Jobless yoofs! Get on your bike, er, mobe, and look for work Reading Borough Council is to develop an app to help young people find jobs. The authority's plan is part of its "from handset to mindset" project that aims to address the Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETs) issue across Reading and West Berkshire. By developing the app, with the benefit of £125,000 of funding …
Yet another way for the huge number of people out of work to chase the tiny number of available jobs.
It doesn't matter how flashy your tech is if there aren't enough jobs.
No matter how many people find work through this scheme there will still be exactly the same number of people out of work - just different people.
The way to get more people into work is not to endlessly harass and blame the unemployed, it is to make more jobs available. (And NOT by giving the rich tax cuts and claiming it will 'trickle down' - the poor are already being pissed on.)
But it's such fun harassing the unemployed, especially during a Depression.
Kicking people out of their wheelchairs, making cancer patients stack shelves for nothing, abusing NEETs for being lazy while your trust fund gets fundier and fundier and you snort more and more of it - what kind of lunatic wouldn't enjoy this?
Be fair. It's not as if anyone is asking them to work in a bank.
With $32+Trillion hoarded in off-shore the vaults, where is the consumer 'demand' to create jobs that manufacture products or provide services, in a deficit driven economy? Someone please make a rational economic evidenced-based argument to the contrary. Thank you Christoph for the reality check.
Local councils helping people? Odd ... one of the perks of working for a council is that you get to make life hell for ordinary people. Then I read that they laid off 150 employees last year, so maybe this scheme is meant to redress the (self-inflicted) balance somewhat. Although a council with a conscience is rarer than a council with a "help the public" ethic, so that can't be right.
So, in honour of aeronaut Norman Tebbit (and his mate Keith Joseph of "planned run-down of Merseyside" fame) who didn't "Get It" about this kind of recession, can I just repeat from memory my bus-stop anecdote from the last time we had a nasty recession - year 2002 or so, at least in IT anyway.
First student at bus stop:- "bugger of a recession, isn't it, what we gonna do when we graduate?"
Second student:- "tell me about it, my mate got a 1st in Computing, couldn't get a (real) job, so eventually he joined the RAF instead"
No one seems to be asking the question about the relationship between 'there aren't enough jobs' and G4S failing to fill some 30,000 jobs!!! I would be really interested to see how many people actually applied for jobs with them, if it outstripped the figure fair enough.... if it didn't then that's worrying.
Are these actual longterm jobs, or are people out the door after a couple of months down the line?
And, what kind of jobs exactly, are they highly-skilled and suitable for all the folks that have been chucked out of theirs ......I mean, how do they compare to working for say, other companies that spring to mind, Initial Services for example, some of us have long memories ;)
Plus, do you need old skool security appearance, like tattoos, a mullet, and a black leather bomber jacket to work for them, or are they more into the neo-Auschwitz guard/TSA Official vibe.... ;)
Has she considered training up for welding? Seems girls can be very good indeed.
Real money, real job. Downside - need some determination, and a steady hand!
"Carissa Love Showed up Ready to Kick A$$ and chew gum...But she ran out of gum."-
http://www.weldingtipsandtricks.com/how-to-weld.html
http://www.weldingtipsandtricks.com/shortage-of-welders-ua-video.html
HR business grad girl quits, goes into welding .... wins prize.
http://www.ccac.edu/default.aspx?id=150327
OK she may never consider it but at least it shows what is possible.
Plumbing also pays well, always required.
@AC, re: your 26 year old, unemployed daughter.
I am not sure what sort of luxurious lifestyle your daughter is managing to create on her £70 a week benefit for a single person, but if it's that good, maybe she could write a book about it and let everyone else in on the secret.
I am in full-time, well paid employment, but I have friends who are not, and they can just about manage to feed themselves adequately on their £10 a day dole money. Bear in mind that the £10 a day has to pay for heating and electricity, as well as food.
She spends most of the day sleeping and the evenings in pubs where other "out of work" (re black economy) people buy her drinks, her leccy is on key meter and her b/f pays for that.
As said, her rent is paid so she has no £220 per week plus council tax outlay that most of us have from out £1100 a month
Well they didn't apply for it because if you do get the six weeks work then you likely lose your benefits for 3 months. They might pay you back eventually but by that time you are borrowing £50 at 2480% to buy own brand beans and pay your electric before they cut you off.
I imagine You would also be moved to the 'pester list' where you are seen as recently unemployed so extra hoops would be placed in your way before you qualify for benefits you have already received and depend on.
The jobs were paying near minimum wage, benefits pay what you need, there is a vast gap between if you have any dependants.
What I would have done was taken a look at good candidates on the dole who would like to move into security, give them special dispensation to do the 6 weeks work with the option to return to benefits immediately if needed.
They would be trained, obtain certification which is worth ~ £500 -£1000, given 6 weeks work and a reference I would imagine 50% would be back in work almost immediately afterwards. Group 4 and its subbies would probably hire the ones they liked. The rest are in a better position to find work.
It would pay for itself by the ones not available for work having their benefits stopped and not paying a management fee G4S would supply some of the training instead.
Better than subsidising big multinationals by supplying cheap shelf stackers.
Of course many may have applied but because G4S would have lost money putting them on a retainer or guaranteeing the work most good ones have got another job.
