A long-term obsession with cutting costs has consequences. In addition, we have a disproportional number of pensioners and too few young workers, due to a failure to reproduce at sustainable levels.
People are in denial.
Lots of young people around her won’t come back after moving away to university because there are very few high skilled high wage jobs around here. Our children are a prime example of that.
BrianW
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- Joined
- 6 Mar 2006
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- 6,004
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- There's Only One City
Another factor is the inflexibility of the housing market, making it hard, if not impossible, to move to take on low-paid work.
For example, I have just read that a house in Nefyn, Wales, is now an average of £400k.
The chances are there are low-paid jobs in the area to service the tourist market but no one on a low wage can conceivably afford such a house and the rentals will be in proportion and chiefly aimed at the holiday market. An example of how market forces simply do not work. There might be 1000 jobs in Nefyn, for all I know, but they might as well not exist for someone in a council house in Kirkby or Hartlepool.
For example, I have just read that a house in Nefyn, Wales, is now an average of £400k.
The chances are there are low-paid jobs in the area to service the tourist market but no one on a low wage can conceivably afford such a house and the rentals will be in proportion and chiefly aimed at the holiday market. An example of how market forces simply do not work. There might be 1000 jobs in Nefyn, for all I know, but they might as well not exist for someone in a council house in Kirkby or Hartlepool.
bluethrunthru
Well-Known Member
Another factor is the inflexibility of the housing market, making it hard, if not impossible, to move to take on low-paid work.
For example, I have just read that a house in Nefyn, Wales, is now an average of £400k.
The chances are there are low-paid jobs in the area to service the tourist market but no one on a low wage can conceivably afford such a house and the rentals will be in proportion and chiefly aimed at the holiday market. An example of how market forces simply do not work. There might be 1000 jobs in Nefyn, for all I know, but they might as well not exist for someone in a council house in Kirkby or Hartlepool.
Its like when they go on about the fruit pickers and veg pullers jobs need filling - if you are out of work in North Wales what good is there in 3 weeks work picking apples in Kent? Seasonal jobs require seasonal transient labour which is how we have always done them.
SkyBlueFlux
Well-Known Member
Some good points being made in here. I’ll summarise my thoughts (though I could rant on this all day so it’s quite long).
The world faces a population crisis in our lifetime and it’s not the one people thought would happen. Everybody assumed global population would keep growing, outstripping resource availability. This will not happen on a macro level, we will hit peak population before 2100, latest estimates suggest 10.5B but it’s already slowing. The financial system is predicated on generating a social safety net which gradually improves over time through the availability of an increasing number of workers.
Japan is probably the first country to hit this problem. Its ageing population means that its pool of workers is only twice the size of its retirees. Europe is 3.4x according to this: IMF.
There are things you can do to ameliorate the situation:
> increase immigrant labour
> increase retirement age
> facilitate an increase in the number of adults available to work
> improve people’s ability to save privately
> make retirement benefits less generous
It’s safe to say our government is relying heavily on the first two.
I think this is very much a slapdash bandage that creates as many problems as it solves. Firstly, we’re not the only country in this situation and eventually cheap migrant labour is going to become harder to acquire. This also doesn’t even speak to the ethics of bringing in foreigners so you can pay them less.
I’m of the opinion we need to focus on three, four and five. Because there’s a world where the impacts of these initiatives on society offset each other. What do I mean by that?
While technology has made lives easier, stymieing people from complaining as much as they naturally would - purchasing power for the average wage in this country is worse than it’s been for a very long time. It’s no longer feasible to run a household on one income, nor get on the housing ladder with one income. This is by design as it brings more women into the workforce thus theoretically creating more workers. The problem I think with that is that it’s disregarding human psychology, people don’t just stop working because they can. The vast majority (including women) want to work and do something fulfilling. So all they’ve achieved is bringing in fractionally more workers over time that might have come in anyway but the offset is that more people are reliant on welfare even when working and they all have a lower purchasing power, very little discretionary saving and in many cases a lower quality of life.
Then there’s the problem that somebody stated above, people who could work but frankly don’t see the point because they don’t see the kinds of benefits that a working man might have garnered 40 years ago. Like being able to rent or buy a place, own a car or even start a family. I think these people are fewer in number than we’re led to believe but they definitely exist.
So what do we do? I think frankly, we’re never going to, in the short term, totally relinquish the need for imported labour. But this shouldn’t be the only card we’re playing because that’s foolish and short-sighted. Businesses need to pay people more, is the bottom line. I’d like to see hikes in minimum wage of course but another thing I’d like to see more of is profit-sharing initiatives where employees have as much skin in the game as shareholders. The government badly needs to make the idea of working worthwhile again because this will increasingly become a problem.
Now businesses won’t like this idea obviously, which is why there would be a huge amount of political opposition to such an initiative. They would cite the need to cut staff. I’d call their bluff on this as it has been said before and never conclusively happened. Improving the purchasing power of every individual in the country should lead to increasing business and consumption.
