Saturday, October 20, 2012

Britain Becoming a Nation of Part-Time Shop Assistants



I welcome any fall in unemployment, but it has to be a genuine fall and not this big lie that is currently being put about by the Tory led government.

The cut in unemployment is almost entirely due the phenomenal increase in low paid part-time work.

There are currently over a million people working part-time because they cannot find full-time positions in a depressed flat-lining economy. Growth has been stifled and the economic recovery, which was underway in May 2010 (when the coalition government came to power) has been strangled. To get this into perspective, if these one million people were to lose their part-time jobs or were to leave their part-time positions then the unemployment figure would rise rapidly by almost a million. This is not an 'if' it could actually happen when the government's flagship universal welfare policy of cutting tax credits for low paid workers comes into play next year.

In 2013 David Cameron's government, and welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith, will be cutting benefits from those in low paid part-time work - unless, they can get extra work to fit in with their existing part-time hours (which may not be available), or they can get their employers to increase their pay or their hours, which is highly unlikely to happen. If people cannot increase their hours above 16 per week then they will lose part, or all of their working tax credits. This will force people to leave their positions as they will become financially untenable. The government will actually be penalising people because their employers are paying them the minimum wage or below, instead of forcing employers to pay a living wage. This will in turn increase the benefits bill as it will force people to become entirely dependent on the state and it will also increase unemployment figures. Where does this fit in with Cameron and IDS making work pay? How can it pay when they are actively making people poor and keeping the poor even poorer?

The government are trying to force people into doing 2, 3 or even 4 jobs in order to make ends meet. This is not being done for the benefit of the person, it is being done solely for the benefit of the government who can then trumpet they have brought down unemployment figures and also so they do not have to pay people any benefits. People do not realise that most people that Cameron is attacking are already in work, it's low paid part-time work, yet Cameron is playing fast and loose and divide and rule with the lives of countless thousands of people and their families. Cameron also has a pilot scheme looking into problem families, how will forcing parents out of the home for hours on end where they cannot see or take control of their children improve the life chances of children from those homes? The Government is helping to breed not only a lost generation, but also a whole new generation of super-latchkey kids who are unlikely to be able to see much if anything at all of one, or even both parents! The Tories once dubbed the "nasty party" by the now Home Secretary, Theresa May, are storing up huge problems, their policies are helping to breed more anti-social problems for society to try and deal with in the future when there will be scant resources available to tackle them. Cameron, IDS and Osborne, are all multi millionaires born into wealth and privilege, they have absolutely no idea what it is like to be poor and neither do their children, it's our children who are going to suffer under this harsh unyielding regime, our children's education, health and welfare and that's *your* children too! Education, welfare and the NHS are being privatised and are being slowly eroded and taken out of the reach of the ordinary person.
Cameron is playing a very class ridden dangerous game with our society and our communities and he needs to be stopped and we can all start by recognising just what a totally misleading picture he is currently painting about the true nature of unemploylemt in this country.
Unemployment is falling due to soaring numbers of low-paid part-time jobs, figures reveal.   The jobless total fell 50,000 to 2.53 million in the three months to August, while last month the number of those claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance dropped 4,000 to 1.57 million. An “Olympic effect”, which created 100,000 temporary positions during London 2012, was credited for helping to put a record 29.59 million people in work since 1971. But, according to the Office for National Statistics, 125,000 new positions were only part-time and another 1.4 million part-time workers have failed to find full-time posts.Some 897,000 people had been out of work for 12 months or more in the three months to August, up 13,000 on the previous quarter. While youth unemployment dipped below the one million mark for the first time in a year, down 62,000 to 957,000, long-term youth unemployment has tripled in the same period, from 25,300 to 78,600.There were also still more than 1.6 million workers in temporary jobs. The Mirror

Even Mark Wallace of the Institute of Directors admits that we have an unequal national insurance system, where it is actually cheaper for an employer to hire two part-time workers rather than one full-time worker and with at least 2½ million unemployed increasing the flexibility of the labour market, this is exactly what employers are doing and this is what the government is encouraging employers to do as this enables the Tories to skew the unemployment figures. More in my opinion this is what the government have probably asked employers to do in private. This apparent fall in unemployment isn't what it seems and it is concealing a huge problem which will pretty soon explode.

