UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
What you never knew about Jobcentres
Although the number of Britons claiming jobless benefit in October rose by its smallest amount in 18 months, the jobless rate is at 7.8 percent.
One resource, sometimes overlooked by unemployed professionals and businesses looking for new recruits, is Jobcentre Plus, a government-run employment agency.
Businesses can cut costs by using the free vacancy-advertising and recruitment service offered by Jobcentre Plus. As well, employers that hire people who are unemployed for six months or more through a so-called Recruitment Subsidy scheme will receive 1,000 pounds for each eligible jobseeker. They can also access in-work training of a value of up to 1,500 pounds.
Chris Nicol, district manager, south London, explains what’s on offer for professional jobseekers.
from The Great Debate UK:
What managers can do to maintain morale in a jobs crisis
* Ian Kessler is a reader in employment relations at Said Business School at the University of Oxford. The views expressed are his own *
The Chinese define a crisis as ‘an opportunity on a dangerous wind', and the crisis created by the current economic downturn has certainly placed the management of human resources centre stage. Corporate survival has become dependent on controlling and reducing labour costs, while future organisational viability has necessitated restructuring, placing further strains on the workforce. The challenge confronting human resources management is reflected in the predicted scale of job losses: the International Labour Organisations suggests that in 2009 as many 51 million jobs worldwide could be lost.
The tension between opportunities and dangers is clear: radical change in a crisis runs the risk of undermining workforce motivation and performance, so precipitating the very organisational failure the changes were designed to avoid. At the same time if employee morale and productivity can be maintained, the likelihood of competitive advantage in the upturn is considerably enhanced.
Success during a crisis is likely to revolve around the balancing of three sets of issues:
Insiders and Outsiders
The shedding of jobs represents the quickest and surest way of reducing financial costs. It is, however, a process fraught with hidden costs and likely to unleash tensions, not least between insiders retaining their jobs and outsiders losing them. This should encourage reductions in the workforce other than through redundancies, for example relying on redeployment, natural wastage or a recruitment freeze. As an alternative, organisations might use more flexible forms of employment such as agency working, so protecting the core workforce. The 850 redundancies recently made by BMW at its Mini plant in the UK were all agency workers. This is not to deny the unease created within the workforce and the community even in this situation, highlighting the need for organisations to care both for those workers who go and stay.
In times of crisis how you do things is more important than what you do. I suggest that managers can take two critical steps to improve the chances of their difficult decisions being judged acceptable. These are;
* to communicate with clarity
* to seek feedback and accept the response, however emotional
Actually I think that doing these two things is extremly difficult for most of us, because they run counter to our inbuilt bias; which is to focus on action, action, action.
‘We are all to blame for financial crisis’ – archbishop
Bankers, auditors, money-market speculators and regulators all came in for criticism at the Church of England’s General Synod during a discussion on the implications of the financial crisis and the recession.
The City had lined its pockets, regulators had not done their job properly and auditors had signed off financial deals that should not have seen the light of day, the synod heard at its meeting in London.
The result is a deep recession, the first since the early 1990s, with Britain suffering a shrinking economy, rapidly rising unemployment and falling output.
But the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, suggested everybody was to blame.
“We have all worshipped at the temple of money,” he said. “We have been guilty of idolatry: the worship of God falsely conceived – which is deadlier than either heresy or sin, for it is the prolific source of each. It is this idolatrous love of money, pursuing profit without regard for ethic, risk or consequence, which has led us from orientation to dis-orientation.”
He said the solution lay not only in economics and politics, but also a “deeper vision”.
“It is not about what governments can do for us but what we can all do,” he said.
With this method of debt relief, the debtor will no longer have to answer embarrassing phone calls from his creditors. The debtor will not receive any bills or pay the creditors directly. The debt consolidation program will directly take control over the creditors. The debtor will just need to pay the debt consolidation company a single amount every month according to the budget which was agreed upon with the debtors. So there is no need for any interaction with the creditors.
Expert view: Redundancy can be a “golden opportunity”
Sue Tumelty is Managing Director of employment law specialists The HR Dept. The opinions expressed are her own.
The latest Labour Market Outlook survey conducted for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) with the accountancy firm KPMG looks bleak. The Ipsos Mori poll of 892 UK employers in January, reveals that more than one in three (36%) plan to cut jobs in the first quarter of 2009.
What if you are a one in three? Regardless of whether you are a high earner or in a low paid job, the chances are that you’ll face the same question. How will you pay your mortgage and bills? How will you find another job?
