When I left school without the A levels that I needed to fulfil my academic dreams I was put on a job creation programme in my local library. I loved the scheme whilst it lasted!
I learned more in those six months than I had learned in a previous lifetime of school. There was something almost magical in handling so many books. Even without reading them, just stamping a book with this book is the property of Gwynedd Council and knowing on which shelf to place it gave me new information about the latitude of human knowledge, experience and insight. It was probably the most influential six months of my life!
But it was still cheap, and useless, labour!
It was a scheme that would never have allowed me to become a librarian or to get even the lowest job in a library. After six months of infatuation with the process I was kicked out because my term had ended, and some other person was inducted to the joys of librarianship in my stead with the same non chance of having a career in the library service.
Pointless really!
Given the resignations of the Apprenticeship Tsars I hope that the Westminster Government will look again at the meaning of apprenticeship and give young people the hope of gaining employment as electricians, plumbers, mechanics, librarians etc, rather than doing what Mrs Thatcher did – dangling the smell of such jobs under their noses in the knowledge that those jobs were never going to be available to them!
But I doubt it – getting kids through schemes, in order to keep them off the streets for a few months is easy politics – giving them meaningful apprenticeships that will lead to lifelong skills and employment is a real challenge that the ConDem Government is too frightened to contemplate.
Showing posts with label employment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label employment. Show all posts
19/01/2012
03/10/2009
Can Anglesey have its £48 million back please?
Apart from owning a sweet shop for a couple of years, which was an abject failure as a business venture (mainly due to my own sweet tooth eating into the profits) my working life has either been in the true public sector or the quasi public sector (where private businesses are paid by the government for providing public services). So I can't pretend to understand how the real business world works.
Because I am venturing into a subject that I know little about this post might be a load of codswallop. If it is I would appreciate a word from the more business savvy of my readers to explain where I am going wrong.
Last June the Assembly and Westminster governments offered RTZ, the owners of Anglesey Aluminium a £48 million package to help secure the plants future. The offer was refused, and as a result about 400 well paid jobs will be lost on the island.
The £48 million to save 400 jobs that was offered (and turned down because it wasn't enough) works out at just short of a quarter of a million pounds per job!
This is where I get confused, if those jobs were worth a quarter of a million each, and if the cash was available to save them at that price, why aren't there 400 grants of a similar size available to 400 individuals on the island to create 400 new businesses after RTZ said No?
Indeed a quarter of the price of each job would be a huge boost to anybody wanting to start up an SME! The £48 million offered to RTZ could be £30k each to help start up 1,600 new Anglesey companies, and if each of those companies employed just one individual each that would be 3,200 jobs for the price of 400!
If the £48 million had been spread a little thinner it could have given £1,500 to each and every working age person on the island as a deposit towards self employment!
In short if the governments have £48 million to spare as (turned down) backhanders to billion pound turnover companies, why isn't that cash available to new Welsh entrepreneurs?
If Wales needs to get out of its public service culture, shouldn't we be using these multi million pound "grants" to encourage the creation of indigenous companies, rather than subsidising multinationals?
Despite the fact that I am a nurse, a public servant and part of the Welsh public service problem, I do appreciate the need for a vibrant indigenous Welsh capitalism.
If Wales is ever to stand on its own two feet it needs interim government financial support aimed towards the creation of Welsh owned businesses, rather than that support only being available to externally owned labour intensive multinationals (Like RTZ) that just happen to be in Wales whilst it suits them.
Because I am venturing into a subject that I know little about this post might be a load of codswallop. If it is I would appreciate a word from the more business savvy of my readers to explain where I am going wrong.
Last June the Assembly and Westminster governments offered RTZ, the owners of Anglesey Aluminium a £48 million package to help secure the plants future. The offer was refused, and as a result about 400 well paid jobs will be lost on the island.
The £48 million to save 400 jobs that was offered (and turned down because it wasn't enough) works out at just short of a quarter of a million pounds per job!
This is where I get confused, if those jobs were worth a quarter of a million each, and if the cash was available to save them at that price, why aren't there 400 grants of a similar size available to 400 individuals on the island to create 400 new businesses after RTZ said No?
Indeed a quarter of the price of each job would be a huge boost to anybody wanting to start up an SME! The £48 million offered to RTZ could be £30k each to help start up 1,600 new Anglesey companies, and if each of those companies employed just one individual each that would be 3,200 jobs for the price of 400!
