UK 'Barking Up Wrong Tree' Trying To Get Over-50s Back To Work, Report Finds (theguardian.com) 325
Rishi Sunak's government is "barking up the wrong tree" by trying to get people in retirement back to work to fix chronic staff shortages, according to a report that warns long-term sickness and pressure on the NHS is having a bigger impact on the jobs market. From a report: The sharp rise in economic inactivity -- when working-age adults are neither in work nor looking for a job -- is more likely to be driven by people waiting for treatment as the health service struggles to cope, as well as by people who permanently live in poorer health, according to the consultancy LCP. "There is a real risk of the government barking up the wrong tree when it comes to the growth in economic inactivity," the report says.
It comes as the work and pensions secretary, Mel Stride, enters the final stages of an urgent review of options to boost workforce participation before next month's budget. The government has so far focused on addressing early retirement, with the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, urging the over-50s to get off the golf course. Official figures published last week showed early retirement explains none of the increase in inactivity since the start of the pandemic. While the number of people who are economically inactive is more than half a million higher than in February 2020, the number who have quit the labour market due to retirement has fallen. Sir Steve Webb, the former pensions minister who co-authored the LCP report, said rising long-term sickness was much more significant.
It comes as the work and pensions secretary, Mel Stride, enters the final stages of an urgent review of options to boost workforce participation before next month's budget. The government has so far focused on addressing early retirement, with the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, urging the over-50s to get off the golf course. Official figures published last week showed early retirement explains none of the increase in inactivity since the start of the pandemic. While the number of people who are economically inactive is more than half a million higher than in February 2020, the number who have quit the labour market due to retirement has fallen. Sir Steve Webb, the former pensions minister who co-authored the LCP report, said rising long-term sickness was much more significant.
Pay people more (Score:5, Insightful)
There you go, I did the rocket science for you.
Re:Pay people more (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pay people more (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pay people more (Score:4, Interesting)
There's research on this, in general happiness seems to plateau out at around $80k/year, IIRC. I'm probably near an equivalent of that in a lower COL country, so I can kind of see that. Around that point (COL-adjusted, obviously) you can have your housing, a car, any food you want, more vacations than you have time for. More than that and it's just slightly fancier versions of the above. Work weekends to get a porsche instead of a bmw? I don't' think so.
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Yeah, few people will be on aggregate happier given the sacrifices needed to earn larger amounts. A lot of people go wrong they're spending money poorly, meaning they need to earn more just to get by.
Find what makes you feel fulfilled and do it. Chances are it isn't working 60 hours a week so you can have a new car every few years.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"If you are in a situation where more money wouldn't improve your life, then sure. But for lots of people, more money would allow them to enjoy their lives more even if it means more time working."
Nobody wants these jobs, not sick pensioners nor young and healthy 20 year olds.
They were all done by EU citizens who left and will never come back.
It's called 'sovereignty', they wanted it, they got it.
Re:Nope - several EU countries have the same probl (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you even ask yourself why does the UK have a housing problem? I don't want the short today answer but the main reason why we no longer build the housing we need.
NIMBYism and government policy and regulations have created this mess. Gentrification, we don't want it. It increases cost of housing. Densification, we don't want it. Who wants to live with the congestion. Urban sprawl, we don't want it. Think of the planet. The sad part is our whole economy is based on growth. You can't have growth in every sector but one.
In today's society the spoils go to the top. The problems are left to be solved by the bottom. Ask yourself. Why are we short of labour? Or the better question is, for whose benefit is this all for? It seems that all the politicians are worried about is stunting our economic growth.
Don't know about the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
You can do whatever you want to zoning laws hear but nothing short of banning ownership of single family homes by corporations will fix things. You can't even limit rentals (though it would help some) because in many cases they're leaving the rental properties empty. A lot of these corps are just looking for somewhere to park the huge amounts of cash they've extracted from the working class during the pandemic and last 40 years of Thatcher/Reagan trickle down economics.
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It's about the choices you make that determine the money you have. If you don't have your retirement by 50, a couple of extra years at work will not fix that. It's about money working for you not you working for the money.
What I want to know is, why is it that governments try to fix a problem with the wrong solution? It feels like government is trying to legislate how things work and keep getting it wrong. We've known we were heading in this direction since WWII. Now that it's slapping us in the face govern
Re: Pay people more (Score:4, Interesting)
UK is a welfare state. The state pays people enough to stay home and live relative comfortable lives. Anyone trying to make more is taxed and regulated to the extent they would make a lot less than if they stayed on welfare.
