Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Oct 10, 2022 1:21 pm

plodder wrote:
Wed Oct 05, 2022 2:50 pm
Devils advocate:

Where is the evidence that austerity has increased poverty, to what extent etc. fully appreciate things like food banks are a phenomenon that ties in neatly with this policy but does that impact enough people to cause these changes, and wouldn’t the reduced tax burden elsewhere have a positive effect? Where’s the actual evidence?
From the paper:
There have also been some attempts to quantify the differential financial impacts of austerity on men and women. For example, detailed analyses by the Equality and Human Rights Commission showed that as a result of changes to direct taxes and social security payments, women lost on average approximately £400 per year between 2010 and 2018 compared with c.£30 per year loss for men. However, that average figure varied enormously across both the income spectrum and different population groups: for example, women in the second and third lowest income deciles lost c.£1500 and c.£1100 per annum, respectively, compared with c.£1100 and c.£600 losses for men; similarly, among those aged 35–44 years, the average annual loss to women (c.£2200) was around four times higher than the equivalent loss to men (c.£550). The latter difference is linked to the average age of lone parents: and lone parents in the bottom income quintile were estimated to have lost around 25% of their entire annual income.23 Other, related, analyses have highlighted the intersectionality of gender, poverty and also ethnicity in assessing and quantifying the impact of the cuts. For example, among the poorest third of the population, white women lost 11% of their income (compared with 8% of equivalently poor men); however, the equivalent figures for black ethnic groups were 14% and 9%, respectively, and for Asian groups it was 19% and 10%.25
Those are significant losses.

But, on top of the financial hit, there are also the cuts to services - carers, social workers, after-school activities, etc. - that lessen the struggle of surviving on a lower income.

I'm very surprised that anyone would think "austerity had no measurable impact on poor people" to be a sensible null hypothesis, even for diabolical advocacy. We already know austerity was mainly cuts to things used by the vulnerable. We know that trickle-down doesn't work. We know that economic growth has been disproportionately felt by the already better-off. To my mind it would be very surprising if taking away people's money and social support didn't have adverse consequences.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Oct 10, 2022 1:44 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 1:21 pm

But, on top of the financial hit, there are also the cuts to services - carers, social workers, after-school activities, etc. - that lessen the struggle of surviving on a lower income.
I suspect that the cuts in services would have a much more immediate effect on mortality compared to lower incomes.

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Fishnut » Mon Oct 10, 2022 4:58 pm

I thought it was my covid-addled brain that was causing me to struggle to follow this thread, but I've finally realised it's not, it's just that the vast majority of replies are ignoring the paper and arguing against a straw man.

The paper isn't claiming that austerity has increased poverty (though I wouldn't be at all surprised if it has), it's claiming that austerity has had a negative impact on mortality rates. In fact, the paper only mentions "poverty" twice - once in the 'Strengths and Weaknesses' section and once in the 'Relevance to Other Studies' section. The only time it appears in my post is as a quote and not even, imo, the most salient part. Yet as so often happens here the discussion devolves into a nitpicking of terms* and ignores the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is that austerity kills, and the government needs to end its harmful policies.

The paper is building on previous research that has found that austerity has caused excess deaths. BoaF helpfully quoted the second paragraph of the Introduction that summarised this research. There are plenty of references there if anyone wants to get sucked down a very depressing rabbit hole.