If the £48 million had been spread a little thinner it could have given £1,500 to each and every working age person on the island as a deposit towards self employment!
In short if the governments have £48 million to spare as (turned down) backhanders to billion pound turnover companies, why isn't that cash available to new Welsh entrepreneurs?
If Wales needs to get out of its public service culture, shouldn't we be using these multi million pound "grants" to encourage the creation of indigenous companies, rather than subsidising multinationals?
Despite the fact that I am a nurse, a public servant and part of the Welsh public service problem, I do appreciate the need for a vibrant indigenous Welsh capitalism.
If Wales is ever to stand on its own two feet it needs interim government financial support aimed towards the creation of Welsh owned businesses, rather than that support only being available to externally owned labour intensive multinationals (Like RTZ) that just happen to be in Wales whilst it suits them.
25/08/2009
Could WAG have done more to help young people get to university?
Prof Dylan Jones Evans asks:
Could WAG have done more to help young people get to university?
The answer is probably YES.
The question that I would ask is slightly different - Should WAG have done more to help young people get to university?
Isn't the real problem that we send too many young people to university in our days?
When I was of university age only 10% of young people went to University, only 8% of the population would gain a degree. The numbers gaining 1st class degrees and doctorate use to be a minuscule percentage of the general population.
There are jobs that would have been available to a CSE failure 30 years ago that now require a degree and a post graduate qualification!
"A" levels and degrees, even MA's and PhD's seem to be like incapacity benefit now: a way of keeping young people off the unemployment statistics for x number of years. As many of them will be on the dole when they graduate the highly educated workforce argument doesn't ring true!
Instead of pouring more and more money into universities wouldn't it be better if we used that funding to give real on the job training to enable 16 year olds to do proper jobs that are needed in our society rather than wasting millions in keeping them in education for an unneeded 5 to 10 years just in order to massage the unemployment figures or in order to create a fake idea of a nation that is more educated than it really needs to be?
Could WAG have done more to help young people get to university?
The answer is probably YES.
The question that I would ask is slightly different - Should WAG have done more to help young people get to university?
Isn't the real problem that we send too many young people to university in our days?
When I was of university age only 10% of young people went to University, only 8% of the population would gain a degree. The numbers gaining 1st class degrees and doctorate use to be a minuscule percentage of the general population.
There are jobs that would have been available to a CSE failure 30 years ago that now require a degree and a post graduate qualification!
"A" levels and degrees, even MA's and PhD's seem to be like incapacity benefit now: a way of keeping young people off the unemployment statistics for x number of years. As many of them will be on the dole when they graduate the highly educated workforce argument doesn't ring true!
Instead of pouring more and more money into universities wouldn't it be better if we used that funding to give real on the job training to enable 16 year olds to do proper jobs that are needed in our society rather than wasting millions in keeping them in education for an unneeded 5 to 10 years just in order to massage the unemployment figures or in order to create a fake idea of a nation that is more educated than it really needs to be?
08/01/2008
Blaming the sick doesn't make things better!
Antur Waunfawr and Menter Fachwen are two world leading projects that enable people who live with learning disabilities to play a full and valuable role in their local communities. They provide things such as cafés and recycling services that enable some people with quite serious disabilities to work. It's fair to say that the work that some of the disabled workforce do is not commercial and that most of them still receive government benefits in order to enable them to have a basic standard of living. However the people with, sometimes, quite severe disabilities that work in Antur Waunfawr and Menter Fachwen do work and they do help provide a valuable service for their communities.
In comparison, the suggestion that almost a quarter of a million people in Wales and two and a half million people in the UK are too incapacitated to play any role in society is clearly absolutely wrong. It shouldn't be so, it doesn’t need to be so and it is absolutely immoral that it is so!
However the blame for incapacity should not be laid upon the so called incapacitated, it should be laid fairly and squarely on the present government and its Conservative predecessor who created incapacity as a means of reducing true unemployment figures.
The whole system that leads to incapacity is flawed. Lets take, for example, a registered nurse who develops epilepsy. Clearly s/he can't carry on with that job. Nobody wants a nurse who might have a fit just when s/he's about to stick an injection in your bum! So job lost on the grounds of ill health, automatic claim for short-term incapacity granted for six months. No help or advice is given within that first six month period to consider what else s/he can do other than nursing. At the end of the six months long-term incapacity kicks in.
Once you receive long-term incapacity benefit (ICB), the authorities (not you) have said that you are incapable of any work. If you apply for a job that you think that you could do, despite your illness, the application is a declaration that you are fit for work, so you may loose money by applying for a job that you might not get. Who in their right mind is going to take that risk?
