Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.
Handwashing is the best.
Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
Similarly, I also pay a barista to make me expensive coffee, whereas only 20 years ago I was able to enjoy “instant” granulated weasel shit for tuppence.
Hang on, it's the weasel shite that is the expensive stuff.
Business plan -
1) Blue Mountain coffee is uniquely expensive, prized (various grades etc). 2) Civet coffee is also insanely expensive (various grades etc) 3) Combined them - feed Civets Blue Mountain, and price at the multiple of the price of 1 and 2
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.
Handwashing is the best.
Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.
How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?
If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.
Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Retail banking is a quasi oligopoly, featherbedded by regulation.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.
Handwashing is the best.
Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.
How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?
If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.
Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.
£30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
They did it in 30 mins. I still can't quite tell the central thrust of your argument. Fundamentally it is a business. I suspect they are all family members. They are not going to get rich, but they are industrious and seem to be happy. Who are you to look down on them?
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.
Handwashing is the best.
Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.
How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?
If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.
Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.
£30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely. (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
It is higher productivity that lets @Foxy laze around in hospitals, treating the dying, rather than having to do a proper job, like scything the harvest.
Until Russia/Ukraine introduced modern mechanised agriculture, they had a massive food deficit. Despite doing things like sending the university students to help with the harvest. With the end of Communism, within a few years, they were exporting food on a vast scale.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
Unfortunately for the UK, we have stumbled into putting it into ever-higher house prices.
You know where hasn’t attracted many migrants? Scotland.
Some of the consequences of that may be seen in the latest SNP budget.
It's actually a big problem. Scotland's demographic profile is pretty bleak. And Scot Nattery doesn't help as it definitely puts off investors worried about potential loss of access to UK market.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.
Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
"Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
Because of RoW immigration.
ROW immigration positive EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.
You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
Making a universal basic income funded by a robot tax inevitable
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
Unfortunately for the UK, we have stumbled into putting it into ever-higher house prices.
Yes; and in the US, health costs and - as far as I can tell - the stockpiling of vast amounts of tat inside their large houses.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
The hint is in the McDonalds experiments with automating cooking - they put people in the front, helping customers etc, rather than reducing the workforce to zero.
Historically, automation has meant increased wealth, leading to higher employment. Not less.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.
Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
"Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
Because of RoW immigration.
ROW immigration positive EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.
You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .
Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
It really depends what you are doing and why.
Certainly it's a very low productivity means of obtaining a jumper for my nephew, to knit the thing myself over a considerable number of weeks. However, for all the jumpers my nephew will wear that aren't handcrafted labours of love, it surely does make sense to use as little labour in their production as possible.
This is why I am the sort of person who can spend €€€ on a hand-turned wooden yarn bowl, and also much less than that for the cheapest wooden coffee table offered by IKEA.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.
Handwashing is the best.
Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.
How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?
If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.
Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.
£30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely. (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
£40 for an inside and out car clean, including polish, at our local carwash. Takes two of them about 20-30mins so I'd say one man hour tops. Those pressure washes increase productivity a lot.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.
Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
"Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
Because of RoW immigration.
ROW immigration positive EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.
You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .
Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
There has not been a net loss of 500,000 EU nationals.
If 500,000 EU nationals left, 500,000 EU nationals came in their place.
There has been net positive EU migration TO the UK for years - and only one year when there was net return to the EU - 2020, and that under 100,000.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
The hint is in the McDonalds experiments with automating cooking - they put people in the front, helping customers etc, rather than reducing the workforce to zero.
Historically, automation has meant increased wealth, leading to higher employment. Not less.
Increased wealth I get. Higher employment, I doubt.
I spent my career developing IT systems for financial services companies and I do appreciate the massive benefits.
But it's not all benefit. And it cannot go on infinitely, at some point we are going to have to find other ways of pursuing happiness.
I think the airport situation is quite simple. 20 years ago working at an airport paid really well, stupidly so in many respects for all the retail, cleaning etc etc, supposed making up for all that inconvenience of weird shifts and anti-social hours.
With the influx of cheap labour its now nowhere near as well paid but still all downside including extremely high cost of housing near airports. Then everything stopped and people have gone why the hell do i actually do this, and very difficult to attract them back.
The FOM aspect is a bit of a red herring, remember any EU national working here could easily have got right to remain and millions did. Its more likely went back to home country during covid, reevaluated living 10 to a house in Crawley to earn poor wages while having to start work at 4am every day.
I had no idea that airport work was ever particularly attractive in terms of pay. That's news to me.
