Recruitment « Dr Alf's Blog

NHS Job Shop: “Working for Health” in Kentish Town. Closed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As Dr Alf knows , there are further distortions because when the Government cites unemployment figures it counts 2/3rds of the new jobs being created as “self employment”.

These for the most part are not jobs at all but are Companies House, Cardiff records of people who have been made redundant, fired or decided to register a company in parallel with full time working as “insurance ” for when the axe falls or the pressure gets too much. These so called businesses have mostly never traded, never paid anyone any money but were used by people who had been made redundant to claim “Working Tax Credit” by dint of recycling redundancy payments into a business bank account and then pretending to trade or remaining in start up mode.

The Treasury put a stop to the worst abuses but the Government uses these Companies House registrations to lower the unemployment rate and pretend that this represents “success” in economic management.

Local authorities on the one hand pretend that they are victims of “savage cuts” but to a man refuse to employ interims directly, choosing instead to work through recruiters who have umbrella companies.

This love of using middlemen is not accidental, is very costly and creates the opportunity on an industrial scale for financial irregularity and corruption.

However no-one looks at why this should be or at the bank accounts of those engaged in decisions about which middlemen to appoint.

The NHS is even worse and has 3 procurement organisations plus NHS supplies and chooses to use Big 4 management consultants, strategy houses and ex NHS employees.

At the bottom end, employers are using migrant labour to do unskilled work, work that British workers are unwilling to do, or do fast enough, plus of course illegal workers who will work for as little as £2.50 GBP an hour in the garment or fast food trade.
Many UK workers are lazy and unproductive so employers pay them very little as a result but pay themselves extremely well.

Mrs May as a weak and ineffective leader has failed to deal with executive pay for fat cats which creates a situation in which these low paid workers refuse to be more productive and poor employers refuse to set an example whilst punishing the workers for not working properly.

This creates a Mexican Standoff and drives the trend towards more automation, RPO, machine learning and AI.

The political class do nothing leaving the Guardian and people like Haldane to cry crocodile tears.

John Gelmini

View image | gettyimages.com

According to this excellent article in the Independent, prejudice, blocking social mobility in the UK, is widespread. It’s a must-read. Check it out!

via ‘Poshness test’ is the new glass ceiling: Working-class denied top jobs as firms prefer ‘well-travelled candidates with the right accent’ – Home News – UK – The Independent.

The article examines research by Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

Of course, there has always been prejudice in the UK, in favor of the privileged, those with family wealth and social connections.

During my early career, I found that ambitious, hard-working and talented people from working-class backgrounds often had an edge – they’d grown up in the school of ‘hard-knocks’ and were quicker to seize opportunities, where privileged people felt socially uncomfortable and ill-prepared.

These days, increasingly, with downsizing, offshoring, robotics, and increasing deployment of technology, there are fewer jobs to go round, so there’s a different challenge. People with connections get the unpaid work experience in privileged organizations in their holidays and they are able to do exotic things in their gap year etc.

It’s commendable that the UK government and some leading firms are committed to social mobility. But the reality is that there is not a level playing field.

Let me turn this to an open open question: