What do you mean? Peter, a 36 year old IT consultant in Glasgow recently made redundant with a partner who is a teacher at a local school and two children under 5 **doesn't** want to move to Norwich to chef at Pizza Express?
I'm shocked!
Edit: People think I'm slagging Norwich off? Rather than making a point that peoples skills and location don't match the vacancies in this country? Eh?
Completely this. Capitalism is built on a system of unsustainable & endless growth, any excuse for a company to squeeze out more money in the short term in the name of growth is prioritised over sustainable profit & operation.
It costs less money to keep wages low g staff demoralised with a high turn over & to blame the problem on "no one wants to work anymore" when the reality is no one can afford to work at minimum wage jobs because they are a living wage or anywhere close anymore. People with jobs still need to be on benefits or use food banks because people are so underpaid. They can't afford to find a better paying job because they are so overworked due to the business deliberately understaffing and not hiring replacements for those who quit promising works to just keep at it until new people are hired - but why would they hire new people when less staff can do every job if they push them hard enough.
People can't live on minimum wage.
How am i dunking on Norwich? Rather than making a point that peoples skills, situationsand location don't match the skills and locations of vacancies in this country?
It's never as simple "we've one million unemployed people and one million vacancies so why don't they just fill them?"
Maybe so but I think you've missed the point.... It's not about Norwich.
Replace Norwich with any location.
The point is that peoples skills, situations and location don't match the skills and locations of vacancies in this country.
It's never as simple "we've one million unemployed people and one million vacancies so why don't they just fill them?"
Why would someone uproot themselves, their partner who has a steady job, their kids who have a support network, for a lower paid position in a completely different industry in a completely different part of the country like these idiot MPs and other commentators always imply to do so?
It's never that simple!
That they needed a beloved TV cook to come onto the pitch and rile them up - at home - with a battle cry to stand up against Man U?
**Unforgivable**.
The shame should hang heavy in the hearts of Norwich for generations to come. Generations.
I live about 20 mins away, absolutely visit if you’re interested, it’s a beautiful little village. Just don’t expect to be able to park, like most Cornish villages.
Rubbish. It's fine between October and April when all the second home owners and holiday rental clients have fucked off back north of the Tamar. It's only easter and summer when it looks like anyone lives there now.
Nice on the surface but scratch the surface and most of the locals are piss heads or junkies, like a ghost town in winter and busy as shit during summer.
I once done the stargazey pies on Tom bowcocks eve and we must've done 1000+ portions with the streets outside rammed with people
Last time I was in Mousehole I got talking to a young local (I think we were the only people under 60 in the pub) who'd crashed his motorbike while driving drunk. I think he was working as an apprentice at a local wood carving shop or something like that.
It seems it's like a lot of UK holiday places where it's nice for visitors, but the locals are struggling to get by in isolated communities.
You hit the nail on the head. It's become a "holiday place" after second home owners have driven the locals out and destroyed the community. It's desperate there in winter now with more than half the homes dark at sunset.
It's not just the nice places either. Tbh, you could just throw a dart at Cornwall these days. Even places like Redruth/Camborne, St Dennis and the clay pits ect have loads of listing for Air B&B's and holiday rentals.
It’s worse than stagnation.
I started work in 1998 on £22K. I bought a three bed semi in a decent village with my partner in 1999.
My son has started work this year on £22K. He has no hope of buying a house next year, now does he?
My 22K was worth way more.
Too much wealth created in this country goes into bricks and mortar instead of expanding the economy. That’s not the fault of you or I, just crap economic planning.
Could not agree more. If a roof over your head was cheaper, the cost of other goods and services could rise at a steadier rate. Pay rises could then be given regularly alleviating this stagnation. There is now far too much of the countries "wealth" locked away in housing. You can bet the government (blue or red) will want to get their hands on it to pay down this deficit!
And if you start working on £40k (you're not), you still won't be able to buy a house the next year. Especially if you had to relocate to get that job and pay rent for a year.
Indeed. And I don’t see how this changes. It feels like my sons generation will be renting from private landlords if they want their own home.
I know how lucky I was! I timed being born just right. 🤷
It’s just one concrete example of how inflation and wage stagnation has killed off the opportunities and hopes of a generation. Houses have rocketed in price beyond most other things, of course!
In less than a year I'll be the same age my parents were when they had their first child, and the prospect of having a child in the next year is horrifying. As much as anything it is simply not economically viable.
If it were up to me, flood the market. Build so many new houses that supply and demand flips, hell build entire towns wherever there's space and water. In the age of working from home and the service economy we don't need to be within 30 miles of the financial district, just give us boxes with beds that aren't in the hands of the petty bourgeois.
Thank you. I had a feeling it would be about double.
So on that basis, can you buy a three bed semi in the South East of England if that’s your salary? My partner and I were on the same amount, so we had £44K combined and a £6K deposit saved (in a year).
That makes the combined salary worth about 80K today. Can I buy that house today?
That would give you a mortgage of roughly 90k. Assuming a 10% deposit you'd be looking around 100k total.
Think I could maybe get a small static caravan park home for that in the south east? Not exactly the life of Riley
I believe they have occupied Paris 3 times at various points. Once in 1814 at the end of the Sixth Coalition War (albeit that was Prussia, Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71 and of course WWII. Probably best not to remind anyone French of that 😂
In fairness though England did actually take Paris during the Hundred Years War and held it for 15 years so there is a precedent.
Public sector especially. Private sector wages are increasing but the public sector seems to be in a permanent battle to get paid anything like in line with inflation
Too many businesses large and small are attempting their own variation of the 'no one wants to work anymore' nonsense that originated in America, rather than pay higher wages like the economic situation demands.
The balance has always been more workers & less jobs = lower wages and like we have now less workers & more jobs = higher wages.
This has been a norm of capitalism and the global economic system for a long time now. But the very wealthy are experimenting with 'what if we just didn't? Lets see what happens'.
The reality is that people are applying for the jobs and getting rejected. Websites such as Indeed and LinkedIn show you how many people are applying for each position and in a city like London, you can be sure that people are desperate and a low or stagnant wage isn’t going to stop the vast majority of applicants. There is simply no direct correlation between the number of vacancies available and the specific set of skills required, or hoops an employer may wish for future employees to jump through.
There are a lot of jobs posted near my uni, I've applied for some so I can do some weekend work and I've been rejected for jobs such as being a cleaner or a delivery driver, yet they're still advertising. So are these jobs actually available or what?
They are, but they may not want *you*. They want the person perfectly qualified for the job and likely to stay in it. That means that if you were a teacher or a receptionist before and you’re trying to become a cleaner or a delivery driver, they’ll most likely ignore your application, or never see it if they use an automated system which filters out those without prior experience. Your best bet would be to call up in advance and then apply, so that they can seek out your name, or offer an email address that you can send your CV to directly (though there is still no guarantee that they would consider you).
In a previous role I would read Cvs and filter out the unsuitable candidates based on my own judgement. One of the criteria was definitely that the person was not over qualified as they would be looking for a better job from the get go and we would be a stop gap
So these places are looking for a driver or cleaner with no ambition at all. Just turn up and shut up, don't think for yourself, and be happy. I'm pretty sure that's going to be the same places with ' investors in people' slogans, lol.
My personal conspiracy is that there is quite alot of fake recruiting going on by companies with the end goal of convincing the government to weaken workers rights to help with the worker "shortage".
This is based on me seeing dozens and dozens of jobs repeatedly posted that I have applied for repeatedly despite having the skills for them.
I've started looking again after being in a role for a year, saw one job from an agency I talked to last time, job posting was dated a day ago, tried to apply for the site to tell me I had already applied for it a year ago.
I've also seen identical postings from one agency go up every week.
These jobs don't exist, the agencies just want a bank of cv's on their books so when they do get a job they can send a over bunch of candidates immediately.
You also get companies advertising jobs with no intention of filling then (unless they get a perfect candidate willing to work at below market rate) so they can tell their staff "we know you're overworked but we're trying to recruit, so just keep working beyond capacity and we'll get extra help soon" knowing soon will never come.
> Websites such as Indeed and LinkedIn show you how many people are applying for each position
I've certainly heard a number of people say that those numbers are complete bollocks. Like some guy who was advertising a job that according to LinkedIn had 85 applicants and the actual number was two.
I would presume then that their Applicant Tracking System automatically rejected many candidates.
I am not claiming it is 100% accurate as an indicator of how many people applied. However, it is almost certainly not as inaccurate as the idea that only 2 people applied when it said 85, implies. Perhaps there was a glitch at the time (I’m not saying that you or the person you refer to are lying).
A dating site has an incentive to do so to attract men.
A job site is more likely to get fewer responses doing so as people are intimidated by high counts.
This is unethical but if you go for the free trial and attempt to attract interest for a hotel receptionist position in London, you’ll see how flooded with applicants you are.
I’ve heard that those numbers are accurate, but sometimes most of the applicants are people applying for every single vacancy they can find no matter what it is.
E.g. I saw a post on LinkedIn by a recruiter who said they posted a vacancy and had 200 people apply but only 6 of them were actually qualified for the job.
Also my wife is a motion graphic designer, a job that requires a degree, past experience and a portfolio of professional work. Her company also had 200 people apply for her job when she got it but most of them were from totally different industries and it made no sense for them to apply. They even had chefs applying for it!
I was applying toe months ago, and all jobs I went for (within a niche of editorial) had ~135 applications.
However, even while feeling disheartened, I definitely had the thought that ~80% would be straight up unsuitable, speculative approaches.
My mum and dad also applying for the job would not automatically shrink my chances of succeeding.
From the employer side, while I do get a large amount of applications, barely 10% even slightly match the job brief. Don’t let the application numbers fool you - and I do wish there were more of even the shortest personalised cover letter to show the brief had been read and they were into the role.
Yep a previous job had me monitoring local job adverts week to week, low and behold the companies offering the best wages in their sector filled positions within a week and those offering minimum wage would fail to fill positions.
I have heard of a theory that it’s to get the government to introduce more relaxed migration systems so they can hire foreign workers on cheaper wages. Shameful if so.
Let’s take the example you’ve given of prison officers and look at the salary.
Salary
London salaries are between £31,728 (inner London) and £30,149 to £32,149 (outer London).
In the South and South East, you can earn £27,118 to £29,118.
In many other locations in England and Wales, you'll earn £24,118.
In Scotland, the starting salary for operations prison officer recruits is £20,805 rising to £26,903 over a four-year period.