That means many people at the lower end of the income spectrum are not incentivized to work at all, or at least not legal/taxed work. EU migrants have flocked to the UK as a result and used the open travel provision of the botched Brexit deal, even non-EU immigrants have noticed how well the UK treats them and now that the borders are slightly less porous will risk going on dinghies over the canal to get the handouts.
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Please, to narrow this problem down to just that is obviously overly simplistic as there are countries with more generous benefits than the UK and who aren't having this problem.
Re: Pay people more (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Pay people more (Score:5, Interesting)
UK is a welfare state. The state pays people enough to stay home and live relative comfortable lives. Anyone trying to make more is taxed and regulated to the extent they would make a lot less than if they stayed on welfare.
That may be true, and if so then it was at least as true pre-pandemic as it is now. If you RTFA you'll see that the Slashdot editors missed perhaps the most important quote. It states "The report says the number of 'long-term sick' has risen by more than 350,000 since the start of the pandemic, accounting for more than half of the growth in inactivity over that period". When you add to that number the people whose working hours have been reduced or eliminated because they're family members taking care of the 'long-term'sick', then you have a staggering loss of job-occupiers.
In addition to what's been called "long-haul Covid", the pandemic has blessed many countries with a sharp increase in the death rate [ourworldindata.org]. Given these factors, the shortage of workers can't be hand-waved away as an increase in laziness that just happened to accompany the pandemic.
Re: Pay people more (Score:4, Interesting)
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"Good, enjoy your retirement. "
43% earn less than £12500 a year and so don't even have to pay income tax, how cool is that?
I mean if you don't have to eat or heat.
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> I am 65, look at how much money I have, and expect to have enough for the rest of my life unless I get to live to 125.
They'll maintain inflation at 10% so you'll run out and need to go back to work.
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The rising cost of living has really screwed younger people, and by younger I'm starting with Gen X who are in their 40s and 50s now.
Boomers helped their kids get on the property ladder, while benefitting massively from increasing property prices and gold plated pension plans. Of course they bought property when it was cheap, burned all the cheap fossil fuels etc.
Gen X mostly managed to get on, but of course their kids needed even more help. Now Millennials are trying to help their own kids out and it's com
Re:Pay people more (Score:4, Insightful)
High wages and lower property prices are required.
High wages just push inflation generally. What's needed is lower housing prices. On the one hand, that's great because housing prices are easy to fix: Just remove the zoning restrictions and let builders build. Housing prices are so high that there's huge profit potential in building, especially for moderately-dense housing. On the other hand, that sucks because all of that building would push housing prices down, and those who already own property and who have profited tremendously from the increase in property values don't want that and fight like hell to keep the lid on construction.
This situation is most acute in the places with highest housing costs, obviously. Those areas have the greatest need for more housing, and also have the most people whose net worth is tied up in their homes, either because they bought decades ago and their homes made them wealthy or because they bought at the top of the bubble and don't want to be upside down.
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I agree. And it will happen, but employers will try every other option first. We've had many decades of an economy built on cheap imported labour. This has allowed both education and training quality and drug law enforcement to be ignored. Why does it matter if 3 million really badly educated, unskilled Brits are so fucked up on skunk and synthetics and meth that they rely on social security, when we can get skilled and unskilled people who will work for low wages from Eastern Europe? Well now it does.
Re:Pay people more (Score:5, Insightful)
Decreasing returns.
After a certain point more pay doesn't bring more happiness, only more responsibility and stress.
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Decreasing returns.
After a certain point more pay doesn't bring more happiness, only more responsibility and stress.
Especially if you use that additional money to buy more things, etc... rather than paying things off and simplifying your life. Needs over wants...
Re:Pay people more (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, increasing wages to reduce poverty & the causes of ill-health would be part of the solution but not enough. We'd also have to treat the backlog of people too sick to work. Pover
Re:Pay people more (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, if you under fund your socialized medicine for around a decade https://www.health.org.uk/news... [health.org.uk] then it will stop working well. Who would have guessed!?
Work Less Hours (Score:3)
Paying more is probably not going to get professionals to start working 40 hours a week again. But if there were more jobs where retirees could work 10-20 hours for 1/4 - 1/2 of their previous salary, that might get them back.
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Wages have not grown anything like inflation, which is why inflation is hurting so much.
