Sunday, December 04, 2011

Pity The Poor Employer ...

The standard of school-leavers is so poor that one supermarket has sent back three-quarters of its recruits for "remedial pre-job training" before they start work. Morrisons, Britain's fourth-biggest supermarket with 135,000 employees, found that many of its applicants in Salford, Greater Manchester, lacked even the basic skills needed to stack shelves and serve customers. While some had a poor grasp of maths and English, others lacked simple skills such as turning up on time and making eye contact.


Well - it is Salford. But it was this gloss that struck me.

The warning will fuel concerns that schools are failing to teach the skills necessary for young Britons to find jobs, forcing firms to recruit migrant workers instead.


Now there's no doubt that our education system's been wrecked over the last 40 years, even as exam passes hit record levels. But I seem to recall that in the days before mass immigration, if you wanted to find a better candidate for a post you offered a higher wage - and that usually seemed to work.

My business contacts inform me that this business model is no longer in vogue for jobs at the lower end of the wage scale. Instead the "import someone better and cheaper" model reigns supreme.

But at the top end - say at board level - offering more money - lots and lots more money, the more the better - is still seen as the best way to attract a high-quality candidate. No UK or US bankers seem to think it's a good idea to get in, say, a Chinese CEO, despite the fact that they run the world's largest banks for salaries between 2% and 10% of US levels. Odd, that.






UPDATE - I disagree with young clever-clogs and Grabber look-alike Daniel Knowles when he says that "there are no jobs left for the dim" - there are plenty of them and they're all being done by immigrants. The thing is, no matter what the level of job - even shelf-stacker - the cleverer person's likely to do it better than the not so bright. Only in 'pure' manual jobs like fruit or vegetable picking does the intellectually-challenged employee get a level playing field - and that arduous work is done, if the fields around Bromsgrove and the gangmaster's white vans plying up and down the M5 from Brum are any guide, by an eclectic assortment of third-world chaps - beards and pugris at one end of the field, mustachios and bare heads at the other.

Of course, UK average intelligence would be higher if we hadn't been running a vast scheme, not of eugenics, but of dysgenics, for the last fifty years. Bright and conscientious women have been encouraged to go out and work, the not so bright and feckless have been encouraged with hard cash to stay at home and have lots of babies.

23 comments:

JuliaM said...

It's not just a factor of pure intelligence though. It's also social skils, teamwork, manners, and basic hygiene.

And I'm sad to say, these are the things that are letting down many young people looking for jobs.Also the 'immediate gratification' culture.

The Ch 4 show 'Living With The Amish' is an eyeopener. And you can see they programme has selected the very best and brightest too...

Sgt Troy 11th Dragoons said...

"No UK or US bankers seem to think it's a good idea to get in, say, a Chinese CEO, despite the fact that they run the world's largest banks for salaries between 2% and 10% of US levels. Odd, that."

LOL

But otoh the Chinese have got real money and it is a comparatively simple affair to lend it out

Whereas conjuring up complex and exotic derivatives and passing them off as "securities" takes real skill

As indeed does buying bust Dutch banks for tens of billions.

Bobo said...

Also the benefits system provides no incentive to grub around in the mud for tatties for minumum wage. When you factor in Council Tax benefit and Housing Benefit, even for a single childless person thats probably equal to around £120-£150 per week.

Thats a lot of taters.

Anonymous said...

It seems to me that the Amish succeed up to a point by setting their goals very low.

I want my country back said...

The landlord of the house where migrant workers bunk four or five to a room puts in a relative who has a right to reside and is habitually resident in the UK and so can claim HB and CTB for the house. The relative doesn't have not actually live there of course. As any fule kno, the Council has to give 24 hours notice of inspection visits so a bit of tidying up removes all trace of the lodgers. Of course it's fraud, but it's "honour fraud" because money accrues to the family.

Umbongo said...