Mrs U as a teenager worked at one. Her retail job paid a very large premium compared to working in the same shop in the local town. The pay was so good it was very difficult to ever actually get your foot in the door, it was always my mate knows such and such will give you in.
And this should continue because?
Of course people should be paid properly and to the extent airport managers have been shafting lower paid workers they deserve what has come to the them,
But consumers have to pay for this somewhere down the line - in higher landing charges or higher prices.
Sounds like an argument for FOM keeping wages down, so consumers can have cheaper travel on the back of others low pay
I think you have unwittingly just made the case for Brexit and controlled immigration
Not at all.
I’m just noting that wage increases are paid for by everyone eventually, especially those in the non-tradeable (ie non-exporting) sector.
As I said upthread, most economists (but not all) believe that immigration increases wages over time, by increasing firm productivity.
There is also a view that immigrants, by taking lower paid jobs, allow native born workers to move up into high paid positions.
Yes, that’s a common economic theory seen in text books.
The real world UK, with EU membership, FoM and a non-contributory benefits system, suggested otherwise.
The theory works in Arabia, where the immigrants will never become citizens, and their visa is tied to their employment. I don’t see anyone advocating a similar system for the UK.
The evidence from the UK doesn't support the hypothesis that EU immigration pushed down wages, actually.
Overall that’s correct, but only because of above-inflation rises in the legal minimum wage.
That the ending of FoM meant the minimum wage became a minimum, rather than a maximum, saw huge pay rises for unskilled British workers.
There is also a great deal of segmentation in the labour market.
World wide, there is a shortage of highly educated professionals. So if you are a highly paid professional, total FOM has nearly no effect on your wages - the market is failing to clear, very often, despite big wage increases. So a high skilled professional sees only upsides to FOM.
Not really true. In many professional fields there is a bigger shortage locally than globally, so FOM might have depressed wages for these people. My own field of economists in finance for instance is full of European and global talent taking up jobs in London. It probably didn't have this effect, for the same reasons it didn't depress wages more generally. But the idea that skilled professions are uniquely shielded from globalisation is bollocks.
I think there's two factors working in tandem here:
- more economists (or programmers) means a deeper labour pool, which means lower wages - a deeper labour pool means that people will look to open companies (or increasing hiring), which increases demand
And, fwiw, while it's more pronounced with the highly skilled, it happens with low skilled workers too. Look at Las Vegas - by far the biggest low skilled immigration magnet in the US, but that hasn't resulted in wages falling, it's resulted in companies springing up that benefit from a large pool of unskilled labour.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Indeed.
The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
As one of the resident OAPs I can do all the banking I need to on line, topped up with a very occasional phone call. I can pay in, on the rare occasions I need to, via the Post Office. Longer hours, too. When, a few years ago, I was Secretary of a u3a, dealing with their on-the-ground bankers was a total pain.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
It's a bit lower in the EU27 than in the UK but not much lower. Brexit is likely to have led to higher prices in the UK but this a price level effect not something that would push up the rate of inflation indefinitely.
I read somewhere that core inflation in the EU27 (excluding fuel, energy etc.) is currently half that in the UK
I think that reflects EU27 wages are rising less quickly than in the UK - partly due to lower labour market participation (i.e. greater slack), and partly due to labour market rigidities than mean prices move less quickly.
What that means is that - in much of the EU - the cost of living crisis is going to be worse than in the UK.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
Making a universal basic income funded by a robot tax inevitable
Lol - GE32 slogan: 'Tax the robots'!
Won't those robots want a vote if we start taxing them?
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
DALLE-3 and GPT4 are going to take away ALL the jobs of everyone; brace
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
What party has been in government during this revolution, which has been very widely commented on, for instance by the Consumers' Association/Which who have been fighting a major campaigm about it? What age group does it crucially depend on for its votes?
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
UK productivity growth slowed after the GFC by exactly the same extent as productivity growth in the EU. Productivity growth fell in all the advanced economies including the US at the same time. Economists still don't fully understand the reasons for it, but it is so generalised that it is highly unlikely that an idiosyncratic factor like EU FOM was the reason in the UK.
It is certainly true that the experience in Japan, the US, the EU and the UK post 2008 have all been remarkably similar, despite very different immigration profiles.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.
Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
"Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
Because of RoW immigration.
ROW immigration positive EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.
You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .
Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
There has not been a net loss of 500,000 EU nationals.
If 500,000 EU nationals left, 500,000 EU nationals came in their place.
