Friday, February 19, 2010

Resolved!

In a forum I frequent somebody told me of the apprenticeship scam, it is a variation of the new deal scam.

For the new deal 50% of your pay is paid by the government, 50% by the employer, this means uber cheap employees, the crick is that if you perform well the person is kept on. The employer gets some sort of bonus for simply taking them on, what happens though is at the end of the year the person is let go, the positon vacant for a few weeks then another New Deal person is hired the employer gets cheap staff, a bonus etc the cycle continues. Although the person who did it has a years worth of work experience and reference to hand, although the usefulness of this is questionable as if you can hire somebody for 50% of the cost and get a bonus why hire somebody you need to pay fully?.



The scam is this:

Is it a scam however, [edited]or whatever, is taking on 55 at £100 a week, suspicious i'd say. I've just been offered the chance to take on a plumbing apprentice, government scheme, £1500 for me on accepting the youngster, a further £1000 for me after 12 weeks of employing the apprentice. If i pay £100 a week, and sack him at week 13, id be £1200 in pocket.
So there you have it, it effectively means it IS a scam, with 12 weeks work experience it also makes your CV look bad, as it looks as if you can't hack it even if you were a perfectly capable employee. This also says bigger things in that the National minimum wage doesn't actually exist in this country as there are methods to get round it. If people find it hard to make ends meet on NMW then how on earth are people going to get by on apprenticeship wages? of £2.71 a year.

In that yes government top ups are available but doesn't this mean tax payers are subsidising the wages of the low paid? , doesn't this distort and encourage wage fraud?.

In that two businesses A + B , if A hired somebody playing cricket on NMW ,and B hired somebody on an fake apprenticeship then surely B has a slight advantage. This advantage of which he can pass to his clients or take a bigger profit and reinvest, A is at a disadvantage so either continues as normal or plays the same game.

In the end the employees lose out, and again we have the Henry Ford problem, if nobody can afford your goods and services you'll go out of biz.

Oddly enough recessions encourage this in that if something is cheaper for the same thing people will buy it as it stretches their money further. However somebody else pays for the savings you make and longer term everybody pays. Those cheap £5 jeans you see in some supermarket? , somebody in China has taken the job of a British person for that.

I'm not saying British jobs for British people just a moment of consideration as to why things are the way that they are right now.




No comments:

Post a Comment