The Feckless Unemployed

I've just spent ten minutes typing out a response to question someone asked me underneath an earlier post and, f*** it, that makes it long enough to be a post of its own...

Anon - 05 January 2009 13:00

Stef, what do you make of this statement? (something I hear quite a lot in certain social circles):

Although it is true, there was a whole program on BBC dedicated to it. I said that we don't do the jobs on average as well as they do. That's not opinion, that's fact. There are plenty of stats flying around about workforce productivity in the labour market comparative to earlier years. A trip to Google might suffice.

The jobs will likely be filled at one point or another, although I wouldn't expect it to be the kind of speed at which they were taken a year ago. The sad truth is that a British citizen can quite effortlessly gain 15k a year through benefits, so why earn 11k at subway and have to work for it? Unemployment has far too many benefits, no pun intended.

As for those who are employed, take builders for example... It's pretty common knowledge that if you want an excellent individual job done you don't employ British labour. It's par to say the least, where as the foreigners really earn their money and do a great job (talking averages here), and do it a lot cheaper.

The absence of the immigrants means that we're not going to be filling jobs as fast, we're going to lose out on productivity, and it's going to waste money for corporations. Be that on recruitment, productivity, employment (maternity rights, anyone?), and general service. And that affects our economy.

A lot of people slate the Polish for reasons they don't understand, but they were actually a great benefit to our nation - and they expect very little.

Stef - 05 January 2009 14:32

There's a lot of talk in the press about one group of benefit scroungers, the 'feckless' unemployed, and fuck all talk about another group of benefit scroungers, exploitative employers, who can get away with paying shit wages and benefits because the shortfall in what they give their staff is picked up by the welfare state

The DSS, that would be the rest of us, effectively subsidises lousy companies

So maybe, just maybe, a large part of the problem is not that the benefits are too high but that the wages are too low

Anxiety Culture

It's also worth remembering that the expression 'productivity improvement' is largely a euphemism for paying people less money to produce more output

Maybe you could argue that was a good thing if that money made was reinvested in productive infrastructure or paid out in dividends to the people who took the risks and created the jobs in the first place.

What usually happens in practice is that the financial benefits of 'productivity improvements' are trousered by senior management who have no problem with paying people more to do less; provided they are the people being paid more and doing less

By any measure, income inequalities in the UK have increased over the last 10-15 years off the back of this kind of mentality

And, as well as being inequitable, it's unsustainable because, sooner or later, once you've ripped off ordinary people past a certain level they can no longer afford to buy the goodies that make your system go round. They can start borrowing, of course, but that can only work for so long; as we're currently in the process of finding out

People forget now but about 10-15 years ago the press was full of talk of a 'leisure bonus', as new technologies promised to reduce the amount of time people would need to spend at work.

Fifteen years on and now we're being told that we won't be able to afford ever to retire

What happened?

Imagine for a moment you're a member of the Evil Overlord class. Can you imagine anything worse than the prospect of the plebs having more free time on their hands and becoming financially independent?

Fuck that

Think about the kind of useless jobs so many of us are engaged in. Jobs that offer no real benefit to society as a whole and absolutely no sense of satisfaction or self-worth to the people doing them.

Anxiety Culture

The Evil Overlord class would have us believe that any job, however pointless and soul destroying, is worth having just for its own sake

Bollocks to that

It's also worth pondering upon the fact that the vast majority of jobs people would identify as being intrinsically worthwhile and offering a sense of self-worth to the people doing them usually sit at the bottom of society's pay scales. And, speaking as someone who's held down a couple of highish paying jobs in his time, I can absolutely guarantee that higher pay is absolutely in no way intrinsically linked to high ability, high intelligence, high integrity or high commitment

Migrants play along with this shit because they're economically desperate and easily exploited. Neither of these qualities strike me as something we should be encouraging in our society; however profitable they may be for The Few

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