There has been net positive EU migration TO the UK for years - and only one year when there was net return to the EU - 2020, and that under 100,000.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Even if your gilded lily argument is correct, 100000 is a lot of change. It is rate of change in employment that matters. In the non-ONS real world, ability to respond to changes in workforce is what counts. It takes significantly longer to replace than it takes for someone to give notice. It is like the difference between deceleration and acceleration in a queue of traffic. You can play with stats as much as you want, but Brexit has contributed to labour challenges. But hey, we were promised so many benefits. Jam tomorrow eh?
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.
Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
"Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
Because of RoW immigration.
ROW immigration positive EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.
You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .
Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
There has not been a net loss of 500,000 EU nationals.
If 500,000 EU nationals left, 500,000 EU nationals came in their place.
There has been net positive EU migration TO the UK for years - and only one year when there was net return to the EU - 2020, and that under 100,000.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Even if your gilded lily argument is correct, 100000 is a lot of change. It is rate of change in employment that matters. In the non-ONS real world, ability to respond to changes in workforce is what counts. It takes significantly longer to replace than it takes for someone to give notice. It is like the difference between deceleration and acceleration in a queue of traffic. You can play with stats as much as you want, but Brexit has contributed to labour challenges. But hey, we were promised so many benefits. Jam tomorrow eh?
You're more than a little like Sir Humphrey - your statistics are facts, but you dismiss CV's facts as just statistics.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
UK productivity growth slowed after the GFC by exactly the same extent as productivity growth in the EU. Productivity growth fell in all the advanced economies including the US at the same time. Economists still don't fully understand the reasons for it, but it is so generalised that it is highly unlikely that an idiosyncratic factor like EU FOM was the reason in the UK.
It is certainly true that the experience in Japan, the US, the EU and the UK post 2008 have all been remarkably similar, despite very different immigration profiles.
But what about the CAR WASHES. But what about STUART ROSE.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
Point of order: the move to online banking has undermined the branch network, and that's more about convenience than cost - for consumers, anyway. It might have cost you some money to get to your local bank branch if it wasn't within walking distance, of course, but it's hardly as if they charged entry on the door.
Of course, banks aren't going to keep an extensive network of these facilities open once most of their customers are no longer bothering to use them. Old people who can't cope with technology will just end up having to spend more time and money getting to the remaining branches.
This is one example of societal change being stacked in favour of the young and against the old, albeit scant compensation for the fact that your average pensioner is better off than your average worker - and probably vastly better off than people in their twenties, a great many of whom have precious few if any assets and little hope of ever acquiring them either.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
As one of the resident OAPs I can do all the banking I need to on line, topped up with a very occasional phone call. I can pay in, on the rare occasions I need to, via the Post Office. Longer hours, too. When, a few years ago, I was Secretary of a u3a, dealing with their on-the-ground bankers was a total pain.
Anyone posting on here is, by definition, reasonably computer literate. In contrast, my 90 year old father-in-law has never touched a computer in his life, my late mum was the same.
They could learn of course (well not my mum anymore obvs!) but they lack the confidence, and perhaps at 90, the motivation or the learning ability.
There's no real solution beyond waiting for that generation to die out.
What will be the equivalent for my generation I wonder?
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
And why have you been making them feel unwelcome?
You see the way he responds to other posters - is it any surprise?
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.
Handwashing is the best.
Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.
How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?
If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.
Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.
£30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely. (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
£40 for an inside and out car clean, including polish, at our local carwash. Takes two of them about 20-30mins so I'd say one man hour tops. Those pressure washes increase productivity a lot.
(I still worry about exploitation though.)
I paid £100 for my last car valet. Car in question had transported hay round all winter though.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
And why have you been making them feel unwelcome?
I haven't, it is twats like you who voted for xenophobia back in 2016. Don't try and tell me it was about "sovereignty" and all that bullshit. It was pure and simple small minded xenophobic nationalism. Nothing else.
Have a nice evening. I won't be around to read your unbelievable protestations lol.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
What party has been in government during this revolution, which has been very widely commented on, for instance by the Consumers' Association/Which who have been fighting a major campaigm about it? What age group does it crucially depend on for its votes?
Personally if I were Boris I would fine any bank which shuts more than a handful of branches each year
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
Point of order: the move to online banking has undermined the branch network, and that's more about convenience than cost - for consumers, anyway. It might have cost you some money to get to your local bank branch if it wasn't within walking distance, of course, but it's hardly as if they charged entry on the door.
Of course, banks aren't going to keep an extensive network of these facilities open once most of their customers are no longer bothering to use them. Old people who can't cope with technology will just end up having to spend more time and money getting to the remaining branches.
