[Closed] Can there ever be full employment

If you class 16 hours a week on minimum wage as a job - maybe. Of course this leave you with less money in your pocket than being on the dole... Especially if you're under 23 and get less working tax credits.

I was luck enough to have an ace apprenticeship but looking around my workplace at the number of guys 10 or less years from retirement (lots) 27 to 40 year olds in the middle of their career (a few) and Apprentices / Trainees (1 or 2). I think we're gonna have a problems really quite soon...

or do you think those shelves at Tesco's are going to stack themselves ?

I'm sure they're working on it.

I'm afraid the main issue is there isn't enough real work to keep everybody gainfully employed 38 hours a week (that should be 4 days not 5 btw) from 21 to 65. And that driving to the office every day to sit on the internet isn't really efficient in terms of resources and productivity.

I know lots of intelligent people who never had the opportunity to go into higher education

Really? I thought the universities accepted people from any background nowadays. What exactly was it that stopped them going and becoming a doctor?

Really? I thought the universities accepted people from any background nowadays. What exactly was it that stopped them going and becoming a doctor?

Yes, they probably would have been easily accepted into university if that's the direction they had been channelled in by parents and education. If the influences and advice isn't there to direct a person in that path, then its much less likely to happen.

So the opportunity was there then, they just didn't take it.

Real opportunity is more than arbitrary rules.

Can there ever be full employment ?

Has the idea ever formed part of the election promises of any party ?

Be pretty difficult to achieve if the govt. of the day doesn't want to achieve it.

Occupational and geographical immobility of labour means we will never have 0% unemployment.

Japan has pretty much full employment. A lot of jobs are non-jobs, like having old fellas standing at traffic lights doing hand signals that duplicate what the traffic lights are telling you, and guards stationed at 5m intervals round building sites. Still, everyone seems to have a role, and everyone seems content.

TJ - 25% of the population jobless. average week 48 hrs. share the work around - bingo - 36 hr weeks for everyone.

1. Do you know many people who would be willing to reduce their income by 25% so someone else can have a job too?

2. Do you know many people who could afford to continue spending at current rates (and therefore "supporting the economy") if their income fell by 25%? (Yes the unemployed would also be working but on average they would be earning 25% less than todays average earners so not affluent).

3. Many of those people working 48h weeks are only contracted to do 35h weeks, and not paid any overtime. So they would really not want to cut their salary to work their contracted ours. Employers would need to find 25% more money to pay for the extra staff. Tax would need to increase to cover that in the public sector whilst the cost of goods in shops would go up in the real world. At a time when salaries would be falling!

4. Tax revenue would fall. Whilst people coming off benefits would start paying tax; income taxes are biased towards higher earnings. Reducing everyones earnings by 25% has a disproportionate effect on tax.

5. You don't have enough skilled people to take up the slack in the skilled area of the market. Do you really want the long term unskilled unemployed (unemployable?) filling the gap in the services you want to receive? We'd end up increasing migration to get vaguely competent people to fill the roles.

Now we don't actually have 25% unemployment (its about 8% - and only just over 1/2 of those claim benefit).

Finally - why do people seem to think stacking shelves at Tesco is badly paid. If you worked TJ's 48 hr week stacking shelves you'd earn about £17k a year (possibly more for Sundays etc!).

Full employment can only be achieved if I put everyone to hard labour ... in fact there will be world wide labour shortage if I become the Uber Living God Dearest of the Dear Dictator. 😈

poly - Member

TJ - 25% of the population jobless. average week 48 hrs. share the work around - bingo - 36 hr weeks for everyone.

thats far too simplistic an approach though.

1. Do you know many people who would be willing to reduce their income by 25% so someone else can have a job too?

2. Do you know many people who could afford to continue spending at current rates (and therefore "supporting the economy") if their income fell by 25%? (Yes the unemployed would also be working but on average they would be earning 25% less than todays average earners so not affluent).

3. Many of those people working 48h weeks are only contracted to do 35h weeks, and not paid any overtime. So they would really not want to cut their salary to work their contracted ours. Employers would need to find 25% more money to pay for the extra staff. Tax would need to increase to cover that in the public sector whilst the cost of goods in shops would go up in the real world. At a time when salaries would be falling!

4. Tax revenue would fall. Whilst people coming off benefits would start paying tax; income taxes are biased towards higher earnings. Reducing everyones earnings by 25% has a disproportionate effect on tax.

5. You don't have enough skilled people to take up the slack in the skilled area of the market. Do you really want the long term unskilled unemployed (unemployable?) filling the gap in the services you want to receive? We'd end up increasing migration to get vaguely competent people to fill the roles.

Now we don't actually have 25% unemployment (its about 8% - and only just over 1/2 of those claim benefit).

Finally - why do people seem to think stacking shelves at Tesco is badly paid. If you worked TJ's 48 hr week stacking shelves you'd earn about £17k a year (possibly more for Sundays etc!).
Posted 14 minutes ago

Economies throughout the Western World are in a mess precisely because of economic inequality, and the ridiculous attempt to deal with that issue by providing easy credit.

And no single thing contributes more to economic inequality than mass unemployment.

[url= http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roubini43/English ]The Instability of Inequality[/url]

[i]"Firms in advanced economies are now cutting jobs, owing to inadequate final demand, which has led to excess capacity, and to uncertainty about future demand. But cutting jobs weakens final demand further, because it reduces labor income and increases inequality. Because a firm’s labor costs are someone else’s labor income and demand, what is individually rational for one firm is destructive in the aggregate.

The result is that free markets don’t generate enough final demand. In the US, for example, slashing labor costs has sharply reduced the share of labor income in GDP. With credit exhausted, the effects on aggregate demand of decades of redistribution of income and wealth – from labor to capital, from wages to profits, from poor to rich, and from households to corporate firms – have become severe, owing to the lower marginal propensity of firms/capital owners/rich households to spend."[/i]

ernie_lynch - Member

But only through state interference.

The state interferes at every level of the economy. Or did you think that George Osborne didn't have a job?

I did not mention anything about George Osborne.
In fact I have not really thought about George Osborne for a while until you mentioned him, personally I find him an abhorrent little toff.

theres no shortage of uk citizens working abroad who post on this forum