OPINIONS

1. People must be able to earn a living while they train for a new job and must know that when their training has been successfully completed they will be able to obtain the type of job for which they are now qualified (or else be compensated for their wasted effort).
2. The market economy is making people's lives a misery, particularly the lives of elderly people who were brought up in much less prosperous times, didn't have the educational opportunities enjoyed by younger people and are unable to obtain them now.
3. Unemployment is catastrophic for many people. Often it isn't possible for them to get another job comparable with their previous one at all, let alone quickly.
4. People who accept a less senior and less well paid job as a temporary stopgap usually find they have trapped themselves in the "you are only as good as your last job" dead end.
5. Finding themselves a half decent new job is a nightmare for many unemployed people over forty who have worked in some high tech. professions such as electronics and IT but haven't got very far up the greasy pole, nobody wants to employ them at any price. Redundancy and unemployment is an occupational hazard in the engineering profession as manufacturing is given away to the Far Eastern emerging economies and defence projects, about the only remaining fairly healthy source of employment, wax, wane, get postponed, cut back or cancelled.
6. Provision needs to be made for professionals and semi-professionals to do useful work or training to maintain their skills and obtain some income while they are trying to find a new job.
7. Employers expect job applicants to have an improbable range of skills, many more than they have themselves. They are deluding themselves about their own abilities.
8. Unemployed people must be paid a full wage so that the Government is given an incentive to find them work.
9. The unemployed shouldn't have to write begging letters to employers, (people they probably despise and detest). Most people don't change their job very often and do jobs that don't give them the skills that enable them to obtain new jobs easily, they need help to find suitable work. There must be people whose job it is to find suitable work for those needing it, these people would need to have a good knowledge of the employers and opportunities for people working in the occupation(s) they cover.
10. Employers are not the best people to decide how others are employed and what they should be doing, they usually put their own narrow interests first.
11. When unemployed and losing money, people rapidly lose confidence and become alienated and hostile: in this society one has to be confident and contented to stand any chance of getting a job.
12. Being unemployed is an emergency that is probably more serious than being injured in an accident; full recoveries are made from most injuries whereas ground lost due to unemployment is quite likely never to be made up. There should be emergency services to get people back into work appropriate to their skills and experience so that they can earn a proper income and maintain their skills. If necessary the employment services should ask suitable companies to provide temporary work, at the expense of the government, while a permanent position is being sought. If retraining is required it must be provided in an intensive form without delay (not after a six month wait as seems to be the situation now).
13. Most employers demand years of experience from job applicants, few are prepared to provide it, except grudgingly and if they are lucky, to the young who are just starting out. Older people have virtually no chance of changing tack or improving their situation, it is intolerable. The Catch 22 situation of no experience so no chance of a job and no job so no chance of getting experience is never even tackled, let alone dealt with satisfactorily. Either employers must be forced to take on a certain quota of people who need experience or the government must subsidise people while they are getting on the job training, or both.
14. It is no good for older people to learn anything in the hope that it will help them to get a job. Every employer wants a different combination of skills, if you don't have that combination or a very similar combination you are unlikely to get the job. This society is a Loaded Lottery Society, the odds are heavily loaded against anyone seeking a new job or career, especially if they are getting on in years.
15. An Australian scheme to encourage employers to take on unemployed people by subsidising their wages wasn't successful because employers were of the opinion that the long term unemployed have low skill levels and a poor attitude to work. (They probably had a poor attitude to work because previous employers had given them no opportunity to improve their skill levels or financial circumstances. Also, long term unemployment and consequent loss of earnings is bound to cause anger, resentment and hostility to the system and employers within it.)
16. Provided people register as unemployed and accept any reasonable job offered they should get full pay. This would put pressure on the employment authorities to find people suitable work quickly.
17. If you want to work you mustn't say anything negative or critical in your CV or at interview because employers don't want critical employees, they want uncritical suckers.
18. Job applicants are usually in a much weaker position than prospective employers, they need a job more urgently than the employer needs staff as a rule. In normal circumstances this is probably true even if the applicant still has a job, if it is one he is trying to escape from.
19. Workfare project work is slavery.
20. The unemployed are blamed for unemployment, usually it isn't their fault.
21. Workstart benefit money is supposed to be used to subsidise the wages of people who otherwise wouldn't have been recruited but in practice, employers use the scheme to subsidise their normal needs.
