Assumed £19.00 a week cuts expected in benefits to those that need it the most.

...which didn't address my point at all :confused:

Train drivers or self-employed window cleaners are not the next great employment surge. We are going to move further and further away from this idea of full employment, and nobody really seems to have a clue of what to do about it.

I checked a few franchises to humour you and the only one listing vacancies for drivers is GWR, with 7 openings for already qualified drivers. I'm not sure how listing a profession that isn't likely to expand any time soon and isn't a particularly large employer in the first place is helpful to people wondering how they are going to make up the shortfall from tax credit losses.

I'm all for the costs of working tax credits to be moved to the employer, but the current proposal is stick with a vague promise of a bit of carrot in a few years.
 
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Caged said:
...which didn't address my point at all :confused:

Train drivers or self-employed window cleaners are not the next great employment surge. We are going to move further and further away from this idea of full employment, and nobody really seems to have a clue of what to do about it.
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If your saying more jobs need to be created they will be, simply by having more people working.

More people working means more people spending. More people saving. More people buying houses, cars, food, holidays, etc.

That means more people building homes, fixing homes, boilers, cars, etc. More people selling wares, stacking shelves, etc.

The more people working creates more jobs itself. Those that say there aren't enough jobs aren't looking hard enough or thinking outside of the box. As more people find employment more jobs create themselves.

Sure the jobs created won't be luxurious but then maybe they should have tried harder at school, etc if they wanted a good job.

Mr Branson needs someone to serve him coffee and wash his aston martin and the more Branson's you have the more coffee shops and car washes you need.

Jobs aren't going to come by the million in 1 sector. They slowly create themselves as the market evolves.

As more homes are built that means more local businesses, more supermarkets, more pubs and restaurants, etc and therefore more jobs. All those new homes also need their windows cleaned.


Or the other solution would be to convert to communism if you don't believe that capitalist society is the future. If people aren't getting by in the current world they need to try harder or live within their means, don't blame the system. The system is more than fair, in fact millions want to come here because the system is so good.
 
Your solution doesn't add up Psycho. More people working doesn't mean more money being spent across the whole economy unless wages are high enough for people to thrive. Without significant wage growth, more jobs will only succeed in improving the state of government finances through a higher tax take and lower benefits bill. If people are too poor to spend outside of the supermarkets, rent and taxes then the wider economy isn't going to feel much of a boost.

Tax credits should go, but over the long term, with real incomes rising through increases to the NLW. That is how you stimulate spending in the economy. Being horribly blunt, if you give people who are poor and financially naive a bit more money then they will spend it. They will transfer that money straight back in to the economy, rather than hoard it. More sales, more vat collected, higher gross profit for businesses.

Mr Osborne is increasing the wage bill for businesses, but at the same time he is lowering the incomes of millions of poor households. If the money they have left is only enough for them to survive, rather than thrive, they aren't going to be contributing much to the economy.

The Living Wage movement isn't about increasing the wellbeing of the individual - it's about increasing living standards across the whole country. This isn't about the politics of individualism - work harder simply isn't a scalable solution. It will succeed for the individual, but if the whole of society works harder, tries harder, becomes more educated, all that happens is the bar rises and the people at the new bottom are just as poor.
 
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FoxEye said:
Yes but if the jobs don't pay enough for people to survive, then nobody will take them.
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That depends on whether or not they have an alternative. If jobs don't pay enough to live on and people turn them down as a result, what do those people do then? In the absence of an effective safety net, they wind up on the streets. Where is the incentive (short of a moral obligation) for businesses to pay more then?

I can't see how we can have an effective and fair labour market without some degree of state involvement.
 
Where are all these low wage employers rushing to pay their employees more now the government is going to stop funding them?
I suspect under 25 employment will go up, and over 25's will find themselves out on their ear.
 
satchef1 said:
I can't see how we can have an effective and fair labour market without some degree of state involvement.
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Which should take the form of regulation, not subsidy.

Companies that can't make a profit wihtout paying a living wage should be allowed to go under. In reality they won't. Corporate profit has doubled in the last decade or so.

A little less corporate profit won't see companies going bust and mass unemployment.
 
FoxEye said:
Which should take the form of regulation, not subsidy.

Companies that can't make a profit wihtout paying a living wage should be allowed to go under. In reality they won't. Corporate profit has doubled in the last decade or so.

A little less corporate profit won't see companies going bust and mass unemployment.
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Ahh, we're on the same page there then.
 
Demand, not profitability, drives employment. Why would a profitable, efficient business make employees redundant without a drop in demand? Reducing the workforce would, in most cases, be the wrong course of action.

There will be cases where people lose their jobs because wage rises force businesses to become more efficient, or where businesses collapse because wage rises mean they are no longer profitable, but mass redundancies are unlikely.
 
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Cyanide said:
It won't see them going bust but the moment profits drop there's massed redundancies.
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As said above, if that were true then it would follow that an increase in profits leads to an increase in employment. That does happen but only if you get cause and effect completely wrong - the increased profits are as a result of increased demand, which has driven the increase in employment.
 
Caged said:
As said above, if that were true then it would follow that an increase in profits leads to an increase in employment. That does happen but only if you get cause and effect completely wrong - the increased profits are as a result of increased demand, which has driven the increase in employment.
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That went out the window with automation. I work for a delivery company, with out main sort machine we can blast around 15k parcels an hour with 16 staff. That just wasn't possible not so long back.

Not complaining, my job is to monitor the main sorter ;)
 
I guess that stands true if automation is only worth doing once you get past a certain size, so your employment vs demand graph is a bit like a bell curve, but isn't it the job of a business to be as efficient as possible? Why wait to automate?
 
Caged said:
I guess that stands true if automation is only worth doing once you get past a certain size, so your employment vs demand graph is a bit like a bell curve, but isn't it the job of a business to be as efficient as possible? Why wait to automate?
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I can't say for every business but ... our main sort is HUGE, and uses a redonkulous amount of power, under a certain number of parcels its just isn't worth it.
 
Presumably though if you're processing more orders then you're receiving more customer enquiries and need to bill more clients etc. So although the rate of increased employment slows down, you're still adding head count in the office.
 
That's automated too though. Customer care is mostly automated, live chat is mostly automated. Billing clients is automated.
 
FoxEye said:
Which should take the form of regulation, not subsidy.

Companies that can't make a profit wihtout paying a living wage should be allowed to go under. In reality they won't. Corporate profit has doubled in the last decade or so.

A little less corporate profit won't see companies going bust and mass unemployment.
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but its not just going bust.

if they can make an extra 10% profit moving out of the country why wouldn't they?
 
Tefal said:
but its not just going bust.

if they can make an extra 10% profit moving out of the country why wouldn't they?
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Those kinds of jobs have already gone. To places where there is no min wage, and you can pay a worker a couple dollars a day.

Skilled labour is not going to be affected by increases to nat min wage, as those people were already earning more.

There's plenty of low-paid work that you can't outsource. Retail, cleaning, carers, etc, etc. And like I said, low-paid unskilled manufacturing jobs are already gone.
 
It seems the Tory back benchers are twitching and have woken up to the fact that people have realised they will be (initially) worse off and there are local elections next year!

Time for some 'tweaking' of the Tax Credit reforms...:p

And the other part of the overall package of reform, ie: extending free childcare to 30 hrs for working parents has stalled in the HoL, so that's not likely to be brought in on time either.
 
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