You can't even apply for training in a new occupation whilst on ICB, because if you're able to train you're able to work, so if you train you loose out!
So when a deaf, epileptic, former nurse who can lip-read finds out that there is not a single Welsh language lipreading tutor in the whole of Wales, but is told that his family will be impoverished if he dares to go on a lipreading tutor's course, can you blame him for saying no to the opportunity? Can you blame him for being absolutely pissed off and disgusted that such an employment opportunity should be denied to him by bureaucratic intransigence and unfair financial risks?
Lets suppose you do take the risk of applying for a job, because you are so pissed off with not working and you really do want a job. The Mail, the Telegraph, Tory blogs, David Cameron and even Peter Hain have gone on so much about the lead swinging, work shy, lazy, scrounging, swindlers who claim ICB. So who in the hell will even give you an interview, never mind a job, when your CV says claiming ICB for the last 4 years? No sensible employer would want to employ the caricature of the ICB claimant that is rife in journalistic and political circles. Given the choice between an eastern European desperate for work to help his family back home and a lazy git who has fiddled the country for the last four years and will probably fiddle your business too, who would you employ?
The current system of dealing with illness / disability and employment is flawed - it is in desperate need of change in order to enable those who can contribute to society through mainstream employment to do so and in order to ensure that those who are unable to get out of benefits, for what ever reason, are encouraged and enabled to fulfil some sort of valued role in their communities.
If Wales can be inovative and lead the world by providing a valued role in society for those who would have been condemned to the back wards of the assylum thirty years ago, suerly we can do better for our 250,000 incapacitaed than resorting to blame and fiscal punishment!
In comparison, the suggestion that almost a quarter of a million people in Wales and two and a half million people in the UK are too incapacitated to play any role in society is clearly absolutely wrong. It shouldn't be so, it doesn’t need to be so and it is absolutely immoral that it is so!
However the blame for incapacity should not be laid upon the so called incapacitated, it should be laid fairly and squarely on the present government and its Conservative predecessor who created incapacity as a means of reducing true unemployment figures.
The whole system that leads to incapacity is flawed. Lets take, for example, a registered nurse who develops epilepsy. Clearly s/he can't carry on with that job. Nobody wants a nurse who might have a fit just when s/he's about to stick an injection in your bum! So job lost on the grounds of ill health, automatic claim for short-term incapacity granted for six months. No help or advice is given within that first six month period to consider what else s/he can do other than nursing. At the end of the six months long-term incapacity kicks in.
Once you receive long-term incapacity benefit (ICB), the authorities (not you) have said that you are incapable of any work. If you apply for a job that you think that you could do, despite your illness, the application is a declaration that you are fit for work, so you may loose money by applying for a job that you might not get. Who in their right mind is going to take that risk?
You can't even apply for training in a new occupation whilst on ICB, because if you're able to train you're able to work, so if you train you loose out!
So when a deaf, epileptic, former nurse who can lip-read finds out that there is not a single Welsh language lipreading tutor in the whole of Wales, but is told that his family will be impoverished if he dares to go on a lipreading tutor's course, can you blame him for saying no to the opportunity? Can you blame him for being absolutely pissed off and disgusted that such an employment opportunity should be denied to him by bureaucratic intransigence and unfair financial risks?
Lets suppose you do take the risk of applying for a job, because you are so pissed off with not working and you really do want a job. The Mail, the Telegraph, Tory blogs, David Cameron and even Peter Hain have gone on so much about the lead swinging, work shy, lazy, scrounging, swindlers who claim ICB. So who in the hell will even give you an interview, never mind a job, when your CV says claiming ICB for the last 4 years? No sensible employer would want to employ the caricature of the ICB claimant that is rife in journalistic and political circles. Given the choice between an eastern European desperate for work to help his family back home and a lazy git who has fiddled the country for the last four years and will probably fiddle your business too, who would you employ?
The current system of dealing with illness / disability and employment is flawed - it is in desperate need of change in order to enable those who can contribute to society through mainstream employment to do so and in order to ensure that those who are unable to get out of benefits, for what ever reason, are encouraged and enabled to fulfil some sort of valued role in their communities.
If Wales can be inovative and lead the world by providing a valued role in society for those who would have been condemned to the back wards of the assylum thirty years ago, suerly we can do better for our 250,000 incapacitaed than resorting to blame and fiscal punishment!
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