First it was Jessops, then Blockbuster, now the armed services, and HMV, closely followed today by Rolls Royce.

All prospective customers for our shops,and tradesmen, and all tax payers, just who is going to fund all these people now out of work.

Discuss.

Well it won’t be Dave and his chums with their tax cuts come this April!

you need to check out the stats, benefits are relatively small part of govt spending….you wouldn’t know it by all the right wing hysteria though..

The bigger affect will be loss of their wages in the economy and their taxes in HM’s coffers.

Of the £695bn total spend, only £5b goes on Job seekers allowance (2011-2012 figures).

Benefit spending breakdown 2011-2012 by brf, on Flickr

The bigger affect will be loss of their wages in the economy and their taxes in HM’s coffers.

The large increase in Housing benefit costs,free precriptions,free school meals, job centres, and lots more add to that the lack of customers for shops and trades like i said pushing more buissnesses into insolvency.

2013 should be intresting for al the wrong reasons.

I think the ONS are releasing new labour market stats tomorrow. No doubt the government will announce there are more people in work that ever, and ignore population increases and the amount of part time jobs people are having to do.

Except that behind the high profile high street headlines, official labour market stats are telling a different (if confusing) story….

Unfortunately I cannot see this trend changing.Irrespective of which government is in power.

Our export market has decreased significqantly. If we do not export, it is difficult to see how things will improve.

Opening supermarkets, macdonalds etc. while creating (low paid) jobs,will do little to help the long term UK economy.

We will never compete with overseas sweatshops used by manycompanies. So not sure how any government will change this trend.

Except that behind the high profile high street headlines, official labour market stats are telling a different (if confusing) story….

Let’s not bring facts into a headline debate.

small businesses are fubar too, we have had 2 go pop on us since the new year.

Oops sorry mike!!!

Except that behind the high profile high street headlines, official labour market stats are telling a different (if confusing) story….

explain please

I think the ONS are releasing new labour market stats tomorrow. No doubt the government will announce there are more people in work that ever, and ignore population increases and the amount of part time jobs people are having to do.

Did you know that 214,000 people who are being counted as employed but are actually on government training and back-to-work schemes (unpaid)!

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/jan/15/employment-figures-how-unpaid-get-counted

I think there should be two lots of figures – those with Full-time jobs and those with Part-time jobs

Ok – there are two surprises in the official statistic (at least to date). The first is the fact that the labour market has fared better than expected during this recession. Indeed in the last recorded quarter the ONS states that full-time employment increased, part-time employment fell and the number of unemployed fell.

Second, this is at odds with the weak output data (GDP). This is a puzzle for economists (go and read Stephanie Flanders on the BBC) and for the “Tories doing this deliberately to help their mates’ margins” argument occassionally/frequently heard on here, since it suggests that productivity is going down – ie, employment is rising but output is falling. Edit, and that’s not what the bosses want to hear!

Need to include those who want part time too rather than all in part time. How about who has a job vs who doesn’t but wants one.

Part of the anomaly is that we classify a fair chunk of the unemployed as being employed – see my previous post!

I’d suggest that thm and the rest of the right will use the stats to tell one story, while the left will use them to tell a different one. While nobody actually does anything useful with them other than push his or her agenda.

The other reason the figures are miss-leading is that if you are part time / self employed and your hours have been cut from 40 a week to 1 hour a week, you still show up as employed rather than as 39/40 unemployed. So you can lose a huge amount of productivity without showing any rise in unemployment.

I’d suggest that thm and the rest of the right will use the stats to tell one story, while the left will use them to tell a different one. While nobody actually does anything useful with them other than push his or her agenda.

There is some political intervention, but also the way we collect stats pre-dates our current economic situation and harks back to a jobs-for-life era with one bread winner per family in full time employment or unemployed.

Odd comment DD – I am merely quoting ONS stats and pointing out the objective challenges that they present in interpretation. There are always challenges in data presentation but footflaps arguments do not hold water with most professional economists – hence the on-going debate and attempts to understand.

IMO, the OP makes a rather naive view on the economics of employment by only stating half the story. What must be considered is the number of jobs lots compared to the number of jobs created as this eventuallt determines if unemployment rises or falls. With regards to Blockbusters and HMV, they failed to evolve with an evolving market so in my opinion its, although sad, hardly surprising.

Perhaps we should start counting those who work and are registered tax payer, those who work and dont register for tax (a lot of them), and those who claim benefits including disability and maternity benefits.

Those on training schemes, and apprenticeships, and those on eduction courses.

add them all up and see wht the figures are then.

Barclays Bankare geting rid of a large number of staff now……………. obviously they failed to adapt, or screw the governmnet for some cash like BOS, and northern rock etc etc.