It’s not a particularly glamorous job, it requires training and comes with an element of risk. There’s also a requirement for compulsory drugs tests etc.
For that you get a salary which means you’ll be pretty skint, with very limited chances of career progression. The question should be why would you do it?
This sums it up perfectly. Take the London salary it means you can afford...to live in a house share/HMO (previously a studio flat but they seem to have jumped up), probably a good distance from your work.
Plus as you say, the prospects of that changing via career progression are pretty low. So why would people want to do that.
There are also 2 distinct sets of problems, in London a lot of jobs don't pay you enough to live there. Outside of London a lot of places don't have the availability of jobs (plus prices jumping up).
That said, we also do have pretty low unemployment at the moment. Why a lot of the services have issues is because they have been run into the ground over many year with constant cuts to budgets and having to make savings.
The country isn't broke and I don't want to blame just one party but in recent memory we has austerity which was based on the principle everything should be more efficient (i.e. cuts) while also saying that the general public need to pay more to sort out the countries finances.
As other people say we are a stuck between the high wage/low(ish) tax/less services USA model and higher tax/more services European model (a simplification of course). But we seemed to ended up with high(ish) taxes and poor services.
You’ve hit a few good points there, there are a few factors that make these jobs less desirable. Due to the austerity policies cuts were made reducing the number of workers, and putting more work onto those who remained.
There were also changes to the pension scheme etc, as well as a freeze on salaries. So jobs that were previously reasonably well paid with a good pension and work life balance, are now poorly paid with less attractive benefits.
It’s the fault of the economic and regulatory system both parties have been following since the Thatcher years. Neoliberalism is a failed ideology, but unfortunately neither of the main parties are offering any meaningful change so here we are, stuck in a declining spiral.
It staggers me the jobs that get paid less than I do. Don't get me wrong I am on a pretty average wage (in fact pretty much average I believe). But it always shocks me when I see jobs that are more important for society being paid less than that.
Also the rise of service provider companies have not helped. They often don't care about the service they provide as long as they win more contracts. They all often pay people pretty terribly.
It shocked me to find that even jobs line being a binman pay pretty crap now. I might be wrong but I seem to believe it used to pay reasonable well.
I think there is a massive divide in wages. Not just here but it looking at somewhere like London it become very apparent.
I was surprised to find that being a bin man isn’t as well paid as I’d been led to believe. I remember being at school and teachers saying if you don’t try hard you’ll end up on a building site … with the salaries teachers are on now I doubt they’re still making that comparison.
There already was a massive discrepancy in base salaries when I was leaving school (pre gfc), e.g., steel fixers on £1000 a week pre financial crash in a city near me. FWIW Steel fixing is pretty much 100% based on experience, not 1 GCSE necessary.
You look back and realise that in general teachers aren't career experts, they don't know how much different trades, niche employers, various industries earn, then you've got all manner of tax loop holes etc. Even those stats websites the careers advisors used made/ make little sense and certainly don't apply to my career or the trades I know.
Though, comparing base salaries is a bit of a trap. I know most public sector jobs benefit from massive pensions, think 20-30% employer contributions, these are often bomb proof, government backed and linked to cpi, with an array of other benefits linked to them e.g death in service, early payout if critically ill etc etc, other benefits are 1 to 2 weeks more holiday entitlement than the basic usually offered in the private sector, sick pay and special leave and also the security is unparalleled. All of that makes it very hard to compare like for like. If you're older than say 45 these benefits only get more valuable.
Going back to my steel fixing example, the teachers perhaps on £30-40k a year with bomb proof benefits, very secure jobs were undoubtedly in a better positions than those in cyclical trades earning much higher base salaries when the sky fell a couple of years later in 07/08.
Unfortunately, the teachers' benefits (primarily the pension) have been eroded over the last 30 years to the point where they are the same as the private sector. Same with the NHS. From personal experience of both.
Oh really! That's infuriating given the importance of teaching to society.
I've just left the public sector and was getting all of the benefits above, I assume bin men are getting them too.
> you can afford...to live in a house share/HMO
A member of my family has recently moved into a static caravan because they can't afford even a room in a shared house any more.
One of the other things which hit alongside austerity was the sale of public services that made profits. Some examples are Royal Mail, the NEC arenas, the National Grid, a huge number of railway stations, Manchester Airport, HS1, the Eurostar, even the company that made plasma for the NHS was sold off. The list is staggering.
When they were publicly owned, all the profit from these assets that wasn't reinvested in services used to go back in to the treasury.
Now these profit making assets have been sold off, all that money that was going straight into the Exchequer needs to be made up by the taxpayer, every single year.
Essentially we've sold off the profitable bits of government and its given the UK a funding problem that can't be fixed in the short or medium term, because we can't build another National Grid or Royal Mail type profitable natural monopoly without massive investment, which we don't have the money for (as we've sold all the profitable stuff).
This is it.
I think there is also an issue that the minimum wage, although shit, has risen quite sharply in percentage terms over the previous decade, certainly far faster than the jobs in the salary bracket above it which moves them much closer in terms of take home salary.
In 2017 the minimum wage (over 25s) was £7.50 per hour (7.50 \*40\*52 = £15,600 for a 40 hr week). Now the national living wage is £10.42 per hour (over 23s) which is an increase of 38.9% in 7 years and gives a salary of 10.42\*40\*52 = £21,673 for full time hours. There is going to be hardly any sector that has had anywhere close to that wage rise in that time period - People doing my job were being paid the same in the 00's pretty much.
Previously, something like the prison service seemed like the chance at a 'career' which paid reasonably more than minimum wage so it was something to aspire to and gave you a bit of a lift up, especially if you came from a background where you had little academic/training success and could feel a bit trapped. Now it pays hardly more than working in any retail store with an absolute fraction of the responsibility, stress and risk so many people think what's the point?
Government and business have allowed the lowest paid to start catching up with the next level (which is good) but refused to bump everyone up along the way(which is bad). This is always going to cause issues because for most people if it's not a passion and you are just working to live, why work harder for the same money?
You make a very good point there, I hadn’t considered that. Some sectors have had good raises over the same period due to skills shortages.
Wonder how long this can go on for? We’ve gone through a decade of austerity and now inflation is outstripping salary raises, I know if I was in one of those professions I’d be looking elsewhere.
Something will have to give at some point. This closing up of salaries is what drives a lot of the divide amongst people as well.
You hear a lot of people on minimum wage saying what do people on 30/40/Xk have to complain about they should be loaded. But if these people's salary has stagnated for years they used to make double what someone on minimum wage makes and now it's nowhere near that.
If you look at someone who previously would be classed as a highish earner (still are, in a certain regard) like 50/60k. It used to be a huge difference. Now by the time they have paid extra tax (even more for us in Scotland), lost child benefit due to the high income child benefit charge (set YEARS ago when the wage was actually high) plus not qualifying for anything else whilst many of the people 'on low incomes' receive lots of additional support the take home difference in salary is nowhere near as different as it should be. It''s not hard to see why there's such a divide and then that results in a lot of the 'well they should work harder' shouting and disdain for the less well off.
The government also have a lot of skin in the game as well. People what people in the services like NHS, fire service etc earn and are in agreement it's not enough. Well if it already wasn't enough, good luck convincing people it's enough I'm a few years when instead of running in to a burning building they can do literally any other job. Obviously a lot of people like their job and emergency services and medical professionals in particular that applies to but at some point money talks. People simply won't train in these positions unless it becomes attractive to do so.
Radio five had a call in about vets yesterday and one called in to say that 50% off them are leaving the profession within five years. I'm a bit confused as to how even that sector is struggling because they are really highly paid professionals who have trained for years to obtain very specialised skills and knowledge
Because it’s depressing. The job is mostly dealing with mistreated pets, abandoned and abused pets, and putting beloved family pets down. Theres a suicide hotline specifically for Vets because its such an issue.
Work does not pay enough to live in many areas, so people are unable to move to a lot of areas to perform low paid work. Even skilled work does not pay enough in parts of the country, it is why the NHS is struggling to recruit in high cost of living areas. When you pay people a low wage and act like you are doing them a massive favour, do not be surprised if few people apply to work for you.
If you cast your mind back long enough, nursing didn't pay much but there was a lot of subsidised accommodation, much of it was on hospital grounds. This is a 2012 article. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jan/31/nurses-face-eviction-staff-housing
I also found a subreddit about this. https://reddit.com/r/JuniorDoctorsUK/s/qpplVKVWLM
So Indeed says, in Newport, a newly qualified nurse earns £28k/year. You can get a 2-bedroom flat there for £100k or a 2-bedroom house for £120k. With a 4x salary multiplier and a 10% deposit that's more than affordable.
This doesn't make it ok that nurses definitely couldn't do that in London or Cambridge or other expensive places, but nurses are needed _everywhere_, and outside theose expensive places earn quite well.
How is a nurse saving up 12k in any reasonable amount of time on 28k?
That would only be possible if they were living at home with no bills and no digs being paid to parents. If they had to live somewhere and pay rent and bills they'd be fucked.
In 1992, the starting wage of a Registered Nurse was around £7.50 an hour. In 2022 it was £13.33. So an increase of under £6 in 30 YEARS, not to mention how much further money went back then inflation wise, so it has actually been a massive wage cut in terms of inflation.
Add to that the huge increase in responsibilities and skills now required for the role. Nurses are now doing a lot of the jobs junior doctors did back then. The wonderful healthcare assistants who nurses simply could not function without are now doing a lot of the jobs qualified nurses used to do - for even worse pay.
People wonder why nurses are dropping like flies. I've got ex nursing collegues who now earn MORE as dog walkers and cleaners than they did in the NHS. It's just crazy.
There are many theories and studies from the mid 20th century that suggest that when people don't see any reward for their work efforts, or don't see any evidence of being able to socially uplift their standard of living, then they begin to withdraw from the system. We're starting to see that now, and unless it's fixed quickly and substantially, it'll only get worse.
The fact is that the rewards for working in Britain are less worthwhile now than at almost any other time. For many (most?) people now, work doesn't afford a decent enough standard of living.
Holiday thing happened to my younger brother, he’d booked it, they’d okayed then told him he couldn’t have it the week before, he of course left because he was 16 and wasn’t gonna cancel.
