Thursday, Sep 09, 2010
Good old Labour
The Sun: 1 in 5 British homes now jobless
ONE in five households in Britain has NO ONE in work, shocking figures revealed yesterday.
And in some areas the figure is a devastating ONE IN FOUR.
Official statistics show 1.9million kids - one in six of the UK's children - are growing up in families where benefits are the only income.
Posted by debtfree @ 12:34 PM (1929 views) Add Comment
49 Comments
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1. mrmickey said...
On the other side of the coin you will have people who have worked all their live and have nothing to show for it not even a pension, at least these people will be able to buy their council house cheap and retire to Spain.
2. Leicestersq said...
I am not so worried about the children growing up with parents on benefits, it is the ones whose parents choose to work for a living that are in the most desperate poverty.
3. charlie brooker said...
Vats tracts of the UK look grubby and run down yet on the other hand millions claim benefits without contributing anything in return.
There is a simple answer to the problem : scrap benefits and instead offer the chance to work for the benefit of the country making it spic-and span.
The positive effects are countless among others that accusations of scrounging disappear, the unemployed get some exercise reducing the burden on the NHS, the country will be engendered with a sense of pride, more tourists will want to come here and more foreign investors will look favourably upon us.
Most of all the country gets real tangible value for its money removing the dispute of money being wasted.
If someone is genuinely looking for work then let them work improving the appearance of the country for everyone's benefit.
On the way into work this morning the taxi driver told me about a man he regularly picks up. This man is in his mid forties is able-bodied yet has never actually had a job. How did he achieve this miracle? Playing the benefits system; one reward among others has been a 50 inch plasma TV.
4. khards said...
charlie , I have thought this for a long time
Unemployed = Free labour for manufacturing goods profitably (cheaper than china)
Unemployed = Free labour for mining
Unemployed = Free labour for (NAME ANYTHING WE IMPORT)
However in doing the above you need to ensure this scheme is government run and not in competition with any of our own industry thus causing more unemployment.
5. mark wadsworth said...
And this is "news" because..? This has been the case for nearly thirty years, for crying out loud. I blame the tax/welfare system, myself - nothing that can't be fixed.
6. cat and canary said...
Ah, but, a 50 inch plasma TV means you have to watch Jeremy Kyle in giant widescreen, surely thats a punishment?
7. khards said...
Why work if you don't need to?
8. timmy t said...
Completely agree with Charlie. I'd also add that given the choice of cleaning up the streets or stacking shelves, I reckon shelf stacking would suddenly become remarkably attractive. And these are (I suspect) mainly the people that make the streets so dirty in the first place, so there would be an incentive to stop doing that if you knew you'd have to clean it up yourself. And thirdly, these circumstances are learned behaviour - if your parents never worked then that is what seems normal. Perhaps watching their parents scrubbing graffiti every day would incentivise kids to work at school.
The flip side of course is that not everyone can be an investment banker - we need real companies with real jobs. Decent education would make that happen although not overnight. But at least we'd be on a path of progression, rather than self-destruction as we are now.
9. debtfree said...
6. khards said...Why work if you don't need to?
To get across the river you need to swim, not tread water.
10. letthemfall said...
Clap hands, here comes charlie
Or how about rounding up all the scroungers and getting them to dig their own graves.
What we need is a survey of taxi drivers. Then we'd know exactly what needs doing to sort the country out.
Vote for the Taxi Party.
11. Ccamper said...
Charlie Brooker ought to be sacked - if he can afford to catch a taxi into work they are paying him too much.
He should be sacked and forced to clean up the grubby streets on the minimum wage. Also he should live in a hostel or on the streets because you can't afford anywhere to rent on the minimum wage. However when he is hospitalised due to the fact that all he can afford to eat is tesco value and sainsburies basics I would let him have a 50" plasma on his ward.
12. the number cruncher said...
The best thing to cut unemployment is to:
1) abolish income tax and NI for those earning under 25k a year
2) Raise the minimum wage (think about this one before jumping to conclusions)
3) and dare I say it tackle monopolistic practices that waste economic resources.
Sound like our old friend Henry G. beat me to that thought some time ago.
13. mark wadsworth said...
