Working in IT, I've seen many jobs have been outsourced, also worry about my own role. A few weeks back I met with old lawyer friend who tells me that to deduce cost's his firm have outsourced their legal secretary. All communication is via Internet, recording of voice memo's. Once the secretary has completed the document and he is emailed location of document with password, he prints this off and posts it off, 25k/30k saved.
With the low cost of bandwidth and reliability of the hardware and stability of operating systems, support staff and developers can be based anywhere in the world as they are able to remote control on to the users PC or server to resolve problems.
As manufacturing has gone, services are gradually being transferred what is the next wave, just can't see where we going, what is there for the future work force in the UK? What is running this country, debt?
I see Britain becoming two nations, one that still uses money and one that doesn't. I know we have niche manufacturing but that can only support niche communities. We have the financial firms in London but sooner or later London is going to get fed up with being asked to bankroll the rest of the UK so London, en masse or a piece at a time, will relocate. We can't rely on it. The whole idea of everyone being part of a consumer society is that the society overall makes enough money to support everyone, those in work, those ill or infirm included. For a consumer society to function, for it to make any kind of sense, certain parameters must be in place. You have to have the right ratio of workers to customers to available (local) work. That's gone now.
Plumbing mate,train to be a plumber..it only takes a week to train and you can earn £250,000 a year. Also train to be a bricklayer or plasterer in only a week and earn similar amounts.
Oh hang on, i forgot,weve got lots of Polish plumbers, plasterers and brick layers coming over here already.
Strange though, we dont seem to have any Polish lawyers, estate agents, members of parliament, judges or any other similar "professionals" coming over do we?
Seems like we will all have more leisure time on the dole, and why not ? Its a lifestyle choice these days.
Good point, these characters are often quick to defend the rights of those outsourcing others. Maybe it's time to begin outsourcing them. Would we really miss the present judiciary and their spectacular failure, nay , lack of will to protect the public. Would we miss our highly paid administrators of EU directives, our representatives, lol-- MPs? Can you think of any group that wouldn't make a better job of representing us? I'm sure that cosseted bastion of the left, the BBC would be glad to see themselves outsourced, it would be in keep with their agenda of "inclusivity" Or would they think that was a step too far?
Yes, flogging rip off pension policies, endowment policies and useless clause ridden insurance policies, and collective funds to the hapless and gullible.
On Wed, 7 Jun 2006 10:25:46 +0100, "Miss L. Toe" wrote:
It's disguised at university learning for meaningless degrees, getting deeper into debt as it does so. It's disguised on training courses for non-jobs. It's disguised on sickness benefits. It's disguised by employment, if you can call it that, in the public sector. Soon when Gordon Brown starts his youth organisations, many of the younger unemployed will be disguised there.
It's there, it's just hidden from immediate view. The problem we have as a country is that it costs us a lot more money to maintain training schemes and the like than it would to come right out and admit they're all useless and decant everybody currently in disguised unemployment back on the dole. That would be the best thing to do in the interests of the country. It would be very bad politically, though, as they'd have t admit things aren't going so well. in fact, very, very badly. Our money is spent to disguise from us the facts about how badly our money is spent. And don't moanl Chances are you voted for this - don't say you didn't know what you were doing!
Lots of no chance to empower or sustain oneself through work. Reason being, too many people, not enough paying work due to no customers due to our not being able to compete internationally.
It's unlikely they'll last, though. Gordon seems to be sniffing round London now to get more taxes out of them by closing down loopholes.
See, if you're Gordon, you've got a problem. You need taxes now, not next year or the year after, because you've got bills to pay for all the benefits people are receiving and the public sector wage bill. The only people who can fund that are, or should we say, is, London. So, London has to pay more taxes. This is a must as without the money London provides, the rest of the country, which by comparison provides very little, simply ceases to function as an economy. Eeek! End of the consumer society for Blighty - that won't look too good on the old political resume. So Gordon has to tax London more, it's the only significantly earning sector in the UK, but make his getaway before the resulting chickens come home to roost. But getting back to the problem, London itself doesn't actually owe the rest of the country anything. If you upset it, it'll move. Take a few years, but it'll move. Scatter round the globe, maybe, or get a boat, work from there. Buy, say, a small island. Somewhere warm. Sounding good already, isn't it? So say London's gone; how does Britain continue to function as part of the global economy? Well, it doesn't, but that doesn't bother our Gordo, because he's long gone. He's been PM for a couple of years, years he's spent spending our money globe-trotting establishing himself as a world statesman, (bit like that recent 9 billion pound jaunt over in Africa), and he's now Grand Umpah of Lumpahs in Pooh-Bah Land (formerly Europe). And we've paid for it. And, we voted for it to happen too!
We now live in the global economy where the big corporations now dictate the success or failure of nation economies. Many of the British institutions are now in the hands of foreign investors and owners. And everyone from lawyers to supermarkets are competing in a knifedge competition for business. The shareholders and lenders to business demand maximum profit which means that overheads and expenses in business has to be addressed.