This is one example of societal change being stacked in favour of the young and against the old, albeit scant compensation for the fact that your average pensioner is better off than your average worker - and probably vastly better off than people in their twenties, a great many of whom have precious few if any assets and little hope of ever acquiring them either.
Swings and roundabouts though. As mentioned upthread, you can do a lot of routine banking at Post Office counters; I don't think people realise how much.
My bit of Romford has lost two bank branches (Mon-Fri 9-3) and gained a new Post Office inside a convenience store (open 7 days a week into the evenings). Which model gives better service to more people?
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
What party has been in government during this revolution, which has been very widely commented on, for instance by the Consumers' Association/Which who have been fighting a major campaigm about it? What age group does it crucially depend on for its votes?
Personally if I were Boris I would fine any bank which shuts more than a handful of branches each year
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Indeed.
The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
Making a universal basic income funded by a robot tax inevitable
Lol - GE32 slogan: 'Tax the robots'!
Won't those robots want a vote if we start taxing them?
It is the corporations that employ them that will be taxed until robots start earning a wage
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.
Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
"Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
Because of RoW immigration.
ROW immigration positive EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.
You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .
Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
There has not been a net loss of 500,000 EU nationals.
If 500,000 EU nationals left, 500,000 EU nationals came in their place.
There has been net positive EU migration TO the UK for years - and only one year when there was net return to the EU - 2020, and that under 100,000.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Even if your gilded lily argument is correct, 100000 is a lot of change. It is rate of change in employment that matters. In the non-ONS real world, ability to respond to changes in workforce is what counts. It takes significantly longer to replace than it takes for someone to give notice. It is like the difference between deceleration and acceleration in a queue of traffic. You can play with stats as much as you want, but Brexit has contributed to labour challenges. But hey, we were promised so many benefits. Jam tomorrow eh?
And you would appear to deal in lies and florid prose when your beautiful theory is destroyed by ugly facts.
100,000 is less than 2% of the number of EU citizens who have applied to stay in the UK. And that’s “a lot of change”?
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
Point of order: the move to online banking has undermined the branch network, and that's more about convenience than cost - for consumers, anyway. It might have cost you some money to get to your local bank branch if it wasn't within walking distance, of course, but it's hardly as if they charged entry on the door.
Of course, banks aren't going to keep an extensive network of these facilities open once most of their customers are no longer bothering to use them. Old people who can't cope with technology will just end up having to spend more time and money getting to the remaining branches.
This is one example of societal change being stacked in favour of the young and against the old, albeit scant compensation for the fact that your average pensioner is better off than your average worker - and probably vastly better off than people in their twenties, a great many of whom have precious few if any assets and little hope of ever acquiring them either.
There is a data that a good deal of the take-up of online banking is among the elderly.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
And why have you been making them feel unwelcome?
You see the way he responds to other posters - is it any surprise?
Lol. I now have an image of @Nigel_Foremain pompously lecturing a bemused Polish couple keen to work in London
“Pliz. We just want work here, Is good. London good.”
“No. Don’t you understand, this is a Nazi toilet, you don’t want to work here, everyone hates you”
“But… people nice?”
“You stupid Polish thickos, you know nothing! Brexit is terrible!!”
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
And why have you been making them feel unwelcome?
I haven't, it is twats like you who voted for xenophobia back in 2016. Don't try and tell me it was about "sovereignty" and all that bullshit. It was pure and simple small minded xenophobic nationalism. Nothing else.
Have a nice evening. I won't be around to read your unbelievable protestations lol.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
DALLE-3 and GPT4 are going to take away ALL the jobs of everyone; brace
Not in our lifetimes, nor our children's or grandchildren's.
The @Benpointer dishwasher test is still waiting for a challenger.
I could also add the 'cook-a-meal-for-four-using-whatever-is-in-the-cupboard' test. Or the 'do-the-gardening' test... etc.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Indeed.
The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Just got so deeply involved in the post I'm writing on the confidence vote / leadership election that I accidently left my youngest in the bath for an hour. I think it's time to accept I have a problem.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.
Handwashing is the best.
Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.
How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?
If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.
Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.
£30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely. (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
You've clearly never had @Dura_Ace and @Leon have parties in your vehicle.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Interesting.
1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this? 2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
What party has been in government during this revolution, which has been very widely commented on, for instance by the Consumers' Association/Which who have been fighting a major campaigm about it? What age group does it crucially depend on for its votes?
Personally if I were Boris I would fine any bank which shuts more than a handful of branches each year
Lol.
No wonder the Tories are fucked.
You could use the money to give funds for deposits for property purchases to the young. It would be very popular with old and young alike
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.
Handwashing is the best.
Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.
How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?
If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.
Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.
£30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely. (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
£40 for an inside and out car clean, including polish, at our local carwash. Takes two of them about 20-30mins so I'd say one man hour tops. Those pressure washes increase productivity a lot.
(I still worry about exploitation though.)
I use one in a Tesco car park, sanctioned by Tesco. It’s independent, but they take credit cards. That means they are probably paying VAT, and possibly corporation tax. Doesn’t necessarily mean they are paying staff properly though.
Here’s an example of the explotation that can occur:
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Indeed.
The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
The cost for audit letters is a scam.
A chap I used to work for, opined that the Richardsons "Firm" offered better financial services for the businesses under their "care" than the High Street Banks. Lower interest rates for a start.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Interesting.
1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this? 2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
1 As I said I would fine banks that shut too many branches
2 Youth clubs depend on volunteers, I am for the big society
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
As one of the resident OAPs I can do all the banking I need to on line, topped up with a very occasional phone call. I can pay in, on the rare occasions I need to, via the Post Office. Longer hours, too. When, a few years ago, I was Secretary of a u3a, dealing with their on-the-ground bankers was a total pain.
Anyone posting on here is, by definition, reasonably computer literate. In contrast, my 90 year old father-in-law has never touched a computer in his life, my late mum was the same.
They could learn of course (well not my mum anymore obvs!) but they lack the confidence, and perhaps at 90, the motivation or the learning ability.
There's no real solution beyond waiting for that generation to die out.
What will be the equivalent for my generation I wonder?
It must be close to died out already. Computer literacy as an essential for existence in society has been unarguable for at least 15 years, and almost anyone who lacked the learning ability then will no longer be with us.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
Making a universal basic income funded by a robot tax inevitable
Lol - GE32 slogan: 'Tax the robots'!
Won't those robots want a vote if we start taxing them?
It is the corporations that employ them that will be taxed until robots start earning a wage
Good grief @HYUFD, should we have a whip-round to buy you a sense of irony?
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
When did net half a million people leave these islands?
Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.
You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
You espouse socialism.
No traditional Conservativism ie respect for tradition and the local community. I am not proposing nationalising all the banks permanently which a socialist would do
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Indeed.
The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
The cost for audit letters is a scam.
How much do No Confidence letters cost? Just asking
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
DALLE-3 and GPT4 are going to take away ALL the jobs of everyone; brace
Not in our lifetimes, nor our children's or grandchildren's.
The @Benpointer dishwasher test is still waiting for a challenger.
I could also add the 'cook-a-meal-for-four-using-whatever-is-in-the-cupboard' test. Or the 'do-the-gardening' test... etc.
But, QED
Your claim was “automation tends to take out the simpler jobs”
This is my argument just expressed differently, I’m just extrapolating trends. Automation took out the simpler jobs until about 20 years ago, that has been less true for a while, and going forwards it will be the opposite of the case. It will be the brainier jobs, from journalist to solicitor to doctor to graphic designer to illustrator to pilot to lawyer to general to surgeon - which get taken out, from now on
Note the jobs you say can’t be replaced. Dishwasher stacker, spontaneous house chef, basic gardener?
These are the low IQ but high human contact jobs which might survive, because it will take a long time for robots to achieve the extremely fine motor skills to do them. But even they might go, in the end
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
You espouse socialism.
No traditional Conservativism ie respect for tradition and the local community. I am not proposing nationalising all the banks permanently which a socialist would do
Traditional Conservatism is all about letting businesses operate without needless interference from the state.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Interesting.
1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this? 2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
I'm not generally against intervention in a free market but I understand the isles of Scilly no longer have a bank!
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Interesting.
1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this? 2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
1 As I said I would fine banks that shut too many branches
2 Youth clubs depend on volunteers, I am for the big society
Why not fine buildings that don't employ lift operators?
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Indeed.
The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
The cost for audit letters is a scam.
How much do No Confidence letters cost? Just asking
Beautiful! M. Macron has some taste in some areas.
President Macron is trolling us. Remember the French puppy incident in Yes, Prime Minister (that could not be accepted owing to quarantine regulations, and was a device to secure concessions in negotiations over the Channel Tunnel). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DERkHtpgRgE
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
What things shouldn't be automatic?
As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.
There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.
The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not at all.