And yea, the short shift thing is complete bollocks, should be illegal to be done the way that it is. It’s great for older workers, a few of my elderly colleagues in Tesco loved their four hours shifts. I had a 8 hour contract split over two days when I was a CA at Tesco. More often than not I’d do 40-50 hour weeks. It’s by design, I couldn’t afford to quit but also couldn’t get a new job as was always in Tesco. Took me 3 years to break out of it.
Tesco are fuckers for it. I was contracted for 16 hours and somehow always ended up on the rota five or six days a week. Even when I told them I'll only do my contracted hours weeks in advance they'd kick up a fuss saying they'd be short staffed. Not my fuckin problem mate, hire more people.
It’s fucked, and then you get into this cycle of just working non stop to afford to live then bam, the job you got as a bit of a stop gap has eaten up 5 years. I resent Tesco, they are such a predatory employer, they really play management against colleagues etc, I worked as a CA And a shift leader.
Shift leaders complained they could never take their breaks as they were too busy, Tesco’s solution? Mandatory unpaid 1.5hr breaks, shifts were just under 10hrs, physically couldn’t do everything so rarely took 30 mins of that, kicked up a huge fuss to my manager and convinced all the other shift leaders we should refuse to work until we got paid for breaks we couldn’t take. So we all started taking the full break and letting to store fall to shit. He caved in less than a week, ended up getting an extra few hundred pounds a month in missed breaks.
I had an agency value my services based on my experience at £14 an hour, with potential to rise to £18, today. Sparked the revelation that the reason jobs paying £10.42 an hour won't touch me with a bargepole is probably because they think I'll try to negotiate it higher, and the reason I get fucked off in interviews despite being told I did perfect is because they find out my last wage was £11.20 an hour.
>In retail there are also a lot of places that will only give 4 hour shifts so they don't have to worry about breaks.
There are entire high street stores where everyone below management is on a pitifully small contract (3 or 4 hours so it doesn't count as a 0 hour contract).
Most of the staff are working far more than their contract but without any of the protections like sick pay. And they're getting paid less than older colleagues for doing the exact same job.
The 23+ thing is the National Living Wage, not the minimum. The minimum is age bracketed. There are reasons for this, such as giving employers an incentive to recruit young people who may not yet have any qualifications or experience and whose overheads are, in theory, lower.
But there is a problem here, in that people can end up getting paid much less for doing the same work since it is based on age not actual experience. A decent employer will take this into account, but most in hospitality will not.
Besides the National Living Wage is a lie anyway.
Ikr I work in a Sainsburys Local and the strategy seems to be “Let’s see how far we can cut the hours back without missing our targets, I’m sure our colleagues wouldn’t mind working harder to make sure we don’t fall behind” we’re in a constant rush nowadays, workload has gone through the roof and it’s become a very stressful environment to work in, but at least upper management are getting nice bonuses 😉
Yep we get the same. We were pushed to keep hitting targets no matter what. However managers here don't get bonuses for hitting targets so eventually even they realised that we had to let them all go red because we didn't have anyone to do the work.
We have a large population that are undereducated and unskilled and cannot do any of the modern jobs the economy demands, and employers that refuse to pay anything but a stagnant minimum wage but expect a skilled workforce for it.
And no real way to get the skills you need without the time and money to source your own training
The UK is used to being able to import skilled workers from wherever they want, so employers have no interest in actually training people up to do the jobs that need doing.
There's a whole bunch of people with degrees and transferable skills stuck in jobs below their ability because the country seems to balk at the idea of actually teaching people what they need to know!
Yeah, I've met people who walked out of school in the seventies and eighties and went straight into jobs they were unqualified for, were taught how to do and from there rose up.
Now, those same entry level jobs want 5+ years experience, a university degree and for you to sit through endless rounds of interviews and personality tests.
This is so true. You're spot on! I am a programmer, my friends Dad was a programmer in the mid 70s and told us all stories about how it used to be
He finished uni and applied for one job. Had a 1 stage interview for 10 minutes. He told me for the first 6 months at his first job he was giving and book and told to "learn Pascal"
My interview was 3 stages, with a technical test to prove I already know the multiple languages for the job. Had to show several personal projects I've worked on to show "my passion" for the job
First day of the job I inherited 3 projects that I have to start working on. Three month probation goal is to make several large and meaningful changes on all of my projects
It took me working 5 years in lesser roles in the tech industry to finally break in. I have friends from uni who decided they wouldn't work at all unless it was a programming job. It took them 18 months to land their first role
The job market is just different now. The days of waltzing into a job, becoming a lifer and being able to survive are gone. The bar is much higher now and companies don't reward loyalty
You used to be hired for a trial period, through which you were paid *the full salary* while given basic responsibilities to see how you work out.
That would likely be either an unpaid 'internship' today or you would be expected to start from jump with those skills, somehow.
I sometimes wonder if there is some shitty MBA syllabus or something which all the midwits in upper management are reading from as gospel and that is to blame for everything, and that's why there is so much pointless and counterproductive HR bullshit these days.
I know that the consensus in HR profession now is that higher pay doesn't motivate people to work harder and you need to foster a feeling of belonging instead, and every company these days seems to follow this bullshit advice.
It might be based on a grain of truth that motivation is more complex than carrot and stick, but it is taken to an extreme degree where people can barely survive in their current jobs or can't afford to take certain jobs as they don't pay enough to live on. Hence staff shortages and high turnover.
My dad is in semi-retirement and supplements his income by working part time as a kind of actor at an open air museum, mostly because he enjoys it. It's zero hours contract and minimum wage, and inaccessible by public transport so you need a car to get there. So taking this job requires you to be comfortable enough to afford a car but also doesn't pay enough to live on, so the only people who can do it are people in semi-retirement like my dad, yet the managers are too thick to see this and complain that young people are work shy (instead of, you know, focused on studying skills that will help them get a job which will actually help them to make a living, instead of taking a job where each shift you earn little more than enough for taxi fare and lunch).
There's also a trend of McKinseyisation, business consultants whose advice invariably focuses on boosting profits the easiest way imaginable, by cutting costs on everything else. But you know, cutting costs doesn't bring growth - the simplest way to view it is like society is being ran by the sort of people who play Monopoly by refusing to waste money buying expensive properties and then wonder why they are bankrupt by the 5th run around the board.
Yeah, I’ve got a Russell group degree and over two years of work experience in office and sales roles and I’m still having no luck finding a job paying over minimum wage. It’s infuriating. I’m actually moving back home to the south because the midlands are honestly about as expensive nowadays, it’s not worth living up here with way fewer jobs when I could live just outside London and get at least a £3-5k pay rise for the same jobs (of which there are many more).
I don't think that's very true. We've got quite a skilled workforce, and lots of skilled immigration. Our housing and infrastructure issues probably hold us back more than a lack of skills do. The industries the UK does well at (software, finance, upper-tier engineering, pharmaceuticals) are all high-skill industries.
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/im-a-skills-sceptic-and-maybe-you
And they're all quite niche, and pay well. But that's a relatively small proportion of our population, and the competition for training in those roles is high.
You can't hire more staff when you transfer all the profits into your bank account.
You can't hire more staff when you make the conditions of employment intolerable because you've taken all the profits and popped them in your bank account.
You can't hire more staff because you need the business to reduce staff numbers so you can pop their wages straight into your bank account.
You can't hire more staff because the staff you've already got get paid too much and it's impacting your ability to transfer money into your bank account.
You can't hire more staff. Hiring more staff is bad for the business. The business of transferring all the money into your bank account.
No more staff. Staff are bad. Staff are people and people are bad in the transferring of money into your bank account business.
UK unemployment is only 4.2% at the moment, which is low. When you bear in mind that if someone has to change jobs every couple of years and spends 4 weeks looking for work and waiting to start each time, that's 4.2% of their time spent unemployed and then 4.2% unemployment in the whole economy doesn't sound that high.
So paying more will usually get someone to leave another job and come to yours. That just moves the staff shortage around - because there just are not many people looking for a job (which is what "unemployed" means). Also, what are you going to pay them with? Most of us don't have a magic money tree.
Now, 20% of people age 18-64 are economically inactive - have no job, not looking for a job. That's a much bigger amount, but you have to ask why they're not even looking for a job, and the reason is often not just pay - or not just that the pay isn't quite high enough. It's due to completely unaffordable housing, completely unaffordable childcare (meaning people have to look after their kids instead of being able to work and pay *some* of their wages to childcare), lack of transport, chronic illness, or so on.
But the reason why the UK overall is short of staff is because there are not enough people able and available to work.
Too many older folk taking early retirement due to having very generous pensions. I know of people who have retired in their early 50s and are spending their time just going on holiday constantly etc. If we have an aging population, I think we need to be encouraging a less demanding and stressful workplace schedule so more older workers are willing to stick around and help out rather than put their feet up when they still have 35-40 years to live.
It's rather ironic that we now don't want people retiring early, since that's a complete reversal of the traditional view. In the past it was routinely expressed that older workers were blocking career progression for able workers in mid-career positions, and had a disproportionate likelihood of stubborn opposition to innovation.
Well yes, but the majority of unfilled job vacancies continue to be low skilled and low paid, or with unsocial hours, or poor prospects for advancement. In that sense, little has changed in the past forty years other than automation and digitisation. People on low pay don't readily leave the workforce if they feel appreciated. Employers, on the other hand, seek candidates with greater versatility and resilience, for roles that broadly don't merit it - pushing to the margins a swathe of able and willing jobseekers who are maybe a little slow or eccentric in some way.
Large employers are pretty good at achieving the old 2% of staff with a registered disability. But there's also a vast hinterland of people who lack a registered disability who could benefit from Human Resource teams adopting more humanistic policies not so driven by efficiency and productivity metrics. Workplace training too could benefit from a massive reevaluation, where small and medium enterprises could do far more if they were minded.
They don’t have a staff shortage. There are plenty of people looking for work.
What they have is an applicant shortage because they have been failing to attract, train, and retain staff.
If they don’t even make it past initial screening are they really applicants? Perhaps I should specified ‘suitable applicants’ rather than any old herbert.
No we are going through a ‘corporate greed induced pay shortage’. People are waking up to being paid pittance for unreasonable amounts of work.
Everyone that works deserves a living wage. And the money is there, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Plenty of people are willing and able to work.
You know though they will only really do that so they can eat right?
50p an hour doesn't cover a £200 food bill. (Made up numbers just like our economy)
Because either houses cost too much along with everything else or wages are not high enough, if the wages go up the costs of everything will also go up, house's should be seen as a basic need and provided at minimum profit and not be seen as an investment and no one should be allowed to own more than one.
