Snow

The first white Christmas I've seen in a while, lots of people can't get to work, though here it makes no difference as I work odd hours anyway. Also that there are so many unemployed people nobody goes out anyway.

Asda shelf stackers

Alex from the last post introduced me to a supermarket shelf stacking job, its something NMW I naturally applied for it handing in my typed up CV. I was told thank you we'll give you a call as she dropped it (my CV) onto a pile which looked 4-5 reams of paper thick.

Each ream is 500 sheets, by my reckoning at least 1-1500 people applied for this job.

Historical update

I didn't get the job, many are in the same boat as me and they need something, with such an oversupply of labour I the employers can pick and choose. I don't think it is going to be a very merry Christmas.

An old friend

Today I met an old friend from high school, its been 14 years since I left highschool with a handful of GCSEs and dreams of a better future.

His name is Alex, he will never read this blog and I make no reference to his surname so he won't mind me mentioning him. He has been in and out of work since high school when we left in 1996.

I bought him a coffee and had a chat in that effectively he had never had a job that was not a contract job, all of his jobs were short 6-9 month contracts whereby he was usually given the push at the end of it. He is a nice guy, but he looks kind of ill but I've not been in contact with him all that much.

I think back to my accounting jobs, the same thing happened to me, nobody there was actually an employee everybody was a temp worker, in that this did two things it gave nobody any rights or protection from being fired. It also saved on redundancy money.

These trends are disturbing to me, in that I feel that the legacy of the 00s as it is nearly the end of a decade is good for the corporates and those at the top but will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of the staff and the employees. Job security was bad before, now I think it has to be redefined. In that I sometimes think far into the future as an old man (if I live that long) where myself and my friends are in a pub talking about the good old days about job security rather than everybody working temp contracts.

I believe that the youth of the future if there is a youth of the future (as economic pressures mean nobody can afford to have children) will not believe us at all.

Revenge of the internship/apprenticeship

I've noticed in my job search a rather disturbing trend lately, in that there are more apprenticeships and internships. This is a good thing you might say. Normally I would agree to this, in that there are many people trapped in the no experience trap who cannot get experience without a job. Ironically they cannot get a job without experience so what to do...

The answer lay in internships and apprenticeships, you get paid travelling costs to do a job for a certain amount of time which gives you experience. This in normal times works great.... as it allows people to put a foot in the door and have some work experience in which they can show their next employer.

Unfortunately we are not in normal times I am afraid... in that an internship is either unpaid or has very little pay.

Apprenticeships on t he other hand are exempted from the national minimum wage and therefore can pay a minimum of £95 a week.

There is usually a sort of unspoken deal in professions from accountants, lawyers to metal workers in that they hire apprentices so that the apprentices learn something and gain experience from old hands in the business.

My case in point was as an accountant, I started out really low, I was taught how things worked and this training formed part of my 'pay'.

Or my mechanic friends, they would be tasked on their first days to make tea and watch, they would then be tasked menial jobs such as washing cars, cleaning the toilets making tea and sweeping and mopping the floors. Once they showed reliability they would be given basic mechanics jobs like changing oil. Over time their responsibilities would be enhanced until one day they were on an even level with that of the mechanics.


Whats the problem ? I hear you mumbling already.


The problem is apprenticeships have moved down in the chain, in that jobs which a person can be trained in within 5 minutes are being turned to apprenticeships. I'm sorry but I forgot to get screen grabs. But here are some examples:

Office junior apprenticeship:

Hold on! , what does an office junior do?, they photocopy, answer the phone, open the post and perform basic filing duties and the odd office erand. That is all, the training and learning lasts less than an hour a day if the company is particularly diligent in their training.

Cleaner apprenticeship

Back in the 1990s I had to work for a while as a cleaner, I do not believe there is any job other than sexual services that are below me, its money, I (so far) have not had to sell myself for sex (yet). In the 1990s I was handed a mop a bucket and a trolley of detergents and told I would figure it out. I did after 10 minutes. The training ended there and then I was an ok paid cleaner after day 1, the learning ceased there and the.


The problem is these are now turned into long term apprenticeships which pay £95 a week for 40 or so hours, how can employers do this? . On a NMW job a person on 40 hours a week will be paid £232 gross, and yet employers are being nasty enough and that isn't too strong a word to cut the pay of their lowest paid staff by £137 a week.

Insanity, pure insanity...



As a boot note I am too old to go on an apprenticeship.

Death of the dole queue

As I will point out again I'm not on the dole I am underemployed just scraping by on NMW on horribly low hours. But this article caught my eye.

A positive experience on the job centre


However the comments at the bottom are most scathing here are a selection:

crumble1987

22 Sep 2009, 10:55AM

By far the most ridiculous part of the jobcentre process is that to sign up/enquire further about a job, without going into the centre, you must ring a premium rate phone number. I recently applied for jobseekers allowance for the first time and due their internet site not working, I was forced to ring from my mobile. This cost me £15 before I had even attended for the first time.

My only other experience of the job centre is during my time as a student, my girlfriend required jobseekers allowance. Due to us living in a shared house (despite having separate bedrooms) she was forced to make a joint claim. The member of staff then proceeded to tell me I needed to be looking for a job despite being in full time education. He then made up some job prospects for me, telling me I would never need to come back as long as there was something on the system. My girlfriend was then rejected from receiving jobseekers allowance due to me being a student. Obviously I was supposed to support us both on a £3000 a year loan.

HumanBoeing

22 Sep 2009, 10:42AM

You have to lie at the dole, that's what pisses me off the most. You can't just say what's true, that yes, you are looking for a job that isn't a shit job and no, you're not sending off three applications a week for arsehole jobs that no tosspot in their right mind would want to do.

So you have to lie; you become a liar by necessity; if you tell them the truth you don't get the dole.

Happy 100th birthday jobcentre

100th birthday


But will it see its 101st? , in that all I see around me are job centres closing down staff not being replaced, my local job centre has been replaced by a get to work place which never appears to open and has a conspicious lack of opening hours.

Job Scams

Gumtree used to be good for job adverts but in the throes of the depression page after page after page of scams. All of these 'jobs' require you to pay a registration fee first in which to get a few links to a job survey thing. I've never tried them but working as an accountant I've seen the other side of them, yes my old firm used to do the accounts for one of these scams.

You must squeeze!

My kitchen portering job isn't exactly satisfying or well paid but at least it is a job right?.

Unfortunately this job is shortly going to end. My bosses the Bangladeshi couple who run a micro restaurant in the back street of a backwater little town received today their Business rates bill which quite frankly is incredible. Per 1 Sq metre they have to pay the government £300. which is incredible as they last year paid £120 per sq metre.

The government's finances are bad, and they are so bad they think they can squeeze businesses and the productive to get their money back.


They are wrong...


The government have squeezed so hard that my employers have decided to close down at the end of January. The business rates have gone up 250% over the past year and quite simply their moddest living of the prior periods has turned to nothing. Very clever eh?

Looks like packers jobs are going to vanish too

In past times there were always jobs which you could fall back on, meat packing, cleaning, resturant jobs but even these jobs are being taken over. So there are no jobs in the middle, no jobs at the bottom, what the hell is the UK population going to do?.

Is part time the new black?

The economic apocalypse has sped ahead a trend that seems to habe ingrained already that is the move away from full time for part time hours in many jobs. This is less damaging than say in the US of A where by if you are a part time worker they don't give you health insurance. Though this seems to be common in the low paid part of the jobs market. This shows a big serious financial blow to both the government's taxes and the people who are affected. When I worked as an accountant this seemed to be a trend which I had to adjust the employee figures for.

In fact its even worse in that although people may work less hours, those hours are spread over the week therefore the travel costs of a full time job are incurred for the pay of a part time job. So that people are squeezed on both sides!, the value of their free time is diminished and they still have to pay the full costs of getting to work. A week bus ticket or a year's road tax and insurance does not get cheaper because you work less hours. I dispair at this. The nightmare of zero hour contracts that plague the American jobs market seem destined to take root here too, the future looks rather bleak.

Next door neigbour lost his job today

My friend the guy next door, well not quite next door but a few doors down was handed his P45 today, he has been reduced from a 40K a year job as a printer manager down to that of a NMW warehouse assistant. Good on him but he is 62 years old and lugging boxes around in a warehouse.

I wonder how long this can continue..

More fake jobs

I recieved a glowing email offering me a job (in accountancy as I am underemployed there is a big difference) £19,000 a year not bad 32 hours a week. I was invited to attend an interview but on the morning of the said interview the job was mysteriously withdrawn. Which dashed my hopes, less than 3 hours later the same job identical in wording was readvertised online.

Surely there must be something against this sort of insidious practice in getting peoples' hopes up about getting out of their current situation?


Although I complain about it now this isn't new, when I first started out in 2004, I was asked to attend an actual interview in Cornwall just off Penzance from Manchester in the winter. Thats 373 miles away. I used to ride a motorbike at the time as it was cheap effective transport. I rode 359 miles in the rain and cold on mind numbing motorway costing me 6 gallons of petrol in and 6 gallons of petrol out £61 each way.

As I left the seemingly positive interview I felt rather happy about being given a chance, how wrong and naive I was then. I was told by SMS message that sorry the job did not actually exist they just wanted to interview graduates to see how much they should increase the pay of their current staff. Had I not been travelling up the A38 towards another fake job in Edinburgh I'd have probably been angry and broken something. It pains me now and I get chest pains considering the anger and betrayal I felt at that.

20 hours later I had gone to Edinburgh and attended a similar fake job, I was £200 down from my megre savings and had nothing to show for it.

Job centre plus not fit for purpose

Not fit for purpose

In a recent post I talked about how critical it is that Job Centre Plus (JCP) gets its act together to support the increasing number of us who are forced to rely on their support. These days I regularly hear quite demoralizing tales about the culture shock experienced by senior folk who have never been in a Job Centre before in their lives.

I saw a news report with the new Secretary of State - Yvette Cooper (well known to us in regeneration of course) - being challenged about recent negative public comment that JCP has been receiving. She talked about how the organisation has transformed itself since the 1970s.

Well I should hope it has!

But doesn't she miss the point? The issue is not how JCP (and its forebears) has improved over the past 40 years, but whether it is currently fit for purpose. The issue is: does JCP meet our needs today?

And I fear it does not.

Many of the changes have been superficial - new brand, new job titles, private-sector language, advertisements on the TV and radio. But the essence of what it does has not changed at its heart. Any marketing expert or business person will tell you that, to meet the needs of your customers, you have to accept that individual needs vary enormously. One size does not fit all. A process of customer segmentation defines their needs and products and services are developed to meet those needs. So someone with no qualifications looking to develop IT skills needs to be treated differently from a budding entrepreneur. The latter, in particular, needs to be taken out of the system and supported on their own individual journey.

Surely the time has come for the Department for Work and Pensions, JCP, government agencies, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) and any other professional body in this field to get together to develop a new, more radical, segmented, truly customer-focussed model? A model that is fit for purpose and one that will adapt and endure future (inevitable) economic and social crises. Linking this to support for business - the creation of new businesses and support for those with potential - is critical.

The CIPD is predicting some 600,000 job losses in the public sector by 2012. Where else are the jobs we so urgently need going to come from?

One job lost every 30 seconds

Job lost every 30 seconds

Admittedly this is the daily mail we are talking about here, but the figures that are appearing, appear to be terrible. Various pundits predict it is going to get EVEN worse...

This isn't good news.

Fake jobs

These are a bane on the jobseeker, there are actually several kinds of fake jobs and I'll detail them here:


#1 Is a real job but advertised in such a manner that NOBODY can get that job. You might ask why on earth do people put these jobs up then if they do not want anybody. Well UK and French laws state that you can only hire people from outside the EU if you have advertised the job here for a certain period of time. Then you can give it to somebody outside the EU, in effect it is going through the motions.

#1.1 This can also exist as an internal job, this is somewhat normal in council jobs where the job description is so incredibly narrow somebody who already works in a lower job has been groomed to do this job. Hence this isn't really a job open to the market as it is again going through the motions.