The authors clearly state the aims of their research,
we sought to statistically test whether there are differences when all-cause mortality trends changed, and to quantify the number of sex-specific deaths that have been observed in the past decade compared with what was expected given previous trends.
They wanted to look at sex-specific deaths because women have been disproportionately affected by austerity measures and they wanted to see if that had led to them bearing the brunt of the excess mortality too. As they explain in paragraph 3 of the Introduction,
There is also evidence that the reductions in social security income and loss of services have disproportionately affected women in the UK. This is for a number of important reasons including: more women being in receipt of social security payments in the first place; the disproportionate effects of cuts on particular, female-dominated, groups such as lone parents; the contraction in public sector jobs where women are likely to be employed; and inequalities in caring responsibilities (and the associated need for local government services and social care in particular).23–29 Among the elderly, the fact that more women live alone and are unable to share financial burdens may also be relevant.30 However, it is unclear whether the mortality impact of austerity has also been worse for women. Some recent descriptive trends supported this hypothesis, with adverse changes in all- cause mortality seemingly occurring earlier for women (around 2010–2011) than men (around 2012) in some UK countries and cities.4 In contrast, previous analyses of Scottish trends suggested similar turning points for both sexes.3 Given that uncertainty, the overall aim of this study was to examine whether there are differences in trends between men and women in Great Britain which might support the hypothesis of a greater health impact of austerity on women.
Surprisingly, the analysis found that the majority of excess deaths were in men, not women, though,
...among those living in the most deprived 20% of areas in Scotland and England, mortality rates between 2010 and 2019 increased to a greater degree among women compared with men. [first paragraph of the Discussion]
Honestly, I thought that would end up being the focus of the nitpicking - why are men dying more if austerity is harming women more? It's an interesting question and one the authors don't yet have a good answer for. But no, lets debate whether poverty is really harmful :roll:

The thing with austerity is that it has the potential to harm anyone outside the richest, because it cuts services we all rely on. For example, the BMJ [PDF] published research earlier this year that showed that delays in patient admissions to A&E increased chances of mortality. They found that the risk of death in the month following A&E attendance was 16 per cent higher for those who waited over 12 hours than those seen within four. The paper doesn't examine why delays occur, focusing instead on the potential mechanisms for the delays to increase mortality, but one explanation is likely the increase in 'Bed blocking'. Austerity cuts to social services made it harder to find people the community-based care they needed to permit their discharge, which leads to delays in people being admitted, which leads to their increased chance of death. If a UK-based forumite gets hit by a car tomorrow and are sufficiently injured to need to go to hospital by ambulance, their chance of survival is impacted by the austerity measures implemented by this government.

* To be generous to those nitpickers, I will acknowledge the paper refers to 'deprived' populations, but deprivation is different to poverty. The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government uses the following definition,
Though ‘poverty’ and ‘deprivation’ have often been used interchangeably, many have argued that a clear distinction should be made between them8. People are in poverty if they lack the financial resources to meet their needs, whereas people can be regarded as deprived due to a lack of resources of all kinds, not just income. ‘Deprivation’ thus refers to people’s unmet needs, whereas ‘poverty’ refers to the lack of resources required to meet those needs.
Put more clearly,
Poverty is not having enough money to get by on where as deprivation refers to a general lack of resources and opportunities.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by lpm » Mon Oct 10, 2022 7:22 pm

The poverty vs deprivation distinction is a good one.

The right wing Tory tabloids love to enrage readers about giving money to the poor - "booze and fags", "flat screen TVs". But it's actually their preferred option. They hate providing services to the poor even more.

Meanwhile the left wing Guardianistas are utterly confused by it all. We've become institutionalised. Back in the 70s, if inflation was 10% everyone would be harassing their shop steward to get a 15% pay rise. The central demand was always pay. Rising real wages, year after year, shifting the capitalist share from capital to labour. But nowadays when someone says people should respond to the cost of living crisis by seeking higher pay, the left is bemused. It's like we no longer see it as a possibility, after 40 years of being pummelled by the forces of capitalism.

Being institutionalised plays into deprivation. Things that are individual responsibility are today seen as a service. "The government isn't looking after us properly... They've cut our social services, the elderly are stuck in hospital beds, drug addiction services have vanished... Single mothers can't feed their kids and the choice in food banks is really poor..."

We've got to get back to providing the necessary financial resources to all. Meeting needs via services is a really bad approach that's far more costly and doomed to fail. Raise benefits to modern European standards and deprivation falls away. There's reduced need for all these services we provide to deal with the fallout of poverty.

