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More than a fifth of UK adults not looking for work

About to become one of them in my mid fifties..... just can't stand the politics and crap at work anymore.
"Has lost the ability to tolerate BS" should be stamped on my references.

I think a lot of middle aged people who have been lucky enough to build up savings are, like me, looking at their working lives and wondering why they are bothering.
 
wulbert said:
Yeah, I heard an economics professor talking about how UK's poor elderly care results in women over 50yrs old withdrawing en masse from the workplace to become a carer for parents. Not all public spending is money wasted, it would seem. It might even be an investment.
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Don't they then get a carer allowance? Instead of staying in work and then a carer being employed? (if they can find you one)..
 
I am now 'economically inactive' and not looking for work (In previous job for just under 13-years), since becoming a stay-at-home Dad just before Christmas, the cost of full-time nursery was one of the reasons, as well as wanting to take over the childcare when the Wife went back to work full-time. Probably look at getting a part-time job down the line when the child(ren) is/are at school age.
Already ofsetting the reduced wage with far less travelling and only using one car (soon to sell the 2nd due to low use) etc.

It's been amazing to be home full-time, I actually get to be part of the development of our child rather than a hour or so after work every day, also means I can catch up with chores around the house, and crack on with gardening and other projects!
 
Hoopsontoast said:
I am now 'economically inactive' and not looking for work (In previous job for just under 13-years), since becoming a stay-at-home Dad just before Christmas, the cost of full-time nursery was one of the reasons, as well as wanting to take over the childcare when the Wife went back to work full-time. Probably look at getting a part-time job down the line when the child(ren) is/are at school age.
Already ofsetting the reduced wage with far less travelling and only using one car (soon to sell the 2nd due to low use) etc.

It's been amazing to be home full-time, I actually get to be part of the development of our child rather than a hour or so after work every day, also means I can catch up with chores around the house, and crack on with gardening and other projects!
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I want your life!
 
alanbeeb said:
About to become one of them in my mid fifties..... just can't stand the politics and crap at work anymore.
"Has lost the ability to tolerate BS" should be stamped on my references.

I think a lot of middle aged people who have been lucky enough to build up savings are, like me, looking at their working lives and wondering why they are bothering.
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Plus for people of our generation where one needed a bit of a thick skin to survive the work place, it's become almost ludicrously easy to get in to trouble at work for saying/acting the wrong way or even just having the wrong look on your face during an encounter with another employee.

Obviously the bullying, harrasement and "banter" of the past are all things that nobody should mourn the passing of, but the work place has gone far further than that these days and now all that needs to happen is that someone is offended and that is the only criteria required to get someone in trouble. People are being enabled to raise any kind of complaint they want these days. Throw in generational differences and you have a recipe for problems in the work place.

I say that as someone who is of a senstive nature and who doesn't cope with critisism of my performance well, yet I've never "gone to HR" over any of it because I recognise that none of it was because the other person was being intentionally hurtful, it's my issue that I got upset when other people wouldn't have. If I had the mind set of a typical 20 something of this world I'd have gotten more than one of my managers disciplined by now, all because my ego was buised.
 
The issue we have in the country on employment is complex and as Bob has mentioned, because of a large decrease of people responding to surveys, the data that is being produced isn't reliable.

Covid changed the way people think about work we have probably gone through a generational change in around 4 years, combine that with people are getting more ill as they approach their 50's, all the usual rules and norms that were in place have largely gone.

The "pipeline" we used to have where young people sort of replaced people who were retiring for one reason or another is now broken. There is an increasing number of young people are falling out of employment and an increasing number of older workers either making a choice to leave employment because they can, become carers or are simply becoming too ill to sustain work.

You also have an increasing number of people who are going off sick or are having to come into work when they are ill because of the issues we have with statutory sick pay. The result that people who do this are making their work colleagues ill, who then go off sick....... An increasing number of employers think that employees who have illnesses that don't understand enough about are too expensive to help and are actively managing them of out their jobs.

We also have changes in how particularly large organisations are handling recruitment with the introduction of AI. My daughter applied for a job with AVIVA recently and was surprised that in 4 hours she got a rejection email. I'm fairly sure that was because they were using AI to screen application forms.

So lots of things going on with not enough accurate data to understand exactly what is happening.......
 
gez said:
Could have fooled me. In over 6 months of searching and applying for jobs that I'm eminently capable of doing, and that my CV proves (to anyone that knows what they're actually talking about at least), I've had just one give me an interview. Getting close to the point where I'm thinking of just giving up, putting my flat up for rent and emigrating and living on a farm in the countryside somewhere.

That said, the number of roles that I've seen re-advertised multiple times just leads me to believe that the people doing the recruiting have no bloody idea what they're doing. If you get 200 applicants for a job there is simply no way that one of them isn't going to be good enough, so either the people sifting the applications haven't the first clue what they're doing, or they simply not even looking at all the applications, or they've got ridiculously high expectations that'll never be fulfilled by any real human being.
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you are not alone Gez ... its flipping tough out there at the moment
 
Bob McC said:
The governor of the BoE says there is no reliable unemployment data and he reckons we are at near full employment!