Even in local government councils are under pressure due to lack of funding from central government to keep their council tax down so they will cut overheads and services. The government also has to balance the books against an increasingly expensive NHS, pensions and increasing deficit so are cutting ministry budgets. The only good thing about governments is they can see off problems with loans going over decades or centuries. The man in the street cannot do this and nor can most businesses that exist year from year or even days to day to survive.
In the global economy Britain has an influx of workers from other countries who are willing to work for much less and lower living standards than your average British worker. Also the big companies know that they can keep wages down if they employ people in a different country to do the same thing but on a cheaper basis. Places like China, Taiwan and India are going to be the big winners in the global economy.
Take my pet subject, the baby boomer ... those aged 42 - 60 years of age. These guys have always been spoilt and were able to have a good time in their youth, spend a high life as yuppies by spending big sums on the latest hi-tech toys, cars and fashion and generally are highly materialistic and spend happy. The boomer faces huge debts to finance the lifestyle they are always used to, a problem of pensions and the loss of jobs to lower paid workers in other countries. It is a generation that is going to end in serious trouble.
The generation x and y's are also in problems as they face huge debts from student loans, face huge competition for jobs against equally capable people from other countries, cannot get on the housing ladder, face huge council bills, rent, fuel... They have also been tempted by easy credit to spend spend spend and are also been influenced into gambling and making serious losses.
We have lost two major employers in the Suffolk town of Haverhill in recent weeks due to the same global economy and all those workers have little prospects. Manufacturing in UK has been in recession for several years but the consumer recession has yet to happen as these guys are spending on the back of credit cards, loans and the increasing prices of their homes. The whole financial and economic fabric of Britain is insecure and it will take only one serious reversal in the house market, stock market or other area and the house of cards will crumble... fast.
For the generation x and y the answer is to get out of Britain and head east to places like Hong Kong and India. The future is bright in those countries. There is no future in Britain.
The BNP will also be a big winner in the equation as they are putting forward a form protectionism, isolationism and generally trying to protect the worker and Britain. However even the BNP will fail as they will rule a country in absolute poverty and the wealth will be elsewhere along with all the bright young minds that were Britain's future.
Not me, I didn't vote for this lot of incompetents. Trouble is I can't see the other lot doing any better. They seem to be turning themselves into clones of this lot.
Broadly agree with your above summary, except I would be surprised if this lot do get re-elected this next time so Gordo is unlikely to get his couple of years as PM.
Miss L. Toe wrote: || On Holiday !! || || || || || If it was *that* serious - where is the mass unemployment ? ||
Just for starters... people now on incapacity benefit circa 2.8 million, latest official unemployment figures 1.59 million, since New-Labour came to power an extra 1 million mopped up in government funded employment, well over a million manufacturing jobs lost since 1997...
||| just can't see where we going, what is there for the future ||| work force in the UK? || || Lots of holidays :-) || ||| What is running this country, debt? || || Financial services.
One day, lawyers are going to realise that they can use those keyboard things attatched to their computers to actually type letters themselves.
The thing is, outsourcing generally doesn't deliver anywhere near the savings that the hype claimed, since the separation drastically reduces the quality of the work. There are a few kinds of work which can be outsourced fairly well - call centres, for instance - but only a few. We don't need to worry about the UK's jobs all being outsourced.
We do need to worry about Indian and Chinese companies just straight outcompeting ours, though.
It is not really cost effective for a lawyer charging 300 UKP/hr to type letters or judgements. Getting good legal secretaries is not easy and whether the work can be done accurately enough by someone in a 3rd world country is far from obvious. Some big accountants are doing the same with a lot of their work.
"fairly" being the key point, the Indian call centers I've spoken (Lloyds, Citibank) to have been appauling. I think the whole call center thing has been overblown.
I betya there is every chance that the current lot get voted back in.
There are millions of potential Labour voters who hate TB, just waiting for somone else to vote for. If the handover to GB is handled correctly I don't think the tories have a hope at the next election and any ideas that they have is just whishful thinking IMHO.
In a nutshell. It is a debt that can never, and isn't expected to ever be paid back. The money that is lent out is created as a simple bookkeeping entry by the banks. But accumulates as an interest-bearing debt. Thus the amount of money in circulation is always less than the amount owed to the banks.
More worrying than the personal debt levels reached, is what is happening on a global scale. You do realise the world is in the biggest liquidity bubble *ever*. Banking institutions have had access to money at zero percent interest since the early nineties. And they have been borrowing it by the truckload, in seemingly limitless quantities.
It is fuelling bubbles everywhere you look. Private equity, hedge funds, the housing market. Interest rates are now on the rise and at some point you can expect a financial disaster that makes the great depression look like a nice picnic.
I would set your aspirations for the future on basic survival.
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