Well, that budget was a doozy wasn’t it? Thankfully they didn’t put up tuition fees (I’m gonna thank the Liberals in government for that), but there a whole lotta stuff just happened to do with employment. So let’s dig in a little here.
The public sector has stopped hiring. As part of the cutting back of government bureaucracy, the public sector has stopped hiring people - cutting out tens (and potentially hundreds) of thousands of jobs created annually, of which some 25,000 are usually reserved graduates. Additionally, with these £6 billion or so of cuts, we’re going to see a lot of existing civil service staff be laid off.
The age of retirement is going up to 66. While that’s not much of a rise from 65, it is a stepping stone on making it higher still. Iain Duncan Smith (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) said last night that he wanted to raise retirement up to 70 at some point in the future. That’s only adding a few hundred thousand more people to the job pool, and more still as people live for longer.
It also - if somewhat tenuously - links to the whole “help the rich” vibe you tend to get from the Conservative party. After all, the affluent are the people who live longest. Your average working class manual labourer will statistically only survive a few years after retirement, while a member of the middle and upper classes can enjoy over 20 years of life after 65. It’s not true in every case, but enough to be statistically significant.
They’re cutting benefits for those out of work. Be it for disability or just plain unemployment, you’re gonna get less money. The amount of time you’re allowed to claim unemployment benefits is being reduced, meaning people are going to have to find work faster before being left out in the cold (something rather difficult I would think, now that there’s half a million more unemployed people).
Over the coming years they are going to evaluate people classed as disabled to see whether they are actually capable of work - something they may struggle to do, seeing as there aren’t even standardised tests to detect many mental disorders, which are instead diagnosed through psychiatric procedures. These tests are (apparently) going to be very strict, so let’s add another bunch of people to the job market, trying to survive on the (now reduced) jobseekers allowance while searching for work.
Job centres are closing down. While I do not think this was mentioned in the recent budget, it was part of the Conservative party manifesto as part of the whole cutting back of work and pensions and blah-de-blah. Saving money by closing down state-run job centres and replacing them with either private-sector or charity run organisations. Of course, if it’s private-sector then they’re going to want money to help people find work (which I doubt many will do when living solely off benefits), and charities depend on - well, charity. It’s by no means certain whether you’ll be able to find a place to find work at all.
So let’s see, they’ve added hundreds of thousands more people to the job market (through public sector cuts, raising unemployment age, cutting disability and unemployment benefits), made it harder to find work (through flooding the market and closing job centres), then penalised people who can’t find a job (through reduced benefits). Totally makes sense!
And all this during a recession, when the Keynesian principle of full-employment is at it’s most critical - you NEED people to be in work in order to keep the flow of cash through businesses. If you want to roll-back spending in benefits and welfare, don’t do it by making MORE people depend on benefits and welfare!
I feel a facepalm coming on.
Update: What did I tell you?