TNC: "2) Raise the minimum wage (think about this one before jumping to conclusions)"
I have been thinking very carefully about this for years, and a far neater way of doing it is to have a reasonable Citizen's Income and/or much reduced means-testing (preferably none). By imposing a NMW, what you are doing is making certain low paid jobs illegal - surely it's better to have 5 million people earning £4.50 an hour than to have 3 million people earning £6.50 an hour?
14. jallan said...
If people were forced to work for their benefits, ie American style WorkFare, the result would be mass slave labour (American unions are already upset that council staff have been paid off and replaced with WorkFare people). The companies that have been making people redundant over the last two years, could simply replace them with people on WorkFare. They could then make further people redundant and replace them with people on workfare, until the whole company is staffed by people on WorkFare. All of the companies in Britain could do this. The Roman Empire had exactly this system, most employees were actually slaves. The reason the majority of people in this country have real paying jobs, is because your employers can not replace you with people on WorkFare. Your employers and the politicians would love to do so ( so don't expect the goverment to come running to your aid, if you are made redundant and replaced with someone on workfare, as this would make us extremely competitive like the Chinese and would inrich their lifestyles, as they are in a position to take advantage of such a senario. ) This would turn you into a WorkFare rent slave, with zero chance of buying a home. The unemployed are paid to stay out of the labour market for good reason. Do you really want to go down the Roman, Victorian, Chinese, Indian route?
15. sibley's b'stard child said...
Soylent Green
16. letthemfall said...
jallan
And in fact the US effectively have slave labour, in that prisoners have to work with either no pay or very low pay. Apparently their labours contribute a significant component of GDP.
17. letthemfall said...
mark w
It's not the jobs that would be illegal but the wages.
18. mark wadsworth said...
OK, LTF, let's assume somebody offers to decorate your front room for £80 and you know it's going to take him 2 full days.
£80 is the most you are willing to pay (if he asks for more, you will do it yourself). This decorator doesn't have much work on, and if you don't employe him for 2 days, he will just sit at home. Is it really better to say that you have to pay him at least £130?
The point about a CI is that nobody would be "forced" to do low paid jobs, they would do them entirely of their own volition because they preferred more than a minimum living standard.
In extremis, we could do like the French where the NMW is about £20,000. As a result, they have massive unemployment but the average output-per-actual-worker is fantastically good. What's the point of that?
19. the number cruncher said...
I understand the idea of a 'National Dividend' and good old Major Douglas's works, to coin its old name and respect the different ideas that have surrounded it proposed forms (I worry that some tea baggers, like your good self, think that absolves them of any other duty to society though, which is morally repugnant to my bleeding socialist heart)
The reason I think a high NMW is a good free market idea is that many jobs have to be done, and have some inelastic qualities (not totally I will grant you that). Having a high NMW will give a real incentive to get out of the state safety net and have a real job, even if its just cleaning the bogs.
This will force employers to invest more time in the job and its efficiency, improving our economic standing in the world.
The objective of Government economic policy should make the decision of getting off benefits a 'no brainer' for our stay at home foot-resters. Nothing wrong with a big stick, but as any really good manager knows it must be held just out of sight with the occasional glimpse and lots of stories of how it has been used unmercifully in the past. But there is a clear carrot dangling in front of the nose of out daytime loungers.
A national Dividend will end up being a subsidy to an unproductive low wage service based economy.
As an employer myself I want to compete on quality, innovation and customer service and not on how little I can get away with paying my staff.
20. down wave said...
Go to http://www.rightbiz.co.uk/ and see the massive number of commercial businesses and properties for sale.
It seems not even those with a busines and working have any real work. Its looking like every aspect of life
in the UK is heading down the tube.
21. mrmickey said...
When I left school in the 80's and signed on they still made you queue up outside the dole office before you could sign on, I expect you can do all that online line now from the pub.
22. timmy t said...
In response to Jallan - TNC beat me to it with his last sentence.
23. charlie brooker said...
@khards
Before the age of disposable goods, throw-away packaging and fast-food Britain - so I'm told - used to be a clean and tidy place. Photos of 1960's Britain seem to bear this out. Chewing gum, graffiti, plastic wrappers and bottles and an odious assortment of other litter now blight our country so much we've almost become blind to it. Urban shopping areas have become no-go areas, afflicted with decay and dereliction - and with the forthcoming cull of the public sector this will only get worse.