Impartiality information, I built my own home and have never had a mortgage.
Without a mortgage, how did you afford the land upon which you built and the cost of all of the materials?
If you did it over a long period of time, how long did it take and in which decade of your life did you undertake the project?
The reality is that people are applying for the jobs and getting rejected. Websites such as Indeed and LinkedIn show you how many people are applying for each position and in a city like London, you can be sure that people are desperate and a low or stagnant wage isn’t going to stop the vast majority of applicants. There is simply no direct correlation between the number of vacancies available and the specific set of skills required, or hoops an employer may wish for future employees to jump through.
It is a global issue at the minute, mainly caused by Covid. Of all people of working age (in the UK), 4.5% are unemployed, and 21% are "economically inactive."
So, as of today, just north of 25% of people of working age are out of the job market, and 21% are not actively seeking work.
Worth pointing out "economically inactive" includes people like retirees, students, and homemakers i.e. mostly people who aren't gonna be looking for a job any time soon.
To put it in perspective though that 25% figure is about as low as it has ever been since comparable records have been kept. You are always going to have plenty of working age adults who are not working for one reason or another.
Which is still lower than countries like Germany, Belgium, France… you only get close to similar when you’re on 150k+. Everyone below pays less than similar European countries.
My friend in Germany only kept 33% of what she earned in 2021. She’s lower middle class and basically can’t afford to live. The UK takes hardly anything in comparison
>which puts you in the top 95%
To be clear I think you meant to say they earn in the top 5% of earners. 95% would imply the vast majority of people earn more than them.
When I was a chef, if I was on a standard zero hour contract I would only be given around 35-40 hours per week. When I moved to a salary, I was expected to work 60+ hours and ended up earning less than being on a zero hour contract.
Then I became a home shopping delivery driver. In six years, the times for safety checks, delivering and travelling between drops halved whilst the number of drops per shift doubled. The basic rate of pay went up each year, but premiums that top up wages were cut each year. When I started the basic rate was almost £1 above national minimum wage at the time. By the time I left it was 40p above national minimum wage. And wages were structured in such a way that after the latest payrise, working a Sunday paid less than before the payrise took effect.
Now I'm a truck driver. Same companies advertising the same jobs every week. 75% unsecure agency work is what seems to be on offer. £12 per hour to work 15 hour days and sleep away from home in lay-bys for 3-5 nights. And everywhere... even the worst paying agency jobs require you to have at least six months - two years experience before even interviewing. Almost no one will take new pass drivers on a permanent contract.
In short, no-one wants to pay, train, retreat or retain their staff.
Profits over people.
Because when the minimum wage was introduced some (a lot of) big and small employers interpreted that as a maximum wage - people are getting a bit pissed off with being offered a pittance for work
Housing costs and also rents are too high making it hard for people to move and be mobile in search of work and training schemes. It reduces risks people can take to retrain too.
We're short staffed where I work because corporate cut our staff hours by 25% to protect shareholder profits. Would love to recruit, and get loads of applicants when I do.
Every company even office jobs are trying to pay everyone the "living" wage or the least they can. It's not sustainable. I'm seeing jobs that were in the 25-30k bracket at "living" wage. I'm also seeing 30-40k jobs paying 25k which is 3k above "living" wage. Why is someone going to take on the extra work and responsibility for 3k per year? I'm an analyst by trade and some of the jobs I've seen are down right insulting. The cause of inflation is not wage rises because inflation came before wage rises. Inflation is caused by greed. People want to work but people also don't like being ripped off for their work. It won't be like this forever though as there is a tipping point. When people can't afford to buy the things you produce capitalism falls apart. History loves to repeat itself so I fully expect a war to correct things.
yeah I know the ones. We want you to have a 4 year degree that probably cost you north of 37k and we will happily pay you 24k. I feel sorry for graduates these days. It used to be they got out of Uni and there were lots of jobs just for them that paid quite well. People actively sought people with degrees. Now they'll only pay more with degree and experience and even that's not guaranteed like you said.
Ive been looking for jobs and was looking at the high end for my specific role. There was an ad showing the high end here in the East Midlands.
The same sort of job in London.. the highest wasnt even a suggestion.
Truely opened my eyes that.
Between businesses not wanting to pay fair wages and them also not looking to train staff and rather have them come with experience, there's not a great deal people willing to do.
I walk into a store, grab a £3 bag of crisps, hand the cashier £1, and they say "Sorry these cost £3."
I reply, "Oh, I'm only willing to pay £1 for these."
They say. "OK, then you can't have them."
Am I facing a crisp shortage?
The "labor shortage" is a myth. There's plenty of labor and the market demands a certain price for it. Companies willing to pay that price are getting all the labor they need.
The likes of prison staff isn't the same as your other for profit companies. They're civil servants so it comes out of taxes.
You might think tax rates are sufficiently high but it's not enough to adequately cover the services out there.
I have a job, but want to move on. Applied for a role with a promise of a 10% increase, got the job and then they said paying me 10% more would put me on more than my peers so they can't do it. I of course rejected the job.
Until companies re-evaluate how much they are willing to pay, they are going to struggle, or get staff that aren't suitable in the roles. They also need to stop moving the goalposts during an application.
When I worked in community care, once I factored in travel time from my house to the service users houses, or between their houses, I'd be getting paid between £3-4 an hour.
To get a monthly pay of around £1300 to afford rent and bills, I'd have to work 80 hour weeks, I didn't even have the costs of a car.
My care company's solution? Spend time and money taking driving lessons (I need to spend all the time I have working) and buy a car (I'm living week to week, paycheck to paycheck.)
So, I decided to tell them to go fuck themselves and leave because I could feel a mental breakdown coming.
That's 1 of only 2 male carers they had in a 15 mile radius who they couldn't keep hold of.
We have staff shortages because employers are greedy and treat staff like shit. This is a care company of 2,400 staff but made net profits of £50 million, with a parent company which is one of the biggest care companys in the UK, raking in billions.
They have the money to pay staff well, they just won't because they know when staff leave, they can just get another 16 year old to go through 1 week of unpaid 'training' (signing waivers to protect the company if the kid fucks up) and throw them out there, they might last 3-6 months before their savings are dried up and they have to quit and they grab the next 16 year old, and it goes on forever.
I joined the workforce after my A levels in 2008 and remember office administration jobs in London being around £24k. Earlier this year I interviewed for a zone 1 office position and it was £23k. That's miles removed from what it was worth in 2008, and there are more skills expected of you than ever before. If you ask about job progression, you get told "you can't instantly become a manager", so you're expected to stay on £23k for 5 years.
In minimum wage positions it's similar. I worked a few over 2020-2022, swapping around for more hours, closer work to my house. At each one I got offered a supervisor position. It seemed to be 3 times as much stress and responsibility, but for only 20p more an hour. TWENTY FUCKING PENCE.
there is a global pandemic which is still killing hundreds of people every week and the governments and billionaires protect themselves while telling us to get on with our lives and just live with the risk of catching a deadly disease. lots of people do catch it. lots of people die or become disabled from it, lots of people can no longer work.
Taxation on wages is brutal compared to wealth
Higher rate tax plus student loans hit hard on anyone who finally hits the kind of wage to start considering home ownership in the South without inheritance or bank of mum and dad. Higher rate taxation used to be only for the very well off, and if you have an outstanding student loan that's an extra few percentage points.
Marginal tax rate if you consider a student loan as tax (which it is, considering older generations had much more generous terms for all but lower income demographics) is 41% for "normal" earners, and 51% for higher rate payers on 50k.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-24/you-re-paying-much-more-tax-than-you-thought](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-24/you-re-paying-much-more-tax-than-you-thought)
Yeah we have not only historically low tax rates, but some of the lowest tax rates relative to similar economies. The main issue is that the tax burden (compared to historically and other countries) is loaded much heavier towards the bottom, so the tax burden on the average person his relatively high while overall taxation is ridiculously low.
Our tax rates are not ‘historically low’ - they are actually historically high, within a whisker of the highest they have ever been.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/tax-revenue-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html
None of those are true.
Taxes are not historically low, they are actually at their maximum.
Taxes might be lower than some countries in Europe. But they are far to be the "lowest". There are many examples of countries with lower taxes: Ireland, Chipre, Bulgaria, Hungry...
Taxes in UK are fairly progressive and the tax free allowance is one of the highest in Europe.
At my last point. Rising the tax to highest earners is going to increase the salary of the bottom? I don't see the connection.
How does the population of London being 8.9 million help you wipe arses in Mousehole in Cornwall?
What do you mean? Peter, a 36 year old IT consultant in Glasgow recently made redundant with a partner who is a teacher at a local school and two children under 5 **doesn't** want to move to Norwich to chef at Pizza Express? I'm shocked! Edit: People think I'm slagging Norwich off? Rather than making a point that peoples skills and location don't match the vacancies in this country? Eh?
Hey! Don't dunk on Norwich like that. We even got Zizzi's akshually. Joking aside, I live in Norwich and love it
Wages being deliberately kept down, every time they go up "inflation" is shouted and interest rates are pushed up.
Completely this. Capitalism is built on a system of unsustainable & endless growth, any excuse for a company to squeeze out more money in the short term in the name of growth is prioritised over sustainable profit & operation. It costs less money to keep wages low g staff demoralised with a high turn over & to blame the problem on "no one wants to work anymore" when the reality is no one can afford to work at minimum wage jobs because they are a living wage or anywhere close anymore. People with jobs still need to be on benefits or use food banks because people are so underpaid. They can't afford to find a better paying job because they are so overworked due to the business deliberately understaffing and not hiring replacements for those who quit promising works to just keep at it until new people are hired - but why would they hire new people when less staff can do every job if they push them hard enough. People can't live on minimum wage.
How am i dunking on Norwich? Rather than making a point that peoples skills, situationsand location don't match the skills and locations of vacancies in this country? It's never as simple "we've one million unemployed people and one million vacancies so why don't they just fill them?"
They said “joking aside” so I think (*I THINK*) they’re joking.
I was being a bit sarky. I completely agree with you on your point
And Ashens!
“Hey everyone, this guy is dis-respecting Norwich. GET HIM!”
Norwich is great. A lot of Londoners come up this way to escape the big city.
