The unbearable lockdown

As night follows day, so the media hyperventilating about the need for a hard lockdown have switched to demanding an end to it.

The lockdown though now is causing a real split between those who are being furloughed or in full work and those who have lost their income entirely. Clearly the latter group are rather keen on coming out of lockdown so that they can survive.

My own focus today is those who are in lockdown but basically on an enforced staycation. There are millions of people now  in this state. Whilst worried for the future, they are actually having quite a nice break now. My hunch is quite a few won’t fancy a return to work. These will be the group that claim they are too scared to travel etc in true new woke style. They will demand to work from home or have sick leave.

The longer we have a lockdown, the worse this mindset will become. For this alone, we need to quickly long term impact for this further 3 week lockdown. I have not criticised the Government ugh clearly are trying their best and the time for asking questions about preparedness is later when we are through the worst.

France has already seen this phenomenon, I was speaking to an employer there who said 30% of staff won’t come back because they don’t feel safe but expect someone to pay them (white collar workers).

Should part-time work pay so much - the other side of the coin

I am going to get a lot of stick for this post but here goes. The Universal Credit is being made out to be big saviour by the Tories in terms of making work pay and benefits not. However, I have some personal experience in recent months which has made me look at what people are getting and why.

I have had requests to go part-time and people turn down jobs, all because of benefits, not career choices. As readers will surmise, its not like I work in a low-paid industry, but in the City.

But here we go, if you work part time for 60 hours a month and earn say £13 an hour, not great, but far above even the living wage in London, it comes to £720 a month - for effectively 2 days work a week. Annually that is £9360 per year, so no income tax to pay as it is under the free amount threshold. On this there is NI of course, which amounts to £193 per year, so net income is just £9,165.

Also let's say you are also a single mum, you would be in receipt of the full working tax and child tax credit of £7,165 per year. Then there is child benefit at £4175 for her child. Of course, this person lives in Southwark and so get housing benefit and income support to help with the rent and council tax - this amounts to another £7592 a year (I checked).

All in all this is a net amount of £28,097 income. Now, this is post-tax income of £2,341 a month, or a little over £500 per week. I am not saying this is some kind of luxury lifestyle in an expensive City, far from it. It is a net income equivalent to half of what someone would earn doing a full time £85,000 job. Or a normal full time job paying £40,000 a year.

So my beef is that the real cost per hour is huge, when viewing private sector income and state sector support together. The work value delivered is £9360, so even with a margin of 30% this equates to £3000 of added value - but the cost in benefits etc is £19,000. I am yet to work out a way to matrix this with gross productivity per hour which is falling in the UK, but given we are in effect paying £36 an for work that has a market rate of £13, there may be a link?

No wonder to me now why so many of my team are kicking their boyfriends out and begging to go part time. Maybe Universal Credit is the answer, but from my perspective we are a long, long way from a Capitalist economy now.

Working Hours

Thanks to all the voters who entered into the poll on hour many hours we all work a day. There were 50 votes so I make that quite a decent effort for one of these polls. The results are still in the sidebar until tomorrow when Nick Drew has new one to go in.

Here are the results for analysis:

<7	16 (32%)
8	16 (32%)
10	12 (24%)
12+	6 (12%)

I am pleased to see that so many people manage to work less than 7 hours a day. You only live once and I don't think at the pearly gates or wherever we end up you will look back and wish you had spent more time in the office. Some of you probably have better things to do than work anyway- Gordon steals most of it anyway!

8 hours too is a commendable achievement in clocking on and off to an exact time. If you voted in this category is it because you work just to get the money or are indeed your employers (yourself included possibly) fair and honest?

Part of me thinks thought that some explanation for the 64% in these two categories is a dissatisfaction with your work ?

Then we get to the 1/3rd of us who seem to put the hours in. This poll was inspired by my current 70 hour weeks in a new job. Hopefully once I am up to speed this can be reduced to something more akin to the EU maximum (48 hrs). On the other hand, I don't hate what I do and am paid well there is little to moan about beyond not seeing the family quite enough. My guess is that this applies to most of the voters here, some of whom are no doubt self-employed too as building a business requires endless work; and for little reward in the beginning too.

That is my take, what is yours?