Preparedness for when

nuatha

Frugalsod wrote: »

I suspect that even if we were able to get rid of all the immigrants over night that things would not improve.

In fact they'd get much worse very rapidly. The 2011 Census has almost 12% of the population as not born in the UK.
Since immigrants on the whole contribute more to the economy than they receive in benefits, there'd be an even larger hole in public finances.

Many immigrants do jobs that locals would not do and could not afford to do without lots of benefit top ups. Many of them are doing jobs on farms or factories and we have brought up a generation to think that anything less than an office job with a degree is beneath us. Employers have spectacularly failed to train a work force that they have claimed that they are short off, relying on foreign trained workers from Eastern Europe to do jobs that they will not train anyone for. They are all free riders trying to get the trained work force but without paying for it. The same applies to the government for the last 30 years who have gradually passed the risk and burden of training on to the individual who is probably the least equipped to know what trades to study for.

Maybe what we need is a tax on employers that pays for training and higher education? Need a degree for that job then pay a tax based on needing a degree, use the funds to give free tuition to students and maintenance grants as well. Lets see how many jobs really need a degree level of education.

Apart from the estimated £20 Billion EU migrants have contributed to the UK economy since 2001, its calculated that there is also a saving to the economy of almost £7 Billion in education costs.
the traditional idea that migrant labour is uneducated and predominantly ends up as menial labour is somewhat out of date - migrants from the EU are more likely to have a degree than UK residents.

One of the problems of training a workforce is predicting what that workforce will be doing. There has been huge amounts of change in recent decades - when I left school the big employers in the region were heavy industries and coal mining. Within a decade these had been decimated and few traces now remain.

Frugalsod

nuatha wrote: »

That's what we've been doing for a while now, immigrants and migrants make a net contribution to our economy (despite the reports in certain of our newspapers).
Unfortunately I doubt that higher numbers would have prevented the rises in pensionable age.

I agree but reality does not bother many of our newspapers.

nuatha wrote: »

That is my expectation - legislation brought forward this parliament as part of the welfare cuts/austerity measures to raise the retirement age to 70 with a further escalator to 75 phased in over the following 10 years.

It had to happen eventually. The demographics meant it was a certainty eventually. The pensions industry are also going to need it. For far too long they have been promising investment growth around 8% pa. Yet they have struggled to get an investment return anywhere near that. Lowering of interest rates has not helped them at all. What it basically means is that pension funds have not had sufficient contributions to accumulate the funds able to pay out the promised pensions. What they should have been doing for decades is making higher pension contributions essential. This applies to both employers and employees. In order to have a retirement that people expect that they need to pay three times as much into their pension pot if they want to retire. The problem with that is that it is akin to saving too much and the rest of the economy would have an immediate recession as their would be simply no demand for goods as people save for their retirement. Also would houses or rents justify their high levels if disposable income was a third or more less than now? That would trigger bank failures.

nuatha wrote: »

I can see a system arising where you pay some taxes and some sort of insurance to your "parent" country no matter where you work (or are earning, for remote workers) in order to maintain some right to a pension or at least the right to retire in the "parent" country. Parent country possibly being linked to nationality, but may become another commodity.

The latest figures I can find show 1.86 million unemployed with with just under 800K claiming JSA. The employment rate is 73%, a 33% increase in working numbers would certainly be a major boost to the economy.

The problem is that those jobs will all be part time and minimum wage with everyone qualifying for in work benefits as well. So the welfare savings would be minimal. In the US and Japan their has been no increase in full time employees but all in part timers. I cannot see us being able to avoid that here. So if you do eliminate all the unemployed by getting them jobs the governments finances will be no better off. They will still have to pay lots of in work benefits even though they were working as much as possible.

moneyistooshorttomention

Frugalsod wrote: »

Employers have spectacularly failed to train a work force that they have claimed that they are short off, relying on foreign trained workers from Eastern Europe to do jobs that they will not train anyone for. They are all free riders trying to get the trained work force but without paying for it. The same applies to the government for the last 30 years who have gradually passed the risk and burden of training on to the individual who is probably the least equipped to know what trades to study for.

Maybe what we need is a tax on employers that pays for training and higher education? Need a degree for that job then pay a tax based on needing a degree, use the funds to give free tuition to students and maintenance grants as well. Lets see how many jobs really need a degree level of education.