Inflation has been caused by free money - low interest rates.
There are other contributors, but they all pale in comparison to the damage low interest rates have caused.
Re:Pay people more (Score:4, Informative)
Writing from Lithuania. We have 20%+ inflation since last summer.
Inflation is cheating on savings, you were working hard for. Savings are discarded, as they melt in such policy.
This well may be price for money printing: is it worth to seek for another job, if you can survive on food and necessities already accessible?
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Well, why do you think we have that kind of inflation? People have money so they don't put the nose to the grind stone, and we have to remove that so we can whip them back to work.
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Cheap money only made the rich richer and the poor poorer. We didn't have this kind of inflation to help common people - far from it.
Re:Pay people more (Score:5, Interesting)
Repeat after me: correlation is not causation.
The economy (and the world in general) is not as simple as A causes B because A en B happen together.
Since 2008 the advent of inflation caused by low fed intrest rates has been announced.
In 2021 high inflation arrived.
In 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 high inflation did not happen with low intrest rates.
Some elements that do drive inflation?
1) supply disruption: supply chain problems, economic warfare, shift in economic ties, opioid crisis and unhealthy workforce, shrinking labor force, uneducated workforce
2) profit maximisation through extreme unhindered pricing power (=there is no real competitive market anymore in lots of products and services. And companies in the end allways try to achieve extreme pricing power so its a natural evolution for all markets)
3) healthy demand for goods and services. People have money.
How do you lower inflation? ...
You can solve some of the drivers of inflation. That takes institutional changes. That's not going to happen in the short term, if at all.
You can raise intrest rates to cool the economy in general. Higher intrest rates can cool the economy and has as byproduct the expectation of lower inflation. Other byproducts of high intrest rates: lower wages, unemployment, lower stock valuations,
Inflation is hurting so much for workers because unlike other economic actors, workers generally seem to have no pricing power. Most workers cannot disappear from the market if they are not happy with wages. Workers generally are price takers. The workers are now arriving at pricing power (because of full employment). So action is being taken to rein in their pricing power because its easy. Workers are the ones you can screw the easiest, so they get screwed. Just sit still and hope for the best.
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I'm old enough to remember publicly owned utilities. The streets were clean, people were polite, the sun always shone and life was peachy. NOT. What actually happened was you got whatever product you were given - you had no say in the matter. You had to pay whatever the price was, you got no say in the matter. You also had blackouts and cuts at a moments notice because well, frankly, no one gave a toss about it. Good luck getting a new property hooked up in less than 6 months, or heaven forbid you might nee
Re:Pay people more (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, of course it hasn't. Why bother creating a pile of money when it just adds extra zeroes onto everyone's balance at the bank. Creating, for example, $2.2T doesn't help the government a lick when it is automagically offset by increasing wages by $2.2T...
Do remember that inflation, pretty much by definition, is caused by the government (they're the ones who control the money supply), for the benefit of the government.
Qualifier: there are a few conditions where inflation is not under government control (losing a war in a big way being one of them), but, in the big picture, inflation is a creation of the government, for the benefit of the government....
Re:Pay people more (Score:5, Informative)
High wages is not what drives inflation. Inflation is driven by a combination of:
1. Government printing too much money.
2. Government spending in excess of taxation (by borrowing)
3. Too much money lending in the private sector (due to low interest rates)
4. Broken supply chains (usually from natural disasters or wars or what-have-you).
High wages cannot drive inflation unless they are all being paid-for by business loans. Most wages are paid for by money actually earned, which has a net neutral effect on prices.
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"Broken supply chains (usually from natural disasters or wars or what-have-you)."
In this case the 'what-have-you' is called 'BREXIT'.
time to start lowering the full time hours? (Score:5, Interesting)
time to start lowering the full time hours?
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This is so F***ked up (Score:5, Insightful)
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A million people in France rioted because the government wanted to up the retirement age from 62 to 64. The USA could learn a thing or two from that.
Re:This is so F***ked up (Score:4)
A million people in France rioted because the government wanted to up the retirement age from 62 to 64. The USA could learn a thing or two from that.
Social Security retirement age (the age when a US citizen who has contributed into Social Security can receive a "full" monthly payment) has been 67 years for decades now.
It was bumped to 67 during the Reagan years, a deal between Republicans & Democrats (President Reagan & House Speaker Tip O'Neill).