The area where I grew up used pleasant clean and tidy, with a smattering of genuine civic pride, but over the decades it has fallen into disrepair. The prevaliing state of neglect has resulted in an air of despair and despondancy.
Its no coincidence that in the sixties most of the people living in the area were white collar professionals, nowadays many are state-employed blue-collar and a fair share of them are unemployed.
My idea was to marry up a readily available workforce to address the neglect that afflicts towns and cities up and down the land.
Letthemfall may scoff, but the main forum current has a thread suggesting Altrincham is a ghost town; there have been umpteen different books on Britain's crappest towns and even guides like Lonely Planet have made their fair share of negative observations.
The country's financial conditions mean that we either adopt new ways of thinking or we'll all soon be speaking Chinese.
24. mark wadsworth said...
TNC: "This will force employers to invest more time in the job and its efficiency, improving our economic standing in the world"
Efficiency = using less labour for the same output = unemployment.
25. peeping tom said...
What really pees me off about any of Murdoch's rags peddling 'scrounger' stories is News Corporation's avoidance of paying corporation tax (see John Pilger's book Hidden Agendas, published in 1998, pp 473-4)
26. This comment has been removed as it was found to be in breach of our Blog Policies.
27. charlie brooker said...
While I do not agree with the exploitation of the unemployed for the benefit of private corporations as happens under WorkFair in the US, it is only right that those receiving benefits from the nation return the favour by working for the benefit of the nation.
28. letthemfall said...
mark w
Extending your example on the local scale, I would, as part of the economy, offer a service or good to the decorator that took up 2 days of my time. And if I paid the decorator £80, I could only expect £80 in return, assuming income reflected value.
But on the broader scale, we have a situation where someone can extract £130 payment for their work, while paying only £80 in return for work of equal value - the concept of economic rent. The bankers, who we all know and hate, are prime examples. Globalisation has brought about a distorted - and I would add corrupt - economy.
charlie b: "Letthemfall may scoff,"
You noticed that. The issue is not whether Altrincham is a dump (never been there), but whether it is full of intentional spongers, and whether taxi drivers are reliable analysts, or indeed whether anything in the Sun is worth reading. No doubt some on welfare are layabouts, but bankers and the like are the other side of the coin. One cannot write off the majority of unemployed as wasters.
29. shipbuilder said...
Charlie Brooker @ 2 -
Why can't someone just employ them to do those things instead?
If you can answer that, it'll tell you all you need to know.
30. Alvin said...
Just another thought, instead of raising minimum wage, why not reduce benefit to the extent where people living on benefit can barely live - hence have to work.
31. Rented said...
19. mrmickey said...When I left school in the 80's and signed on they still made you queue up outside the dole office before you could sign on, I expect you can do all that online line now from the pub
If you're signing on at 9am you still queue up outside in the street before they open the doors.
32. braindeed said...
What a sad bunch of paranoid nut jobs
33. the number cruncher said...
MW @ 22 -
Now we really are getting into economic conceptualisation brain stretching territory!
My answer to you is real efficiency (not just raping mother earth more quickly) in the grand scheme of things it is its own reward and creates more jobs and more rewarding, interesting, higher paid jobs - positive feed back loop as long as the wealth goes into the productive economy - now how on earth can we ensure that? Why that would be our old friend LVT and all his taxing monopolies buddies.
Have you been following the mighty Georgist battle going on in Australia over the Australian Mineral Resource Rent Tax?
By the way France does not have real higher unemployment than the UK, their 10% rate is real unemployment while our rate of 7.8 is more fiddled than theirs. Also there are a lot of structural differences in age of population, percentage part time working and a lot of other boring details.
Basically France is a way better place to live than the UK for its average citizen, better schools, hospitals, housing, employment rights, average (modal and median) income - bloody socialist unions what have they ever done for us...
34. Frenchy said...
Hi everyone,
I have been reading this site for years with great interest but never posted.
I feel that I "know" a good few usual suspects and value their comments but tonight I have read something extremely inaccurate which I must correct and which will make me thinks twice about trusting some posters in the future.
The french minimum wage is nowhere near 20kGBP, in fact it is less than the British minimum wage. A quick google search of "salaire minimum francais" will give you some useful tables with the MW of most developed countries.
France has a high unemployment rate for completely different reasons.
35. growler said...
