john banks

Agree very much. How do you fix it? Has our economy become 'too advanced' in that it requires everyone to up their game and some just can't do it making them "disabled" if you are the previous government, or "fit for work" if you are the present government? I am trying the tread this line daily in how I deal with requests for sickness certificates for people who are not medically sick but are unemployable due to ability or choice. It does puzzle me that I can offer £12-15/hour for unskilled labour that any motivated hardworking 20 year old could rise to, yet I have struggled to find reliable people that will turn up for such work. Friend who runs a large business he built from nothing to something impressive through his own graft tends to have trouble with school leavers who may be started on washing the directors' cars. They have an opportunity to impress the boss and have a potentially well paid job for life, yet some say to him, "I'm not washing @#$£ing cars." Funnily enough, the Poles just get stuck in...

ditchmyster

iTrader: (7)

I agree with a lot of what you say but it's no different to when I left school in the 80's, I went on a YTS scheme (remember those) that was considered slave labour with no real prospect of a job, but I got £13 more than the dole, yes people that's a whole thirteen pounds for working all week, I just got on with it, then went to college for a year and did another couple of years day release working at a tool hire firm, apparently there wasn't much work about but I was never without a job, I'd just go to industrial estates and knock on the door and ask for a job, and I always got one.

My car insurance was £700 and I didn't make enough to buy a house either.

The main problem with the youth of today is their get up and go has got up and gone.

zip106

I also started on a YTS - £27.50 a week and I gave my mother £10 of that for board.

I had to get two buses each way to work and was working on freezing cold building sites throughout winter in my first year.
It was hard work, and at times demoralising, but the alternative even then (1985) was the dole and street corners as many of my peers did.

I came out the other side and think I've done ok.

I'm working on a renovation project at the moment that's having £1m spent on it.
The main contractor is having issues with labour - the young lads come and go, you hardly see the same ones from one week to the next.
They're all paid above minimum wage with a bonus system in place, but from what I've seen most of them want more for less.


They moan about having to get one bus to work, or even that if one of the foremen give them a lift then its too early to be picked up at 7:00!

There's a few good lads, the ones that get their heads down and crack on - the sort I'd willingly employ.
In the main though, the majority are uncouth, discourteous and think the world owes them a living.

fatscoobfella1

iTrader: (1)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Well said...

Much the same myself....1985 offered nothing but YTS...So thats what i did,walking 3 miles either way in the mornings,as the garage i started at was way off the bus route. I never thought of it as hard,just got on with it and if that what was required then so be it.
I saved up and bought a Mk 1 Escort,and did it up in my spare time..Then worked my way up to an RS2000 at 21 yrs of age...Insurance £700 in 1990!

As the years went by i became i city and guilds trainer in the motor trade for apprentices and the level of lads i seen come through that where acceptable was very low. Probably less than 10% of the total i saw,would i personally employ.The majority where more than happy to sit down on the nearest thing and try and lie their way through..

I even saw one lad trying to use a jack with a wheel and tyre balanced on the plate trying to fit the wheel on a car.When i asked him why he was doing this and not just picking up the wheel and fitting it,his reply was "i dont think im strong enough".. I mean FFS!!

RA Dunk

Looking at the above four posts, Like I was saying the youth nowadays are so far up their own ar$es it's unreal. I could almost understand it if they had something to be up their own ar$es about but most of them haven't got **** all to their names.

pflowers

I agree completely with the above.

But I truely believe it's all down to what we aspire to have and that is what has evolved and changed.

I too left school in 1985 and knew to get what I wanted I would have to work my way up. In the late 80's every youth wanted a nice car, xr2, xr3, mini 1275gt etc and to get that you needed a good job.

What have the youth been programmed to want nowadays? Social networking on the latest iphone/htc/etc and they can get that even on the dole.

I won't let my kids be like that and am working hard to make sure it doesn't happen and to be fair they have a pretty good work ethic at 14 and 16, being encouraged to work in the family business at weekends as soon as they were old enough.

But when I show my 14 year old son a picture of the STI I want and he just shrugs his shoulders you can see the battle we face, he would rather have an iphone 5s..

fatscoobfella1

iTrader: (1)

^^^^^^^

Until he reaches 17 and see's his mates scooting around in little cars and scoring with the hot chicks....lol...

lordharding

iTrader: (1)

Another lad that started on the yop even before yts (young tarts to screw we used to call them )
£25 per week
£5 for a lunch in our cafe
£10 for the bus per week to I passed my driving test and got my parents old Austin Maxi
I had TI work hard as a junior in a department store
Dispaplin ,and hard work and dedication was what you were taught and you were rewarded with the vison of a job for life
I rose through the ranks to area manager and never forgot my tough training and proper old fashioned values

Compare that to the modern youth of today that the boss recruited on the last fee years
Forever texting
Coming in late
Cant even make a decent cup of tea
Always complaing about work
Not my job and just ignoring the basics and then complaining about money
Then back to stareing at their mobiles looking for the next text or fb message


I have no time for the modern youth of today and the only place for them is a few years in the army to make proper adults of them

All part of broken Britain I'm afraid

pflowers

Todays youth are just a product of the modern system, we were taught by society to work hard to get what we want, today's kids can get what they want and sit on their ****.

Too many benefits, human rights, employment rights and easy credit, that's the problem.

I suggest it all started to go wrong in 1997 and we all know what happened then...

pflowers

Double post

JTaylor

As Tony alluded to earlier, the above reads as being deeply demotivating. This generation have inherited what we left behind. Perhaps we ought to take a look in the mirror.

