WTF is a "soft job"? Can we have more of them, please?

[AnnO'Neemus]

Apparently, there's a shortage of City & Guilds qualified mechanics. So I've heard recently from someone who is one.

 

[newbie]

No-one could deny that extra free childcare and cleaning up a few forests would be nice

er. There's a real problem with the modern obsession with (unnecessary) tidyness. There's greater biodiversity in an untidy forest and most forest clearing is slash & burn resulting in increased carbon release to the atmosphere. Wildlife Trusts are particularly irritating in this regard: manager with degree + grant + volunteers = widespread death & destruction.

 

[SpookyFrank]

[*]child carers

How about we let the dog wag the tail for once and let people raise their own children instead of forcing everyone to work

 

[audiotech]

The Tories launched a similar scheme in the 1980s called the 'Community Programme', iirc one of the first top-down initiatives to use the word 'community' in a feelgood way. A lot of the tasks on offer really did amount to little more than make-work: cleaning grafitti from walls which would be sprayed over again the next week, or planting saplings that would be pulled up at night by bored youngsters. Quite a few of my friends did them, the only task I ever heard people speak well of was drystone walling out in the countryside.

The decorating, tidy gardens, replace fencing etc of those unable to do such things was a good idea, union rates too where I was, but temporary for a year. Some on the jub training as such, some supervision and some corruption.

 

[newbie]

This reminds me a little of the old Youth Training Schemes that previous governments tried, and probably for a similar reason. The YTS allowed loads of people to be taken off one set of statistics and shifted over to another as a means of massaging the unemployment figures, while simultaneously giving unscrupulous employers the chance to take on unemployed young people for shitty wages and condition under the guise of their being 'trainees' IIRC.

If I remember the old YTS schemes correctly, this isn't the first time this ploy has been tried.

they weren't all like that though, I'm minded of the huge numbers of YTS involved in rebuilding the Kennet & Avon canal. I knew some of them, and I think they'd agree they benefited, as the alternative was hanging around a busstop being skint. Since a project like that couldn't be funded on any commercial basis, and since it's now a popular leisure resource, I'd see it as money well spent.

There are plenty of similar projects where there's benefit for relatively small outlay. Perhaps the modern term for such labour is 'tourism ambassadors'?

 

[JHE]

This reminds me a little of the old Youth Training Schemes that previous governments tried...

The Tories launched a similar scheme in the 1980s called the 'Community Programme'....

YOPs, YTS, Community Wotsit... various other schemes before and after, the names of which I have either forgotten or never known...

These things were mostly (I have to say mostly, coz they weren't all the same, and there were good exceptions) crappy little joblets with little or no training provided. The supposed trainees were paid hardly anything because they were supposedly benefitting from training. In some cases, youngsters were taken on as shelf-stackers, but without the usual pay, since their work was supposedly training them.

Is that this? No, I don't think so!

Bakunin & IMR, if the govt's job creation plan turns out to be just more of that sort of scheme, I will readily congratulate you for having seen through some distorting spin, but the little I have read so far provides no reason at all to think this job creation plan is YOPs reborn.

The proposal seems to be to create proper useful jobs.

Sure, I'll have to wait to find out more about it and how it is to be implemented before I can be sure that it's a good thing, but at the moment it looks to me as if your perception, like Fruitloop's idea that the govt intends to break (or change) the law over NWM, is based on nothing that's been reported so far.

 

[treelover]

But yeah, generally speaking, a bit of rather expensive and depressingly transparent election-time PR manipulation bullshit.

Usually i would agree with you, but in this case it may be a genuine desire to limit long term youth unemployment: for NL and more so Old Labour the ravages and impact and tensions, eg crime levels, on working class communities of 80's mass youth unemployment are buried deep in its psyche, indeed i would argue that they consider much of the UK's record of 'anti-social behaviour' can be put down to these 'lost generations'. Having said that, it is in the implementation: who runs the schemes, rates of pay, trainee's rights, etc, I also suspect as other posters note it will be disabled people on IB who are shunted onto many of them, that the success and integrity of the proposals will be determined.

 

[IMR]

Bakunin & IMR, if the govt's job creation plan turns out to be just more of that sort of scheme, I will readily congratulate you for having seen through some distorting spin

In principle it might sound good, but forgive me for being cynical where promises from the government are concerned. Distorting spin is the baseline.

The problem is first that paying people a pittance for doing nothing is a fairly stable equilibrium in the short term, and second that public finances are in poor shape.