Tbh continental shifts are horrible. I always thought those in the office wouldn't be so keen on them if they had to do them as well, rather than their cushy 9-5 with the air conditioning / heating.
Poverty rate among working households in UK is highest ever
- Thread starter HACO
- Start date
How long would you personally stick out such a job? 5 years? 10 years? 15 years?
Or would you personally aspire to something better?
Deleted User 298457
Deleted User 298457
I reckon I'd stick it out but make a thread every 7 years about why I can't do anything better. But that's just me.
There's nothing wrong with factory jobs, or any other jobs.
However, at some point there will just be no need for them in the economy. Most factory job that the average 75-85 IQ person will be doing can be automated away within the next couple of decades. A lot of them are already automated.
UK will never be a factory job powerhouse, employing a ton of people in factories. The time for that has passed, and even if we bring back factories and production into the country, it will be automated factories requiring very few actual factory workers.
Heinz is the newest example, who just pledged to invest into a UK production line for their sauces. They are going to produce their entire UK sales here in the UK, investing $200 million into their product line, but are only planning to employ 50 people permanently. 20 years ago the same production capacity required almost 1000 full-time workers.
https://news.sky.com/story/heinz-brings-ketchup-manufacturing-back-to-uk-in-140m-investment-12321966
Deleted User 298457
Deleted User 298457
You see a similar trend with Adidas. Especially now the Bangladeshis are asking to be treated like humans with decent and safe working conditions.
Yeah. Slave labour is cheap, robotic production lines are the next best thing. They don't need to be paid, they don't even complain or ask for a break and can work 24/7. And once they've outlived their usefulness you can throw them into recycling and build new ones.
This is something we need to be thinking about for the long term. Factory jobs will continue to decline, and back office automation makes a lot of office jobs redundant as well. Any economy that heavily relies on these jobs is going to have a rough time adjusting to the new realities. And certainly no country should be betting on these sort of jobs to carry it forward.
At some point in the next few decades we may need to rethink our entire way of life.
Deleted User 298457
Deleted User 298457
You sound like a man that would enjoy the book Abundance.
Yeah I like it. But I'm a lot more pessimistic about the future. We do have a great opportunity to improve the way of life of everyone on the planet, but I don't think we're going to do that. Our priorities as a society and our short-term way of thinking in politics means we will do the wrong things every step of the way.
My money's on a great human die-off (or cull) or some other cataclysm. For the mid-to-long term.
I don't think we have it in us to create some utopian paradise for all. Our core ethos is that there should be "winners" and "losers". People at the top and people at the bottom. Creating a society for the mutual benefit of all would require some very non-human thinking.
Deleted User 298457
Deleted User 298457
Utopian paradise is relative and a journey. People living on a dollar a day earning two dollars have doubled their income. We just live in 'level 4' where additional cash doesn't give us life changing benefits.
Buy Factfulness as an audio book, it is a great listen.
Climate change could play a part, with 3 billion people currently living in areas that will be uninhabitable within 50 years:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020...te-change-greenhouse-gas-niche-emissions-hot/
That mass migration could lead humanity into a very ugly place, the likes of which we have never seen before. Less than 3 million migrants caused the migrant crisis of the last decade, imagine if there were 500 million migrants coming to Europe from Africa and the Middle East.
The utopian paradise paradigm isn't helpful. The reality is never like that, and our goal should be to improve the way of life for everyone, step by step. There can always be winners and losers, but life could suck less and less for losers, or hopefully, it could just not suck at all even if you're a "loser".
most relative poverty in this country in my mind will be single people who aren't in work and couples without kids who live together but don't work.
likely people who have or had drug habits, ex criminals, homeless, people escaping domestic abuse etc
job seekers or whatever it's called these days is enough to survive on between jobs but it doesn't really sustain any kind of life.
you could argue these people should be helping themselves but not everyone is quite capable the government should provide better assistance and support to get people into work or get them the education they need.
people are basically just left to rot and die on the dole.
society failed them just as much as they failed themselves.
has the job centre ever really been about helping people get back to work? seems more like it's just place to hassle people and make them uncomfortable.
Caporegime
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They are not horrible as the hours you do are the hours you do. As someone in management I much prefer it. When I was doing 5 day weeks I was doing 12 hour days anyway being first in last out without the overtime paid as it was considered part of your salary and expected.
Now everything is more structured and there is a nights manager and days manager you do the hours and that's it. Plus if I am feeling peckish or need to be part of a meeting and do a days overtime I get a decent wedge and get paid a whole 12 hours instead of doing bits of OT here and there.
Plus 8 days holiday gives you 22 days off.
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Caporegime
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It depends what you aspire to. I have had employees work the lines until their 60's and work better then half the kids that come in their 20's and are perfectly content with what they do. You also have ones like myself who came in fresh from college and worked themselves up to the top over the years. If you want it you go for it.
There is also a lot of stigma attached to it. It isn't a mentally demanding job at the bottom but have had many teachers and other qualified people working the machinery as it is a ticket away from the stress they are used to and with added bonus of not having to deal with the public unlike retail.
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It's it difficult post industrial issue. The are many towns that grew around factories and now they've gone, what do the people and their descendants do?
I'm well aware of the dictionary definition of "relative poverty" and your term "nonsense" aptly describes it.
It's a phrase typically conjured up by people on the economic left to make the living situation seem dire when people are actually living quite a good lifestyle, useful for constructing a political narrative but not much else I'm afraid.
£18.5k is not a bad salary at all for someone living in the North, I owned a horse on less, and this is not even taking into account the multitude of benefits a couple with kids would receive to top that up.
This is why we need to talk about poverty in an absolute sense for it to be meaningful, and not use wishy washy phrases to make things sound dramatic.
The common sense answer would be do the same thing I and everyone else did when we moved area, retrain.
The EU solution on the other hand would be to force taxpayers to subsidise lifestyle choices as they did with farming.
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google says a pair of trainers costs the manufactures something like $20-35.
it also claims stores get them at only 100% markup though, do trainer shops really make huge margins on a pair of trainers? I guess the overheads are huge though.
shame nike/addidas etc don't just undercut them on their own websites
Uk relative poverty is 60% of median income so about 18k a year/ 1.5k a month income
I mean a 65" tv is about 300ish quid so yeah I'd say actually energize relatively right
I could afford a 65" tv on the uks relative poverty ibcome
Which just goes to show how daft it is. If you can afford luxury goods then you ain't in poverty!