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

FFS while I agree that the New Labour government fanned the flames extensively of an already breaking society to say it all started to go wrong in 1997 is complete and utter bollocks usually perpetuated by people who want to believe it can all be attributed to one government so that they can falsely hope another is going to 'save us'.

The problem goes right back to when the welfare state started to be expanded to be more than safety net. Successive governments especially the Thatcher/Major and Blair governments massively expanded the system and made it more complex to allow different people to claim for a multitude of different things depending on their circumstances, but mainly so they could massage the statistics to their own agendas and in Thacher's case create a convenient black economy that exists to this day.

As soon as welfare moves from being a safety net to a lifestayle choice then you have problems, but the biggest issue now is we have masses of families where at least two generations have never had a job and live on benefits in some cases through choice (in many cases not, but don't let the press know that).... young people see this (and of course what they see is worse than the reality thanks to the scum we call the press publishing article after article about families getting thousands of pounds of benefit a month designed to 'outrage' us all) and at best they know they will be fine even if they don't work, at worst they think it's easier to go on benefits so where's the incentive?

On top of that there is the high level of taxation (indirect and direct) on anything and everything so a large amount of whatever you earn appears to be swallowed up by the goverment etc.

At the end of the day there isn't much to persuade young people that work is a good idea these days!

chocolate_o_brian

iTrader: (22)

daveyj

iTrader: (1)

I don't think it helps that kids are bombarded with programming that glamourises glamour tbh. "Reality TV" soaps with young twenty-somethings all driving around in flash motors and wearing blingy clothing with no connection to a real job other than existing tends to give a distorted view of how life is.

My colleagues daughter is 22/23 and she could not give less of a **** about the working world. Instead she hangs around in bars in london trying meet footballers and cast members of said reality shows thinking a faster buck can be made.

I'm a Chef and proud of it. I'll never be a millionaire doing it but it's kept me in the money and I'm happy enough. I've had to let kids go who have a slack attitude to work despite my best efforts to connect to them and get them working hard. It's a tricky subject to tackle tbh.

pflowers

Yes I agree, after all most of us are from the generation that created these kids and the world they live in.

pflowers

And kids believe that in today's world the only way they would ever become something is to be famous.

I too hate with a vengeance the reality tv culture, but presumably it's on tv because people want to watch it, it gives them something to dream of or aspire to be, the problem is it's giving out the wrong message.

I however quite like the apprentice but even that gives out the wrong message, spend a few weeks being humiliated by Alan Sugar and his cronies and if you are lucky land yourself a £100k a year job.

tony de wonderful

Poles coming here will be disproportionately hard workers just through a kind of 'natural selection'. Moaning about the younger generation is something which seems to be a constant in every older generation.

Anyway, let's not romanticise hard work. A true 'work ethic' which values work for its own sake is rare (Protestants), most 'work ethic' is just 'busyness' or obedience. For all the praise we heap on Indians for their hard work (a kind of racist generalisation I know), you won't find many who actually value hard work with their hands which is disdained (car washing for example). Most people who do this sort of thing from a young age are being trained to do it forever; it's dead end, and the middle classes know it, which is one reason - when I was a kid - they didn't have their kids doing paper rounds or washing pots in restaurants, they didn't want them to 'learn to labour', to become a person who labours.

Globalisation (whatever it means exactly, it is contested) is given as a reason for making people more precarious and under pressure in the workplace, invariably doing more hours for less pay, zero hour contracts, less rights, etc., all celebrated as the 'holy' free market in action. I was watching a famous war film called Twelve O'Clock High which is about the effects of battle fatigue amongst US aircrew in WW2. The point of the film was that the 'managers' of the air force had to accept that there was a maximum effort that the crews could give before they started suffering debilitating psychological problems. This had to be accepted, regardless of managerial style. Pushed too hard, the machine breaks. I think there is a point where the economy - which is supposed to aid and abet life - actually becomes anti-life, compels people to push themselves too hard, makes them under too much stress, the machine breaks.

tony de wonderful

Motivation by fear, no surprise it creates resistances in people.

Martin2005

Yes and especially the youth of the country

Oh how i love a bit of blantant hypocrisy

RA Dunk

Are you calling me a hypocrite?

Martin2005

By your own words...

RA Dunk

Whats your grounds for this?

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

Ignore him, he can't write anything in plain English, it's always stupid riddles with him these days!

RA Dunk

Just his 'usual' attempt at trolling I'm thinking, House of Commons must be quiet today before David Camerons bothering with Scoobynet.

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

[ PMQs tomorrow so he'll be busier then

Martin2005

No I was interested to read your views on the youth of today, and how everything is always someone elses fault. It seems a little hypocritical to then start apportioning blame a particular group that you are not part of, doesn't it?

Whilst I'm at it; it's also a bit random to be resting the blame on the youth on a thread about debt. It's not the youth that created this debt, but it is the youth that will have to pay it off!

RA Dunk

No, I've never claimed for anything, ever....

So take you hypocrisy comment and shove it up your ar$e.

Martin2005

Originally Posted by RA Dunk
No one in this day and age are responsible for their own actions anymore, everything is someone elses fault.

RA Dunk

And? In this day and age of Claims Direct, Injury Lawers 4 U and the rest of these sleazy type of companies I stand by what I said. These type of companies are making a killing of of the claiming culture.

Dingdongler

How is that racist?