There were no crazy riots or political upheavals in that day; I had started working almost a decade before that time.
So I think it's actually the lazy "metropolitan French" (being 1/2 French, but "rural roots", I can say that with all honesty) could learn something here.
Re:This is so F***ked up (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, we have basically been conditioned to eating a big hearty shit sandwich because we were told it would keep the commies away. And anything remotely "socialist" allowed in the US will turn us into hard core commies who address each other as "comrade", if the popular fear is to be believed.
"I break my back everyday and I am this close to becoming homeless and losing everything, and I can't afford to see the doctor for the life threatening condition I think I might have, but at least I am not one those reds!"
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I think realistically by the time I reach retirement in the UK the age will be 70. Might be able to get a tiny state pension before then, but unless they can downsize your house to get a big lump sum of cash I think most people will have to work many more years by then.
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I can absolutely tell you what will happen. Aside of the happy few who somehow manage to have a sheltered job that they can ride to the end, most others will lose theirs around the time they're 60-65. Because their knowledge is outdated, because they can't work fast enough anymore, or simply because their failing health sends them to the hospital every other week.
So they're unemployed for the last 5-10 years of their "working" years.
Now the interesting part: Your retirement money is calculated around here b
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If you spend your entire life working a job you hate, then yes, that is a waste. What you should be doing is working towards a job you do not hate. Such a thing requires planning and effort, of course, but it can totally be done. It might mean spending the money you earn at your hated job on an education that positions you for a job you prefer. Also it could mean saving up enough to eventually work a job that is truly soul-satisfying for you even if it plays little-to-nothing.
Most retirees who just up a
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The entire point of the modern economy is to break down every economic and commercial activity into thousands of hatable sub-activities and drive workers - excuse me, "resources" - to execute those sub-activities until they drop from exhaustion. Every job with any element of satisfaction to it get stripped out of organizations, as much as possible is foisted back on the customers/clients, and what remains is deeply unpleasant scrabble-for-wages. Kinda weird that people are no longer interested in playing t
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And I thought Rishi is detached from reality...
The only, and I mean only, way you can have a job you enjoy is if you have a one-in-a-million talent. Preferably one that creates something others want and pay money for. That's it. For a very simple reason. Anything else that brings joy will soon be flooded with people doing it, because it brings joy, which also means that by the laws of supply and demand, the price for that service will plummet to a point where you can't really make any reasonable money with
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Many people might be fine with working 2 or 3 days a week after retirement, but many employers don't want them because the balance of power is shifted. One of my early workplace experiences was seeing an older employee yelling right back at the boss/owner "I don't HAVE to be here, I just work because it's cheaper than the funny farm! If you don't like it, I'll leave.". The boss decided his best move was to STFU at that point.
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Communism takes hold when retirees give the finger about going back into the workforce? GTFOH.
I always read that Millenials and GenZ want old folks to "get out of the way and retire". But when they do ... communism? :D
Unfavorable demographics (Score:4, Insightful)
Barking Mad (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two solutions to this - immigration or cutting services.
This is exactly why the UK is facing the problem suddenly - it's the result of Brexit not just cutting immigration from the rest of Europe but causing many EU citizens to leave.
The UK government isn't just barking up the wrong tree it's barking mad. The previous prime minister was outlasted by a lettuce and the one prior to that was the first one found to have broken the law (and one he passed!) while in office.
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Is there a way to reverse Brexit? It may take a lot of finagling with the EU, but having the UK a part of the EU made things better for all parties involved in the long term.
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Re:Barking Mad (Score:4, Insightful)
Would probably be political suicide for at least a generation, to be honest.
Sure, nearly half the population was against Brexit, and of those for it, the age range was skewed toward the older population, meaning less support as they have died off.
But the concessions the EU will demand as a requirement to rejoin at this point would be so egregious that it would literally destroy the party which agreed to it - the UK would have to join the Euro, central bank and other fiscal controls, Schengen, open fishing quotas, and essentially be classed below the rest of the EU member states in terms of seniority. Even with the leaning that the younger generation has, a lot of those things would be show stoppers.
The EU would have to have its pound of flesh, because it cant be seen as allowing the UK to leave and join when it suits them. And quite rightly too.
Re: Barking Mad (Score:5, Insightful)
Concessions? Those are the rules for everybody. The fact you think that just following the same rules all other countries do is "extracting a pound of flesh " only shows you still haven't got over the delusion of UK exceptionalism.