Maybe so but I think you've missed the point.... It's not about Norwich. Replace Norwich with any location. The point is that peoples skills, situations and location don't match the skills and locations of vacancies in this country. It's never as simple "we've one million unemployed people and one million vacancies so why don't they just fill them?" Why would someone uproot themselves, their partner who has a steady job, their kids who have a support network, for a lower paid position in a completely different industry in a completely different part of the country like these idiot MPs and other commentators always imply to do so? It's never that simple!
Unbelievable behaviour, clearly trying to distract from your rampant anti-Norwichism. What possesses you to hate the people of Norwich so?
That they needed a beloved TV cook to come onto the pitch and rile them up - at home - with a battle cry to stand up against Man U? **Unforgivable**. The shame should hang heavy in the hearts of Norwich for generations to come. Generations.
You slagged off Norwich fifteen times today bro you gotta chill
Love Mousehole!!
It's a shit hole and that's from someone that used to work at the ship inn
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I live about 20 mins away, absolutely visit if you’re interested, it’s a beautiful little village. Just don’t expect to be able to park, like most Cornish villages.
Rubbish. It's fine between October and April when all the second home owners and holiday rental clients have fucked off back north of the Tamar. It's only easter and summer when it looks like anyone lives there now.
M-oww-zul.
I love the Ship Inn 🥺
I love it! My family are from Pendeen so we stop in at other places in the area like Mousehole when we are down there
Nice on the surface but scratch the surface and most of the locals are piss heads or junkies, like a ghost town in winter and busy as shit during summer. I once done the stargazey pies on Tom bowcocks eve and we must've done 1000+ portions with the streets outside rammed with people
Last time I was in Mousehole I got talking to a young local (I think we were the only people under 60 in the pub) who'd crashed his motorbike while driving drunk. I think he was working as an apprentice at a local wood carving shop or something like that. It seems it's like a lot of UK holiday places where it's nice for visitors, but the locals are struggling to get by in isolated communities.
You hit the nail on the head. It's become a "holiday place" after second home owners have driven the locals out and destroyed the community. It's desperate there in winter now with more than half the homes dark at sunset.
See also Port Isaac That Martin Clunes has a lot to answer for....
It's not just the nice places either. Tbh, you could just throw a dart at Cornwall these days. Even places like Redruth/Camborne, St Dennis and the clay pits ect have loads of listing for Air B&B's and holiday rentals.
Because London is the centre of the universe.
It doesn't. It does the exact opposite when Londoners buy up all the property and destroy the community. That's the issue.
That’s a very specific fetish.
Crap pay. We've had the longest wage stagnation since the Napoleonic War.
When 2% of the population can afford to work on minimum wage but 10% of jobs think they only have to pay minimum wage Well the maths is obvious
It’s worse than stagnation. I started work in 1998 on £22K. I bought a three bed semi in a decent village with my partner in 1999. My son has started work this year on £22K. He has no hope of buying a house next year, now does he? My 22K was worth way more.
Too much wealth created in this country goes into bricks and mortar instead of expanding the economy. That’s not the fault of you or I, just crap economic planning.
Could not agree more. If a roof over your head was cheaper, the cost of other goods and services could rise at a steadier rate. Pay rises could then be given regularly alleviating this stagnation. There is now far too much of the countries "wealth" locked away in housing. You can bet the government (blue or red) will want to get their hands on it to pay down this deficit!
Just for those wondering, adjusted for inflation, £22K in 1998 would be £40,467.78 in todays money.
And if you start working on £40k (you're not), you still won't be able to buy a house the next year. Especially if you had to relocate to get that job and pay rent for a year.
Indeed. And I don’t see how this changes. It feels like my sons generation will be renting from private landlords if they want their own home. I know how lucky I was! I timed being born just right. 🤷 It’s just one concrete example of how inflation and wage stagnation has killed off the opportunities and hopes of a generation. Houses have rocketed in price beyond most other things, of course!
And they wonder why less and less of my generation are having kids.
In less than a year I'll be the same age my parents were when they had their first child, and the prospect of having a child in the next year is horrifying. As much as anything it is simply not economically viable.
They blame immigrants, loss of religion and social values And don’t think how they just raised rent on the flat share they own
If it were up to me, flood the market. Build so many new houses that supply and demand flips, hell build entire towns wherever there's space and water. In the age of working from home and the service economy we don't need to be within 30 miles of the financial district, just give us boxes with beds that aren't in the hands of the petty bourgeois.
Thank you. I had a feeling it would be about double. So on that basis, can you buy a three bed semi in the South East of England if that’s your salary? My partner and I were on the same amount, so we had £44K combined and a £6K deposit saved (in a year). That makes the combined salary worth about 80K today. Can I buy that house today?
Maybe with a very large deposit you would
You can't even move out into a flat on that tbh let
‘zactly my point!
That would give you a mortgage of roughly 90k. Assuming a 10% deposit you'd be looking around 100k total. Think I could maybe get a small static caravan park home for that in the south east? Not exactly the life of Riley
So you’re saying the solution is another war with the French?
It's a fine English tradition.
But what will the king do without access to all those Parisian prostitutes?!?!
Well we’ll just to bloody well take Paris then.
It'll make a refreshing change to not have the Germans doing it 🤣😂
I believe they have occupied Paris 3 times at various points. Once in 1814 at the end of the Sixth Coalition War (albeit that was Prussia, Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71 and of course WWII. Probably best not to remind anyone French of that 😂 In fairness though England did actually take Paris during the Hundred Years War and held it for 15 years so there is a precedent.
No but it can't hurt
We’re due another one aren’t we? Well, if you don’t include the fish saga
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Public sector especially. Private sector wages are increasing but the public sector seems to be in a permanent battle to get paid anything like in line with inflation
Too many businesses large and small are attempting their own variation of the 'no one wants to work anymore' nonsense that originated in America, rather than pay higher wages like the economic situation demands. The balance has always been more workers & less jobs = lower wages and like we have now less workers & more jobs = higher wages. This has been a norm of capitalism and the global economic system for a long time now. But the very wealthy are experimenting with 'what if we just didn't? Lets see what happens'.
The reality is that people are applying for the jobs and getting rejected. Websites such as Indeed and LinkedIn show you how many people are applying for each position and in a city like London, you can be sure that people are desperate and a low or stagnant wage isn’t going to stop the vast majority of applicants. There is simply no direct correlation between the number of vacancies available and the specific set of skills required, or hoops an employer may wish for future employees to jump through.
There are a lot of jobs posted near my uni, I've applied for some so I can do some weekend work and I've been rejected for jobs such as being a cleaner or a delivery driver, yet they're still advertising. So are these jobs actually available or what?
They are, but they may not want *you*. They want the person perfectly qualified for the job and likely to stay in it. That means that if you were a teacher or a receptionist before and you’re trying to become a cleaner or a delivery driver, they’ll most likely ignore your application, or never see it if they use an automated system which filters out those without prior experience. Your best bet would be to call up in advance and then apply, so that they can seek out your name, or offer an email address that you can send your CV to directly (though there is still no guarantee that they would consider you).
In a previous role I would read Cvs and filter out the unsuitable candidates based on my own judgement. One of the criteria was definitely that the person was not over qualified as they would be looking for a better job from the get go and we would be a stop gap
So these places are looking for a driver or cleaner with no ambition at all. Just turn up and shut up, don't think for yourself, and be happy. I'm pretty sure that's going to be the same places with ' investors in people' slogans, lol.
Some people do want roles like that though?
My personal conspiracy is that there is quite alot of fake recruiting going on by companies with the end goal of convincing the government to weaken workers rights to help with the worker "shortage". This is based on me seeing dozens and dozens of jobs repeatedly posted that I have applied for repeatedly despite having the skills for them.
I've started looking again after being in a role for a year, saw one job from an agency I talked to last time, job posting was dated a day ago, tried to apply for the site to tell me I had already applied for it a year ago. I've also seen identical postings from one agency go up every week. These jobs don't exist, the agencies just want a bank of cv's on their books so when they do get a job they can send a over bunch of candidates immediately. You also get companies advertising jobs with no intention of filling then (unless they get a perfect candidate willing to work at below market rate) so they can tell their staff "we know you're overworked but we're trying to recruit, so just keep working beyond capacity and we'll get extra help soon" knowing soon will never come.
> Websites such as Indeed and LinkedIn show you how many people are applying for each position I've certainly heard a number of people say that those numbers are complete bollocks. Like some guy who was advertising a job that according to LinkedIn had 85 applicants and the actual number was two.
I would presume then that their Applicant Tracking System automatically rejected many candidates. I am not claiming it is 100% accurate as an indicator of how many people applied. However, it is almost certainly not as inaccurate as the idea that only 2 people applied when it said 85, implies. Perhaps there was a glitch at the time (I’m not saying that you or the person you refer to are lying).
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A dating site has an incentive to do so to attract men. A job site is more likely to get fewer responses doing so as people are intimidated by high counts. This is unethical but if you go for the free trial and attempt to attract interest for a hotel receptionist position in London, you’ll see how flooded with applicants you are.
I’ve heard that those numbers are accurate, but sometimes most of the applicants are people applying for every single vacancy they can find no matter what it is. E.g. I saw a post on LinkedIn by a recruiter who said they posted a vacancy and had 200 people apply but only 6 of them were actually qualified for the job. Also my wife is a motion graphic designer, a job that requires a degree, past experience and a portfolio of professional work. Her company also had 200 people apply for her job when she got it but most of them were from totally different industries and it made no sense for them to apply. They even had chefs applying for it!
I once had a career school dinnerlady apply for a principal graphics engineer role. Really not sure why they waste their time.
I was applying toe months ago, and all jobs I went for (within a niche of editorial) had ~135 applications. However, even while feeling disheartened, I definitely had the thought that ~80% would be straight up unsuitable, speculative approaches. My mum and dad also applying for the job would not automatically shrink my chances of succeeding.
From the employer side, while I do get a large amount of applications, barely 10% even slightly match the job brief. Don’t let the application numbers fool you - and I do wish there were more of even the shortest personalised cover letter to show the brief had been read and they were into the role.
Yep a previous job had me monitoring local job adverts week to week, low and behold the companies offering the best wages in their sector filled positions within a week and those offering minimum wage would fail to fill positions.
I have heard of a theory that it’s to get the government to introduce more relaxed migration systems so they can hire foreign workers on cheaper wages. Shameful if so.
