sdg wrote:
I promise I'm still a liberal at heart but my concern right now based off what I see in my area is that there is a section of society who are chronically unemployed and who literally plan to have kids straight from school in order to get a house and more money who think that working as a cleaner or behind the counter in McDonalds is more embarrassing and shameful than living off of benefits.
We stayed in Chester at the weekend and every member of cleaning staff at the hotel I encountered was eastern European, as well as the people who were clearing tables in a couple of the restaurants we visited. I bet there are local people sitting in their houses playing Xbox and claming job seekers allowance. Now I'm not naïve or disillusioned enough to feel like that's the majority or anything but there are people who just won't work. Or they believe they can't get a job because they don't try and refuse to do some jobs. I've been unemployed, it sucked. So I worked anywhere I had to to get by. I've worked as a cleaner, a maid, in a bar, serving tables in a restaurant, as a kitchen porter, in a call centre, in a shop, in McDonalds...I've done load of crap jobs. It infuriates me when I see people unemployed and there are jobs available.
I'm not sure that quite sums it up fairly. Going to the numbers, unemployment has come down, but the latest figure I can find (quickly) is 1.8 million. For jobs, 500,000. So that's 1.3 million people who might claim benefits. The figures can shift, of course, but any idea that the more people chase jobs and work and release money, the more jobs are created is true but not something that continues forever. Underpinning all of this is the fact that even if we got to full employment you'd still need a percentage of people unemployed, otherwise inflation goes haywire - and if that happened, then keeping interest rates low to prevent people being turfed out of their overpriced houses as their mortgages escalated would look insane, but letting them rise would create its own homelessness problem.
So given all that, there will always be a large number of unemployed people. It isn't so hard to see how some people see chronic un or under employment as being part of their lot. Call them the underclass, if you like. Some might even enjoy it, though it seems unlikely. The economic system, though, is the problem - that an underclass has developed (and been well-predicted in literature for years - dystopian science fiction anyone?) isn't because people are feckless, but because it is an unavoidable consequence of capitalism. Unavoidable and inevitable. Sure, capitalism is the best economic system we've come up with so far, but it has less and less to offer in building a society as time goes by and the rewards are shared around less generously.
I'm sure we can make the welfare system work better, but even if it was as full of incentive as possible and efficiently gave just enough for people to live on, you'd still be left with lots of unemployed people (3-4% unemployed in full employment, from memory). Any fixes are going to create problems elsewhere - like a barrel with four holes and only two bungs, you can plug any hole you like, but the others will keep leaking.