What’s wrong with working in Greggs?
I have the utmost respect for anyone doing their jobs, whether it’s cleaning toilets or serving chips.
I left school at 15 and in between jobs I delivered leaflets for a curry house. I took pride in what I did and felt good earning my money. I’d do the same now, rather than being on the dole.
Nothing at all.
Would you be happy being pressured to take that job if you were an elderly parents sole carer? Or would you be happy if you lost your job in a field of specific skill sets and experience you have built up and when you try to claim benefits whilst you try to get in that field of work you were told no benefits the local car wash is hiring so you had better go there? Regardless of how much tax and NI you have paid over your working life.
Was waiting for someone to say this.
Well let me take these one step at a time bud-
1) No of course not, I don’t think that will happen
2) I’ve only ever found new jobs whilst I’ve been employed so I would wash cars whilst I looked for another job in my field of expertise, yes. Just don’t put that on your CV, leave the gap blank.
3) My mum and dad, despite being divorced have a good relationship. My dad used to run his own gang of brickies and when my step dad got made redundant, for a period of time he worked for my dad hodd carrying. He’s pretty experienced in advertising and does well but took a manual labour job to keep his and my mum’s mortgage afloat. He found a new job in advertising after 8 weeks of interviewing. I’ve always respected him for that.
People need a bit of pride and to work hard in life, despite what you’re doing.
I'd argue that a lot of those subjects are actually relatively cheap to run, and therefore often subsidize the more expensive ones. There's no requirement in tuition fees to link the price the student pays to the actual spending on education, so many universities used this extra funding to pay for expensive improvements and research in their science education. It's one thing to say that humanities students should fund their own education, but they're quite often subsidizing the education of students studying more expensive courses, which is what the government should be doing. If a degree is, as you put it, less valuable, then it should be cheaper, but we don't see that, because student loans create a market where universities will almost always simply charge the maximum allowed.
Also just to point out, it's not this government that writes off half of student loans. That cost has been passed on to a future government.
So what courses in particular would you identify as needing subsidizing? I mean there's the obvious like medicine, nursing and other public sector jobs (interesting you point to sociology as an unworthy course when we have 122,000 unfilled vacancies in social care in the NHS, and that's often the first step to getting a professional licence). But there are plenty of others where it's far more difficult to predict, because you're looking five years into the future to decide what is worth studying, but ignoring the fact these individuals are choosing something that's hopefully going to provide them with an income for the next 40-odd years of their life. And the reality is that none of us know what that will look like.
It's also worth mentioning that often you don't have a shortage because you don't have an industry. In Sweden, for example, all youngsters are entitled to 230 hours of publicly-funded music education and out-of-school education is subsidized too. And nowadays, American singers and bands are falling over themselves to record in Stockholm and are increasingly getting produced by Swedish producers. They're only behind the US and UK in the size of their music industry, despite a population of just 10 million. But then you combine this with high levels of education in technical fields and you get things like Spotify, that are able to work with Swedish musicians to further grow the industry. It's only through this collaboration of a range of highly educated people from a range of disciplines that you can build successful industries. They didn't fund music education because they identified shortages in a music industry and needed to fill them, they have a music industry because they decided to fund music education.
When I was choosing subjects for university in the early 2000s, no-one would have suggested linguistics as a degree choice. It was all computing, technology and engineering (when isn't it?). And yet now technology companies are falling over themselves to hire trained linguists because it turns out that a background in programming and engineering doesn't help when you're trying to create technology that understand's people voices and can communicate effectively with people. It wasn't IT engineering that turned Apple into the behemoth it is today, it was industrial design and business acumen combined with good engineering. It's at that intersection between the disciplines that you often see the best innovation.
But like their ridiculous policy on spouse earnings, this fails to take into account average earnings in different parts of the country. It basically means that the only degrees worth studying are the ones where you're going to work in a big city afterwards, preferably London. It basically follows the ideology that someone who studied art history at Exeter University for example is contributing more if they move to London and get a job in recruitment than if they stay in Devon and work for a museum on a comparatively lower salary. But then that's always been the Tory ideology, particularly since Thatcher's era. If something has no financial value, then it has no value to the country.There probably is an element of cross-subsidisation but I'm not sure that comes close to offsetting the amount that's put into these subjects via direct grants and by the fact that 75% of loans for certain creative arts subjects are written off because so many students fail to earn above the £25,000 repayment threshold.
all interesting lived experiences that don't really answer my point. Several Govt ministers are on record for over a decade having co-authored a piece that describes British workers as lazy feckless and workshy.
One of those Govt ministers today ( who tonight faces bullying accusations ) has spent all day justifying the points based immigration system in which any shortfall in workers from the continent will be made up for by the 8m people who she says are economically inactive.
When its pointed out to her that the 8m people that she points to is a figure produced by the ONS and is made up mostly of groups who can't or don't want to work and she just blanks that information and bangs on about the economically inactive. ( I have posted the BBC factcheck piece again below to illustrate )
The conclusion is therefore that if you are economically inactive you will be expected to do the work where there are vacancies regardless of where your skill and experience lies. You may wash cars whilst you would be looking for other work I just hope your boss at the car wash would be understanding and allow time off for interviews etc. Now there are changes to workers rights he can sack you without explanation during a much longer period that used to be the case and I doubt someone would take you on knowing that you would be nipping off now and then leaving him short of manpower. In the end people get trapped in a spiral of low paid work or no benefits. But thats Tory Britain in the 20's - they duped enough folk to reap their whirlwind.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/51560120
If we are nearly at full employment, why are there so many homeless/beggars on our streets?We keep being told we are at virtually full employment so we obviously need those workers. If the government think they are being exploited , then police it, don't stop the workers that are needed.
Immigration should be on need not income.
I don't say it, the government tell us.I think there is a statistical figure that is used that is something like 5% unemployment .If we are nearly at full employment, why are there so many homeless/beggars on our streets?
Well it won’t be Carers, it will be people who just literally do not work.
As I’ve said, I’ve always got a job whilst already having one - the majority of people do this.
You will be entitled to holiday and you can interview out of ours. Again people books holiday off all the time to interview. I’m a manager in a recruitment company, I know what I’m talking about here as we deal with candidates in my team every hour of every day.
The biggest category is students, who account for 27% of the inactive. They may be able to take on part-time jobs, but could not be relied upon to deal with the staff shortages that some business groups have warned about.
Another 26% of the inactive population count as sick - almost all of whom are long-term sick.
Next up, 22% of the inactive are those who are looking after their homes or caring for family members.
The fourth most common reason for economic inactivity is people who have retired before the age of 65 - that's 13% of the total.
There is a very small category - less than half a percent - who describe themselves as "discouraged workers".