Slightly OT but re Sgt Troy's remarks about Chinese bankers:

The guys who run the Chinese banks do as they are told by their political masters. There's no pretence (actually there is a pretence but it's not a successful one) that these guys have anything but a "caretaker" role in the banks' management. The Chinese government - unless it is dealing with its own (cf the UK and EU political class) - does not have to pretend that vast numbers of "workers" in the public sector workers (which is what Chinese bankers are) produce anything of value at all. As with our own public sector, everything workers there receive in pay and pensions is coerced from those who create the real wealth in the economy.

OTOH in a (more or less) properly run capitalist economy the banks are (highly regulated) free agents. Unfortunately our politicians don't have the balls to recognise this and let these free agents go bust from time to time. This need not be a threat to the banking system but would certainly be a threat to individual banks and those who run them. Even they might perceive that inordinate unearned remuneration could endanger the future of the institution which pays them and the managers themselves.

As to Sgt Troy's point about the Chinese banks having "real money": a straw in the wind of Chinese banking and economic problems is set out here. The "real money" in China is the stack of dollar bills under the Bank of China's mattress. Unfortunately this is, to a large extent, unspendable and unexchangeable. The real "wealth" of China outside its borders is its unchallenged ability to strong-arm weaker nations in Africa and Latin America to hand over natural resources at, effectively, knock-down prices.

banned said...

A while back at my local Tesco the till failed to inform the perfectly bright looking English tillboy how much change to give me.

I told him, "you owe me £14.80". He looked unsure until the till kicked back to life and confirmed my mental arithmetic.
The look on his face was priceless and read "Crikey, HTF did you do that, brainbox or wot!"

Mark said...

'The guys who run the Chinese banks do as they are told by their political masters. There's no pretence (actually there is a pretence but it's not a successful one) that these guys have anything but a "caretaker" role in the banks' management.'

I recall about 5 years ago hearing Will Hutton at a public lecture at LSE making the same point- and prognosticating that the Chinese banks would all shortly go belly-up, unlike the lean 'n' mean banks in the West, honed by a cutthroat competition that, as an unfortunate side effect, gave these 'wealth creators' massive salaries & bonuses. In the wake of the 2008 banking collapse here in the West, the truism about motes & beams comes to mind when I recall these remarks.

'Instead the "import someone better and cheaper" model reigns supreme.'

Insofar as the 'better & cheaper' option is East European, one possible Euro breakdown scenario (the one that suggests a bifurcation between the efficient German led north, and the less efficient Club Med countries)may result in that model hitting the buffers in the UK. This year citizens of Poland & the Baltic states gained the same right to work in Germany as western Europeans. If a 'hard Euro' forms around the German core, Balts & Poles could find themselves much better off in Germany than here in the UK due to the new exchange rate- and they would be able to live that much closer to home.

Umbongo said...

Mark

Just because Will Hutton is a useless bag of wind doesn't mean he doesn't (very very) occasionally get it right (usually by accident). Remember, of course, that his remarks re Western banks (if you are quoting him correctly - a reference would be nice) was made at the time that Labour was in office and the banks were coughing up oodles of tax for Labour to waste.

BTW - setting aside Hutton's supposed remarks - are you claiming that Chinese bankers are, more or less, free agents vis-a-vis the Chinese government and do not do as they're told by their political masters?

James Higham said...

They'll not employ the Chinese for the very reasons you state - they see it as suicide, the thin edge of the wedge.

Mark said...

'setting aside Hutton's supposed remarks - are you claiming that Chinese bankers are, more or less, free agents vis-a-vis the Chinese government and do not do as they're told by their political masters?'

Umbongo- no, your point about Chinese bankers being essentially political appointees is a good one. My point was that Hutton drew the wrong conclusions from this fact; Chinese banks,(ditto Japanese banks)may have had their balance sheets stuffed with underperforming loans (in China's case to other state enterprises), but their politically appointed (and modestly remunerated) boards at least kept well clear of the toxic derivatives that did for their western counterparts.

I can't find a reference to the lecture now, but it was one of several he did just prior to Crash, while promoting this book-

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-Wall-China-West-Century/dp/0316730181

Needless to say, I wasn't persuaded to buy the product he was plugging !

Anonymous said...

In 2004 Salford was already 6% non-white. That number will be higher now and concentrated toward the younger age groups.

