SO WHO IS GOING TO BRING 800,000 PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS TO SCOTLAND?

The Tories have promised to get people off Incapacity Benefit and JSA and into jobs.

They have also promised to drastically reduce the size of the civil service, presumably by sacking staff, and to increase the age at which men and women can retire.

This is a subject I’ve visited before on the blog, and I do so again because according to the Dundee Courier a new study by the GMB union shows that there are 650,600 people of working age in Scotland who are economically inactive and 175,200 people registered unemployed. But, as of this week, there are just 21,700 notified job vacancies across Scotland.

The Tory’s policies will increase unemployment by large numbers. Each year a certain number of people retire to be replaced by school or university leavers on the job market, but with the age for female retirement rising from 60 to 61, then 62 and by stages to 65 to make them at long last truly equal with men, there will be fewer people retiring and fewer vacancies to fill.

Then there are the civil service cuts that the Tories have promised. They will be swingeing; vast numbers of staff can be expected to go and in addition there will be the people who depended on these civil service personnel to spend their money in their shops, restaurants, gyms, hotels....etc. They will downsize too. And so the miserable cycle of unemployment will begin.

The Tories say that the private sector will supply the new jobs, but exactly how that is going to happen I’m not sure. Mrs Thatcher managed to created quite a number of jobs in finance and insurance, but ...well, the bottom has kinda fallen out of that market here, and in any case most of the existing or soon to be unemployed would, had they been capable, have taken that kind of job with big fat bonuses when they were in supply.

Where are the jobs going to be for the people who actually live in the country and aren’t some fairy tale dream that the politicians have created? You know, the ones that find reading and writing hard; the ones that can’t spell too well; the ones that speak with heavy regional accents and bad grammar; the ones that swear lots and punctuate with F***s rather than commas and semi-colons?

Currently in Dundee 5100 people were chasing 797 jobs and 20,300 people of working age were recorded as economically inactive. That’s around 25,000 people chasing 800 jobs (31 people for every job) and that’s before all the redundancies from councils and civil service.

And one of Dundee’s biggest private sector employers D C Thomson, the Courier’s publisher announced over 300 redundancies today.

So who will create these jobs? We might need around 800,000 of them across Scotland.

I’ve worked in the employment business for 10 years and more now and I can’t see foreign companies bringing manufacturing jobs here unless we bribe them with all manner of costly concessions, and allow them to employ eastern Europeans. For the life of me I can’t.

And it was on the Monday Morning that the Gas Man FAILED to Call!

It never rains but it pours for Gordon. First the civil servants, then the BA staff, then the railways and now the gas men.

The British Gas dispute is over working conditions of engineers, boilers fitters and general electrical repairers. The union (GMB) also claims the company has a "bullying culture".

British Gas wants to make the engineers work longer hours. Many of the engineers apparently get away with working a four-day week, even though they are paid for a full week's work, which seems like a weird situation to me. Of course you might ask how the management (so called) allowed this situation to come about in the first place.

The GMB claim their members are subject to bullying and that engineers are pressured to sell extra services to customers whilst mending or fitting a boiler. According to the union the average amount of time an engineer is allowed to fix a boiler or other appliance had been cut by 22 per cent, in an effort to ensure workers completed more jobs in a given week. So.... they only work four days a week, but they have to do 5 days work in the four days..... Hello, is there anyone in?

Of course British Gas denies all of this. According to them they are model employers and no pressure or bullying is ever exerted on anyone at any time ever....

A whole article can be read here, and various people may analyse it the way that they will. However, I suggest that this is just the start of a lot of action over the next months and possibly years, regardless of who wins the election.

This recession was caused by greedy and incompetent people at the top. Banks and Financial organizations wanted more and more money; governments failed to regulate companies who were behaving outrageously madly. Even financial illiterates like me could see that if incomes rose at 2-4% on average and house prices rose at 10 12%, there would shortly come a time when no one could afford to buy a house except the Queen (and maybe Lard Ashcroft).

Inevitably it all crashed... just because it was bound to sometime... and one day someone started a whisper that it had started, and so people started calling in debts upon which the world depended for its very existence, and ....BANG! It was over. (Of course it started in America and spread around the world.... tra la)

Even in Britian where the Wizard of Arse had abolished Boom and Bust, the bottom fell out of the economy. (Obviously it was everyone else’s fault)

Now we have to pay. But it’s not the people who caused all this strife who are paying. Oh no. It is BA cabin staff; it’s engineers; it’s transport workers, and civil servant. It’s soldiers and pensioners, and it will be all manner of other people.

Amazingly the bonuses for the morons in the banks go on, because if they don’t get big bonuses they will throw their toys out of the pram and go somewhere else. It’s not Ministers and it’s not MPs who have just pocketed £1,000 a year increase, as pensioners are getting a decrease.

British Gas have mismanaged their way into this, and because “everyone” has to tighten their belts they are trying to force their fitters to do more for less. (Despite the fact that British Gas have been coining it in!)

So, if anyone thinks that these strikes are anything other than the beginning of unrest ...then they should probably think again. It seems like Brits have may grown a back bone.