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
Making a universal basic income funded by a robot tax inevitable
Lol - GE32 slogan: 'Tax the robots'!
Won't those robots want a vote if we start taxing them?
If I recall my Futurama the first robot president struck a chord with voters by pledging not to go on a killing spree. Sadly he did not live up to that pledge.
Nevertheless, perhaps robots would be more efficient at making shit political choices, so we should leave it to them
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
As one of the resident OAPs I can do all the banking I need to on line, topped up with a very occasional phone call. I can pay in, on the rare occasions I need to, via the Post Office. Longer hours, too. When, a few years ago, I was Secretary of a u3a, dealing with their on-the-ground bankers was a total pain.
Anyone posting on here is, by definition, reasonably computer literate. In contrast, my 90 year old father-in-law has never touched a computer in his life, my late mum was the same.
They could learn of course (well not my mum anymore obvs!) but they lack the confidence, and perhaps at 90, the motivation or the learning ability.
There's no real solution beyond waiting for that generation to die out.
What will be the equivalent for my generation I wonder?
Quite. It's perhaps not so much the simple mechanics of the task but understanding how fraud can happen, the need to buy a new phone every few years, the need even to realise there is such a thing as a virus etc checker ... and don't forget that being hard of hearing can be a big turnoff for someone thinking about a mobile. As can be the tiny keys.
It's also what happens when there are problems, the bank wants to see original documents ... think about some of the stories that have emerged re HMG and its way of dealing with elderly immigrants wh o have lived in the UK almosat as long as we have but have not got round to becoming UK subjects.
I don't know what our generation's problem will be (assuming you are in the 60s) though I sometimes think it will be attitudes to sex and gender. Or indeed the notion of having a permanent 9-5 job of any kind. Friend of miner was made redundant from his job about 10 years back - not his fault, major reorganization and outsourcing - and he was surprised at the hostility from some of the older [but, at that time, surely retired] relatives who blamed him for not having a job - though he remedied that situation pretty promptly, he found this feeling very disconcerting.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Interesting.
1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this? 2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
1 As I said I would fine banks that shut too many branches
2 Youth clubs depend on volunteers, I am for the big society
Why not fine buildings that don't employ lift operators?
As pressing one button to use a lift is not the same thing as having someone in person you can chat to at your bank in your own town!!
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.
Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.
Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.
UK productivity is a v interesting topic.
There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.
The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.
It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.
Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....
In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....
Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
As one of the resident OAPs I can do all the banking I need to on line, topped up with a very occasional phone call. I can pay in, on the rare occasions I need to, via the Post Office. Longer hours, too. When, a few years ago, I was Secretary of a u3a, dealing with their on-the-ground bankers was a total pain.
Anyone posting on here is, by definition, reasonably computer literate. In contrast, my 90 year old father-in-law has never touched a computer in his life, my late mum was the same.
They could learn of course (well not my mum anymore obvs!) but they lack the confidence, and perhaps at 90, the motivation or the learning ability.
There's no real solution beyond waiting for that generation to die out.
What will be the equivalent for my generation I wonder?
It must be close to died out already. Computer literacy as an essential for existence in society has been unarguable for at least 15 years, and almost anyone who lacked the learning ability then will no longer be with us.
You need kit to do it. One issue that was emerging well before covid shook things up was the simple need for access to a PC, printer, scanner, etc. Very difficult for the poor and unemployed - especially when councils started closing libraries, and when HMG started demanding 'proof' of internet searches, job applications, etc.
Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.
We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”
Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain
I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.
Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.
To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
That seems rather doubtful to me, if you are a low paid person trying to buy services which are no longer available or only at increased prices.
Low paid people dont, buy services, they dont hire nannies, they dont hire plumbers or electricians
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
You espouse socialism.
No traditional Conservativism ie respect for tradition and the local community. I am not proposing nationalising all the banks permanently which a socialist would do
Traditional Conservatism is all about letting businesses operate without needless interference from the state.
No, that is traditional classical liberalism, hence you now vote LD not Tory
Beautiful! M. Macron has some taste in some areas.
President Macron is trolling us. Remember the French puppy incident in Yes, Prime Minister (that could not be accepted owing to quarantine regulations, and was a device to secure concessions in negotiations over the Channel Tunnel). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DERkHtpgRgE
Given that the issues are on the EU side of the border, it should be us that gets Macron something nice that falls foul, on his next big celebration. Can't be long till Bridget's 70th.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Interesting.
1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this? 2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
1 As I said I would fine banks that shut too many branches
2 Youth clubs depend on volunteers, I am for the big society
Why not fine buildings that don't employ lift operators?