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And that attitude is why it would be political suicide for the UK to rejoin the EU any time soon.
Theres a reason that the UK was allowed to remain outside the Euro, and largely those reasons havent changed - the UK didnt need any EU Central Bank funding during any of the financial crises in the life of the Euro, while most Euro countries did require bailouts. The UK funded their own bailout.
While the UK has issues right now, its underlying financial situation is still pretty solid, so joining the Euro woul
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Would probably be political suicide for at least a generation, to be honest.
I'm not so sure on that. I think the political 'solution' is the Swiss arrangement, where you pretend you are outside the EU, but basically just ratify everything anyway. Add to that a continuation of the Schengen opt-out and I think you could sell that to the UK electorate reasonably well, particularly as the counter voices of Boris' and Farage are shown to have been wrong.
Of course it's a stupid solution compared to what they had before but it would fix the majority of the current economic problems (free
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Is there a way to reverse Brexit?
Technically yes - the UK could apply to join as a "new" country. However, if I were still an EU citizen I'd not be happy allowing the UK to re-join without making _really_ sure that the government was fully committed to long-term, permanent membership. I do not see that in the UK at the moment, just a growing realisation that they really fucked up. My guess is that the UK will remain outside the EU for a decade or two, probably doing some deal to ensure better trade relations and then, as those who voted f
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Is there a way to reverse Brexit?
No there's not. The issue now is the UK can never go back to the way it was. It received a whole host of concessions when it joined the EU due to the bad state of the UK at the time. If the UK were to re-join the EU they would be doing so in equal terms. While the majority of people now say that Brexit was a bad idea and there's no way it would pass a vote now, the results become a bit different if asked what they would think of joining the EU under equal terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Barking Mad (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, that lettuce-PM served under two monarchs, nobody in the past 70 years could boast that!
Re:Barking Mad (Score:4, Interesting)
Long COVID too. By not protecting people from it, we have ended up with a couple of million people who have permanently poor health due to the lingering effects of COVID.
That's a massive drain on the economy. Not only do many of them stop working or go part time, they also need treatment (free on the NHS) and can often claim benefits too. In the UK you can get benefits even if you work, either to top up low pay, or because in the case of disability benefits because they are not means tested.
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This is the new normal of demographics in most Western countries. You have older population that requires services and is not as productive. So government has less taxes and more expenses. There are two solutions to this - immigration or cutting services.
There is a third solution: euthanasia. Anyone over 65 who is too sick to work becomes Soylent Green.
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Oh man! (Score:5, Insightful)
If only the British had some sort of system to incentivize people to work certain jobs that they wouldn't do otherwise, maybe involving financial instruments of some sort?
Oh well, I guess they'll have to wait for the next Einstein or Hawking to figure that out...
Re:Oh man! (Score:4, Interesting)
See my comment below - the UK taxation system is actively forcing people to retire *from* the NHS, and people have been demanding change for years to prevent the bleeding of staff due to it.
Re: Oh man! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh man! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that many of them don't want to work, it's that they can't.
Long COVID has injured millions. While working does typically bring in more than benefits, it can also have costs like childcare and transportation.
We have been trying to bully people back into work for decades. It doesn't work in most cases. What does work is helping them back into work.
Government misses the point yet again... (Score:5, Informative)
Seems that quite a few people there are missing the fact that its the government that is causing a lot of older people in the NHS to retire in the first place.
Senior NHS workers are running into this thing called "Lifetime Allowance" when it comes to pension contributions - £1,073,00.
Thats what you are allowed to contribute to your collective (ie private, NHS and state) pension pots before the government can swoop in and tax you for the excess. The problem is, most of the pensions involved in the NHS are mandatory enrolment, meaning that if you continue to work, you continue to pay into the state and NHS pension schemes - regardless of whether you have breached the limit...
The tax due on pension funds above £1,073,000 (which isnt that high considering a lifetime career of working life in the NHS as a doctor or nurse, for example) becomes payable immediately on your first withdrawal from the pension scheme - in full. Meaning that people are facing tax bills of £50,000 or more, which they cannot pay using the funds in the scheme itself.
So, instead, people are retiring early to avoid having to pay more into the pension pot and thus avoiding large tax bills later on.
Fix the fuck up with the "Lifetime Allowance" and you stop losing experienced staff from the NHS.
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£1,073,00.
Can someone decode this for me? It's hurting my head.