I suspect the unemployables in the article will quite representitive of this group.

We need more migrant workers because the last lot were useless.

paulilc said...

Our school leavers may be pretty dire, but I've had some dreadful experiences (eg hygiene, attitude, laziness) with hiring Greeks, Poles, Ghanaians etc, too. Recently, I have noticed that more British graduates are now willing to take NMW jobs in order to get work experience.

Anonymous said...

Ed Balls is right on the economy

These crazies just don't give up.
The article is writen as if Labours 14 years never happened.


"Note the metaphor deployed by the Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugman, suggesting it was Osborne's austerity programme that was perverse, and comparing the chancellor to "a medieval doctor bleeding his patient, observing that the patient is getting sicker, not better, and deciding that this calls for even more bleeding".
"

Joe90 said...

"A while back at my local Tesco the till failed to inform the perfectly bright looking English tillboy how much change to give me."

My local Aldi used to hire bright youngsters to work on its cash tills.

There was no scanner and no adding up by machine. The till workers would just look at the items and add them up by mental arithmetic.

Admittedly this was made easier by nearly all Aldi produce costing something-and-99p, but it was still good to see a bit of brainwork going on.

Two of the till workers were Chinese, one was English.

Laban said...

Joe - I used to be amazed at the Aldi till people before they got scanners - unbelievable mental skills. It wasn't just that they could add it all up in their heads - they knew the prices of everything in the shop!

What happened to them all, I wonder - they were really bright.

Joe90 said...

Yes, they did know all the prices as well! I'm sure they've done alright for themselves, hope so anyway.

In one of Umbongo's posts I read this sentence:

"As with our own public sector, everything workers there receive in pay and pensions is coerced from those who create the real wealth in the economy."

Businesses of all kinds cannot function without the public infrastructure of roads and rail, a workforce able to read and write, police to protect them, the legal system and so on.

All those make possible the creation of wealth, and to label the private sector the creators of 'real wealth' and, by implication, the public sector as greedy drones, is like trying to separate a cake into flour, sugar and eggs after it's been baked.

You are obviously right in saying that taxes are coerced from people, but that is the price of civilisation.

Furor Teutonicus said...

XX even as exam passes hit record levels.XX

And THERE is the problem in one.

Too many sub inteligent Untermensch who fall for the propoganda of the "teaching classes", that "qualifications mean everything, and makes the job world to your oyster".

So you give Billy bloggs a handfull of paperwork, which sais he has "A" levels, (but what would he know, he can not read them), and tell him that:....

"stacking shelves is too good for you Billy, you have A LEVELS(!)*
You could be the managing director of Shell!!!"

*(Wood work (Result not known. Broke finger whilst picking nose), Sock darning (C), combat flower arranging (A+), and getting the number of fingers on each hand to add up to about 8,(Result not known, he had a broken finger on the day (see "woodwork") which cocked EVERYTHING up)

Anonymous said...

Joe90.
Civilisation existed before rail, and schools. Both of which are relatively new on the scale of things.
(yes schools go back a long way, but only for a very select few.)

And whats more, the Rail was originally private, only after WW2 was it fully nationalised.
Schooling was also not originally government funded in this country.
I think it was the church that started bringing education to the masses.


But I agree the distinction between public and private isn't as clear as it used to be, that is our problem. The government has tried to do more and more and pushed out the private sector in favour of the less efficient politicially motivated sector.

Liberal Heresy said...

"if you wanted to find a better candidate for a post you offered a higher wage - and that usually seemed to work"

One of the issues previously discussed by Ezra Mishan : http://www.thephora.net/forum/archive/index.php/t-5625.html

Hugh Oxford said...

If candidates have qualifications in English and Maths at GCSE level, but in reality they lack those skills, then why can't Morrisons sue the examination board for damages?

Furor Teutonicus said...

Or the firms could go back to ther system wherby you took a maths and english test at the interview stage, and forget the "A"/"O" level shit all together.

Liberal Heresy said...

I seem to recall reading that GCE 'O' Levels still exist and are offered in certain African states. The article stated that some exam boards here still create and mark them but just not for domestic consumption.