I just tweeted this:
The UK's suffering a labour shortage. There are four causes. a) Covid deaths b) Long Covid c) People not working because of no Covid restrictions d) Brexit. We can't do much about (a) and (b) but we can protect older workers from Covid and we can reverse Brexit. Problem solved.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) May 17, 2022
That's literally solved the UK's labour problems in 280 characters.
Now, why is no politician talking about it?
And why didn't the Bank of England do so yesterday? Is there some sort of conspiracy going on here to deny the truth? And why isn't the Opposition talking about it?
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Hi Richard
Politically as with the rest of the western world we now reside in the post-truth epoch. The political worldwide class is bereft of hiding the fact that they work for the billionaires and tax havens
I hope this is an area where we will see some solid non-government research soon otherwise we know that the most likely outcome is that the real causes will be ignored and the Tories will turn it into yet another piece of culture wars mendacity.
I accept that Brexit and Covid are the most obvious issues but I do wonder the extent to which it may be the result of people working in bogus self-employment, zero-hours type contracts or even the Black economy making sensible cost-benefit decisions about who they work for and how they work, the effect of which is hard to predict and so far is an issue I have not seen addressed.
So far this year my biggest expense has been for leaving cards and collections at work in my public sector organisation.
People in their 50’s leaving early or younger and 50+ olds finding better paid work in the private sector where wages are higher.
The Government has no interest in dealing with this because it makes the public sector perform worse so that it makes it easy to consent to it being further privatised.
The Tories hate the public sector. Labour hates it too because it disagreed with Tony because it left him with ‘marks on his back’.
There’s your answer.
What you describe is a serious drain of expertise and experience. Elsewhere in the public sector redundancies during the Cameron era were sometimes higher than 50% of the workforce. When work started backing up large numbers of 16-21 year olds were brought in on temparary contracts to fill the gaps on the understanding that all that was required was bodies. Apart from anything else linked to poor or non existent training the culture shock of an influx of teenagers and their phones was obvious.
Sorry, PSR. Not following you re what you are saying about Blair. Could you clarify? Thanks.
Blair once said that he had marks on his back from negotiating with the public sector I think he gave at a Labour party conference once. Personally I hope that he was unable to sleep on his back for weeks.
My late father told me that Labour would eventually betray the working man/woman and he was right.
It did not stop his administration from ripping up our employment contract and making us in the public sector have an average salary pension rather than a final salary one in 2003 and went on to give the private pension industry huge tax breaks in 2007/08.
Other crises in the public sector pension pots is where Councils as employers took pension contribution holidays as set up by the Tory party – Councils of all political persuasions took this break and much has had to be done to fill holes in pension pots up and down the country – money that could have gone on recruitment and better wages.
Thatcher’s chickens coming home to roost again. What a way to run a country eh?
I have not voted for Labour since as they are yet another party who believe in taking money from working people and in their own way have helped to contribute to the COLC for all those retiring from the service now.
There is another obvious issue, even if it might take longer to fix which is productivity, significantly worse in the UK than Europe.
What seemed interesting was that when Companies adopted the ‘Living Wage’ productivity went up, in art at least because they were paying more for labour they became better at using it.
I suggest however that a combination of poor management and under investment will take a long time to turn round.
There is also the factor that many workers from the EU who were working here before Brexit (1 million +?) have now gone back to their EU countries of origin and obviously not coming back even if they could because of our dreadful pay and working conditions.
There is no great evidence of this in the data
Recently during a visit to Suffolk we saw two large asparagus fields which had gone to seed. No workers to harvest this high value crop because of Brexit.
Supermarkets are selling asparagus flown in from Peru. Just consider the carbon footprint of this.
I expect other home grown essential food shortages will follow because of agricultural worker
storages.
I can tell you now that if the Tories and their house building mates had their way, that asparagus field will be used for executive style homes – that is why many of the Tories also hate farming and want it out of the way.
Land.
I kid you not.
i have see the same with sweet corn
How recently did you see this?
There were reports in late February that the asparagus season began 8 weeks early this year; English asparagus hit the shops by the 25th. The traditional season is St George’s Day ’til the summer solstice (April 23rd – 21/22/23 June) which is only 8½ weeks long.