Re:Government misses the point yet again... (Score:4, Informative)
Its missing a 0 off the end, blame me for not proof reading.
The second use is correct - £1,073,000.
Or £1.073Million.
Thats the total amount you are allowed to earn in your pension pot before the Lifetime Allowance kicks in and shoves a huge tax burden up your arse for each penny after that.
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Damn. That’s a lot of money
Re: Government misses the point yet again... (Score:3)
This sounds more like a 1%-er thing to me. How many people in retirement have a pension income in excess of the UKâ(TM)s median salary? Just saving for this and being able to afford things like a house mean youâ(TM)re earning a lot. Iâ(TM)d bet most people in the UK have a pension pot that isnâ(TM)t even 10% of this. In fact, the ONS report is rather eye opening: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep... [ons.gov.uk]
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It affects a lot of doctors and consultants.
On the lower end of the scale, the nurses are currently holding strikes because they have been getting pay cuts for over a decade. Inflation is into double digits and they are being offered yet another reduction in their income.
On top of that there are fewer of them because brexit made many leave, and now it's harder to recruit from our neighbours.
As for everyone else, most people under 50 are screwed when it comes to pensions. The older ones have much better sche
The shortages are mostly (Score:2)
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You're slipping a bit here. The suspected cause is right in TFS. The article is criticizing their NHS for being too inefficient at treating the healthcare needs of the elderly. From an American perspective it might sound like they're implying it needs to be abolished, but the Brits love their NHS too much to ever do that. No, what the article is advocating for is to solve the problem with more socialism...
Hunt has also been exploring options to reduce childcare costs to support more parents back to work. However, an option of extending 30 hours of free childcare to one- and two-year-olds in England at the forthcoming budget has been rejected on cost grounds.
...which of course, gets rejected by the more conservative members of their leadership. Although t
Re:The shortages are mostly (Score:4, Insightful)
You're slipping a bit here. The suspected cause is right in TFS. The article is criticizing their NHS for being too inefficient at treating the healthcare needs of the elderly. From an American perspective it might sound like they're implying it needs to be abolished, but the Brits love their NHS too much to ever do that. No, what the article is advocating for is to solve the problem with more socialism...
Oooooh dont be so sure about that. The Conservative Party is two faced.
Its been the goal of the Conservative party over the past 13 years to run the NHS into the ground precisely so then they have an excuse to sell it off - huge parts of the NHS have been sold off over the past decade under that very banner of being "too inefficient and costly - sell it off and contract back the services!".
And its working - there is a lot of hatred in the UK population right now toward NHS doctors. They get paid too much, they have too much say, they are lazy etc. The UK is actively hostile toward its doctors right now, which is why record numbers of them are leaving for other countries (or outright retiring for taxation reasons, see my other comments). There is a move to sideline doctors within the NHS, moving critical care responsibilities to lesser trained staff.
Hunt, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, headed up the NHS portfolio for 6 years, and wrote a book on how to privatise the NHS. Under his leadership of the NHS, things got actively worse rather than better and he was outright hated by doctors and nurses because of the cuts and changes he brought in. And now hes in charge of funding the NHS as well....
This wont end well.
Hunt has also been exploring options to reduce childcare costs to support more parents back to work. However, an option of extending 30 hours of free childcare to one- and two-year-olds in England at the forthcoming budget has been rejected on cost grounds.
...which of course, gets rejected by the more conservative members of their leadership. Although to be honest, it's a bit refreshing seeing a story about politics as it relates to matters of fiscal responsibility. Disagreeing solely on matters of money is a civility much missing from today's politics in the US.
Ironically, the government funding of childcare in the UK has actually reduced the amount of childcare places available in the UK - the government pays so little, and childcare centres are both simultaneously required to take the government funding AND they are not allowed to charge parents more as top up fees, that childcare centres are simply closing because they cant afford to do it any more.
You have the situation where there are childcare centres that are 100% full, have wait lists for places, have an "Excellent" rating from the government body, but are closing because the financial situation means they are losing money.
In theory, government funded childcare is fantastic - in reality, its making the situation worse. The solution? Well, that would be to pay more and stop the bleeding of childcare capacity, but the government wont do that.
Re:The shortages are mostly (Score:4, Informative)
I was reading an article [cnn.com] about the situation with the NHS after seeing your post. It's quite shocking to see what's going on over there, and kind of explains a lot as to why the Democrats here haven't been pushing the healthcare angle much lately. The unraveling of the UK's NHS would be the perfect lightning rod for the Republicans to point at and say "do you really want something like this happening here?".