Certainly training is something that is woefully short here and has been for quite some time. Everyone going seems to skive out of accepting responsibility for training and re-training (be it Government or private employers).

There used to be a lot more available - eg apprenticeships. We can all see that we have a shortage of properly-trained workers for jobs like plumbers, electricians, carpenters and the like and we all suffer from it (ie when we try to find suitably-skilled workers in these trades for work on our homes and the like).

I've long been cynical about "absolutely everyone" trying not to take responsibility for the provision of training. I seem to recall that, when I joined the workforce many years back there was the chance to retrain for a different job if needed and be paid a decent income whilst doing so. However, when I realised the skill I had was becoming outdated (whilst I was still quite a few years from retirement) then I looked around for chances to re-train and keep a reasonable income whilst doing so - and there weren't any.

I worked in the public sector forgawdsake and one of my reasons for doing so was because I could see that, during the course of a 40 year or so worklife, that they would probably need to re-train some of their workforce because of their skills becoming outdated. When I looked around to see what opportunities they were providing for their staff to re-train (ie for totally different type of work) I darn soon realised why many of us could see this fact as clearly as I could - but could see it was being left to us as individuals to work out ways to cope with this and we would then have little option but to "dig our heels in" and cling on to what we had (outdated as it was) and hope it would last us (by hook or by crook) until retirement.

Frugalsod

nuatha wrote: »

One of the problems of training a workforce is predicting what that workforce will be doing. There has been huge amounts of change in recent decades - when I left school the big employers in the region were heavy industries and coal mining. Within a decade these had been decimated and few traces now remain.

Which is why I think it should be left to employers and governments to fund, rather than shift the burden on to individuals. Sure they may have a new skill in something but if that skill is in something that is obsolete rapidly then they may still be paying for that training via their student debt and have nothing of value to use in the workplace.

Personally if a child is not academic then they should be allowed to leave school at 14 and do an apprenticeship, which is better than them wasting two years to get poor grades in GCSE or O levels.

GreyQueen

Twenty years ago, I was chatting to a gas fitter working on my combi boiler. He was a man in his fifties and, like most of his peers, had been trained as an apprentice with British Gas. He told me then how few apprentices were being taken on in that trade and how they were worried about having enough skilled people in the future.

SG has family connections with BT at management level and told me in the past couple of years ago, they had 66,000 applicants for a few places on BT apprenticeships. And that isn't a typo, btw, that really is sixty-six thousand wannabees competing for about 20 apprenticeships.

I also encounter what I consider faux-apprenticeships, where young people are being taken on as so-called apprentices for what are essentially entry-grade office junior posts. There isn't a highly-skilled trade being acquired (and I am office fauna myself, so am not disrespecting the cadre of the workforce to which I belong). But it's a great wheeze for paying an office junior at apprentice wage rather than the NMW.

I also see puff pieces in the local newspapers bigging-up local businesspeople, including mentioning how many people they employ. Because of the work I do, I and my colleagues encounter their staff as in-work benefit claimants. Because these wonderful employers won't give anyone more than 6-12 hours a week, even though there is the will to work far more hours and no impediments to doing so.

Many employers are building their businesses off the back of taxpayer funded in-work benefits quite deliberately. And others are getting a free ride off their workers' parents and grandparents and spouses, as they live with them becuase they can't earn enough to self-support.

This, of course, is not something you hear very much about when local business critters are being lionised, or national businesses, for that matter.

I consider retirement at 70 to be a conservative estimate. I can very easily see the situation where you will be considered a worker until medically certified as being unfit for work, in which case you will be signed off as a pensioner and get to spend a few years waiting for death and trying not to feel to bitter about it.

As it is, I drag my aging and chronically-ill self out to work whilst living with a few meters of 20 and 30 something unemployed and able-bodied young men, who haven't the nous to do the kind of work which is available and who haven't the opportunty for well-paid manual work which existed here in their grandparents' generation when my city actually manufactured Things rather than produced nebulous Services.