What currently looks like a general lack of resources and opportunities is actually an overburdening of resources and a limiting of opportunities through financial starvation. Blair & Co understood this. They tackled deprivation by giving people money.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by discovolante » Mon Oct 10, 2022 8:54 pm

'Everyone would be harassing their shop steward' - well I guess part of the problem now is that a lot fewer people have a shop steward. I'm lazily just quoting wiki here because it lays out the narrative but the figures for each year can be fairly easily checked against other sources:
Membership declined steeply in the 1980s and 1990s, falling from 13 million in 1979 to around 7.3 million in 2000. In September 2012 union membership dropped below 6 million for the first time since the 1940s.[2] Union membership has since begun rising gradually again, reaching 6.44 million in 2019.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_u ... ed_Kingdom

And apparently union membership is still on the rise: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... r-in-a-row but I'm linking to the guardian article partly because it points out that part of the problem seems to be increase in public sector trade union membership vs private sector. There's a BEIS pdf that I can't seem to find a proper link to that seems to show a gradual decline in private sector trade union membership since 1995 whereas public sector declines a bit and wobbles about but is rising again. Possibly the ability to collectively bargain in the private sector is more difficult these days, along with greater instability in employment, so trade union membership is less worthwhile? Otherwise why the big difference?

I can't easily find up to date direct statistics (or rather cba to go trawling through union websites) but another guardian article suggests strikes/disputes are on a fairly steep increase https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... -inflation which again doesn't really suggest that everyone is just rolling over helplessly.

I've not got my finger on the pulse of public opinion but I'm not sure the general public is as anti-union as it was a few years ago, although I'm sure there're still plenty of people who think that way, but expecting private sector union membership to suddenly resurge seems to be a bit like trying to turn round a ship and recreate things that don't really exist any more, rather than people suddenly deciding to take advantage of something that's just sitting there waiting to be used. I'm sure you'd think people should just get on with it in that case, but it doesn't seem to be as straightforward as 'hassling your shop steward'.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Millennie Al » Mon Oct 10, 2022 10:58 pm

lpm wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 7:50 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 12:55 am
But you have still failed to come up with any plausible mechanism by which relative poverty could reduce life expectancy.
Relative poverty makes people feel like losers.

Drug takers are predominantly losers.

Drug mortality includes young people so has outsized impact on the life expectancy stat.
Glad to see somebody can come up with something sensible.

But there have been societies with very great inequality which have not had mass suicides, so it seems there's another factor at work - telling people that equality is a reasonable, achievable objective. If instead people were reassured that inequality is perfectly normal and they shouldn't feel bad just because they see others much (or, maybe, the real problem is slightly rather than much?) richer than them. After all, those who play the national lottery and fail to get the million pound prize don't commit mass suicide at the thought of the resulting inequality created.

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Millennie Al » Mon Oct 10, 2022 11:12 pm

discovolante wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 8:54 pm
Possibly the ability to collectively bargain in the private sector is more difficult these days, along with greater instability in employment, so trade union membership is less worthwhile? Otherwise why the big difference?
If you can quit your job and get another elsewhere, that becomes an easy way to get a salary increase. In the 1980's, unemployment was over 3 million, while now it's about 1.2 million (https://www.statista.com/statistics/280 ... ingdom-uk/) so that strategy is much more practical now than then. Additionally, people used to stick with one job for long periods - even aspiring to a job for life. If you're going to switch jobs in a year of two, why would you be willing to put yourself to considerable trouble to improve its pay or conditions? In many jobs, unions are not hated, they're just a lot less relevant.

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by JQH » Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:37 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 7:22 pm

Meanwhile the left wing Guardianistas are utterly confused by it all. We've become institutionalised. Back in the 70s, if inflation was 10% everyone would be harassing their shop steward to get a 15% pay rise. The central demand was always pay. Rising real wages, year after year, shifting the capitalist share from capital to labour. But nowadays when someone says people should respond to the cost of living crisis by seeking higher pay, the left is bemused. It's like we no longer see it as a possibility, after 40 years of being pummelled by the forces of capitalism.
As you well know, when the government says "get a better paying job" they don't mean demand better pay in your current job. It is an attempt to blame the worker for being in a job that does not provide enough to live on even if you do it full time.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Little waster » Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:50 am

JQH wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:37 am
lpm wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 7:22 pm

Meanwhile the left wing Guardianistas are utterly confused by it all. We've become institutionalised. Back in the 70s, if inflation was 10% everyone would be harassing their shop steward to get a 15% pay rise. The central demand was always pay. Rising real wages, year after year, shifting the capitalist share from capital to labour. But nowadays when someone says people should respond to the cost of living crisis by seeking higher pay, the left is bemused. It's like we no longer see it as a possibility, after 40 years of being pummelled by the forces of capitalism.
As you well know, when the government says "get a better paying job" they don't mean demand better pay in your current job. It is an attempt to blame the worker for being in a job that does not provide enough to live on even if you do it full time.
TBF the Tory Chairman, Jake Berry, had a point. If you are struggling to make ends meet stacking shelves for minimum wage 40 hours a week you really should consider, you know, becoming the CEO of British Gas or something.