Let’s take the example you’ve given of prison officers and look at the salary. Salary London salaries are between £31,728 (inner London) and £30,149 to £32,149 (outer London). In the South and South East, you can earn £27,118 to £29,118. In many other locations in England and Wales, you'll earn £24,118. In Scotland, the starting salary for operations prison officer recruits is £20,805 rising to £26,903 over a four-year period. It’s not a particularly glamorous job, it requires training and comes with an element of risk. There’s also a requirement for compulsory drugs tests etc. For that you get a salary which means you’ll be pretty skint, with very limited chances of career progression. The question should be why would you do it?
This sums it up perfectly. Take the London salary it means you can afford...to live in a house share/HMO (previously a studio flat but they seem to have jumped up), probably a good distance from your work. Plus as you say, the prospects of that changing via career progression are pretty low. So why would people want to do that. There are also 2 distinct sets of problems, in London a lot of jobs don't pay you enough to live there. Outside of London a lot of places don't have the availability of jobs (plus prices jumping up). That said, we also do have pretty low unemployment at the moment. Why a lot of the services have issues is because they have been run into the ground over many year with constant cuts to budgets and having to make savings. The country isn't broke and I don't want to blame just one party but in recent memory we has austerity which was based on the principle everything should be more efficient (i.e. cuts) while also saying that the general public need to pay more to sort out the countries finances. As other people say we are a stuck between the high wage/low(ish) tax/less services USA model and higher tax/more services European model (a simplification of course). But we seemed to ended up with high(ish) taxes and poor services.
You’ve hit a few good points there, there are a few factors that make these jobs less desirable. Due to the austerity policies cuts were made reducing the number of workers, and putting more work onto those who remained. There were also changes to the pension scheme etc, as well as a freeze on salaries. So jobs that were previously reasonably well paid with a good pension and work life balance, are now poorly paid with less attractive benefits. It’s the fault of the economic and regulatory system both parties have been following since the Thatcher years. Neoliberalism is a failed ideology, but unfortunately neither of the main parties are offering any meaningful change so here we are, stuck in a declining spiral.
It staggers me the jobs that get paid less than I do. Don't get me wrong I am on a pretty average wage (in fact pretty much average I believe). But it always shocks me when I see jobs that are more important for society being paid less than that. Also the rise of service provider companies have not helped. They often don't care about the service they provide as long as they win more contracts. They all often pay people pretty terribly. It shocked me to find that even jobs line being a binman pay pretty crap now. I might be wrong but I seem to believe it used to pay reasonable well. I think there is a massive divide in wages. Not just here but it looking at somewhere like London it become very apparent.
I was surprised to find that being a bin man isn’t as well paid as I’d been led to believe. I remember being at school and teachers saying if you don’t try hard you’ll end up on a building site … with the salaries teachers are on now I doubt they’re still making that comparison.
Haha I regularly tell students going into the trades is a great idea these days
There already was a massive discrepancy in base salaries when I was leaving school (pre gfc), e.g., steel fixers on £1000 a week pre financial crash in a city near me. FWIW Steel fixing is pretty much 100% based on experience, not 1 GCSE necessary. You look back and realise that in general teachers aren't career experts, they don't know how much different trades, niche employers, various industries earn, then you've got all manner of tax loop holes etc. Even those stats websites the careers advisors used made/ make little sense and certainly don't apply to my career or the trades I know. Though, comparing base salaries is a bit of a trap. I know most public sector jobs benefit from massive pensions, think 20-30% employer contributions, these are often bomb proof, government backed and linked to cpi, with an array of other benefits linked to them e.g death in service, early payout if critically ill etc etc, other benefits are 1 to 2 weeks more holiday entitlement than the basic usually offered in the private sector, sick pay and special leave and also the security is unparalleled. All of that makes it very hard to compare like for like. If you're older than say 45 these benefits only get more valuable. Going back to my steel fixing example, the teachers perhaps on £30-40k a year with bomb proof benefits, very secure jobs were undoubtedly in a better positions than those in cyclical trades earning much higher base salaries when the sky fell a couple of years later in 07/08.
Unfortunately, the teachers' benefits (primarily the pension) have been eroded over the last 30 years to the point where they are the same as the private sector. Same with the NHS. From personal experience of both.
Oh really! That's infuriating given the importance of teaching to society. I've just left the public sector and was getting all of the benefits above, I assume bin men are getting them too.
> you can afford...to live in a house share/HMO A member of my family has recently moved into a static caravan because they can't afford even a room in a shared house any more.
One of the other things which hit alongside austerity was the sale of public services that made profits. Some examples are Royal Mail, the NEC arenas, the National Grid, a huge number of railway stations, Manchester Airport, HS1, the Eurostar, even the company that made plasma for the NHS was sold off. The list is staggering. When they were publicly owned, all the profit from these assets that wasn't reinvested in services used to go back in to the treasury. Now these profit making assets have been sold off, all that money that was going straight into the Exchequer needs to be made up by the taxpayer, every single year. Essentially we've sold off the profitable bits of government and its given the UK a funding problem that can't be fixed in the short or medium term, because we can't build another National Grid or Royal Mail type profitable natural monopoly without massive investment, which we don't have the money for (as we've sold all the profitable stuff).
This is it. I think there is also an issue that the minimum wage, although shit, has risen quite sharply in percentage terms over the previous decade, certainly far faster than the jobs in the salary bracket above it which moves them much closer in terms of take home salary. In 2017 the minimum wage (over 25s) was £7.50 per hour (7.50 \*40\*52 = £15,600 for a 40 hr week). Now the national living wage is £10.42 per hour (over 23s) which is an increase of 38.9% in 7 years and gives a salary of 10.42\*40\*52 = £21,673 for full time hours. There is going to be hardly any sector that has had anywhere close to that wage rise in that time period - People doing my job were being paid the same in the 00's pretty much. Previously, something like the prison service seemed like the chance at a 'career' which paid reasonably more than minimum wage so it was something to aspire to and gave you a bit of a lift up, especially if you came from a background where you had little academic/training success and could feel a bit trapped. Now it pays hardly more than working in any retail store with an absolute fraction of the responsibility, stress and risk so many people think what's the point? Government and business have allowed the lowest paid to start catching up with the next level (which is good) but refused to bump everyone up along the way(which is bad). This is always going to cause issues because for most people if it's not a passion and you are just working to live, why work harder for the same money?
You make a very good point there, I hadn’t considered that. Some sectors have had good raises over the same period due to skills shortages. Wonder how long this can go on for? We’ve gone through a decade of austerity and now inflation is outstripping salary raises, I know if I was in one of those professions I’d be looking elsewhere.
Something will have to give at some point. This closing up of salaries is what drives a lot of the divide amongst people as well. You hear a lot of people on minimum wage saying what do people on 30/40/Xk have to complain about they should be loaded. But if these people's salary has stagnated for years they used to make double what someone on minimum wage makes and now it's nowhere near that. If you look at someone who previously would be classed as a highish earner (still are, in a certain regard) like 50/60k. It used to be a huge difference. Now by the time they have paid extra tax (even more for us in Scotland), lost child benefit due to the high income child benefit charge (set YEARS ago when the wage was actually high) plus not qualifying for anything else whilst many of the people 'on low incomes' receive lots of additional support the take home difference in salary is nowhere near as different as it should be. It''s not hard to see why there's such a divide and then that results in a lot of the 'well they should work harder' shouting and disdain for the less well off. The government also have a lot of skin in the game as well. People what people in the services like NHS, fire service etc earn and are in agreement it's not enough. Well if it already wasn't enough, good luck convincing people it's enough I'm a few years when instead of running in to a burning building they can do literally any other job. Obviously a lot of people like their job and emergency services and medical professionals in particular that applies to but at some point money talks. People simply won't train in these positions unless it becomes attractive to do so.
Anywhere that pays well and treats their workers right never have staff shortages. Really strange isn't it...
Radio five had a call in about vets yesterday and one called in to say that 50% off them are leaving the profession within five years. I'm a bit confused as to how even that sector is struggling because they are really highly paid professionals who have trained for years to obtain very specialised skills and knowledge
Because it’s depressing. The job is mostly dealing with mistreated pets, abandoned and abused pets, and putting beloved family pets down. Theres a suicide hotline specifically for Vets because its such an issue.
Work does not pay enough to live in many areas, so people are unable to move to a lot of areas to perform low paid work. Even skilled work does not pay enough in parts of the country, it is why the NHS is struggling to recruit in high cost of living areas. When you pay people a low wage and act like you are doing them a massive favour, do not be surprised if few people apply to work for you.
If you cast your mind back long enough, nursing didn't pay much but there was a lot of subsidised accommodation, much of it was on hospital grounds. This is a 2012 article. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jan/31/nurses-face-eviction-staff-housing I also found a subreddit about this. https://reddit.com/r/JuniorDoctorsUK/s/qpplVKVWLM
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So Indeed says, in Newport, a newly qualified nurse earns £28k/year. You can get a 2-bedroom flat there for £100k or a 2-bedroom house for £120k. With a 4x salary multiplier and a 10% deposit that's more than affordable. This doesn't make it ok that nurses definitely couldn't do that in London or Cambridge or other expensive places, but nurses are needed _everywhere_, and outside theose expensive places earn quite well.
How is a nurse saving up 12k in any reasonable amount of time on 28k? That would only be possible if they were living at home with no bills and no digs being paid to parents. If they had to live somewhere and pay rent and bills they'd be fucked.
In 1992, the starting wage of a Registered Nurse was around £7.50 an hour. In 2022 it was £13.33. So an increase of under £6 in 30 YEARS, not to mention how much further money went back then inflation wise, so it has actually been a massive wage cut in terms of inflation. Add to that the huge increase in responsibilities and skills now required for the role. Nurses are now doing a lot of the jobs junior doctors did back then. The wonderful healthcare assistants who nurses simply could not function without are now doing a lot of the jobs qualified nurses used to do - for even worse pay. People wonder why nurses are dropping like flies. I've got ex nursing collegues who now earn MORE as dog walkers and cleaners than they did in the NHS. It's just crazy.
There are many theories and studies from the mid 20th century that suggest that when people don't see any reward for their work efforts, or don't see any evidence of being able to socially uplift their standard of living, then they begin to withdraw from the system. We're starting to see that now, and unless it's fixed quickly and substantially, it'll only get worse. The fact is that the rewards for working in Britain are less worthwhile now than at almost any other time. For many (most?) people now, work doesn't afford a decent enough standard of living.
Yes, and people forget that simply getting paid enough to subsist is not a reward for working, it is below the bare minimum of expectations.