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, its true.
Which would be ironic for the Republicans to point at it and say that, considering what is happening here to the NHS is very deliberate vandalism and calculated destruction - for the Republicans to point at it and say that, it should be seen more as a threat than a warning... "this is what we will do if you enact socialised healthcare here".
Re: (Score:3)
The Republicans absolutely would sabotage it here. They've doing it right now in my home state of Florida to our public school system. They've been removing books and dumbing down curriculums [usatoday.com], and firing teachers [news4jax.com] who dare to speak up about it.
The end game is exactly the goal you've stated for the NHS: make people believe a publicly funded system doesn't work so it can be privatized.
Re: (Score:3)
This is happening in the US, and I support it. Most of what doctors do hour by hour is fairly rote, and major reform to increase the number of physicians is not happening and would take a decade to start yielding results in the best case. I would rather get treated by nurse practitioner than go without. We have a serious and worsening shortage of doctors in my state. I am on the waiting list f
Re: (Score:3)
Of course it would be the Republicans causing the degeneration of the system here in the US just as it's the Tories causing it over there.
All the NHS' problems are is an illustration of if you massively under fund a social program for over a decade https://www.health.org.uk/news... [health.org.uk] it will start to fail. Who knew!?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
10-4 on the physical aspect of work prohibiting seniors from some jobs. I lost the ability to reliably shovel the snow off my driveway somewhere between ages 65 and 69. Dunno where it went, but it has definitely gotten up and left. I have an elliptical crosstrainer, a really nice one, in the living room opposite a really nice LG 86" TV, and if I can get to the point that I'm not so tired so often to run it, and have a bit more of a sense of perseverance, I may regain some of my capability. But really
Baby boomer generation creates an employee gap... (Score:4, Interesting)
Just like how they currently have most of the the money, and have inverted social security, they're also going to ALL RETIRE.
Complaining that a generation is going to retire is akin to pissing into the wind. Your complaints don't matter to people that have their houses in order and have left the workforce for good.
So, yea, turns out there will be a lot of open positions. Sounds like a pro-employee negotiating market to me. Stop bitching and make good use of it. If you're not a complete failboat, you'll end up doing quite well for yourself.
Low payscale jobs, however, are going to suffer no matter what. (line cooks, waitresses, gas station attendants, wallmart greeters, etc) There just aren't enough people left in the workforce, and good automation to replace those bodies is still many years away. Get over it or at least please cry alone - life sucks, get a helmet (has been true for the last 40+ years that I recall).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> waitresses, gas station attendants, wallmart greeters, etc
In the parts of Western Europe that I know and where I live, there are no gas station attendants and no supermarket greeters.
They have not been automated away: those jobs never existed in the first place.
I always wondered if those jobs were a scheme to give crappy jobs to the unemployed in order to save on social security? Who needs someone to welcome them at a supermarket?
Re: (Score:3)
You would be wrong about the gas station attendants then. As a small child back in the 1970's in the UK I remember our car being filled by an attendant. What put an end to that job was the introduction of automatic shutoff pumps. That meant there was no skill involved to avoid fuel spillages so you no longer need an attendant.
Re: (Score:3)
Just like how they currently have most of the the money, and have inverted social security, they're also going to ALL RETIRE.
Complaining that a generation is going to retire is akin to pissing into the wind. Your complaints don't matter to people that have their houses in order and have left the workforce for good.
So many people are utterly ignorant. This is not a generational issue. "The boomers did this, the boomers did that" is all just a distraction. People are fucking you and it has nothing to do with their age. Some of the people who are fucking you are under 30 years old. It is convenient to point at the boomers and say, "they are the cause" of your suffering... when all they did was live during a time of less corruption.
My parents were boomers (yes, dead now). I do not blame them for the current situation. Th
Bring me all your elderly! (Score:2)
Okay I'm pulling a tough movie reference here because it truly was an awful flick, but perhaps that bad guy from Avatar the Last Airbender finally got all those elderly folks he was wanting?
They ought to do what the American GOP wants (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
And just bring back child labor. As an added bonus you save money on smaller mineshafts.
The sad part is, it really happened. [historic-uk.com]
It's almost as if (Score:4, Insightful)
The UK prime ministers have been rather incompetent lately.
