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Where have all the UK workers gone?


Eldorado

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As the UK economy emerges from the effects of the pandemic, various sectors are reporting shortages of staff.

The lockdown easing has prompted employers to start recruiting. UK job vacancies have hit their highest level since the start of the pandemic.

Yet, puzzlingly, the latest employment figures show one-in-20 people who want a job can't find one.

Hospitality, for example, is struggling to find staff, and there is a shortage of lorry drivers. Several other sectors face similar problems.

Where have all the workers gone?

In the words of Kate Nicholls, chief executive of trade body UKHospitality, the sector has "the wrong workers in the wrong place at the wrong time".

Full monty at the BBC: Link

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23 minutes ago, Eldorado said:

 

Where have all the workers gone?

 

Right where Brexiters want them. 

The only puzzling thing is how did they imagine this will work - Eastern Europeans can't both go home and keep on doing their jobs at the same time.

*shrugs*   

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Helen of Annoy:

Right where Brexiters want them. 

The only puzzling thing is how did they imagine this will work - Eastern Europeans can't both go home and keep on doing their jobs at the same time.

*shrugs*   

Yet it doesn't matter:

But Mr. Johnson (whose reputation for not just surviving career-ending controversies but thriving on them has earned him nicknames like “Teflon Johnson,” “Houdini” and, less flatteringly, “the greased piglet”) has coasted through the turbulence. Engulfed in scandal, unassailably popular — this has always been the essence of brand Boris........

Yet for all the specific peculiarities of Mr. Johnson’s persona — a dizzying blend of deception, bravado and self-deprecation — the jarring dissonance that defines his government, at once electorally successful and socially destructive, is not particular to the current prime minister. In many ways, it is the story of the modern Conservative Party. The party’s founding promise, laid down in Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto in 1834, was to stop Britain from becoming a “perpetual vortex of agitation.” Since the Conservatives regained power in 2010, Britain has become just that, with two referendums, three prime ministers and four general elections.

The Conservatives have flourished in these conditions, winning each general election since 2010 with a larger share of the vote than the last. But the spoils of victory have not been widely shared. Wages have not risen against inflation for the longest period since the Napoleonic era, a third of children now grow up in poverty, and state welfare is now one of the stingiest in the developed world.

In Cornwall, where Mr. Johnson will host the Group of 7 leaders in a boutique seaside hotel, Britain’s social and economic misery is plain for all to see. In 2008, Cornwall was one of three areas in the United Kingdom to suffer among the worst levels of deprivation in Europe; now it is one of seven. And the number of neighborhoods in Cornwall that rank among the most deprived in England has more than doubled since 2010. Across the country, Tory rule has coincided with a coarsening of living conditions.

 

Opinion | Boris Johnson Is a Terrible Leader. It Doesn’t Matter. - The New York Times (archive.is)

Edited by ted hughes
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32 minutes ago, Eldorado said:

As the UK economy emerges from the effects of the pandemic, various sectors are reporting shortages of staff.

The lockdown easing has prompted employers to start recruiting. UK job vacancies have hit their highest level since the start of the pandemic.

Yet, puzzlingly, the latest employment figures show one-in-20 people who want a job can't find one.

Hospitality, for example, is struggling to find staff, and there is a shortage of lorry drivers. Several other sectors face similar problems.

Where have all the workers gone?

In the words of Kate Nicholls, chief executive of trade body UKHospitality, the sector has "the wrong workers in the wrong place at the wrong time".

Full monty at the BBC: Link

In the U.S. there is a problem with employers trying to recoup losses by lowering wages and a lot of people who got laid off can't or won't work for 2/3 what they were being paid before.   So, they are still looking for work and the employers who have cut wages are still looking for experienced workers that they can't get to hire on because of their low wages.

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Some of it will be caused by the unusual way economies are opening up.

Under normal circumstances economies lose and gain employment over a longer period and it allows time for staff to be fired or hired by companies in a more controlled fashion. Demand feeds in over a longer period.

I would imagine the current tidal wave of vacancies will create bottlenecks. 

But in theory there are around 1.5 million in the UK, without a job, who could help smooth the problem out. 

