[John_D]

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 11:16 am  

BobbyD wrote:

The UK definition of a recession is 2 successive quarters of negative growth, this hasn't happened since 2009.

A definition invented by trustworthiness's Richard Nixon, altered from the original and more relevant meaning of one quarter of negative growth in order that he could tell the public that the US was not in recession when it was.

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 11:16 am  

Mintball wrote: On a slightly different note – but Jerry has raised the issue of undermployment/casualisation anyway – the Scrooge employer that refuses to pay the national minimum wage, charges his staff 17,000% APR for loans on petrol to get between jobs, 'rents' them company cars at £128 a month because they're not paid enough to buy one and then takes hundreds of pounds from their wages if they're in a road accident where they're not to blame. I must admit to not having read the NMW legislation from cover to cover, but surely if that bit's true, he can be prosecuted?

Mintball wrote: On a slightly different note – but Jerry has raised the issue of undermployment/casualisation anyway – the Scrooge employer that refuses to pay the national minimum wage, charges his staff 17,000% APR for loans on petrol to get between jobs, 'rents' them company cars at £128 a month because they're not paid enough to buy one and then takes hundreds of pounds from their wages if they're in a road accident where they're not to blame. I must admit to not having read the NMW legislation from cover to cover, but surely if that bit's true, he can be prosecuted?

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 11:18 am  

Ajw71 wrote:

The economy "won't pick up that much if at all between now and the next election".

The economy has picked up

AGAIN because you seem have difficulty with this question or (and this is harsh but looks as if it is true) your intellectual capacity cannot comprehend such a simple, straight forward question.

WHICH ECONOMY????

I even coloured it in for you to help

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 1:15 pm  

Mintball wrote: On a slightly different note – but Jerry has raised the issue of undermployment/casualisation anyway – the Scrooge employer that refuses to pay the national minimum wage, charges his staff 17,000% APR for loans on petrol to get between jobs, 'rents' them company cars at £128 a month because they're not paid enough to buy one and then takes hundreds of pounds from their wages if they're in a road accident where they're not to blame. No one is forced to work here, he would have to change his attitude and conditions if he couldn't find anyone to do the work. Presumably everyone knew what the terms were when they joined?

Mintball wrote: On a slightly different note – but Jerry has raised the issue of undermployment/casualisation anyway – the Scrooge employer that refuses to pay the national minimum wage, charges his staff 17,000% APR for loans on petrol to get between jobs, 'rents' them company cars at £128 a month because they're not paid enough to buy one and then takes hundreds of pounds from their wages if they're in a road accident where they're not to blame. No one is forced to work here, he would have to change his attitude and conditions if he couldn't find anyone to do the work. Presumably everyone knew what the terms were when they joined?

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 1:23 pm  

Sal Paradise wrote:

No one is forced to work here, he would have to change his attitude and conditions if he couldn't find anyone to do the work. Presumably everyone knew what the terms were when they joined?

In "The Real World", people don't have oodles and oodles of lovely choices for jobs.

If they leave a job tomorrow, there are not hundreds of jobs available. I know that, in fantasy la la land, some people like to pretend that there are just millions vacancies out there, all ready to be filled, but this is not the reality. That is why there are more people unemployed than there are vacancies.

And given privatisation of services, it is entirely possible that pay, terms and conditions have been changed since people were employed to do the job – there are plenty of workplaces where this has happened more than once as the workers have been passed between companies like a parcel.

That's "The Real World" for you.

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 1:26 pm  

Chris28 wrote:

I must admit to not having read the NMW legislation from cover to cover, but surely if that bit's true, he can be prosecuted?

I know that the journalist posting this story was so shocked that they double checked – and then the editor and the head of comms did further checks, simply because it is so shocking.

The government has said that not paying people for travel time (thus reducing their pay to below the national minimum wage) is 'not on' and companies shouldn't do it, but they have yet to legislate to close a loophole that, when the legislation was initially enacted, nobody foresaw.

In the case of this branch, I also know that the union is only now in a position to start acting because recruitment (on the basis of the employer's behaviour) has given it good density.

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 3:08 pm  

Sal Paradise wrote:

No one is forced to work here, he would have to change his attitude and conditions if he couldn't find anyone to do the work. Presumably everyone knew what the terms were when they joined?

It ain't necessarily so, this business covers both Dorset and Hampshire social services areas contracted out to do the work that both of those regions would probably have handled in-house.

Now imagine that you are a care worker, a home help or similar, working for those local authorities only to be told that you are now redundant and that you can re-apply to this "Care" company for a position there, it happened in Leeds also by the way, to a friend of mine, there was no transfer of employment as the new contractor stated that their own staff could cover the contract - then they recruited from the ex-council staff that had been made redundant.

You really don't have a choice as to whether you work for this particular employer or not, they are the ones doing all of the care work in your county, and the county next door, if you want to stay employed in the care industry and have a desire to actually CARE for your clients then you have to work for the new company.

Unless you understand how Home Help (for example) works then its probably difficult to understand the attitude that some of the employees have, they have a set routine and a set list of clients to visit, some of those dependent elderly and infirm may rely totally on their home help visit, for some it may be the only visit they get that week, for a few the home help is their only point of contact with the outside world and the only chance that some of them (for example) have to bathe that week - this is very basic stuff but vitally important for those "clients".

The last thing you want as a dependent is for your care worker to be limited to fifteen minutes per day and to arrive full of hell because they aren't being paid for the time to travel to you or for their petrol and vehicle costs, indeed they are having to pay to come and see you and the fact that you want a bath today and need helping in and out of it isn't going to make their mood any better when the 20 extra minutes they spend with you makes them late for their next client and is unpaid.

Quite frankly, its a disgrace and the sign of a society that doesn't give a fook about its elderly and infirm and anyone who is happy to go along with that deserves what is coming to them in the future.

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 3:15 pm  

JerryChicken wrote:

It ain't necessarily so <snip>

Absolutely spot on.

And re your concluding comment –

[DaveO]

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 3:46 pm  

Ajw71 wrote:

The economy "won't pick up that much if at all between now and the next election".

The economy has picked up - 1.9% since your statement and you are becoming more and more wrong with every quarterly growth figure published. You do realise strong growth is predicted next year don't you?

Continuing to post that you don't think you were wrong is going to become more and more embarrassing for you and just shows you up for the doom mongering poster you are. To think you accuse me of having my head in the sand.

Why don't you just admit, like Blanchflower, that you were wrong?

"The economy won't not picked up by much if al"l. That is what I said above, yes you have read it?

So given the economy has not picked up by much, demonstrate to everyone the falsehood of my previous statement. Go on.

The fact is you can't and you need to realise while misrepresenting what someone said repeatedly may be a government tactic in the hope the lie will be believed but this is not the Daily Mail comment column and you are not getting away with it.

As to strong growth, define stroing growth. Will it for example get us back to where we were in 2008? What figure do you consider strong growth?

Will it come about by the rebalancing of the economy Osborne said was necessary that he has conveniently forgotten? Or will it come about as people empty savings and rush into debt on a house buying spree engineered by Osborne instead?

Or does none of that matter to you and all you are interested in is the raw statistics so you can indulge in a not very good attempt at point scoring?

Re: No More Arguments: Austerity is Working! : Tue Dec 17, 2013 3:57 pm  

Sal Paradise wrote:

No one is forced to work here,

Of course not, they could easily get one of those care jobs that offer fully-expensed company cars and unlimited expense accounts that you thought was the norm.

The employer in question has been constantly looking to squeeze ever more out of his workers for less.

Yet another case of the real victims of austerity being those least able to resist it - the bloody working poor