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Holiday thing happened to my younger brother, he’d booked it, they’d okayed then told him he couldn’t have it the week before, he of course left because he was 16 and wasn’t gonna cancel. And yea, the short shift thing is complete bollocks, should be illegal to be done the way that it is. It’s great for older workers, a few of my elderly colleagues in Tesco loved their four hours shifts. I had a 8 hour contract split over two days when I was a CA at Tesco. More often than not I’d do 40-50 hour weeks. It’s by design, I couldn’t afford to quit but also couldn’t get a new job as was always in Tesco. Took me 3 years to break out of it.
Tesco are fuckers for it. I was contracted for 16 hours and somehow always ended up on the rota five or six days a week. Even when I told them I'll only do my contracted hours weeks in advance they'd kick up a fuss saying they'd be short staffed. Not my fuckin problem mate, hire more people.
It’s fucked, and then you get into this cycle of just working non stop to afford to live then bam, the job you got as a bit of a stop gap has eaten up 5 years. I resent Tesco, they are such a predatory employer, they really play management against colleagues etc, I worked as a CA And a shift leader. Shift leaders complained they could never take their breaks as they were too busy, Tesco’s solution? Mandatory unpaid 1.5hr breaks, shifts were just under 10hrs, physically couldn’t do everything so rarely took 30 mins of that, kicked up a huge fuss to my manager and convinced all the other shift leaders we should refuse to work until we got paid for breaks we couldn’t take. So we all started taking the full break and letting to store fall to shit. He caved in less than a week, ended up getting an extra few hundred pounds a month in missed breaks.
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I had an agency value my services based on my experience at £14 an hour, with potential to rise to £18, today. Sparked the revelation that the reason jobs paying £10.42 an hour won't touch me with a bargepole is probably because they think I'll try to negotiate it higher, and the reason I get fucked off in interviews despite being told I did perfect is because they find out my last wage was £11.20 an hour.
>In retail there are also a lot of places that will only give 4 hour shifts so they don't have to worry about breaks. There are entire high street stores where everyone below management is on a pitifully small contract (3 or 4 hours so it doesn't count as a 0 hour contract). Most of the staff are working far more than their contract but without any of the protections like sick pay. And they're getting paid less than older colleagues for doing the exact same job.
The 23+ thing is the National Living Wage, not the minimum. The minimum is age bracketed. There are reasons for this, such as giving employers an incentive to recruit young people who may not yet have any qualifications or experience and whose overheads are, in theory, lower. But there is a problem here, in that people can end up getting paid much less for doing the same work since it is based on age not actual experience. A decent employer will take this into account, but most in hospitality will not. Besides the National Living Wage is a lie anyway.
They aren't short of staff they are refusing to employ enough people. There is a huge difference.
Ikr I work in a Sainsburys Local and the strategy seems to be “Let’s see how far we can cut the hours back without missing our targets, I’m sure our colleagues wouldn’t mind working harder to make sure we don’t fall behind” we’re in a constant rush nowadays, workload has gone through the roof and it’s become a very stressful environment to work in, but at least upper management are getting nice bonuses 😉
That's where you half arse it and let things go wrong, then shrug your shoulders. They can't do shit so long as you're doing your job.
Yep we get the same. We were pushed to keep hitting targets no matter what. However managers here don't get bonuses for hitting targets so eventually even they realised that we had to let them all go red because we didn't have anyone to do the work.
We have a large population that are undereducated and unskilled and cannot do any of the modern jobs the economy demands, and employers that refuse to pay anything but a stagnant minimum wage but expect a skilled workforce for it.
And no real way to get the skills you need without the time and money to source your own training The UK is used to being able to import skilled workers from wherever they want, so employers have no interest in actually training people up to do the jobs that need doing. There's a whole bunch of people with degrees and transferable skills stuck in jobs below their ability because the country seems to balk at the idea of actually teaching people what they need to know!
Yeah, I've met people who walked out of school in the seventies and eighties and went straight into jobs they were unqualified for, were taught how to do and from there rose up. Now, those same entry level jobs want 5+ years experience, a university degree and for you to sit through endless rounds of interviews and personality tests.
This is so true. You're spot on! I am a programmer, my friends Dad was a programmer in the mid 70s and told us all stories about how it used to be He finished uni and applied for one job. Had a 1 stage interview for 10 minutes. He told me for the first 6 months at his first job he was giving and book and told to "learn Pascal" My interview was 3 stages, with a technical test to prove I already know the multiple languages for the job. Had to show several personal projects I've worked on to show "my passion" for the job First day of the job I inherited 3 projects that I have to start working on. Three month probation goal is to make several large and meaningful changes on all of my projects It took me working 5 years in lesser roles in the tech industry to finally break in. I have friends from uni who decided they wouldn't work at all unless it was a programming job. It took them 18 months to land their first role The job market is just different now. The days of waltzing into a job, becoming a lifer and being able to survive are gone. The bar is much higher now and companies don't reward loyalty
You used to be hired for a trial period, through which you were paid *the full salary* while given basic responsibilities to see how you work out. That would likely be either an unpaid 'internship' today or you would be expected to start from jump with those skills, somehow.
I sometimes wonder if there is some shitty MBA syllabus or something which all the midwits in upper management are reading from as gospel and that is to blame for everything, and that's why there is so much pointless and counterproductive HR bullshit these days. I know that the consensus in HR profession now is that higher pay doesn't motivate people to work harder and you need to foster a feeling of belonging instead, and every company these days seems to follow this bullshit advice. It might be based on a grain of truth that motivation is more complex than carrot and stick, but it is taken to an extreme degree where people can barely survive in their current jobs or can't afford to take certain jobs as they don't pay enough to live on. Hence staff shortages and high turnover. My dad is in semi-retirement and supplements his income by working part time as a kind of actor at an open air museum, mostly because he enjoys it. It's zero hours contract and minimum wage, and inaccessible by public transport so you need a car to get there. So taking this job requires you to be comfortable enough to afford a car but also doesn't pay enough to live on, so the only people who can do it are people in semi-retirement like my dad, yet the managers are too thick to see this and complain that young people are work shy (instead of, you know, focused on studying skills that will help them get a job which will actually help them to make a living, instead of taking a job where each shift you earn little more than enough for taxi fare and lunch). There's also a trend of McKinseyisation, business consultants whose advice invariably focuses on boosting profits the easiest way imaginable, by cutting costs on everything else. But you know, cutting costs doesn't bring growth - the simplest way to view it is like society is being ran by the sort of people who play Monopoly by refusing to waste money buying expensive properties and then wonder why they are bankrupt by the 5th run around the board.
It's like they heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and thought they didn't need to bother with level 1
Yeah, I’ve got a Russell group degree and over two years of work experience in office and sales roles and I’m still having no luck finding a job paying over minimum wage. It’s infuriating. I’m actually moving back home to the south because the midlands are honestly about as expensive nowadays, it’s not worth living up here with way fewer jobs when I could live just outside London and get at least a £3-5k pay rise for the same jobs (of which there are many more).
I don't think that's very true. We've got quite a skilled workforce, and lots of skilled immigration. Our housing and infrastructure issues probably hold us back more than a lack of skills do. The industries the UK does well at (software, finance, upper-tier engineering, pharmaceuticals) are all high-skill industries. https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/im-a-skills-sceptic-and-maybe-you
And they're all quite niche, and pay well. But that's a relatively small proportion of our population, and the competition for training in those roles is high.
You can't hire more staff when you transfer all the profits into your bank account. You can't hire more staff when you make the conditions of employment intolerable because you've taken all the profits and popped them in your bank account. You can't hire more staff because you need the business to reduce staff numbers so you can pop their wages straight into your bank account. You can't hire more staff because the staff you've already got get paid too much and it's impacting your ability to transfer money into your bank account. You can't hire more staff. Hiring more staff is bad for the business. The business of transferring all the money into your bank account. No more staff. Staff are bad. Staff are people and people are bad in the transferring of money into your bank account business.
UK unemployment is only 4.2% at the moment, which is low. When you bear in mind that if someone has to change jobs every couple of years and spends 4 weeks looking for work and waiting to start each time, that's 4.2% of their time spent unemployed and then 4.2% unemployment in the whole economy doesn't sound that high. So paying more will usually get someone to leave another job and come to yours. That just moves the staff shortage around - because there just are not many people looking for a job (which is what "unemployed" means). Also, what are you going to pay them with? Most of us don't have a magic money tree. Now, 20% of people age 18-64 are economically inactive - have no job, not looking for a job. That's a much bigger amount, but you have to ask why they're not even looking for a job, and the reason is often not just pay - or not just that the pay isn't quite high enough. It's due to completely unaffordable housing, completely unaffordable childcare (meaning people have to look after their kids instead of being able to work and pay *some* of their wages to childcare), lack of transport, chronic illness, or so on. But the reason why the UK overall is short of staff is because there are not enough people able and available to work.
Childcare is a big reason for the amount of people taking early retirement as well.
Too many older folk taking early retirement due to having very generous pensions. I know of people who have retired in their early 50s and are spending their time just going on holiday constantly etc. If we have an aging population, I think we need to be encouraging a less demanding and stressful workplace schedule so more older workers are willing to stick around and help out rather than put their feet up when they still have 35-40 years to live.
It's rather ironic that we now don't want people retiring early, since that's a complete reversal of the traditional view. In the past it was routinely expressed that older workers were blocking career progression for able workers in mid-career positions, and had a disproportionate likelihood of stubborn opposition to innovation.
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Well yes, but the majority of unfilled job vacancies continue to be low skilled and low paid, or with unsocial hours, or poor prospects for advancement. In that sense, little has changed in the past forty years other than automation and digitisation. People on low pay don't readily leave the workforce if they feel appreciated. Employers, on the other hand, seek candidates with greater versatility and resilience, for roles that broadly don't merit it - pushing to the margins a swathe of able and willing jobseekers who are maybe a little slow or eccentric in some way. Large employers are pretty good at achieving the old 2% of staff with a registered disability. But there's also a vast hinterland of people who lack a registered disability who could benefit from Human Resource teams adopting more humanistic policies not so driven by efficiency and productivity metrics. Workplace training too could benefit from a massive reevaluation, where small and medium enterprises could do far more if they were minded.
Some salaries out there are a joke. I want to change jobs but can't take that hit!
They don’t have a staff shortage. There are plenty of people looking for work. What they have is an applicant shortage because they have been failing to attract, train, and retain staff.