Then there’s other things you can do to bulk the public purse to allow for things like better retirement benefits and training and education. In the “golden age” that many older folks harken back to - the 50s and 60s - the highest rate of tax was 90%. That seems to have just been removed from the public conscious. I’m not suggesting we go back to 90% but it can definitely be increased. People will say if you bring this back then high net worth individuals will move money overseas. And yes that is true, some would, which brings me to my final point. We need to have a coordinated global effort on tax to eradicate this argument. This is already happening in small waves through the OECD. Taxes should be paid in the country where the income was generated. This is slightly over simplistic of course but this should be the principle we strive for.
If you improve the public purse and strengthen people’s purchasing power then you get more discretionary savings, you can stop increasing the retirement age, and you should also bring new people into the workforce (including the retired who might see it as worthwhile to keep working longer). The downside is you may need to make public pensions worse, maybe by making them means tested in some way or disposing of the triple lock which I think is a totally unsustainable policy. But if enough people have private savings this is less of an issue.
To sum all that up. I think we are in the middle of a train crash happening in slow motion and it is going to require radical new long-term ways of doing things to prevent it from happening. Importing cheap labour is frankly not it but it’s what we rely on because we have a dearth of political leadership at the moment capable of actually solving these issues.
The world faces a population crisis in our lifetime and it’s not the one people thought would happen. Everybody assumed global population would keep growing, outstripping resource availability. This will not happen on a macro level, we will hit peak population before 2100, latest estimates suggest 10.5B but it’s already slowing. The financial system is predicated on generating a social safety net which gradually improves over time through the availability of an increasing number of workers.
Japan is probably the first country to hit this problem. Its ageing population means that its pool of workers is only twice the size of its retirees. Europe is 3.4x according to this: IMF.
There are things you can do to ameliorate the situation:
> increase immigrant labour
> increase retirement age
> facilitate an increase in the number of adults available to work
> improve people’s ability to save privately
> make retirement benefits less generous
It’s safe to say our government is relying heavily on the first two.
I think this is very much a slapdash bandage that creates as many problems as it solves. Firstly, we’re not the only country in this situation and eventually cheap migrant labour is going to become harder to acquire. This also doesn’t even speak to the ethics of bringing in foreigners so you can pay them less.
I’m of the opinion we need to focus on three, four and five. Because there’s a world where the impacts of these initiatives on society offset each other. What do I mean by that?
While technology has made lives easier, stymieing people from complaining as much as they naturally would - purchasing power for the average wage in this country is worse than it’s been for a very long time. It’s no longer feasible to run a household on one income, nor get on the housing ladder with one income. This is by design as it brings more women into the workforce thus theoretically creating more workers. The problem I think with that is that it’s disregarding human psychology, people don’t just stop working because they can. The vast majority (including women) want to work and do something fulfilling. So all they’ve achieved is bringing in fractionally more workers over time that might have come in anyway but the offset is that more people are reliant on welfare even when working and they all have a lower purchasing power, very little discretionary saving and in many cases a lower quality of life.
Then there’s the problem that somebody stated above, people who could work but frankly don’t see the point because they don’t see the kinds of benefits that a working man might have garnered 40 years ago. Like being able to rent or buy a place, own a car or even start a family. I think these people are fewer in number than we’re led to believe but they definitely exist.
So what do we do? I think frankly, we’re never going to, in the short term, totally relinquish the need for imported labour. But this shouldn’t be the only card we’re playing because that’s foolish and short-sighted. Businesses need to pay people more, is the bottom line. I’d like to see hikes in minimum wage of course but another thing I’d like to see more of is profit-sharing initiatives where employees have as much skin in the game as shareholders. The government badly needs to make the idea of working worthwhile again because this will increasingly become a problem.
Now businesses won’t like this idea obviously, which is why there would be a huge amount of political opposition to such an initiative. They would cite the need to cut staff. I’d call their bluff on this as it has been said before and never conclusively happened. Improving the purchasing power of every individual in the country should lead to increasing business and consumption.
Then there’s other things you can do to bulk the public purse to allow for things like better retirement benefits and training and education. In the “golden age” that many older folks harken back to - the 50s and 60s - the highest rate of tax was 90%. That seems to have just been removed from the public conscious. I’m not suggesting we go back to 90% but it can definitely be increased. People will say if you bring this back then high net worth individuals will move money overseas. And yes that is true, some would, which brings me to my final point. We need to have a coordinated global effort on tax to eradicate this argument. This is already happening in small waves through the OECD. Taxes should be paid in the country where the income was generated. This is slightly over simplistic of course but this should be the principle we strive for.
If you improve the public purse and strengthen people’s purchasing power then you get more discretionary savings, you can stop increasing the retirement age, and you should also bring new people into the workforce (including the retired who might see it as worthwhile to keep working longer). The downside is you may need to make public pensions worse, maybe by making them means tested in some way or disposing of the triple lock which I think is a totally unsustainable policy. But if enough people have private savings this is less of an issue.
To sum all that up. I think we are in the middle of a train crash happening in slow motion and it is going to require radical new long-term ways of doing things to prevent it from happening. Importing cheap labour is frankly not it but it’s what we rely on because we have a dearth of political leadership at the moment capable of actually solving these issues.