Figures reveal long-term jobless.

PasturesNew

Nearly 200,000 people have been claiming Jobseeker's Allowance for three out of the past five years, according to "staggering" new figures.
The Government said the information revealed the extent of the problem of long-term unemployment across the UK it had inherited from Labour.
The official figures showed that 76,000 people had been out of work for five out of the past seven years and 54,000 for seven out of the last nine years.

http://www.thisisthewestcountry.co.uk/news/national/8456726.Figures_reveal_long_term_jobless/

Jonbvn

I would say that anyone who has been out of work for several years will be virtually unemployable.

mbga9pgf

Do those job schemes and apprenticeships Labour pumped out count as employment too?

vivatifosi

My experience of meeting people who are very long term unemployed - bear in mind I'm in the South East so we've not been hit by much above structural joblessness in the past - is that those that I meet are very skill-poor and often have a low IQ. The skill-poor struggle with basic literacy and numeracy as well as being the wrong side of the digital divide. Those I have met with a low IQ I'd argue are not as good at claiming benefits as their more intelligent counterparts and should probably be classed as disabled, not claiming unemployment.

IIRC from my economics classes in the past, structural unemployment (which occurs when there is a mismatch between worker supply and job skill demand) is about 2% anyway.

mbga9pgf

Should have worked harder at school then. Their Laziness is their fault, noone elses.

michaels

I guess if you have few skills your choices are low skill probably unpleasant work or benefits if you can obtain them - given housing costs, benefit withdrawal, etc the unpleasant work may only pay effectively pennies per hour - possibly the more intelligent thing is to stay on benefits?

mbga9pgf

Not in the near future it wont. Especially as the announcements wrt benefits are yet to come. Christmas is coming!

Hauptmann

High levels of structural unemployment set in back in the 1980's with the closure of major industry and mining in some parts of the country (Wales, Yorkshire, the NE). Some places have had continuous high levels of long-term unemployment for 20+ years. This is not newsworthy.

olly300

mbga9pgf wrote: »

Should have worked harder at school then. Their Laziness is their fault, noone elses.

You have obviously never tried to tutor or teach someone something otherwise you would realise that some people just aren't that intelligent and however hard they work at something they just can't grasp it.

Some people with low IQs are lucky enough to have parents with average and above average IQs who help them find jobs they can cope with. Others don't hence they stay unemployed.

I know plenty of people who didn't "work hard at school" as you put it and have done okay. In fact some are doing very well from themselves.

PasturesNew

I worked hard at school .... well, so so ... but what I trained in no longer exists.

Computerisation and globalisation have removed many, many jobs from people who were trained for certain things. You can't retrain - because to do so you'd need to know what to retrain in and to know there was a job at the end of it for those skills. I've kept myself abreast of many things - and paid for such re-training, never to get a job.

Software gets cleverer, machines get driven by cleverer software, people are put out of work.

Let's take a scenario that's been mentioned in the news this week: driverless cars. Imagine if all bus drivers, all train drivers, all taxi drivers, all works' van drivers, all delivery drivers, all supermarket food delivery drivers, all Tesco/Asda home delivery drivers ... were all out of work in 5 years' time because their skills were no longer needed as it was all just one big system of driverless vehicles.

What next .... robots filling supermarket shelves and auto-checkouts. No more supermarket workers or any shop workers.

Who next .... accountants. Do everything online with some tick boxes and the system works out the most tax efficient way for everything to be done. Scan receipts straight in by emptying your plastic bag of them into a hopper.

Who next .... teachers. No need for them. Big screens, log into a console. Just need a few 'minders' pacing the room.

Who next ....

vivatifosi

PasturesNew wrote: »

What next .... robots filling supermarket shelves and auto-checkouts. No more supermarket workers or any shop workers.

It is quite ironic that for the moment the robot version would cost far more than the employment cost of the real person shelf-stacker. So while higher skill jobs can easily be replaced the computerised function, true robot functionality (which seems to have been threatened since I grew up on a diet of the Jetsons) has yet to arrive.