Mark - I'm a bit concerned with your "efficiency = using less labour for the same output = unemployment". I take it you're having a jest.
36. charlie brooker said...
@khards
If unemployment benefit is £48 a week and minimum wage is £6 per hour then at most the government could put claimants to work for a maximum of 8 hours per week, leaving six days every week to rest and play besides looking for proper work and equiping themselves with new skills.
If that's your idea of slavery then you are a nutter. Self-righteous thinking like yours has dragged this country into the gutter.
37. charlie brooker said...
@shipbuilder
Suprise suprise there are actually some jobs stillto be had; but failing that anyone with half a brain can use their own enterprise to create their own business.
The truth is that a significant proportion of those claiming benefits do so dishonetly and have no intention whatsoever of ending their dependency on the state. They have made a lifestyle choice to shy away from work.
The simplest way to test their honesty is to require they make contribution in return to the taxpayers that sustain them. One day a week would be sufficient - hardly onerous.
I bet that by introducing this system the nation's benefits bill would be slashed in an instant. Genuine claimants would help make the country a more attractive place to live but the shysters would cease being a burden to the rest of us.
38. Daveats said...
One in five are much better off than the workers that support them,,,no rent,council tax etc etc to pay,,looks like the way forward,, why work if you are financially better off not working,,only in the madhouse uk
39. ontheotherhand said...
The workfare does not have to output anything very useful as such, and it shouldn't crowd out viable local private companies. The point of workfare is to encourage people to get off benefits. If we are compassionate about welfare and make being unemployed reasonably comfortable in getting housing benefit etc., we may find it difficult to encourage people to work. Why lose a free house and various cash benefits as well as 5 days of free time to enjoy or work/beg on the side for cash? We either have to make being unemployed slightly less pleasant, which seems a brutal thing to consider, or we have to enable the recently reemployed to keep their free house etc. so they actually feel richer if they work, which seems a bit unfair on other taxpayers. On the face of it workfare at least gets people out of the house every day so that they get used to the routine and aren't enjoying telly/boozer, and it stops them working for cash on the side which makes the life on benefits so attractive. Perhaps make the work 10 to 3 so that they don't add needlessly to commuting rush hour and they still have time for job applications and interviews? How about getting them to make some green technology gizmos togive to taxpayers that help us to reach our national targets like a waterbut and drainpipe adapter to collect water for the garden, or even plugs that turn off things on standby automatically? That would help to sell the concept.
40. charlie brooker said...
@ontheotherhand - good points.
41. mark wadsworth said...
LTF, you've lost me with this: "...we have a situation where someone can extract £130 payment for their work, while paying only £80 in return for work of equal value - the concept of economic rent. The bankers, who we all know and hate, are prime examples"
Can we stick to the example of the underemployed bloke who's handy with a paintbrush please, and is prepared to do two day's work for £80? The chances are that the person paying him can either earn a lot more than £80 in the time it would take him to paint the room (so either he earns more than the painter, or he's rubbish at painting and decorating). If £80 is market rate and the customer is forced somehow (not clear to me how you can force people to pay more than market rate) to pay £130, then is the painter not collecting 'economic rent'?
This has absolutely nothing to do with UK bankers, who indeed collect a small amount of land-related economic rent every year (say about £5 billion in spurious bonuses) in exchange for their most valuable service (from the Home-Owner-Ists' point of view) of pushing up total land values in the UK by about £100 billion a year for ten years (yet more economic rent collection).
42. peter said...
Simple answer:
Scrap welfare, minimum wage and all the other impediments to employment.
If we carry on this way we will end up like Somalia - if we're lucky!
43. mark wadsworth said...
@ Growler 30, maybe I didn't express that very well.
If, for example, you run a cleaning business where the market wage was previously £5 per hour but the state forces you to pay £5.93, then you will have to do various things:
1. Put up your prices and accept that you will lose business, i.e. customers will ask for their offices to be cleaned twice a week instead of three times (so you will sack a few staff).
2. Cut down on staff and make the remaining staff work a lot harder.
3. Use more gizmos and gadgets so that one person can do more cleaning in an hour. Sure, I'm all in favour of automation and efficiency, but only if it is economically efficient. Don't forget that the massive administrative, regulatory and tax burden on employing people makes some automation seem profitable which would not be profitable in the absence of those burdens.