22. Revolving door phenomenon - some people tend to be in and out of jobs frequently. Many people find that due to lack of the opportunity to get the qualifications and experience they need, the only jobs they can get are an insult to their intelligence and almost equally intolerable, they can't endure them for more than a short time.
23. When a person is seriously dissatisfied with his/her job he/she should be able to escape reasonably quickly without risking a period of unemployment.
24. In the Armed Services people are posted to a new position at intervals so that they don't become stale or bored and to maximise their usefulness, in civilian life many people are virtually trapped in the same boring, go nowhere job for life.
25. People should be able to spend a short time in several jobs before choosing to take one permanently.
26. Unemployment is too important to be left to the private sector to solve.
27. People who fall out of work, for whatever reason, must be able to get back in again quickly and easily.
28. Sordid politicians don't take any account of the 'your only as good as your last job' factor. Unemployed people are being forced to take lousy jobs as a temporary expedient only to find that they are trapped in a serf for life situation. People are being forced to accept whatever corrupt employers are prepared to give them, this is tantamount to slavery.
29. Jobcentres don't seem to keep any data on local employers, they just sit back and wait for employers to contact them with their serf requirements. They ought to have a database of all the employers in their area, the nature of their businesses and the different job skills they use. (They have got quite good computer systems now but nearly all the jobs on them are low paid, unskilled or semi-skilled. There is next to nothing for professionals or semi-professionals).
30. Employment agencies probably have data but they won't divulge it. They tend to reveal one suitable job at a time, one possible employer at a time, they rarely give an overall picture.
31. Have co-operatives of workers who hire their labour to employers on negotiated terms? Would get rigid manager /worker divide?
32. People who spend a 40hr week job hunting diligently should get a proper economic wage, (many of the clerks who work in employment agencies are called executives or consultants and are paid much more than the professionals whose time they usually waste).
33. Employers shouldn't be allowed to hide their job vacancies behind employment agencies.
34. There should be an allocation system for jobs for those who are not prepared to beg and crawl.
35. The market system is supposed to match price to value: according to the job market many people have no value at all because no one will employ them at any price. NOT TRUE most would be employable at a sub subsistence wage.
36. Anybody who shows they resent being treated as a serf is likely to find themselves unemployable.
37. The jobs market is madness, it isn't a proper market, in many fields people can't improve their chance of getting work by reducing the price of their labour because it is counter-productive, the people controlling employment don't want low wage interlopers undermining their high salaries.
38. Many people with good jobs do little more than keep their seats warm but an applicant looking for their job or one similar has little chance of displacing them, squatters rights usually prevail.
39. People who become out of work must be fixed up with something more or less immediately, training or work. The longer people remain out of work the more debilitated they become.
40. Business should pay the full cost of unemployment it creates (ie by making people redundant, shifting production offshore etc.) so that it is given an incentive to provide full employment.
41. Nobody should have to endure the nightmare of being out of work and dependent on subsistence benefits. There should be expert councillors with whom to discuss future plans and to facilitate meetings with possible employers.
42. The quest for optimum efficiency is shutting millions out of employment and society, those who are in work should compensate those they shut out and deprive of their share of prosperity.
43. When they get power, young people close the door to older people .
44. Employment agencies aren't fulfilling their proper function, they are a barrier to job applicants, not a benefit. They work for the employers, doing their dirty work for them, weeding out people who aren't enthusiastic about taking jobs that reduce them to being powerless serfs.
45. The Government needs to know what is going on in the job market so that it can make sure that the population knows which skills are in demand, which are not, which are well paid, which are not etc. and so that appropriate education opportunities, incentives and disincentives are provided in a timely way. For this reason and also to make job seeking much easier and cheaper for the unemployed, the Government should perform the employment agency function and make sure it is done properly with proper use of computer technology.
46. Help with relocation expenses should be provided whenever necessary (but not when people abuse this provision).
47. It isn't feasible for elderly people to change their career or even their job, very few employers want to employ them at all. They have no hope of starting a new career in which they have little or no experience, it is unreasonable to expect them to try. If they lose their job they are done for, they have little chance of getting another one that isn't menial, degrading, slave labour. Special provision has to be made for the elderly to enable them to continue to earn a living comparable to that enjoyed by the young.
48. It must be made possible to get worthwhile training while working whatever one's age.Most of the jobs that the agencies which serve the professions advertise and handle are at the top end, for senior people with improbably wide experience. How are people in the lower and, more particularly, the middle parts of the spectrum supposed to find jobs, there is no efficient way to do it? In any case, employers only seem to want to take on beginners they can train for middle rank roles and experts, they don't want to have anything to do with retraining anybody really.
