Was it just me or was there definitely an impression given by the BBC (certainly on 5Live) that the unemployment figures going down by 52,000 was possibly a bad thing……as one reporter suggested…it was only a good thing ‘on the face of it….you have to ask how is it possible (to have falling unemployment) when we are mired in a double dip recession’. ….and the figures only give ‘mixed messages’.
Perhaps, as one analyst opined…the GDP figures were underestimating the strength of the economy?
Perhaps the reporter was more persuaded by Labour’s interpretation…..
‘Shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne said that while the latest figures were “a ray of good news…but when you take a step back and you look at those trends there are some real worrying signs about the long-term damage that is being done to the British economy from the government’s failure to get people back to work fast enough.”‘
Long term damaging trends? Hmmm…hasn’t unemployment fallen consistently….the private sector more than taking up the slack caused by job losses in the Public Sector?
And how’s that private/public sector ding dong doing? Those hard done by public sector workers need your sympathy….or do they?
Average public sector pay now stands at £477 per week, higher than private sector earnings at £459.
Bonus pay fell sharply in the private sector in the three months to February, falling 5.4 per cent compared with last year, although it rose 2.9 per cent in the public sector.
The BBC…never knowingly upbeat about anything ‘Tory’.
I can’t understand bonuses. Especially in public service jobs. You either do your job or you’re sacked. If you’re good at your job you are promoted (to the highest level of your incompetence, haha) and if you’re completely useless you are sacked; isn’t that common sense? Bonuses are just depriving the people who provide the capital for the company; ie the investors; ie the share holders; of money that is by rights theirs.
In the case of the bbc, they should neither have bonuses nor be paid higher than the mean wage of the people who pay their wages. And if they want better pensions, then let them pay for them, themselves, like the rest of us.
Bonuses in the Public Sector are the natural consequence of political correctness in the workplace and the target culture that accompanies it.
The PS used to grade performance and a good grade gave a worker a greater chance of promotion, a poor grade could cost the worker an annual increment. This method of rewarding good workers was necessery because it was accepted as a trade off between job security and lower pay. The PS could stop its best people from haemoraging out to the private sector by rewarding them with a bonus.
However PC ideals meant this philosphy had to go so there quickly became no way to reward exceptional workers and differentiate them from poor ones. Paying workers by results became infer dig, as Sir Humphrey might say.
It’s the age old communist ideal of equal pay for unequal work where the doctor earns the same as the road sweeper. It de-incentivises workers, hence the shameful work ethics we now see in the PS.
Add in a target culture where a manager is commiting career suicide if all his staff don’t ‘improve’ year on year and you have todays parlous situation.
Yet when unemployment dipped ever so slightly in the US, the BBC touted that as a good sign. Different leader, different perspective, I guess.
In the breakdown of the figures on the ONS website it is still the case that UK born people have lost jobs and foreign born gained them.