4. Ergo, whichever way you cut it, we'll end up with fewer people doing cleaning jobs, bar work etc etc, and more people on the dole. What's the point of that???
44. letthemfall said...
mark w
My point is that the market is neither efficient nor fair. Payment rates are influenced by supply/demand, skill levels, etc. But certain individuals and sectors have excessive economic power, which is why bankers, the ghastly examplars in all this, are able to pay themselves millions, far out of proportion to any value they create. Indeed, as we know, they have destroyed value on an immense scale, yet still receive great reward. This happens lower on the scale in other parts of the economy. So arguments about market rates don't wash for me.
45. mark wadsworth said...
LTF: "Payment rates are influenced by supply/demand, skill levels, etc"
Yes of course, that is what markets are about!! Of course a highly skilled electrician earns more than a painter and decorator, of course a Premiership footballer earns more than somebody in the Vauxhall Conference, of course a top surgeon earns more than a nurse who earns more than a cleaner etc. Big deal. You cannot say that the electrician has rigged the market and that is why he earns more than a labourer or something. And yes, football is rigged/a cartel, but no outsider is forced to pay for these salaries.
This has NOTHING to do with bankers who can ONLY earn such oodles of money because the markets in banking and land are completely rigged, government controlled, subsidised, rationed, barriers to entry etc etc.
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and don't paint all markets with the same brush. Banking and Home-Owner-Ism is just Blue Socialism and has NOTHING to do with small government free markets etc.
46. letthemfall said...
mark w
Yes, that is what I mean. But more and more, salaries are not related to skills or education. Although there is a steady stream of attacks on the public sector, the predominantly highly qualified individuals who work for it have seen their pay gradually erode over the last 40 years. Only doctors seemed to have maintained their incomes.
In the private sector, certain individuals have had huge rises in salaries while the majority has lower incomes. None of this has anything to do with market value, but distortions inherent in the market. I don't think it is a case of govt intentionally rigging markets, though policy has this effect over the long term. I doubt very much that it is possible to have a free market of the kind you envisage. VIs have too much power, and only govt intervention (eg NMW) can temper this in my view.
47. the number cruncher said...
MW at 37 your normal impeccable economic logic is oversimplifying the situation
1 yes but a small proportion
2 like to see them try (they will be doing this anyway)
3. yes but so what - frees more people to do other jobs in society
4 No it wont mean more people on the dole in the long run
a cleaning business has both and elastic element and an inelastic element
Cleaning is very important and business will get away with paying more for cleaning if their is a higher NMW - I doubt much less cleaning will be done
They may by more efficient machines for improved efficiency, but that will then create more jobs (as long as that wealth is recycled into productive work)
48. mark wadsworth said...
TNC, let me pick up on one thing.
In a tax and regulation (above and beyond health and safety and normal contractual rights) and hassle free world, the business decides the trade off between employing people and automating. This is all good stuff, as it creates jobs in the industry that make the machines that enable automation and so on, so increases output etc etc. Ultimately all inputs are 99% labour by value (putting land to one side), it is just that some labour goes into making long term assets which we call "capital" and of course people have to finance this capital formation and they get a share of the profits called "interest" or "dividends".
If we then introduce massive taxes on labour, minimum wages, sex and race quotas blah blah blah, this makes, in relative terms, it more likely that automation is the more profitable way of doing things EVEN THOUGH IN THE ABSENCE OF THESE ADMINISTRATIVE BARRIERS it would actually be cheaper to employ people to do stuff. This is economically INEFFICIENT and leads to unemployment.
This is one of the many reasons we have such high unemployment.
Conversely, if we introduced massive taxes on the use of machinery or automation and subsidised employment, we'd end up being inefficient in the other direction - we'd have full employment but we'd still be in the Dark Ages.
The optimum position is only reached if the whole government imposed system does not distort business decisions on what mix of pure labour and automation to use by taxing/regulating one and not the other.
49. the number cruncher said...
I'm not disagreeing with any of that except if you take your logic to its ultimate conclusion we will be back to slave labour and child prostitution, which I am sure some of your tea-bagger friends would welcome
We need to have some moral ground rules in society and one of them should be to fairly value a days labour. If have low pay then people will freely decide to fiddle the dole, higher the minimum pay the less the fiddling of the dole - simples
I think our differences are of a more moral nature and centred on our economic objectives.