Clearly this generation of people have become too lazy and want everything just handed to them.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Oct 11, 2022 1:20 pm

Fishnut wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 4:58 pm
I thought it was my covid-addled brain that was causing me to struggle to follow this thread, but I've finally realised it's not, it's just that the vast majority of replies are ignoring the paper and arguing against a straw man.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Bird on a Fire » Tue Oct 11, 2022 9:03 pm

Here's a mechanism. N=1, but it's 1 too many.
The coroner said that when David Clapson died he had no food in his stomach. Clapson’s benefits had been stopped as a result of missing one meeting at the jobcentre. He was diabetic, and without the £71.70 a week from his jobseeker’s allowance he couldn’t afford to eat or put credit on his electricity card to keep the fridge where he kept his insulin working. Three weeks later Clapson died from diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by a severe lack of insulin. A pile of CVs was found next to his body.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... t-policies
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Bird on a Fire » Tue Oct 11, 2022 9:05 pm

Little waster wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:50 am
JQH wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:37 am
lpm wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 7:22 pm

Meanwhile the left wing Guardianistas are utterly confused by it all. We've become institutionalised. Back in the 70s, if inflation was 10% everyone would be harassing their shop steward to get a 15% pay rise. The central demand was always pay. Rising real wages, year after year, shifting the capitalist share from capital to labour. But nowadays when someone says people should respond to the cost of living crisis by seeking higher pay, the left is bemused. It's like we no longer see it as a possibility, after 40 years of being pummelled by the forces of capitalism.
As you well know, when the government says "get a better paying job" they don't mean demand better pay in your current job. It is an attempt to blame the worker for being in a job that does not provide enough to live on even if you do it full time.
TBF the Tory Chairman, Jake Berry, had a point. If you are struggling to make ends meet stacking shelves for minimum wage 40 hours a week you really should consider, you know, becoming the CEO of British Gas or something.

Clearly this generation of people have become too lazy and want everything just handed to them.
Exactly, folk should be out handing their CVs to all those people who make hiring decisions that you can easily meet, not lying down dead next to them :roll:
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by lpm » Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:12 pm

It troubles me that some of you consistently gravitate towards the extreme end of poverty in all these discussions. The bottom 1%.

Please remember poverty is the bottom two deciles. 20%. And as per fishnut's post, austerity can hit the entire 100%.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Bird on a Fire » Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:40 pm

lpm wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:12 pm
It troubles me that some of you consistently gravitate towards the extreme end of poverty in all these discussions. The bottom 1%.

Please remember poverty is the bottom two deciles. 20%. And as per fishnut's post, austerity can hit the entire 100%.
It's true that the problem is wider than the extremes. But as we've also seen in the thread, the impact on less extreme deciles is more diffuse, and thus harder to visualise and understand.

Also, as Ivan says, extreme poverty is a political choice. I don't think anybody in modern UK should be so poor and isolated that they die for lack of an insulin fridge.

It was just an illustrative example. If anyone sees a good case study of someone getting sick in more of a last-straw, relative deprivation way then do please post it.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Millennie Al » Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:51 pm

Little waster wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:50 am
JQH wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:37 am
As you well know, when the government says "get a better paying job" they don't mean demand better pay in your current job. It is an attempt to blame the worker for being in a job that does not provide enough to live on even if you do it full time.
TBF the Tory Chairman, Jake Berry, had a point. If you are struggling to make ends meet stacking shelves for minimum wage 40 hours a week you really should consider, you know, becoming the CEO of British Gas or something.

Clearly this generation of people have become too lazy and want everything just handed to them.
I suspect they have more modest improvements in mind. For example, from https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... y-shortage we find that delivery drivers are paid:
  • £10.90 by Lidl
  • £10.50 by Aldi
  • £10.30 by Tesco
  • £10.25 by Sainsburys
  • £10.20 by Morrisons
  • £10.10 by Asda
or something like that. It shouldn't take much job hopping to force the lower ranked supermarkets to increase their pay or fail to have enough drivers.

