April 3, 2004
Employment
Yes again... As (ir)regular readers will know this is a particular bugbear of mine, having been made "redundant" last year.
I just can't make the government's unemployment statistics stand up. Minister of State for Work, Des Browne said
Unemployment is at its lowest for nearly thirty years. The even better news is that with the number of new vacancies continuing to grow, we can help more people realise their aspiration of returning to work.
"New vacancies continuing to grow."
That would be all the McJobs that are now being created then. Looking through the papers yesterday (specifically the MEN, the Warrington Guardian and Warrington Mercury) there were lots of jobs but they were basically ALL either sales (or telesales) jobs, customer service jobs or jobs paying £5/hr or less. I don't want to work in sales (don't have the aptitude -- wouldn't sell my grandmother to make a deal). I don't want to man the phones in a customer service battery farm (there's a reason the staff churn in these places is > 50% in some cases) and £5 or less is not a living wage -- it is barely an existance wage given just how high taxes are here.
One of the adverts was for a large insurance company which is opening an office in Manchester employing 500 people. Excellent thinks I and trots off to the website advertised to have a look. "If they're employing 500 people then there must be some openings for IT bods."
I was wrong! Looking through the site and doing multiple searches in their "IT" category there was not a single job being offered doing that kind of work out of the entire 500. What the?!?
Perhaps it's like Keith says about ½ way down this post... Perhaps I'm now "too qualified or too experienced" for the posts available anyway given that there are now seemingly no management jobs being advertised in IT... Certainly that's the feedback I've had from a couple of the positions I've applied for; either that kind of feedback or "Sorry, you don't have the right kind of experience." Excuse me? I don't have the right kind of experience to do a more junior job than I used to do? I don't have the right kind of experience even though you're looking for someone with networking / purchasing, IT vendor management and project management skills? Give me a break.
It's not just me though, out of the people I've kept in touch with from my old workplace who were made redundant at the same time only one of them has just got a job doing admin after 7 months applying. Something is desperately wrong with this economy. It's becoming massively more expensive to live over here, thanks to Gordon and Tony's stealth taxes yet wages just aren't keeping up.
Like I said, I can't make the government statistics add up at all.
Just YESTERDAY there have been announcements of a definite 2070 job cuts at just three companies (Marks & Spencer, BAE Systems and Arla) and another company (Swan Hunter) warning that they may have to let 1500 people go. That's over 3500 jobs potentially lost in 24 hours and these are just the ones that have made the news!
Lowest unemployment for 30 years... Only if you believe the fiddled figures...