These men might be quite content at the moment, with rent and council tax paid, a subsistance income from the social, and a bit of cash on the side from dealing weed, but if you took away their subsistance, how long before there would be riots in the streets?

mardatha

Wondering who is the happier generation... the current ones as described by GQ, lying in bed all day and wandering the streets at night and all the time playing on their phones - or the previous ones who might have got hellish low pay and poor working conditions but who were all in paid work from the age of 14 up, keeping busy and happy to go on excursion trains on bank holidays for a day at the seaside.
Up here historically everybody worked in the mills and there were a LOT of mills, unbelievable numbers of them.Where I grew up it was the pits, again many of them. In both areas there were also the farms, with hundreds of people employed and housed and often fed too.
All those jobs gone and what have we got in its place?

[Deleted User]

Birds eye frozen foods, to give you time to live your life the way you want to, because you're worth it!!! You're most likely calorie counted, low fat, free radical (well radical anyway), anti carcinogenic, new age, free spirits in a non deity way etc etc etc children of the world who owe thier souls to the company store!

maryb

All those businesses that keep employees hours to 6-12 are not just getting a wage subsidy from the in work benefits their employees have to claim to keep body and soul together - they are also avoiding paying National Insurance on earnings above the threshold. Of course, that means that the employees are not paying contributions either, so not accruing any contributory benefits, including pension. So they will have no income in old age so there will be a further cost to the taxpayer down the line - a triple whammy.

I fume whenever I hear companies complain that school leavers don't have the skills they are looking for - that is ALWAYS a sign of a company that doesn't want to spend a penny on training. I started my career in the 1970s when there were still a lot of large companies that invested massively in training - but there was a growing problem of other companies free riding by poaching those trained staff. I remember discussions about training levies at the time. Perhaps something would have come of it if there had not been such a seismic upheaval in the industrial landscape that meant there were few jobs to be trained for.

The talk in the 1990s was all about individuals investing in their own careers (shorthand for shuffling training costs onto employees). The next stage will be to charge employees for the provision of office facilities, I'm sure

thriftwizard

All those jobs gone and what have we got in its place?

An imaginary economy, running on the fumes coming out of the holes in the North Sea bed, plus a deep well of belief and sheer luck, propped up by well-qualified & motivated migrants from places where the luck, belief & quite possibly the water too have run out...

If it all fell apart tomorrow, and the oil became so expensive that running huge tractors in giant fields was unsustainable (btw, I was stuck behind one doing a steady 48Mph down the A31 for about 5 miles last week; seems some of them are a bit blas! about the rules) there'd be a huge demand for workers on the land. But as there's nowhere affordable for them to live, and a huge flock of chattering Nimbys refusing to allow any "social" housing anywhere near their roses-round-the-door & billiard-table lawns, I think we'd be looking at tent villages in rural areas, full of resentful graduates in Media Studies, resounding to the merry chirp of mobile phones.

In fact, one of my friends is a young qualified architect who now sews yurts for a living. Although most of the yurts he makes go to festivals, his view is that this is the way of the future; it's no longer possible for most young people to buy or build their own homes, but he is well-content in his warm & cosy little easily-maintained home in a small field that he now owns, where he's planted an orchard, keeps a small flock of ducks & built a polytunnel. The field was previously "marginal" rough grazing, and belonged to his farmer uncle. There may come a time when many people, possibly entire families, have no option but to live like this; it can work when it's freely chosen, but currently our planning regulations and social expectations make it very hard to do.

Seems to me that there's a huge paradox at the heart of our current arrangements; we expect to get a job in order to keep a roof over our heads & feed ourselves, though we're very lucky if that job actually gives us any sense of fulfilment or achievement. But the "real" jobs have gone away now & our economy has become like that of the village which kept going with everyone taking in everyone else's washing for cash; it only worked as long as no-one saw sense, acted in their own interest & did their own washing. It was bound to come crashing down one day, and indeed it did.

Listening to other people discussing my young architect friend's chosen lifestyle, they are so very damning that you can't help but realise that they see it as a threat to Society, not a possible lifeline for other young people. As if the house of cards that our economy has become could be brought down by one individual's determination to carve his own path out in life...

[Deleted User]

When you see an example of sanity working successfully and well in an otherwise insane system of which you are a part it's human nature to rail against it. I think it's an amazing example to young folks that bucks the 'establishment' in a successful way that makes it feel threatened and challenged. Thank heavens there are younger people who can 'see' and make alternative futures for themselves, or the world will be on an inward spiral that will inevitably disappear altogether!