For what I hear you all are asking to much money and should take an 10% pay cut
and be more realistic for your businesses to stay afloat in these unfortunate times

Or keep the same size profit margin but make/buy less

I dont get a f’in penny, times are hard and its not going get better any time soon, no mater what speil the government comes out with

What must be considered is the number of jobs lots compared to the number of jobs created as this eventuallt determines if unemployment rises or falls. With regards to Blockbusters and HMV, they failed to evolve with an evolving market so in my opinion its, although sad, hardly surprising.

Very true, but the answer isn’t all good news. For example, the migration of media distribution from physical items in 100s of local shops to online downloads from remote server farms has created many well paid high tech SW jobs developing the tools etc (e.g. Apple employees). However, as online downloads scales much better and is less labour intensive that selling CDs in shops, the net results will be a loss in jobs.

hence the on-going debate and attempts to understand massage.

Oh I’m only teasing really thm. 😉

tyger – Member
I think there should be two lots of figures – those with Full-time jobs and those with Part-time jobs

But what about those who work part-time but hAve no desire to work full time….

Although these firms were big names and it all sounds gloomy, the actual numbers who have lost their jobs is minuscule in the big picture of the 30m or so of working people in the UK.

Jessops didn’t fail because of the recession, they failed because people have discovered that smart phones are a perfectly adequate replacement for a compact camera and that online businesses without a chain of expensive retail outlets can undercut them on all counts. I was surprised that they lasted so long given that electical/electronics chains closed nearly all of their small shops several years ago.

HMV failed because they were expensive compared to online etailers such as Amazon and many punters who demand instant gratification no longer buy material in hard copy.

HMV and Jessops were victims of the rise of the Internet and changing habits. Nothing else.

As for the armed forces, they are a big overhead to the tax payer and many services personnel know that they are only going to be signed up for a finite time. Sorry, I know there is a moral issue here – young men risking their necks in Afghanistan and other dangerous places, then coming home to join the dole queues. The plus side is that they are very highly trained disciplined people, so these top people should not have any difficulty getting hired in civvy street. The cost increased costs in paying benefits for servicemen in the short term will be a fraction of what we spent on them and their military units.

Rolls Royce cuts are pertaining to military hardware cuts. Another huge saving for the tax payer – all of us. Keeping that going purely for the benefit of the business and it’s employees would be a prime example of loopy socialism at play.

Yes, public spending is way out of control and our economy is in a mess. The solution is making things for export, but we need to be competitive with the likes of China and India. Very difficult!

If we had strong exports and a burgeoning economy, we could afford to keep a larger military, but we don’t, so the rational best thing to do is to cut spending.

It’s a tough world, so you have to MTFU and adapt!

Some mates got briefed today that 5300 will be made redundant. In the next breath they were told to standby for a deployment to North Africa!
3 commando and 16 air assault taken off the rotation for afghan.

“Job Losses Increasing” – give us the official figures then!

teamhurtmore – Member

Indeed in the last recorded quarter the ONS states that full-time employment increased, part-time employment fell and the number of unemployed fell.

But then since 2012 was the all-time underemployment peak, following huge rises in 2009, a fall on last quarter isn’t very informative by itself.

Spongebob, it might be useful if you lost your job and house etc so you can show us all how to MTFU.

You sound like a Tory.

Spongebob – Member

Rolls Royce cuts are pertaining to military hardware cuts. Another huge saving for the tax payer – all of us. Keeping that going purely for the benefit of the business and it’s employees would be a prime example of loopy socialism at play.

It needn’t be “purely for the benefit of the business and it’s employees”. It could also be for the benefit of the country. Losing highly skilled jobs in an area in which Britain leads, whilst ignoring the long term consequences, would be a prime example of loopy Tory short-sightedness at play.

Spongebob – Member

If we had strong exports……

We don’t export much these days, other than defence related exports – most of them aviation related. Britain is still the second largest defence exporter in the world after the USA. But you don’t think the government should consider throwing any sort of life line to the industry during the lean times. I detect a lack of joined up thinking.

spongebob– are you trolling– as your ‘views/opinions seem to imply,if not then you are very drunk-

army/forces people have great problems adapting to civvy street, not least psychological issues after being trained to kill/and rewarded for it– not many jobs in that line of work…

The plus side is that they are very highly trained disciplined people, so these top people should not have any difficulty getting hired in civvy street.

This is quite true, although it’s certainly not good for all of those competing against them for jobs.

The cost increased costs in paying benefits for servicemen nurses, teachers, policemen, firemen etc etc in the short term will be a fraction of what we spent on them

Doesn’t sound quite so good now, does it?

What the govt are doing with the forces is not only going to decimate the effectiveness of the forces, putting part time soldiers in huge numbers into harms way is negligent IMHO. Exactly how good are they going to be with 2 hours training on tuesday nights and a weekend away per month? (that’s a rhetorical question, I know exactly how good they are)
Even the TA SAS are no match for a regular front line unit.

We have vacancies. Mechanical engineer company. Internal sales, project engineers. Production manager, welder fabricators. Email in profile.

ernie_lynch – Member
We don’t export much these days, other than defence related exports – most of them aviation related.

Care to put some figures on that claim?