As pressing one button to use a lift is not the same thing as having someone in person you can chat to at your bank in your own town!!
For a certain generation it was very disconcerting to have to operate machinery themselves.
Why is doing your banking on a screen any different?
Note that many surviving bank branches have rows of self service screens, with one or 2 actual staff in attendance.
If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Interesting.
1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this? 2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
1 As I said I would fine banks that shut too many branches
2 Youth clubs depend on volunteers, I am for the big society
Why not fine buildings that don't employ lift operators?
I would make it mandatory to allow Post offices in an area which has lost it's bank branches to offer basic banking at the cost of the banks. The financial sector and governments has effectively moved all pay and salaries to BACs forcing people to use banks. They then started introducing ordinary account fees to handle our money, making overnight interest on the resulting vast amounts of our money and not paying anything back to us. They even changed the agreed overdraft interest rates to match the unagreed, making so much more money out of us. The final insult is to close the branches.
Does she also get the strapping, young (I think) dragoon?
He wouldn't understand the orders. Come to think of it, the nag won't either. I have no idea how much of a problem this is with horses - does one have to translate the orders, or am I being too influenced by collies?
One of the pivotal moments in the Near Future will come thusly: when one of the competing great powers, China, USA, Russia, Mighty Puissant Albion, realises that you get much much better military results if you hand the strategising to a computer, and sack the human generals
Computers are already way better than humans at Go and Chess. Which are allegorical forms of warfare on a board. So computers will be hugely better at waging and winning wars. For the same reason
Picture the Kremlin in 20 years. Vladimir Putin 3.1 gets his briefing from GPT7. it doesn’t lie to him, it doesn’t skim off billions in spending to go live in a yacht. All it wants to do is serve the Russian Leader, and advance the military cause, and it can absorb quintillion bytes of logistical information in a second, and autocomplete the Ukrainians’ next move to the exact millimetre
Whichever country does this first, wins. It won’t be the Russians. My bet is China
Comments
1) Blue Mountain coffee is uniquely expensive, prized (various grades etc).
2) Civet coffee is also insanely expensive (various grades etc)
3) Combined them - feed Civets Blue Mountain, and price at the multiple of the price of 1 and 2
How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?
If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.
Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.
£30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
Some of the consequences of that may be seen in the latest SNP budget.
That’s true in most countries, though,
In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.
What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
(I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
Until Russia/Ukraine introduced modern mechanised agriculture, they had a massive food deficit. Despite doing things like sending the university students to help with the harvest. With the end of Communism, within a few years, they were exporting food on a vast scale.
EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.
You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.
Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?
Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
Historically, automation has meant increased wealth, leading to higher employment. Not less.
Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
Certainly it's a very low productivity means of obtaining a jumper for my nephew, to knit the thing myself over a considerable number of weeks. However, for all the jumpers my nephew will wear that aren't handcrafted labours of love, it surely does make sense to use as little labour in their production as possible.
This is why I am the sort of person who can spend €€€ on a hand-turned wooden yarn bowl, and also much less than that for the cheapest wooden coffee table offered by IKEA.
(I still worry about exploitation though.)
Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.
Post Offices are picking up the slack.
If 500,000 EU nationals left, 500,000 EU nationals came in their place.
There has been net positive EU migration TO the UK for years - and only one year when there was net return to the EU - 2020, and that under 100,000.
I spent my career developing IT systems for financial services companies and I do appreciate the massive benefits.
But it's not all benefit. And it cannot go on infinitely, at some point we are going to have to find other ways of pursuing happiness.
- more economists (or programmers) means a deeper labour pool, which means lower wages
- a deeper labour pool means that people will look to open companies (or increasing hiring), which increases demand
And, fwiw, while it's more pronounced with the highly skilled, it happens with low skilled workers too. Look at Las Vegas - by far the biggest low skilled immigration magnet in the US, but that hasn't resulted in wages falling, it's resulted in companies springing up that benefit from a large pool of unskilled labour.
The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Politique/Jubile-d-Elizabeth-II-Voici-le-cadeau-d-Emmanuel-Macron-a-la-Reine-1809092
I can pay in, on the rare occasions I need to, via the Post Office. Longer hours, too.
When, a few years ago, I was Secretary of a u3a, dealing with their on-the-ground bankers was a total pain.
What that means is that - in much of the EU - the cost of living crisis is going to be worse than in the UK.
Lol - GE32 slogan: 'Tax the robots'!