As with any high stress situation, panic won’t help. Try to stay calm and make an effort to understand the process and the options open to you. For example, redundancy can be expensive and difficult for employers. Many are now looking favourably on innovative ideas in an attempt to retain their talent pool. This can range from shorter working hours, to unpaid sabbaticals and temporary pay cuts.
Part of the redundancy process requires consultation. Use this as your chance to offer alternative solutions. It is worth exploring all the avenues that may enable your employer to keep you.
The process begins with the announcement of proposed redundancy. Your employers need to consult with staff as early as possible about the reasons for the proposed cuts.They have to state how many employees are at risk and how the employees would be selected.
If more than 20 people are to go, the consultation should take place over 30 days. Larger scale redundancies need over 90 days with elected representatives, such as unions.
UK job losses: real stories
Simon Owen is a strategy and innovation consultant who helps companies identify and implement new business opportunities. He worked at a London based consultancy before being made redundant in January 2009. The opinions expressed are his own.
Most recently I worked for a leading innovation company that specialised in innovative growth projects. They took a much more creative approach, and I enjoyed it because they generated great ideas that had genuine impact and acted on them.
The ‘innovation’ industry, so to speak, is relatively new and it has grown rapidly over the last 10 years. People will always pay more for the creative than the analytical. The company I worked for were at the top of all this and grew very fast.
Then times started to get tougher. Suddenly our clients, who paid us a lot of money to do what we do, started to cut back. They concentrated on their core business and shied away from taking a risk on any new ventures and ideas, even those that offered potentially greater rewards.
Some experts say that a downturn is always full of new opportunities and businesses should make a head start and prepare for the return of the good times, but it’s a hard sell when profits begin to nosedive. The bottom line was that some clients could no longer afford our projects as they steadied themselves for the bumpy road ahead.
So our profits began to fall and, unfortunately, this meant redundancies. High quality staff are expensive and the outcome was inevitable. To be made redundant was both frustrating and liberating. Frustrating because I loved the job but it’s important to remember that redundancy isn’t personal, it’s about business and I understand why it happened.
It was liberating because, as a professional, I wanted to experience growth, not decline. And, as has happened to numerous people in my position, I have found being out of work can be a great opportunity. There is uncertainty but I’ve started to do freelance work and found that, with freezes on permanent hires, demand is actually up.
Well done that man. You know what they say about clouds and linings…
Out of work: Useful resources
Losing your job can come as a massive shock, even if it is something you have been worrying about for months. The latest figures show that for the first time in over a decade the number of people out of work has risen above two million.
If you are one of them, you probably want to find a new job as quickly as possible. Here are a number of useful resources to help you.
Redundancy procedure, your rights, unfair dismissal
Time for salary cap for bankers?
It’s not a great time to be a banker at the moment with financial apocalypse making the pin-striped gents probably more loathed than estate agents or journalists. Thousands of them have lost their jobs and those that are still in paid employment are finding that their renumeration packages are coming under ever greater public scrutiny.
Over the weekend reports that the Royal Bank of Scotland was about to award its staff a billion pounds in bonuses prompted outrage at a time of soaring unemployment and with a deep recession looming. Most people would agree it is a no-brainer that a company that has just posted the biggest-ever financial loss in British corporate history, required a 20-billion-pound government bail-out to stay afloat last year and is now nearly 70-percent state-owned should not be allowing its staff to be trousering huge bonuses.
The banks say they are bound by contract to pay the bonuses and that they need to retain key staff.
But that argument has got the former deputy prime minister John Prescott so riled he has even launched a public campaign against the bonus payments on Facebook. “This is morally and economically outrageous,” wrote Prescott. “If we hadn’t bailed them out to save homeowners and businesses, their contracts would be worth nothing as they’d be out of work.”
Over in America U.S. President Barack Obama has set a $500,000 annual cap on executive pay and imposed other restrictions on companies that receive government aid. Chancellor Alistair Darling has said it is too early to follow Obama’s lead, despite the European Commission urging states to cap bank pay.
Is it time for banks that are receiving government help to be subjected to a salary cap or would that policy be counterproductive to economic revival?
I am not a fan of John Prescott, but the man is absolutly right, it is a moral outrage to reward the Banking people for the complete disaster in the Banks that has and is giving utter grief to the people of Britain.
Mr Brown has got to stop these boses from being paid bonus’s now-no excuses!
Labour’s jobs summit
The government is to offer firms a “golden handshake” of up to 2,500 pounds for every person they recruit who has been unemployed for more than six months. Total cost of the initiative is expected to be around 500 million pounds.
Unemployment in Britain rose to 1.86 million people in the three months to October, equal to six percent of the workforce and the highest rate since the three months to June 1999.