Britain appears to be near full employment, Bank governor says

The Times & The Sunday Times

News and opinion from The Times & The Sunday Times
www.thetimes.co.uk www.thetimes.co.uk
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Came here to quote the same article. I think someone isn’t being entirely clear on the who, what and why. Probably just more wedges to drive between different socio-economic groups.
 
bernardhepworth said:
that in 4 hours she got a rejection email.
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I had a very similar suspiciously fast rejection from Curry's. Applied Sun evening, received the email 11am Monday. So probably a real person rejected it, but clearly on some dumb criteria such as the "title" of my last role.

NB: It's ludicrous that recruitment teams can't see past job titles in the modern era. One could be a "Senior" position in company A and have far less responsibility or accountablity than a non "Senior" position in company B. But recruiters appear to still be stuck in the middle ages where title was everything.
 
i have 4 open vacancies ATM and struggle to get the right candidates - invariably we do get a decent shortlist of 5 or 6 to interview, but when we appoint we always have to wait a significant period for a visa - typically about 9 months, but for one recent arrival that was over a year.
 
Tony L said:
What are they counting here?
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There's more information on the ONS page - though they only breakdown the figures by age.

The increase seen in economic inactivity in the latest quarter and on the year was mainly driven by those inactive because they were students and those inactive because they were retired. The quarterly increase was partially offset by falls in those looking after the family or home and those inactive for other reasons. The number of those inactive because they were long-term sick fell on the quarter, but remains higher than estimates a year ago (November 2022 to January 2023).

TBH it feels like a bit of a non-story.

Employment in the UK - Office for National Statistics

Estimates of employment, unemployment and economic inactivity for the UK.
www.ons.gov.uk
 
Gez
You can just about understand if an organisation is getting large numbers of applications per job, it can be very time consuming, but I would argue that if you want to find the best person for the job, you can't skimp the process. AI is no where good enough to decide who is worth interviewing.
 
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Actually the ONS have a nice spreadsheet with 30 years of data here.

Here's a bit of it:

2cV2SQZ.png
 
bernardhepworth said:
Gez
You can just about understand if an organisation is getting large numbers of applications per job, it can be very time consuming, but I would argue that if you want to find the best person for the job, you can't skimp the process. AI is no where good enough to decide who is worth interviewing.
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Right but if they end up re advertising once or twice to find the correct person because they didn't actually review all the first set of applications then they've saved themselves no time or effort at all, plus more than likely actually missed out on the best person for the job who was probably an applicant the first time around and who obviously will not reapply the second time.
 
gez said:
It's ludicrous that recruitment teams can't see past job titles in the modern era. One could be a "Senior" position in company A and have far less responsibility or accountablity than a non "Senior" position in company B. But recruiters appear to still be stuck in the middle ages where title was everything.
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My IT CV went 'Network Manager' -> 'Senior Network Engineer VP' -> 'Infrastructure Engineer'.

It looks like an inexorable decline but in practice each move was to a more technically challenging job with higher pay.
 
How can one of the richest countries in the world, with supposedly full employment, be in such dire economic straits?

This is a consequence of many many people being made progressively worse off while a tiny few rake it in all the profits to themselves.

A more democratic economy is a more efficient economy
 
paulfromcamden said:
There's more information on the ONS page - though they only breakdown the figures by age.
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It doesn’t explain why 16-18s are in the dataset when they are (AIUI) mandated by law to be in education of some description. May as well add 0-16 and pensioners in if that is the case.
 
bernardhepworth said:
Gez
You can just about understand if an organisation is getting large numbers of applications per job, it can be very time consuming, but I would argue that if you want to find the best person for the job, you can't skimp the process. AI is no where good enough to decide who is worth interviewing.
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There's a famous, anecdotal story about the Chief Pilot at a major airline who regularly received unsolicited CVs of trained pilots wanting to work for his airline. Recruitment practices at the time (1970s-80s) meant that airlines didn't have to advertise pilot jobs, but just recruited from these 'slush piles' of CVs when the need arose. The pile could get quite large and unwieldy in between recruitment phases.

So said Chief Pilot allegedly used to assemble two equal height piles of CVs on his desk, then push one pile off his desk, into the wastepaper basket:

"Those guys are unlucky. We don't want unlucky pilots flying our planes".

I suspect modern recruitment AI might have a few similar algorithmic peccadilloes.
 
Tony L said:
It doesn’t explain why 16-18s are in the dataset when they are (AIUI) mandated by law to be in education of some description. May as well add 0-16 and pensioners in if that is the case.
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They're just statistics. The ONS doesn't draw any conclusions from them. I think the problem is the way the story concentrates on the 20% figure without really breaking it down or explaining. I guess 'Some students don't have jobs and neither do people who have retired' doesn't really make for a story.
 
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