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Little waster » Wed Oct 12, 2022 8:30 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:51 pm

I suspect they have more modest improvements in mind. For example, from https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... y-shortage we find that delivery drivers are paid:
  • £10.90 by Lidl
  • £10.50 by Aldi
  • £10.30 by Tesco
  • £10.25 by Sainsburys
  • £10.20 by Morrisons
  • £10.10 by Asda
or something like that. It shouldn't take much job hopping to force the lower ranked supermarkets to increase their pay or fail to have enough drivers.
At best (assuming Lidl are even recruiting) an Asda driver can bump their pay by about £20/week after tax and that is based on the Herculean assumptions that those wage differentials represent genuine long-term differences in pay rather than a temporary imbalance and that terms and conditions are the same across the board (perhaps Tesco has a bonus scheme, or Asda a better pension, or Morrisons better hours etc.).

Changing jobs is also not a "free action"; the commute is going to be different (longer?), your workmates will change, childcare is disrupted, your new manager might be a dick, you forfeit any loyalty scheme at your old job and face 6 months probation at your new job (which often restricts access to overtime and benefits etc.), you have a whole new set of rules and practices to learn just to find 3 months later that you'd have got a payrise anyway if you had just stayed put, so all those stresses, uncertainties and costs encourage you to stay put with the devil you know. Is it going to be worth it for a couple extra pence an hour against a background of energy bills heading north of £2500 a year and what percentage of the workforce are going to have to churn to even make it happen?

Even under the very best scenarios it only represents an 8% payrise against inflation of ~10%. That isn't going to fix the problem, it's a blatant bit of victim-blaming to distract from the economic chaos the Tories have unleashed over the last 12 years.

Under classic Tory economic dogma it is more likely that desperate workers will drive pay down so Lidl will drop their pay to match Asda's rather than the other way round. I mean the very article you linked to is titled:-
Asda to cut delivery drivers’ pay by 12% despite staff shortage

ETA: The killer point though is there is NOTHING stopping this happening NOW. We are where we are in an economy where Asda drivers could have quit for Lidl whenever they want already. If a couple of job-hops could fix the problem it already would have done, it clearly hasn't and nothing the Government has done is encouraging such job switches. It's just "get on your bike" updated for the 21st Century.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by lpm » Wed Oct 12, 2022 8:59 am

Incorrect.

In our lifetimes we've never had the current tightness of labour markets.

Inability to recruit is the key reason why growth projects never get started and labour shortages are driving domestic inflation. There's never been a better moment to collectively fight for higher wages.

Your pessimism is exactly what I'm talking about. A loss of the ability to see real change, a nation diminished to seeking small accommodations within an abusive system. Bullied into a failure mindset.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by plodder » Wed Oct 12, 2022 9:21 am

lpm wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:12 pm
It troubles me that some of you consistently gravitate towards the extreme end of poverty in all these discussions. The bottom 1%.

Please remember poverty is the bottom two deciles. 20%. And as per fishnut's post, austerity can hit the entire 100%.
I've been meaning to reply directly to Fishnut's detailed post but this gets to the nub of it. Where's the link between "austerity" and 340,000 deaths?

The researchers literally just drew a trend line of expected deaths prior to austerity, then said "this period had a policy known as austerity" then said "the new trend line is 340,000 deaths higher it must of been austerity".

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Woodchopper » Wed Oct 12, 2022 9:37 am

lpm wrote:
Wed Oct 12, 2022 8:59 am
Incorrect.

In our lifetimes we've never had the current tightness of labour markets.

Inability to recruit is the key reason why growth projects never get started and labour shortages are driving domestic inflation. There's never been a better moment to collectively fight for higher wages.

Your pessimism is exactly what I'm talking about. A loss of the ability to see real change, a nation diminished to seeking small accommodations within an abusive system. Bullied into a failure mindset.
Yes, I agree. People don't seem to have grasped that the labour supply is fundamentally different from the previous four decades. There is no longer a reserve army of labour made up of millions of unemployed people in Britain (1980s & 1990s) or the European Union (2000s and 2010s) who can be relied upon to seamlessly fill job vacancies.