Won't those robots want a vote if we start taxing them?
But what about STUART ROSE.
Of course, banks aren't going to keep an extensive network of these facilities open once most of their customers are no longer bothering to use them. Old people who can't cope with technology will just end up having to spend more time and money getting to the remaining branches.
This is one example of societal change being stacked in favour of the young and against the old, albeit scant compensation for the fact that your average pensioner is better off than your average worker - and probably vastly better off than people in their twenties, a great many of whom have precious few if any assets and little hope of ever acquiring them either.
They could learn of course (well not my mum anymore obvs!) but they lack the confidence, and perhaps at 90, the motivation or the learning ability.
There's no real solution beyond waiting for that generation to die out.
What will be the equivalent for my generation I wonder?
As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
Have a nice evening. I won't be around to read your unbelievable protestations lol.
My bit of Romford has lost two bank branches (Mon-Fri 9-3) and gained a new Post Office inside a convenience store (open 7 days a week into the evenings). Which model gives better service to more people?
No wonder the Tories are fucked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWnijVHC0Iw
Their biggest market mover in the next PM stakes is [drum roll] Rishi Sunak.
100,000 is less than 2% of the number of EU citizens who have applied to stay in the UK. And that’s “a lot of change”?
Not all of them are technophobes.
Lol. I now have an image of @Nigel_Foremain pompously lecturing a bemused Polish couple keen to work in London
“Pliz. We just want work here, Is good. London good.”
“No. Don’t you understand, this is a Nazi toilet, you don’t want to work here, everyone hates you”
“But… people nice?”
“You stupid Polish thickos, you know nothing! Brexit is terrible!!”
The @Benpointer dishwasher test is still waiting for a challenger.
I could also add the 'cook-a-meal-for-four-using-whatever-is-in-the-cupboard' test. Or the 'do-the-gardening' test... etc.
https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1532041795890200576
1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this?
2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
Here’s an example of the explotation that can occur:
https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/human-trafficking-ringleaders-found-guilty-of-car-wash-exploitation
2 Youth clubs depend on volunteers, I am for the big society
How much do No Confidence letters cost? Just asking
Your claim was “automation tends to take out the simpler jobs”
This is my argument just expressed differently, I’m just extrapolating trends. Automation took out the simpler jobs until about 20 years ago, that has been less true for a while, and going forwards it will be the opposite of the case. It will be the brainier jobs, from journalist to solicitor to doctor to graphic designer to illustrator to pilot to lawyer to general to surgeon - which get taken out, from now on
Note the jobs you say can’t be replaced. Dishwasher stacker, spontaneous house chef, basic gardener?
These are the low IQ but high human contact jobs which might survive, because it will take a long time for robots to achieve the extremely fine motor skills to do them. But even they might go, in the end
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DERkHtpgRgE
Nevertheless, perhaps robots would be more efficient at making shit political choices, so we should leave it to them
It's also what happens when there are problems, the bank wants to see original documents ... think about some of the stories that have emerged re HMG and its way of dealing with elderly immigrants wh o have lived in the UK almosat as long as we have but have not got round to becoming UK subjects.
I don't know what our generation's problem will be (assuming you are in the 60s) though I sometimes think it will be attitudes to sex and gender. Or indeed the notion of having a permanent 9-5 job of any kind. Friend of miner was made redundant from his job about 10 years back - not his fault, major reorganization and outsourcing - and he was surprised at the hostility from some of the older [but, at that time, surely retired] relatives who blamed him for not having a job - though he remedied that situation pretty promptly, he found this feeling very disconcerting.
Jubilee display has scarecrow of the Queen sat on TOILET next to '70 years on the throne' banner
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10875339/Village-display-showing-scarecrow-Queen-sat-TOILET-set-torn-council.html?ito=social-twitter_mailonline
Why is doing your banking on a screen any different?
Note that many surviving bank branches have rows of self service screens, with one or 2 actual staff in attendance.
(off topic btw)
Computers are already way better than humans at Go and Chess. Which are allegorical forms of warfare on a board. So computers will be hugely better at waging and winning wars. For the same reason
Picture the Kremlin in 20 years. Vladimir Putin 3.1 gets his briefing from GPT7. it doesn’t lie to him, it doesn’t skim off billions in spending to go live in a yacht. All it wants to do is serve the Russian Leader, and advance the military cause, and it can absorb quintillion bytes of logistical information in a second, and autocomplete the Ukrainians’ next move to the exact millimetre
Whichever country does this first, wins. It won’t be the Russians. My bet is China