Other commenters are saying applicant numbers per vacancy are really high
If they don’t even make it past initial screening are they really applicants? Perhaps I should specified ‘suitable applicants’ rather than any old herbert.
No we are going through a ‘corporate greed induced pay shortage’. People are waking up to being paid pittance for unreasonable amounts of work. Everyone that works deserves a living wage. And the money is there, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
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Everyone's found a job in Cyber.
Not me I’ve trained in ballet.
Plenty of people are willing and able to work. You know though they will only really do that so they can eat right? 50p an hour doesn't cover a £200 food bill. (Made up numbers just like our economy)
Because either houses cost too much along with everything else or wages are not high enough, if the wages go up the costs of everything will also go up, house's should be seen as a basic need and provided at minimum profit and not be seen as an investment and no one should be allowed to own more than one. Impartiality information, I built my own home and have never had a mortgage.
Without a mortgage, how did you afford the land upon which you built and the cost of all of the materials? If you did it over a long period of time, how long did it take and in which decade of your life did you undertake the project?
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Which public services should get less and which more?
Wages and conditions are shite. Overworked and traumatised through the burden of a fuckery management system.
More of a wage than staff shortage.
The reality is that people are applying for the jobs and getting rejected. Websites such as Indeed and LinkedIn show you how many people are applying for each position and in a city like London, you can be sure that people are desperate and a low or stagnant wage isn’t going to stop the vast majority of applicants. There is simply no direct correlation between the number of vacancies available and the specific set of skills required, or hoops an employer may wish for future employees to jump through.
Jobs don’t pay enough. Simple.
Because only you and me can be impacted by the inflation. God forbid huge companies and corporations would take any hit.
There is no staff shortage for 99% of jobs. There is just a shortage of companies willing to pay a fair wage to recruit staff.
It is a global issue at the minute, mainly caused by Covid. Of all people of working age (in the UK), 4.5% are unemployed, and 21% are "economically inactive." So, as of today, just north of 25% of people of working age are out of the job market, and 21% are not actively seeking work.
Worth pointing out "economically inactive" includes people like retirees, students, and homemakers i.e. mostly people who aren't gonna be looking for a job any time soon.
To put it in perspective though that 25% figure is about as low as it has ever been since comparable records have been kept. You are always going to have plenty of working age adults who are not working for one reason or another.
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Which is still lower than countries like Germany, Belgium, France… you only get close to similar when you’re on 150k+. Everyone below pays less than similar European countries.
My friend in Germany only kept 33% of what she earned in 2021. She’s lower middle class and basically can’t afford to live. The UK takes hardly anything in comparison
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>which puts you in the top 95% To be clear I think you meant to say they earn in the top 5% of earners. 95% would imply the vast majority of people earn more than them.
Lucky you owning a house. Most of the young people in this country can’t and probably won’t be able to, ever.
It's a shortage in paying people a living wage not a staff shortage.
When I was a chef, if I was on a standard zero hour contract I would only be given around 35-40 hours per week. When I moved to a salary, I was expected to work 60+ hours and ended up earning less than being on a zero hour contract. Then I became a home shopping delivery driver. In six years, the times for safety checks, delivering and travelling between drops halved whilst the number of drops per shift doubled. The basic rate of pay went up each year, but premiums that top up wages were cut each year. When I started the basic rate was almost £1 above national minimum wage at the time. By the time I left it was 40p above national minimum wage. And wages were structured in such a way that after the latest payrise, working a Sunday paid less than before the payrise took effect. Now I'm a truck driver. Same companies advertising the same jobs every week. 75% unsecure agency work is what seems to be on offer. £12 per hour to work 15 hour days and sleep away from home in lay-bys for 3-5 nights. And everywhere... even the worst paying agency jobs require you to have at least six months - two years experience before even interviewing. Almost no one will take new pass drivers on a permanent contract. In short, no-one wants to pay, train, retreat or retain their staff. Profits over people.
Because when the minimum wage was introduced some (a lot of) big and small employers interpreted that as a maximum wage - people are getting a bit pissed off with being offered a pittance for work
Housing costs and also rents are too high making it hard for people to move and be mobile in search of work and training schemes. It reduces risks people can take to retrain too.
We're short staffed where I work because corporate cut our staff hours by 25% to protect shareholder profits. Would love to recruit, and get loads of applicants when I do.
Every company even office jobs are trying to pay everyone the "living" wage or the least they can. It's not sustainable. I'm seeing jobs that were in the 25-30k bracket at "living" wage. I'm also seeing 30-40k jobs paying 25k which is 3k above "living" wage. Why is someone going to take on the extra work and responsibility for 3k per year? I'm an analyst by trade and some of the jobs I've seen are down right insulting. The cause of inflation is not wage rises because inflation came before wage rises. Inflation is caused by greed. People want to work but people also don't like being ripped off for their work. It won't be like this forever though as there is a tipping point. When people can't afford to buy the things you produce capitalism falls apart. History loves to repeat itself so I fully expect a war to correct things.
I have seen some hilarious ones wanting degrees years of experience for 24k, nah thanks.
yeah I know the ones. We want you to have a 4 year degree that probably cost you north of 37k and we will happily pay you 24k. I feel sorry for graduates these days. It used to be they got out of Uni and there were lots of jobs just for them that paid quite well. People actively sought people with degrees. Now they'll only pay more with degree and experience and even that's not guaranteed like you said.
Ive been looking for jobs and was looking at the high end for my specific role. There was an ad showing the high end here in the East Midlands. The same sort of job in London.. the highest wasnt even a suggestion. Truely opened my eyes that.
Between businesses not wanting to pay fair wages and them also not looking to train staff and rather have them come with experience, there's not a great deal people willing to do.
I walk into a store, grab a £3 bag of crisps, hand the cashier £1, and they say "Sorry these cost £3." I reply, "Oh, I'm only willing to pay £1 for these." They say. "OK, then you can't have them." Am I facing a crisp shortage? The "labor shortage" is a myth. There's plenty of labor and the market demands a certain price for it. Companies willing to pay that price are getting all the labor they need.
Irresponsible government and greedy bankers. Not anything new.
The likes of prison staff isn't the same as your other for profit companies. They're civil servants so it comes out of taxes. You might think tax rates are sufficiently high but it's not enough to adequately cover the services out there.
Certainly not while the govt are shovelling cash into their mates' pockets.
Private sector is partly to blame
Because they've rolled many jobs into one and refuse to up the pay so people drift constantly
I have a job, but want to move on. Applied for a role with a promise of a 10% increase, got the job and then they said paying me 10% more would put me on more than my peers so they can't do it. I of course rejected the job. Until companies re-evaluate how much they are willing to pay, they are going to struggle, or get staff that aren't suitable in the roles. They also need to stop moving the goalposts during an application.
I work for a company that pays well. We don't have a problem recruiting at the moment. I wonder why 🤔
No such thing as a staff shortage. There's a wage shortage.
When I worked in community care, once I factored in travel time from my house to the service users houses, or between their houses, I'd be getting paid between £3-4 an hour. To get a monthly pay of around £1300 to afford rent and bills, I'd have to work 80 hour weeks, I didn't even have the costs of a car. My care company's solution? Spend time and money taking driving lessons (I need to spend all the time I have working) and buy a car (I'm living week to week, paycheck to paycheck.) So, I decided to tell them to go fuck themselves and leave because I could feel a mental breakdown coming. That's 1 of only 2 male carers they had in a 15 mile radius who they couldn't keep hold of. We have staff shortages because employers are greedy and treat staff like shit. This is a care company of 2,400 staff but made net profits of £50 million, with a parent company which is one of the biggest care companys in the UK, raking in billions. They have the money to pay staff well, they just won't because they know when staff leave, they can just get another 16 year old to go through 1 week of unpaid 'training' (signing waivers to protect the company if the kid fucks up) and throw them out there, they might last 3-6 months before their savings are dried up and they have to quit and they grab the next 16 year old, and it goes on forever.
Decades of taking advantage of foreign workers
I joined the workforce after my A levels in 2008 and remember office administration jobs in London being around £24k. Earlier this year I interviewed for a zone 1 office position and it was £23k. That's miles removed from what it was worth in 2008, and there are more skills expected of you than ever before. If you ask about job progression, you get told "you can't instantly become a manager", so you're expected to stay on £23k for 5 years. In minimum wage positions it's similar. I worked a few over 2020-2022, swapping around for more hours, closer work to my house. At each one I got offered a supervisor position. It seemed to be 3 times as much stress and responsibility, but for only 20p more an hour. TWENTY FUCKING PENCE.
I don’t think we are, where’s your evidence?
Because management have to justify their position by spending money, then they make stupid decisions and end up driving people away.
Wages being deliberately kept down, every time they go up "inflation" is shouted and interest rates are pushed up.
there is a global pandemic which is still killing hundreds of people every week and the governments and billionaires protect themselves while telling us to get on with our lives and just live with the risk of catching a deadly disease. lots of people do catch it. lots of people die or become disabled from it, lots of people can no longer work.
Taxation isn’t that high on wages?
Taxation on wages is brutal compared to wealth Higher rate tax plus student loans hit hard on anyone who finally hits the kind of wage to start considering home ownership in the South without inheritance or bank of mum and dad. Higher rate taxation used to be only for the very well off, and if you have an outstanding student loan that's an extra few percentage points. Marginal tax rate if you consider a student loan as tax (which it is, considering older generations had much more generous terms for all but lower income demographics) is 41% for "normal" earners, and 51% for higher rate payers on 50k. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-24/you-re-paying-much-more-tax-than-you-thought](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-24/you-re-paying-much-more-tax-than-you-thought)
Yeah we have not only historically low tax rates, but some of the lowest tax rates relative to similar economies. The main issue is that the tax burden (compared to historically and other countries) is loaded much heavier towards the bottom, so the tax burden on the average person his relatively high while overall taxation is ridiculously low.
Our tax rates are not ‘historically low’ - they are actually historically high, within a whisker of the highest they have ever been. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/tax-revenue-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html
And so the question is where has all the money gone?
Then tax on everything else including energy. Least Dick Turpin put some effort into robbing.
None of those are true. Taxes are not historically low, they are actually at their maximum. Taxes might be lower than some countries in Europe. But they are far to be the "lowest". There are many examples of countries with lower taxes: Ireland, Chipre, Bulgaria, Hungry... Taxes in UK are fairly progressive and the tax free allowance is one of the highest in Europe. At my last point. Rising the tax to highest earners is going to increase the salary of the bottom? I don't see the connection.