[News] Is Britain work shy ?

[Chicken Run]

I started all my kids working for the family business in year9 followed by working for local businesses owned by friends when they were 16. I’m talking shop work, cafe work, restaurant work and bar work at 18

I taught them - BE EARLY every single shift, TURN UP for work every single shift, DO NOT EVER phone in sick because you don’t want to work … in fact don’t phone in sick if you have a cough or a cold or a headache. Always Turn Up and you will immediately be in the top 10% of employees your age no matter what your levels of skill or ability.

Part of the same lecture was to first learn your job, then learn every one else’s job at your level and make sure the boss knows they can call you in at short notice when someone doesn’t turn up for work - because that is guaranteed to happen.

More parents need to be like you, the next generation of working age young people have grown up watching their parent/s to as little as possible for their weekly wage so it’s no surprise that they want a bit of the same

Edit yeah i know there are know parents like that here on NSC x

 

[Weststander]

Easy to forget when discussing these things also a massive change that has happened in the last 50 years that changes the "moral code of working" and this changes the sense of achievement.

In industrial society, most people either harvested resources or worked in factories producing stuff out of resources.

Everything counted. When you went into that mine, you improved your country (and your own situation). When you fed the workers that did it, likewise. When your factory either built something that was used domestically or exported, it improved your country.

Service society isn't like that. The average new job is to produce things that don't exist in the physical reality to people who have no use of what they're buying and it only benefits a group of foreign American, Chinese or Qatarian men who you will never meet in reality.

The idea that working means "improving society" is a relic from days long behind. The average occupation in 2024 is wizardry. "Administration". "Customer service". "IT services". Common jobs outside of wizardry includes creating a gigantic Chinese produced junkyard of abundance, universally recognised as the largest threat to humanity.

Kids know this shit.

They know everything is fake.

In fact, a lot of them - through hearing about crypto - also know that the money is fake. The current ones have even seen it with their own eyes:
Throughout their entire lives, they get to hear about various crises due to underfunding of society. A lack of money to build houses and bla bla. They also get to hear about how important it is to work, because it is valuable to society.

Then covid comes and 80% of their parents are told to go home and masturbate for the next six months because in reality no one needs them. The money that didn't exist to create their future is suddenly created out of thin air to help bank, companies and people pay the rents as they sit at home.

To us who are 30+ maybe it doesn't impact the lens in which we see society all that much, but to most younger people it must have created a mindfuck. "What is this shit?", "Whats the point?", "Is anything real?".

This was sort of a Pandora's box experience to them. Once you get to the point where you ask yourself "what is the point of sitting around for eight hours telling people to restart their computer?" you're in the deep shit. Asking these existential questions may have been romanticised by suicidal poets and bearded batshit crazy hermits, but they harm people. Both living with those thoughts and the escape routes from those thoughts are often non-compatible with inspiration.

The two different way forwards is, I guess, either to literally force people to work or create a society where people spend more time drinking tea and less time on wizardy and pollution. I'm strongly in favour of the latter.

Interesting.

Another aspect, obvious (enhanced money numbers) for 20 years now, is that when anyone buys a home with a bank loan in southern England, or say Stockholm, Paris, Japan, Munich, NYC, even Prague now (as pointed out to us by a cabbie there), a great proportion of that financial commitment and financial cash outflows over the next 30 years is simply paying off the land value and the interest on that. We're talking huge sums now, highly valuable land. Stemming from a huge property 'boom' under Blair, Brown and then the Tories, in the case of the UK. In Prague because of German and Italian investors we were told.

Whereas you're not doing that in for example Lincolnshire, Northumberland and most of North Yorkshire, at least at a far lesser degree.

In 1997 Manhattan and Tokyo were stand out very expensive places to buy, to live. Now there are huge tracts of the western World that are exactly the same.

I wonder if if anything different could've been done to prevent much of this? Nimbies made damn sure it happened in the south of England.

 

[Pavilionaire]

This is an attitude I can only despair at..

The cheapest property to rent in Burgess Hill pcm is £1,150 a month. Six years ago when I was renting, it was £780…

Add council tax (100 pcm), Food bills (200 pcm) utilities (150) thats £1,600 a month before you factor in phone/internet ; travel costs; money to spend on yourself..
Living like a hermit you still need to net out £2,200 a month just to standstill, for a one bed flat in mid-sussex.

Gross that up… you need to be on an income of approaching £40k just to rent a property. Average UK salary for a 20-29yr old, £25k..

It is categorically not entitlement, it is despondency and a lack of meaningful opportunity to progress careers / earnings at pace for many.

Compare this situation to some landlords who own property outright, unencumbered by loan or mortgage. When interest rates go up the cost of mortgages goes up, so for buy-to let landlords this cost is passed on to tenants in the form of higher rents which - in turn - increase the market cost of renting.

This means double bubble for unencumbered property owners, who can increase their rental in line with the market rise without actually having any additional cost themselves. They can then pay the - now higher - rental income into their ISA and receive the - now higher - interest on their savings, tax-free.

In simplistic terms, when they die they can simply pass on the property to their spouse who then gets the probate value uplift on death, and can then transfer the property to the kids at this uplifted price, so no CGT, and the kids can either cash in at no CGT or sell at a later date. This preserves property assets / capital in the family in perpetuity, ensuring that wealth inequality is baked in the UK for generations to come, and is partly why the cost of an average house for an average worker on average wages is now 8 x earnings, rather than 4 x earnings.

 

[kevo]

Very few people have a job they love

Most of us fall into one of two categories either a job you hate or (mostly) a job you don’t hate. People said to me you love your job, I said no I just don’t hate it.

Classic question to avoid for anyone doing social research/surveys etc is to ask 'How would you rate your job out of ten?' A large proportion of people will say '7'.

As you say, very few people love their jobs, but if their jobs were that bad, they'd probably leave/find something else.

 

[dsr-burnley]

Compare this situation to some landlords who own property outright, unencumbered by loan or mortgage. When interest rates go up the cost of mortgages goes up, so for buy-to let landlords this cost is passed on to tenants in the form of higher rents which - in turn - increase the market cost of renting.

This means double bubble for unencumbered property owners, who can increase their rental in line with the market rise without actually having any additional cost themselves. They can then pay the - now higher - rental income into their ISA and receive the - now higher - interest on their savings, tax-free.

In simplistic terms, when they die they can simply pass on the property to their spouse who then gets the probate value uplift on death, and can then transfer the property to the kids at this uplifted price, so no CGT, and the kids can either cash in at no CGT or sell at a later date. This preserves property assets / capital in the family in perpetuity, ensuring that wealth inequality is baked in the UK for generations to come, and is partly why the cost of an average house for an average worker on average wages is now 8 x earnings, rather than 4 x earnings.

If a landlord with no mortgages hasn't enough spare profit already to use up his ISA allowance, then he surely isn't a big enough landlord to distort the housing market?

Also, how do they know which spouse is going to die first, and what happens if husband and wife die less than 7 years apart? Obviously we can hope that no child ever predeceases its parents, though it doesn't always work out that way; but assessing which spouse will live longer is more problematic.

 

[RyFish]

Plenty today regarding the thread title and apparently 9.5 million out of education, looking for work, training etc. Maybe others will see it differently but as one caller described on R5 if you are in work then moving around the employment market is so much easier and as some have said you won't get the job you always want so take a job and press on. Your thoughts.

No. Every older generation since the dawn of time has complained about younger generations being workshy. It was nonsense then and it's nonsense now