#2 Is a more insidious kind of fake job, in that there is no actual job but jobs are advertised under vague terms. The client does not exist, the above jobs in the picture are all fake, out of about 40 or so jobs they are fake. But comes the decry but these sites charge money to post adverts, they do, but not always...

In that if you go to a jobsite and find no jobs what do you think?, its not a very good jobs website is it?. Hence certain jobs websites allow agencies to put up fake jobs for a lower or lesser fee so that it LOOKS as if there are plenty of jobs. I have questioned directors of such agencies before and they always deny that this is the case. Here is an example
Looks pretty convincing doesn't it? , however make a few mockups of your CV and post them, universally you will be invited to an interview, and yet all of a sudden the job is withdrawn mysteriously. The agencies always hide behind the wall of client priviledge so that there is no employer and people think that it is just their bad luck, but when this occurs constantly then your suspicions start getting aroused in that surely there cannot be so many withdrawn jobs and or filled vacancies?

1/4 employers do not use JCP

Here

According to Personnel Today a survey conducted by the British Chambers of Commerce has found that only 1 in 4 employers advertise their vacancies with Job Centre Plus. This is quite interesting if you consider recent changes to the rules for sponsoring migrant workers under Tier 2 of the Points Based System which require employers to advertise jobs to resident workers using Job Centre Plus (and using one other relevant method) before issuing a certificate of sponsorship. I wonder if this will mean that Job Centre Plus starts being used more…

More redundancies

My old firm announced yet more compulsory redundancies today, two of the staff N and K whos privacy I will protect by not naming them directly. Were in effect given the push, everybody was feeling that in the air anyway. But this firm is seriously cutting back. I wonder if it was a blessing in disguise in to be let away sooner rather than later as the fear and uncertainty which arises is stressful at the best of times.

I've had a theory that firings happen now and again to scare the staff into compliance, though I wonder if this will turn into a cascade? A prior work place had a cascade occur where in a period of 6 months there was a turn over of 100% of the staff.

Job centre closures

So whos bright idea was this?, Radcliffe has a job centre closed, Bolton also had a job centre closed, sooo how are people supposed to find work? The mind boggles

Under employment

Things are pretty bad out there nobody seems to be hiring, at least in the accountancy field. In that accountants feel its bad, in that when clients jobs take an hour when they previously took 2-3 days you know its bad.

Anedotally when I was still working as an accountant I worked near the payroll department, it was an absolute apocalypse, we, or rather they kept on running out of pre-printed p45 slips we would have deliveries almost daily and still they would run out of them. I wonder how bad it is going to get as this is presumably just the start.

I have however found a job as a kitchen porter working for a bangladeshi resturant in a small town not far from where I live. They are a nice couple who smile an awful lot, I help out now and again lifting and doing the chopping as well as washing the dishes. Pay? , national minimum wage £5.85 an hour.

Although granted working as an accountant wasn't exactly the highest paid job in the world either, I used to make just under £10 an hour. But its a big fall from grace when I used to earn about £270 a week post tax down to £117 a week. Being under 25, single and renting I am ineligible for any benefits. Although I would probably not take them anyway as it is an admission of defeat.

P45 day

It is often said that a recession is when your next door neigbour loses his job, a depression is when you lose your job.

Today was that day.... I received my P45 for you non Brits out there this is a summary of your pay to date. Ideally it shows your gross pay and your net pay for the purposes of giving it to your next employer so that they can work out how much tax to deduct of you when you start working.

P45s are in 3 pieces for this purpose, one which you keep for your records, one which can be goven to HMRC so you can claim back any tax in the unfortunate case of not being able to find a job shortly. The other one is to be given to your next employer.

At the very least I was given a week of pay for severance purposes, but you know its bad when you are given marching orders in the middle of the busiest period of the year for accountants.


Anybody want to hire an ACCA qualified accountant?

Something is going on

I can't log onto my computer or email at work and my jobs assignment board does not go beyond January, I think I am about to be made redundant.