By that reckoning, this year’s season would have been over by the end of April. Global heating looks like a more plausible reason for the fields being at the stage you observed.
We saw this last week in Suffolk.
I think you may be referring to asparagus grown in polytunnels rather than open fields.
My husband and his father before him have been growing asparagus in their garden or on their allotment for many years and aware of the asparagus season dates. Asparagus needs both warmth and rain so would not not flourish in a cold UK March climate.
@ Teresa Harding, and of course in lockdown, those who did apply for jobs in agriculture came head to head with the appalling working conditions in the sector so never stayed.
Many sectors need to up their game
I wonder how this will be impacted when everyone who is struggling to meet their committments gets better paid jobs as advised by Rachel Maclean?
How will the economy work if significant numbers get better paid jobs and the rest get paid to work longer hours?
I see this as similar to the old adage that anyone can become a millionaire by working hard enough, even if ‘everyone’ had the ability to do this surely being a millionaire would be meaningless if everyone was a millionaire.
Comparing the UK and the EU within the companies that I work with, there is becoming a stark difference. In the EU it is largely recruitment as usual. In the UK it is an emphasis on short term training to try and multi-task as much as possible. Key elements of business development such as new product/service development and IT are moving to the EU. Survival in the UK and development in the EU.
Reversing Brexit completely would obviously play into the hands of the right wing print media, whatever UKIP/Brexit party is called these days and the Brexit Ultras of the ERG. That is why Labour thinks it can’t engage on that front. If the Tory Party was so dogmatic it could still claim that the country had exited the EU but like Norway remain part of the Customs Union and the Single Market. At one point this is what was claimed they wanted. This not only solves the increased costs from being out and may ease recruitment but would solve the NI Protocol issue too.
They won’t though because they are too stupid. Only complete destruction of the UK economy, society and political union will do.
This is the obvious way back – and what Labour should be talking about
There is of course the small issue of the massive dominance of the ‘Pro Tory Pro Brexit’ press who will jump on anything that their owners dont like the look of.
Perhaps Labour should just do what Boris does: Lie.
Tell the country you’re sticking with Brexit, get in and then take us back.
That’s what I’d do.
There’s so many suckers out here – why not?
The UK doesn’t have a labour problem, it has a productivity problem. Employers will only put their minds to increasing productivity when they can no longer scoop up cheap labour.
Recently, the CEO of Next complained that he was having trouble with recruitment and he complained about the lack of cheap housing. Our village is under threat from a 120% increase in houses as it is. Is he suggesting that our village should suffer even more development so that we can attract more people to sell clothes in shops? Perhaps too we should import more labour to build those extra houses and if those new workers decide to frequent restaurants and coffee shops then perhaps we should import more labour to provide those services and if those extra people should need extra housing then maybe we should build even more houses in our village. Presumably, the whole Ponzi scheme should continue until we run out of land to build on and most of us will be dead before then.
The bottom line is that the purpose of the economic activity is ultimately to improve and enhance the lives of people in this country. It is not to generate larger profits for companies. Life in our village would be enhanced by a far smaller allocation of new housing. If as a consequence we had a lesser opportunity to buy clothes from Next then we couldn’t care less about that.
You could also add people like me, 59 years of age with 30+ years of experience in aerospace engineering as both a design engineer and more latterly in the quality function. I baled out earlier this year because working for a business whose senior managers were people for whom the taking of short-cuts was a standard reaction to most problems, who seem to think customer requirements are something that can be routinely ignored, that staff relations were a drag on their valuable time, etc (I could go on but it would be tedious).
Having for some years worked as a contractor on short-term contracts (usually 3 and no more than 6 months at businesses with problems, usually associated with external audits having gone badly) until HMRC imposed a more rigid interpretation of it’s IR35 regulations I have considerable experience of failing businesses and they all exhibit similar characteristics and not least amongst them is the fact that no business will ever be better than its seniors make at and they will always be as bad as they allow them to be. Such managers have no interest in making work a rewarding experience and by rewarding I mean from the point of view of satisfaction on a good job, well done. And so, I now stack shelves in my local supermarket for 16+ hours a week, I doubt I’m alone.
I saw many such managers in my career