49. People who have been in the same job for years are unlikely to have the skills needed to change to another job successfully.
50. Unemployed people shouldn't have to go through the torture of writing sycophantic begging letters to prospective employers they don't really want to even know about let alone work for in order to get the chance to earn a derisory, humiliatingly low income.
51. If one changes jobs too often one becomes unemployable, employers want faithful serfs not people who will put them to the trouble and cost of finding new serfs and giving them a few hours training.
52. If one loses one's chair in the game of musical chairs one is out and can't be allowed back in.
53. Unemployment quickly turns into a nightmare that nobody should have to suffer.
54. Unemployment is crippling and destructive, it must be made impossible for people to become unemployed. If people can't bear their jobs they must be found new, more satisfactory ones within a certain period or be given training for a new one. If necessary, firms must be forced or paid to take people on and find them something useful to do so that they can maintain their skills. The government must provide funds for this.
55. Only exceptional people will be able to earn more then £50K pa.
56. The unemployed have to flounder around to get a job, it's largely a matter of luck whether they manage to get one that is suitable for them. Like everything else in this society, it is a lottery.
57. Switching from one job to another is difficult, it should be made a more gradual process. People should be able to work part-time in the place they are proposing to leave and the place they are proposing to join, tidying up their affairs in one and finding their bearings in the other. It should be possible to cancel the change at any time in the transition process if things don't work out as expected.
58. To escape from a job one doesn't like in a reasonable time it is usually necessary to take a step down in status, once one has done that it becomes almost impossible ever to take a step back up again.
59. Leaving one job before getting another also spoils one's chances of getting a decent job. Breaks from serving our masters are not allowed.
60. There is no way to get training for a lot of the jobs on the market now, they are so specialised there are no courses designed to prepare people for doing them, one has to have worked somewhere where one was able to get experience.
61. The government says we will have to change our job or career more than once in our working lives but employers make it almost impossible to change jobs, they are so picky. They won't employ people unless they have just the right qualifications and experience, nearly all of them want a different combination. When one gets past a certain age it is virtually impossible to get another job of any quality.
62. These days there is much more work available that is suitable for women than there is for men.
63. A lot of the jobs that are available are hidden from most people.
64. Job seekers should have the right to visit companies they think they might like to work for and look around.
65. The professions are as guilty of closed shop tactics as the Unions ever were.
66. Many technical jobs are so specialised these days that losing one's job is totally disastrous, there is almost no chance of getting anything similar and every chance one will fall to the bottom of the heap with little chance of making a recovery.
67. Employment agencies don't seem to communicate with each other very much, if at all, even when they are different branches of the same firm. Their staff seem to be determined to keep their business strictly to themselves even if it damages their clients, for commission reasons no doubt. This is very much against the interests of job-seekers.
68. A lot of employment agency staff seem to be called consultants or executives and get salaries commensurate with their titles but very few seem to be capable of understanding the sort of work people are looking for.
69. If you try to start a business and fail you are in deep trouble. Employers don't want to employ you because they think you will soon try to start another business and that you have ideas above your station (and may be a threat to them).
70. Employment agencies are a barrier between employers and job seekers. They won't help a lot of people to get jobs because they know they can't make a profit out of them, they won't divulge any useful information to them, like names and addresses of local firms, either. They are the curse of the job seeker.
71. To get a job most of us have to feed the egos of the damned filth who think they have the right to decide who works and who doesn't, who has a life and who has a subsistence.
72. Getting a new job is far more difficult than keeping one already held; it shouldn't be. If one has become unemployed, getting a new job comparable with one's previous one is even more difficult.
73. If one takes a low grade job as a stopgap, one is likely to fall into the "you are only as good as your last job trap" and get stuck in it for life.
74. In a service economy there are very few jobs that a person with any ability could possibly want. Service jobs are generally routine, giving virtually no scope for creativity, enterprise, innovation or satisfaction. The life of a peasant is probably more rewarding and fulfilling than that of a service industry worker but why should our lords and masters care?
75. Many people have virtually no value outside the company they work for, if it goes to the wall so do they. There is virtually no provision for retraining people who find themselves in this situation so that they can get a new job comparable to their previous one. They are expected to accept relegation to low paid, unskilled work with good grace.