This is good news for people in work who have much greater bargaining power, but will cause problems delivering all the things that people here want to see (eg improved health and social care, infrastructure projects, house building and insulation etc). As well as thinking about costs and benefits of spending, policy-making will have to consider the costs and benefits of labour allocation.

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by dyqik » Wed Oct 12, 2022 10:54 am

Little waster wrote:
Wed Oct 12, 2022 8:30 am

Under classic Tory economic dogma it is more likely that desperate workers will drive pay down so Lidl will drop their pay to match Asda's rather than the other way round. I mean the very article you linked to is titled:-
Asda to cut delivery drivers’ pay by 12% despite staff shortage

ETA: The killer point though is there is NOTHING stopping this happening NOW. We are where we are in an economy where Asda drivers could have quit for Lidl whenever they want already. If a couple of job-hops could fix the problem it already would have done, it clearly hasn't and nothing the Government has done is encouraging such job switches. It's just "get on your bike" updated for the 21st Century.
I'm willing to make a small bet that the Tory push to replace the NHS with an insurance system is so that they can put a US style employment based health insurance system in place to cut right down on worker mobility.

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Millennie Al » Fri Oct 14, 2022 1:32 am

Little waster wrote:
Wed Oct 12, 2022 8:30 am
At best (assuming Lidl are even recruiting) an Asda driver can bump their pay by about £20/week after tax and that is based on the Herculean assumptions that those wage differentials represent genuine long-term differences in pay rather than a temporary imbalance and that terms and conditions are the same across the board (perhaps Tesco has a bonus scheme, or Asda a better pension, or Morrisons better hours etc.).
That doesn't take into account how the free market works. As we have seen in energy supply, the price paid for any supply is the price necessary to obtain the most expensive supply - so a solar generator may get much more than its costs because the price is the price for gas generation. Similarly for delivery drivers - the price that one company needs to pay an individual is not the price demanded by that individual, but the price needed to pay their most demanding worker (unless the company can somehow differentiate between workers, which is very difficult for a large company that cannot bargain individually with each employee). After a long period where unemployment has greatly reduced workers' bargaining power, it may take a while before workers get used to the idea that they can easily quit and work elsewhere to improve their pay and conditions, and for employers to realise that they will suffer permanent shortfall in labour unless they improve their offers.

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by plodder » Fri Oct 14, 2022 9:19 am

Yes. Also I suspect for many of us that it’s easier to move sideways to a competitor for a promotion and pay rise than it is to progress within our current firms.

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Little waster » Fri Oct 14, 2022 9:51 am

plodder wrote:
Fri Oct 14, 2022 9:19 am
Yes. Also I suspect for many of us that it’s easier to move sideways to a competitor for a promotion and pay rise than it is to progress within our current firms.
IME it is the opposite.

It’s always preferable to promote from within than roll the dice on an outsider who will take 6 months to get up to speed and have a proven track record of jumping ship as soon as anything better comes along.

It also begs the question* why are they suddenly so keen to move and why is their current line manager apparently so happy to see them go. Those are all red flags.

That’s not to say we don’t recruit from outside but I’ve consciously binned CVs of apparent on-paper “superstars” who have a history of changing jobs too regularly.

Also in my line of work, my contract states I’m not even allowed to go directly to a competitor within 6 months of leaving without the written permission of our SLT. I don’t know how enforceable that is but I don’t particularly feel like putting it to the test.

Those totally-spherical cows floating around in that free market vacuum never seem to map too well onto the real world.
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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by plodder » Fri Oct 14, 2022 10:49 pm

Oh yeah sure, jumping ship too frequently is a red flag. Every three or four years with a genuine progression isn’t so bad though. Staff retention isn’t a huge focus for many firms - it should be.

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Re: Austerity has killed at least 334,000 people so far

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Oct 14, 2022 11:16 pm

I get the impression that some organisations are extremely good at fostering genuine growth and progression in staff, and in others you mainly stagnate as long as you're in a role.

I know people (younger than me) who'll quit a job within a year if they can't see how they can grow in the role. Must be a weird market to work with
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