Employers must start behaving responsibly and pay their workers a proper decent living wage, if they cannot do this, if they cannot treat their employees properly then they have no business being in business, this is 2012, not the Victorian era! The government cannot go on attacking those on benefits while allowing Tory supporting companies to suck the state dry in the form of paying their workers low wages and forcing the state to pick up the tab and then the Tory PM deciding that they are no longer even going to support the low paid in order to keep them in work.

This is all part of the Tory plan that they are not telling us about. The Conservatives backed by Liberal Democrat MPs are driving down standards in the form of driving down pay and workers rights. This they are doing to assist the Tory supporting companies to get away with paying their staff low-wages and by taking away workers rights to complain about conditions and unfair dismissal etc, they are rendering workers impotent and too weak to fight back. This is the financial readjustment Cameron and Osborne keep talking about, only they do not tell you that it is you and your families who will be the ones who are forced to readjust paying with your standard and quality of lives! While of course the rich get richer, get taxed less and the bankers just get away with everything.
  • Part-time workers are not classed as unemployed so are not registered.
  • Self employed workers who are not working are not classed as unemployed so are not registered
  • 1000s of JSA claimants are forced to work full-time for nothing, so are not registered
  • People on courses and are not getting paid are also removed from unemployment register
  • People forced to do voluntary work are also removed from the unemployment register
This is how the Conservative government helped by the Liberal Democrats are actually falsifying the unemployment figures - don't be fooled. Britain is becoming a nation of part-time shop assistants and while this continues no one will have money to do anything and demand in the economy will never pick up and we will be stuck in limbo of zero or low growth.

Under this Tory led coalition government Britain is fast becoming an intolerant and more divided society and that is entirely down to David Cameron using 'divide and rule tactics, in order to push his Dickensian policies through and it's not by accident, it is solely by design! he and Osborne and Clegg have planned this, it's part of their strategy to cause dissent amongst good decent people, set them against each other, divide them, steal their votes and get themselves re-elected.

Welfare reforms yes things have to change and progress to an ever changing needs of people, but not at the expense of the poor, disabled, vulnerable and elderly. Cameron is destroying everything about our society that makes us proud to be British, not only will it all end in tears, it will undoubtedly end in rising crime as people steal to feed and clothe themselves and their families. It will end in riots with disaffected youth feeling they have nothing to lose and nothing to live for. Meanwhile Cameron is allowed to go on falsifying the unemployment statistics for his own gain, trying to conceal the fact that Britain is being governed by the most incompetent right wing government of all time. It will not be long before we start seeing whole families evicted onto the streets poor, destitute with their children being forcibly removed from them and taken into care.

Britain looks after its people, this is quintessentially British, if we are not this, then what as a people are we - exactly?

1 comment:

R33 said...

Superb article Gracie. When the Tories keep saying that "we have to compete with India and China" they are deadly serious!

When they watch programmes on TV about the Third world and see the grinding poverty there, they don't feel empathy and compassion for the poor in these countries and the awful conditions they are forced to live in, no, all they see is the kind of abject poverty they would very much like to see on these shores!

Have you noticed the TV programmes and radio shows showing and praising the "plucky", "hardworking" and "resourceful" Indian and Chinese poor that are "still happy, optimistic and cheerful despite their poverty" that have been on TV a lot recently? That is the level of poverty and squalor they intend to inflict on the British people. They fully intend to turn Britain into a Third World country. They are trying to romanticise horrendous poverty and squalor to brainwash us into accepting it here.

These sick greedy maniacs have convinced themselves that the welfare state has "spoiled" us and made us "soft" and "dependent" and that if they take it away from us, we will become more hardworking and more resourceful, ready to compete with the rest of the world.

This is how these treasonous bastards justify their pathological greed and selfishness to themselves. They tell themselves eliminating the welfare state and privatising the country is necessary "for the greater good of the country".

It's clear to me that our ruling class fully intend to do away with the welfare state entirely, to create a sink or swim survival of the fittest society and the "reforms" are merely the first stages of this.

I was listening to Radio 4 last year when I had chicken pox and I heard a German banker come on the radio and say "You British can't afford to have a welfare state anymore, it's over" in a brusque, arrogant, matter-of-fact, blasé way. I was stunned, I couldn't believe what I was hearing, because normally they don't have guests on mainstream radio stations who say things like that so directly.

When I heard it, I thought to myself, "how the hell can a German banker come on British radio and tell us that our welfare state is no longer affordable and that we must get rid of it!" That confirmed even more for me that this attack on the rights and living standards of the people of Europe, has been decided and is being coordinated above the level of elected governments.