Worklessness crisis will take decades to fix, says Asda boss
Story by Hannah Boland, The Telegraph, 9/14/24
EDITORIAL:
The reason youth don’t want to seek employment is because they don’t get REAL economic power by working:
- They don’t own themselves, because they can’t opt out of W-4 withholding and reporting.
- Wages have stagnated so there is no incentive to get better at your job.
- They don’t have any direct control over how the money they earn is spent by the government. Tax returns should be optional, as should W-4 withholding and reporting. If they could take home all that they earn and owned ALL of it, and only paid for what THEY decide they want, they would be truly empowered and engaged to rejoin the workforce.
If you REALLY want people to return to both the workforce and the ballot box, offer them the choices documented in:
FTSIG.ORG opening page, Section 13
https://ftsig.org/#13._A
Until then, they will shun work, be distracted by computer gaming, fornication, and pornography, and live in mom and dad’s basement well into their thirties as many of them are now doing.
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Fixing Britain’s worklessness crisis will take decades, City grandee Lord Rose has warned.
Lord Rose, the chairman of Asda and previously the chairman of Marks & Spencer and Ocado, said the Government should reform the benefits system to encourage more people into work.
He said: “We can’t just become a state now where people just live on handouts. ‘Oh, I’m not feeling very well. Oh, I’ve got a headache. Oh, it’s a bit cold this morning. Oh, I’m feeling a bit tired. Oh, I’m a bit stressed out.’
“I’m not being rude. And people will say I’m some toff who’s got a silver spoon in his mouth. Well, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon. I was born and lived in a caravan. I’m 75 years old and I’m still working.”
A total of 2.8m people of working age say long-term sickness means they are unable to work or look for work, according to the Office for National Statistics. That is up from 2.2m before the pandemic.
Along with students, they make up a growing share of the 9.3m people aged between 16 and 64 who are officially classed as “economically inactive” because they are neither employed nor looking for a job. The total has risen from 8.4m pre-Covid.
Lord Rose, a Conservative peer, said: “We must increase productivity. We must tackle these 2.8m people who are economically inactive. We must make sure that we’ve got the benefit system in balance.
“Sure, we’ve got to help those who are the needy ones. But equally, we have to make sure that those who are more able to contribute than they are doing at the moment are encouraged to do so.”
Lord Rose added: “This is not about taxing the rich. It’s about making sure that we put in place a structure and a way of working which allows the country to thrive.”
The increase in worklessness caused by ill health comes amid a crisis in the NHS that has left people facing long waits for treatment.
Worryingly, there has also been a separate rise in youth unemployment in recent months.
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed youth unemployment hit 13.3pc in the three months to July. This was the highest level since early 2021 during lockdown. More than 500,000 young adults are currently out of work.
A report by the NHS Confederation and the Boston Consulting Group found that thousands of students were going straight from university to long-term sickness, amid a rise in mental health problems.
The figures have prompted fears that worklessness may be becoming endemic. Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, said this week: “I am really concerned by the state of the labour market, by the rise of people not working after the pandemic.”
Lord Rose said the issue was “very complicated” and would take “a decade or two” to address.
He told the Telegraph: “We’ve got to start from the beginning, educating our people in the right skills that they need for the future.”
People needed to be taught that the workplace is “fun” and a place where they can learn new skills, he added, rather than it being demonised.
Lord Rose said: “The workplace is somewhere where you can earn money and earn self-esteem.”
The head of an influential NHS body earlier this week said he believed that a “very negative” view of work among young people was to blame for the increase in joblessness among the young.
Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “I think some young people have a very negative view of what working life is. And a lot of their friends have responded by becoming economically inactive. It makes it more likely the next person will do that.”
He said the Government needed to build in mental health and wellbeing support in schools, making it “a core part of what we do in schools, not just something that is slowly growing in the margins”.
Mr Taylor said: “I think there is good work now starting to happen in schools around mental health support teams, but it’s still only in a minority of schools.”
Neil Carberry, the chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, said it was particularly concerning when people were not in employment at the start of their working lives as it “scars [their] incomes over the following 20 years”.