Too bad so sad (Score:2)
"Rishi Sunak's government is "barking up the wrong tree" by trying to get people in retirement back to work to fix chronic staff shortages,"
Yeah, people are not obligated to make you happy, sport.
You want those people back, better be ready to pay and pay big. They have your balls in their hands so better play real nice.
Another distraction (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems to be Sunak's main strategy, to keep coming up with a bunch of weird and wonderful (or not so wonderful) policy announcements, to distract from the real problems in UK. Those being chronically underfunded public services, NHS especially, and the effects of Brexit starting to really bite. There is inflation of course, which wasn't the government's fault, but problems in dealing with it and mitigating its effects most certainly are. There's energy prices, again not directly government's fault but the way it's been (or hasn't been) dealt with is. Truss's disastrous premiership blew a huge hole in the budget, and now the Tories are trying to close it by cutting the funding to public services even more.
So first they were going to teach Maths to all pupils until the age of 18, the next thing I don't even remember, something to do with illegal immigrants IIRC (there is usually something to do with illegal immigrants), now there is this. People who retired early did so because they had enough money to retire and wanted to leave the rat race, they ain't coming back. Even if they did, that wouldn't address labour shortages. Most of the 'shortages' are people from EU who used to work in low paying jobs mostly before Brexit, the early retirees wouldn't have replaced them anyway. It's just a distraction. Apparently the Tories call it 'dead rat strategy', the idea being you throw a dead rat on the table so people talk about that instead of the things you don't want them to talk about. So they now seem to be constantly searching for more dead rats to throw on the table. Expect more announcements of other bizzare things the UK government wants in coming weeks and months.
And you're gonna hire them, Rishi? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone here over 50? And trying to get a new job? Good luck.
No company will hire you. Even if they have no other option, they won't. As a single mom with 3 kids you have a better chance of finding a job. Employers dread hiring old people. They tend to be expensive. They don't take as much shit as a bright eyed and bushy tailed college graduate who thinks he won't get another job if he bails on your slave-driver job. They know what they're worth because they have already seen it. And they are prone to getting sick more likely than that 23 year old.
Rishi, how far away from reality can you get before even you realize it?
Something, something, Brexit (Score:4, Insightful)
Who would have imagined that a person from continental Europe wouldn't want to pick up and move to the UK when all they could get was a relatively short visa. Maybe the Brits shouldn't have quit the EU and lost all of the "foreign" service workers that were nurses, etc. The British economy worked fine when it could find all of those workers from other EU countries, but there simply weren't enough skilled, British healthcare workers to suddenly take up the slack. This not a fault, it's a feature of earlier conservative governments reducing staffing and making the NHS more reliant on foreign workers.
Re: (Score:3)
Most workers in the NHS seem to be from asia rather then european countries, so they would not have been affected by brexit.
Any european citizen who was already settled in the uk prior to brexit was easily able to get a long term visa and continue living/working there. The same applied to any uk citizens who were settled in other eu countries.
Stop it with this growth nonsense. (Score:3)
Let me bottom line this for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Time > money.
You can pay me more. You can't buy me more time to do things I actually want to do.
Another problem (Score:3)
In my present work, I was pursued pretty vigorously, even though I have been retired a while. Why? Although a lot of it is skillset, a really big part is mental outlook and temperament.
They had been attempting to use young people, but all found it just too stressful. There is a lot of responsibility, and you need to be able to interact with very stressed people without increasing their stress. There is a huge amount of authority, but you can't be running around with "big D energy". Turns out that is a uncommon commodity.
There is a meme that's been going around for so long that older people are technically ignorant, are too slow, and just way past their prime. It is not true, like so many memes.
For me, I went back because of the money - I don't need it, but it does pay for my expensive retirement toys. I call it turbo walking around money.
I know the solution, you won't like it (Score:3)
They will do literally anything except pay people a fair, livable wage. Tens of thousands of dollars to research automation and robotic replacements. Hundreds of thousands of dollars more in bonuses to executives but no pay raises to be found for normal employees. Huge business losses because of understaffing.
Just fucking pay people more. You're wasting the money elsewhere, just redirect it.
And no, you don't have to ask the people who used to receive that money if it's a good idea. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're going to be against it.
Re:I Do Not Understand (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the laws of economics must never benefit the peasants, only their owners. The ruling class bound by laws, get out of here.
Re: (Score:3)
Then I guess you need a better business model.