Some commentators forecast it could rise as high as three million by the end of the year.
Gordon Brown is hosting a jobs summit today, bringing employers, union leaders and sector representatives together to discuss how to tackle the growing problem of joblessness.
The Conservatives have called it yet another government announcement on jobs that is more spin than substance and the employers group the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) say the only answer is to get the banks lending to firms again.
Do you think anything is likely to come of the jobs summit? What would you like to see the government do to protect employment?
A “People’s Charter”, eh?
It’s this kind of gibberish that brought us to the mess we’re now in. Thank God the likes of Crow and Paton are now nothing but a lunatic fringe clinging to an obsolete and malevolent creed responsible for bringing misery to millions. I wonder which of this fine pair see themselves as “The Great Leader” in their “People’s Republic”?
As for NuLab’s “jobs summit”, the best thing they can do for the good of the country is to stop all new employment in the state sector and then call an election. Every month they stay in government increases the damage they have done and the effort that will be required to recover from it.
Job crunch Britain: how have you been affected?
Net job creation in the UK has almost stopped as employers feel pessimistic about prospects for the economy, the latest quarterly Labour Market Outlook survey by KPMG and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has found.
The balance between the proportion of employers looking to increase staff levels over the next three months and those expecting to cut has fallen from +41 in autumn 2007 to +2 in autumn 2008 – the lowest figure recorded since the survey began in spring 2004, according to the Payroll and Human Resources Newsletter. Of the 721 employers surveyed, 83 per cent anticipated that Britain’s economic condition would further deteriorate this autumn and only one percent said they thought there would be an improvement.Respondents felt more optimistic about their own organisation though, with only 25 per cent believing that things would get worse.
Even though inflation is running at a 16-year high of 5.2 percent, staff pay excluding bonuses is seen increasing on average by just 3.5 per cent when the next pay review is due, while the expected average increase including bonuses has risen from 3.9 per cent to 4 per cent.
With official UK unemployment data for October due out on Wednesday, CIPD Chief Economist John Philpott sees a gloomy winter ahead: “With pay increases at best modest for those still in work, the harsh chill of recession will make this the toughest winter for UK households for almost two decades.”
Tell us what impact the downturn has had on you and your business. How has staff morale been affected?
UK govt & BoE was lazy to solve issues in UK. The 1.5% cut was needed back in August as Nothern Rock rocked and B&B started showing soar eye. They waited far too long to get the things going. Now banks refuse to give loans to employed let only unemployed. My bank even refused the mortgage leave that they were suppose to offer as part of the mortgage deal. Both PM & BoE kept the public unaware of the issues and the depth of the problem. They say 2 million is out of job – well my real estimation will be 9-10 million as UK govt has no idea about problems
Spend and spend some more?
Recent headlines alarmed us with news of the country’s budget deficit having risen to its largest in six decades, while top economists ominously declared that we’ve moved beyond merely tipping into a recession, to hurtling towards one.
More crucially, both Chancellor Alistair Darling and Prime Minister Gordon Brown have sought inspiration from revered economist Maynard Keynes’ oft-cited advice – spend and spend some more to fight off the ill effects of an economic slump. Keynesian theory’s greatest principle is the fundamental concept of the circular flow of money. He opined that when individuals rein in money outflow, the government needs to be “priming the pump”.
Brown and Darling insist that we may very well fall prey to a vicious circle if we curb spending – most people hoard money in turbulent times, but times become even more difficult when we’re tight with money. Whether this theory will work remains to be seen.
In November’s pre-budget report, Darling is expected to announce an easing of fiscal rules and outline plans for priority and targeted spending on infrastructural projects. “What I want to avoid is getting ourselves in a position governments have done in the past, where you face an immediate problem and cut back on the things the country will need in the future … ,” says the Chancellor.
Close on the heels of his declaration comes U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s statement to Congress supporting the idea of a second wave of spending. Gearing up for Round Two in the feverish economy rescue battle no doubt.
Could fast-tracking future governmental spending plans provide a fillip to productivity and create job opportunities at a time when forecasts peg the unemployment figure to hit 2 million by end-2008? While staving off unemployment won’t hold good as a sole justification in light of a worrying debt-to-national income-ratio, expanding money supply can put a little power back in the hands of people. Might it restore some strength to the fragile confidence of today’s fraught consumer? What do you think?
I think we should give Darling some credit – he isn’t following an idea laid out by an incredibly wise economist for nothing. Ploughing money back into the economy is likely to create public sector jobs, which in turn gives some purchasing power to those gainfully employed, who in turn spend on necessities…you see my point. Don’t trash it until it’s been tried.
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The Wall
