The Promised Land

[Aurora]

www.monbiot.com - 16/07/12

<snip>

To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.

Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable.

Through globalisation and standardisation, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.

The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity. A rentier class holds the nation’s children to ransom. Faced with these conditions, who can blame people for seeking an alternative?

</snip>

Article continues ...

[DominicJ]

Do you have any idea how expensive it is to employ someone?

Lack of workers rights arent the reason, their introduction is the cause.

Do you have any idea how much an unskilled costs just for their first hour?

Of course you dont.


My office costs £44 in rent and council tax, per hour.

We hire a NEET, in his first hour, he's racked up over £50 in costs.
Take VAT out of his earnings, and he has to sell £60+ in his first hour.

Since he doesnt have any skills, his first hour also includes me to train his incompetence out of him

By the end of day one, I'm down a grand, and that assumes he doesnt decide work is hard, and quit, or even better, decide I racially discriminated against him and owe him a million pounds

[Aurora]

Of course you dont.

Arrogant tw@t!

Who'd want to work for you anyway?

[Pepperman]

My office costs £44 in rent and council tax, per hour.

We hire a NEET, in his first hour, he's racked up over £50 in costs.
Take VAT out of his earnings, and he has to sell £60+ in his first hour.

Why do you attribute all of your office costs to the single additional employee? If you didn't hire this person you would still be incurring those office costs so surely they're spread evenly over each of the people working there including you?

[DominicJ]

True, but that would be his share
If we dont employ him, we can move to smaller premises, which is in the works, with a bit of luck, I'll be off to head office long before than anyway

[Aurora]

True, but that would be his share
If we dont employ him, we can move to smaller premises, which is in the works, with a bit of luck, I'll be off to head office long before than anyway

.... something which I'm sure your colleagues have been looking forward to.

[Tarrel]

Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay.

Actually, we own a modest two bedroom flat which we let to a working Mum and her young daughter. We feel we charge a reasonable rent, certainly compared to other properties in the area. The tenant looks after the flat well, and I'd like her to stay, and give us a consistent income, rather than squeezing her out by putting the rent up, and then facing an unknown tenant or having the place sitting empty. We use a small, local letting agent who behaves reasonably fairly to us and the tenant.

My point is, when we were looking for an agent, and also when our son was looking for a place to rent, I came across some real horror-stories. Getting into the rental market as a young person seems almost impossible now. The fees required up front are ridiculous; a non-returnable "admin fee", inventory fees, damage deposit, a month's rent up front. And even if you can stump up all this, a lot of agents are now insisting on having one of the parents as a rent guarantor (we had to do this for our son).

So, it's not just the rents, it's the up-front costs that are prohibitive.

From a landlord's perspective, there are also some absurd costs, which I'm sure contribute to the charging of high rents in order to gain a reasonable return. For example, when we bought our flat it had a (perfectly serviceable, but basic) electric hob installed. I wanted to replace it with a better one and had an electrician come to have a look. He wanted to rewire the entire place, citing some minor new regulation. This in a building less than 12 years old. When I refused, he declined to fit the new hob. So, I left the old one in. The agent also suggested we have professional cleaners in, to set a standard, so that the tenant could be held to account and made to do the same thing when she vacated. They justified this on the basis of the state some places had been left in. I refused, as I was decorating the place throughout anyway. The cleaning would have cost over £200!

The whole rental market is a gravy train, with letting agents and a whole bevy of service-providers all with their noses in the trough. Our agent seems better than most, but they're not perfect. One cannot only blame the landlords in my (slightly biased) opinion.

[revdode]

The whole rental market is a gravy train, with letting agents and a whole bevy of service-providers all with their noses in the trough.

You do realize this IS the current economic model

[Little John]

True, but that would be his share
If we dont employ him, we can move to smaller premises, which is in the works, with a bit of luck, I'll be off to head office long before than anyway

Hang on a minute.

As for the costs of training the kid up, what are you complaining about? The cost of training him is no more or less an operating cost as any other. For example, you have to pay for electricity don't you? You have to pay for equipment, right? Well, a fully trained operative is just one more thing you need to have in your business to make it work. Or, do you think you should be subsidised in terms of his training? It seems to me you do because, instead of paying him the necessary wages for him to be able to function as an independent agent in the world while he is being trained up in return for the work he does, you expect to be allowed to pay him less than the minimum he needs (that's why it's called the ,"minimum wage", by the way). This will mean, one way or another, his costs will be born elsewhere in the system. In other words, by the rest of us.

I understand well enough that your business' margins will be sufficiently tight in this age of contraction that you will be looking for ways to save wherever you can. However, if you save on wages and training costs then you have simply passed that cost on to the rest of us, It doesn’t just disappear. It comes out elsewhere as housing benefit among other things.

Oh, wait, we’re about to cut housing benefit aren't we. So, basically, we have a rentier class who are holding everyone else by the balls, including your business, by charging sky high rents such that these costs are crushing any possibility of economic activity. And what is the answer from our leaders? Is it to let the debt come crashing down so that we can all find out how poor we really are and then rebuild from the ashes, no matter how hard that may be? No, it is to kick those at the bottom of this stinking pile of debt even harder just so those at the top don’t lose their debt-driven grip on the rest of us. As if that's going to f***ing work.

What you are doing by winging about your costs and implying that they should be subsidised by the rest of us is no different to what is happening at the wider systemic level. It's not the kid's fault, it's not even your business' fault. It's the f***ing system and it's prime orchestrators that need changing.

Stop looking for scapegoats.

[DominicJ]

Steve
I didnt suggest anything, I simply explained why youths couldnt get jobs.
You dont like it, well, I'm not sure what you want me to do about it.

Aurora

.... something which I'm sure your colleagues have been looking forward to. Wink

Nar, things were a bit tense at first, but most of then have accepted I'm not head offices hatchet man.
They arent happy that the office is obviously going to go, but I didnt make the decision, I just predicted it.

[Tarrel]

The whole rental market is a gravy train, with letting agents and a whole bevy of service-providers all with their noses in the trough.

You do realize this IS the current economic model

But only in the last 10-12 years. We rented a house during a job relocation about 12 years ago, and didn't have any of this nonsense.

[DominicJ]

Mostly because of really stupid land lords who dont realise they dont need new paper work every 6 months, or frequently, because they arent even told.

Agent just rings tenant, says they need to pop in and pay a £50 tanancy charge, agent pockets it, LL none the wiser.

Speak to your land lord and do so on a regular basis.
If they're gits, move.