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21 minutes ago, Desertrat56 said:

In the U.S. there is a problem with employers trying to recoup losses by lowering wages and a lot of people who got laid off can't or won't work for 2/3 what they were being paid before.   So, they are still looking for work and the employers who have cut wages are still looking for experienced workers that they can't get to hire on because of their low wages.

Well, they just need to look harder. They're obviously not working hard enough on finding people masochist enough to accept being underpaid. 

(I was being sarcastic. I know you can tell that, I'm just making it clear for those who can't.)

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If the UK is similar to the US there are long term trends as well.

Birth rate is going down for several reasons, one being that raising a middle class, well educated child is expensive when both partners need to work and are faced with child care.

Young people seem less likely to choose trade and craft skills because they are viewed as low status and require training and skill.  Too many machinists, tool and die makers, welders, fabricators, hydraulic techs, and mechanics are reaching retirement age and not being replaced.

We are bombarded with reasons to dislike of immigrants, they steal our jobs, they are criminals, they are not like us.

We worship elites. and we design all of our government systems to benefit that class most.   A great move for politicians who get the crumbs off the table, not so smart for the common man.  

We are furious at waiters who want more money because it will raise prices and after all they are lazy and undeserving.  We never worried about how how it affected prices when Jeff Bezos increased his worth by $100 BILLION during  the pandemic.

We have been schooled to think that our prosperous society can only exist if we have an underclass working for less than survival rate to support the rest of us in the style we deserve.  We think that the solution is to make them desperate and starving so that they will take those jobs. -

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1 hour ago, Helen of Annoy said:

Right where Brexiters want them. 

The only puzzling thing is how did they imagine this will work - Eastern Europeans can't both go home and keep on doing their jobs at the same time.

*shrugs*   

Its Brexit the remainers cry, this after we've just taken in and given right to remain to not 3 million EU migrants, as officially thought to be here, but to 5.2Million. that's larger than 17 out of 18* individual metropolitan cities in the UK. or put it another way the entire population of Scotland. or like accepting every single, man, woman and child in Croatia. the entire 4m population and then adding a further 1 million from elsewhere, that's

the scale.

  1. London. 13million. (*excluding London)
  2. Birmingham. 3.6million
  3. Manchester 2.5m
  4. Leeds Bradford. 2.2m
  5. Liverpool 2.1m
  6. Tyneside 1.1m.    etc................

Besides that, we've just shut the economy down for the best part of a year. there will be many who've saved up during furlough and lockdown, and being off work has made them re-evaluate their current employment and are having a mini career break before getting a new job, - besides that universities and studying being affected, and restrictions on international travel from countries on the warning list for covid. all the bars around here are staffed by uni-students. a lot from Oz.

 

 

 

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@stevewinn Of course. Silly me. Eastern Europeans don't work, they just come for benefits. Apparently you kept those. 

While the mysterious persons who used to work in the UK are now gone. 

:lol: 

Oh, and.... I don't doubt you'll get stuffed.

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22 hours ago, Helen of Annoy said:

@stevewinn Of course. Silly me. Eastern Europeans don't work, they just come for benefits. Apparently you kept those. 

While the mysterious persons who used to work in the UK are now gone. 

:lol: 

Oh, and.... I don't doubt you'll get stuffed.

who told you that?

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That's the peculiar thing about EU workers. They are both workshy and also doing all the work. A bit like Schrodinger's cat.

Farmers have been left ‘on the brink’ after Brexit put a ‘massive hole’ in the numbers of fruit pickers coming to the UK in the summer months, it has been claimed.

Applications for seasonal work at one Kent-based company are down 90% in the last two years and there are fears for the future.

Stephen Taylor, managing director of Winterwood Farms Ltd, said the labour market has got ‘tighter and tighter’ over the last couple of years.

He said the impact of Brexit on the flow of workers to UK farms is only getting worse.

Fruit farming on 'brink of collapse' as Brexit causes shortage of pickers | Metro News

Edited by ted hughes
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Well this is what happens when you let a bus dictate economic policy.

 

At least /our/ ****ty 2016 decision was only temporary. 

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