Jobs! Jobs!

It's 10.30 pm on Monday 16 February and I have just been watching the Dispatches programme on Channel 4 in which Digby Jones investigated the growing problem of unemployment. Standing now at 1.97 million, the numbers out of work is likely to exceed 3 million this year. The method of counting the unemployed has been changed so much in the past that there is little room left for government massaging the figures downwards yet again. It is a depressing picture. Not just the obvious despair of those who had lost their jobs and who were being offered little prospect of any other job. One government minister, at least, thinks that we have already the worst financial conditions for a century. On the Dispatches programme of course, the small number of individuals that the programme focused on to present their picture could be unrepresentative of the overall situation. But I suspect that they were reasonably typical. The things that stood out were :

[a] The pitiful allowances paid to the unemployed - the Job Seekers

[b] The inability of the Job Centres to even cope with the numbers and fill in the forms, let alone actually find jobs.

[c] The modest levels of pay that all but one of the individuals enjoyed when in work - no £100,000 + salaries here.

[d] The efforts that the individuals were putting into trying to find a job - any job.

[e] The yawning gap between the public statements of government ministers and the reality. How can we pour vast sums into ruinously incompetent banks but not give any help to efficient and effective companies to preserved the integrity of their workforces for the future. Why can't we come up with a support structure in which the employee takes a wage cut, the employer pays him for working fewer hours and the government tops up the pay packet so that overall the employee gets 75% pay [say] but keeps his job?

On top of all this, we have the almost total lack of any government commitment for a real future. If we survive this depression, we can no longer have uncontrolled, unregulated banks and an economy based on gambling and debt. We have to make things which the world wants to buy. That means that, somehow or other, we have to re-build the manufacturing base that has been steadily destroyed since the Old Bat [Thatcher] started the rot.

I would like to be optimistic but we need competent leaders with vision. Where are they?