Those are temporary jobs, and even of they were permanent, that's not the issue. It was G4S failing to get enough people through the clearance and training process in time.
This is going to come as a shock to you, but many people who are unemployed, aren't the feckless, welfare scroungers that you think they are.
Again SJRulez, please go back to reading your Daily Mail. Or better still, burn it and read an actual newspaper.
Why go to the hassle of developing another f*ing App (for Droid AND iOS)? Why not just bung the sits vac onto a bleedin' website? Probably rather cheaper, and available to people who only have access to bog standard internet. - oooh, maybe someone's already done that? Or will the app include geolocation and beep to tell you you're walking past a Tesco with current vacancies for shelf-stackers or a hospital with a vacancy for a consultant brain surgeon?
Eeeh lad, I remember t'olden days, adverts on FRONT page of paper where they should be, REAL jobs advertised in Plain English with the SALARY and REQUIREMENTS quoted. No messing.
No need to play silly games with HR asking what you previously earned. Apparently the salary quoted helped to attract the appropriate candidates, too low, no-one bothers, high, and you have stiff competition from the best ;)
Of course, we had a REAL economy then ;)
My old man also delights in telling me the time he was reimbursed for travel expenses to an interview by one of the interviewers (yeah, really!) from a briefcase full of nice fresh crisp notes. Honesty-based system- told them how much it cost to get there. ;)
And went looking for an evening/weekend job to suplement the 9-5. Found a restaurant job with 20 minutes of looking and started my first shft a few days later.
Theres plenty of jobs in this town for those who look for them, ive yet to walk down Friar street and not see at least 50% of the bars recruiting for various roles.
The problem, which noone wants to admit to, is that someone aged 23 who has never had a job almost certainly has no intention of ever finding a job.
G4S
Depends from experience of being unemployed I would be asking myself the following first.
Is it paying enough for it to be worth it?
Hows long is it for.
Do I have enough money to last to the first pay packet, or even have enough spare saved to get to work in the first place?
Will I have to relocate or travel distances that eat up the wages (i'm guessing the wages weren't generous).
Once the contract ends and I am made unemployed again,
will I have made enough money to tide me over and end up effectively pissing down the drain making the whole effort of earning the extra cash completly worthless before the dole get of there arse and start paying me again.
Will my landlord be nice enough to put up with the delays in rent caused by me starting work and waiting for payment, and then ending work and waiting for council to approve the benefit.
You know after that I might have considered it.
Unfortunately a lot of people who are unemployed look at the jobs out there as boring and mundane rather than the means to an end. You cant progress or better yet expect to be earning 30k+ without doing some of the shit jobs along the way. I started out picking up rubbish on the local market at 16, not a great job but it still paid. How many 16 year old's would do that now?
I've on occasion sent job details to friends who are supposedly looking for jobs and quite often get a response back of 'Nah I don't want to do that' and yet a few conversations later they'll vent anger at being stuck on benefits.
Somebody mentioned earlier in the thread, that the unemployed mass are not the benefit robbers I think they are...... Unfortunately that's also down to where you live, the road I live on has two working families, a few that work cash in hand and defraud the benefit system whilst the remaining sit on their ass outside each others house getting pissed all day.
So let me see if I have this right...
1. the council is getting a grant to basically duplicate an app that the jobseeker-direct site already has.
2. they are doing this to facilitate sharing of job links across social media because the .gov site prevents its visitors doing this themselves (due to session variables passed in its URL's).
Colour me cynical but a quick search of Google reveals at least two sites that are scraping the JSD website in almost real time and one unemployed dev showed how to do it using just the Yahoo Pipes service.
By the time the council has debated it, gone through all the paperwork, paid all the staff to check on what was needed, asked a dozen jobsworths to research it, asked another dozen to shuffle the paperwork, it will cost the council about £750,000 to implement it. Progress at last.
I'd be curious if this app got any real jobs. The problem here in the US, there's a couple OK jobs sites (but without enough jobs listed.) The others (*cough* monster.com) have LOADS of "jobs", but they aren't jobs. They are temp agencies that just shovel out junk listings for every locality in the country... so, it's like "Oh! A job", to find out that actually they want to, maybe eventually down the road, get you a minimum wage temp job 1000 miles from your location.
With this App on the unemployed cell handsets, it means that applicant's lives can be monitored.
(1) What time does a user's cell stop moving at night and in the morning; (2) How may times a user actually uses the App; (3) Time planner - allowing users to plan out their job search activities - and for Big Brother to monitor their performance; (4) Check on transportation modes (slow-walking; faster-bicycle;, fast, non fixed route-car; public transport, etc; (5) Plod could track their potential customers; (6) Check on cell usage costs and inquire wheee the funds are coming from.
Great tool especially for social serves and benefits providers..
Had a Work Experience kid here a few weeks ago. His Dad is the current IT director here, so naturally knows nothing about actual IT (He asked me if the Avaya setup we had was IP Telephony and when the comms room flooded, was nowhere to be found).
The lad really thought that he could walk into a job on £30k/year and seemed rather upset when I told him a fantastic graduate package would be between £18-20k and that despite being time served, having 2 degrees, and multiple IT certs, I only just about earn £30k.
I'm sure 'Dad' will sort hum out though..
AC because it's a Viper pit here and I'd like to stay employed :)
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