How far do these t***s in Government think they can push people? Having not had a pay rise for seven years and having a day's less work due to my employer still struggling to find enough work to keep us in jobs I scrape into this category. If they have the audacity to call me into a Job Centre to see if I'm 'working enough' I swear it's gonna get nasty. www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... ing-enough

How far do these t***s in Government think they can push people? Having not had a pay rise for seven years and having a day's less work due to my employer still struggling to find enough work to keep us in jobs I scrape into this category. If they have the audacity to call me into a Job Centre to see if I'm 'working enough' I swear it's gonna get nasty. www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... ing-enough

There is clearly a strong wish within the current government for the in work benefits bill to be cut even further than it already has been, probably much further, they would probably like to dispense with the whole concept of paying out benefits to those who are in work.

The guideline in this story is that this stupid idea will affect those who earn anything less than the National Minimum Wage at 35 hours a week which is basically anyone who is on a limited hours or zero hours contract and like the OP my wife and most of her colleagues in the hotel she works at would fall into this category (although for reasons of our own we don't claim any in work benefits at all).

I can only speak of the hospitality industry having had insight into this via her, but the vast majority of employees within this sector are on limited guaranteed hours contracts, often zero hours - its mitigated by the fact that most of those employees are then expected to work any hours that the employer sees fit, at any time of the day and night, and to do split shifts which only serve to double up the travelling costs to the employee - at busy times the employees will find full employment (albeit at the beck and call of the employer) but in the quiet months of the year (and January-March is dead) they will be virtually unemployed.

Try calling in a hotel worker in for an interview at a job centre and ask them why they haven't worked 35 hours for the last three months, and stand back and watch the fireworks, in fact if they called my wife in I'd take a day off work to go with her and watch.

Anyone who thinks things are bad now, will be apoplecticif by some quirk of circumstance, we find the coalition, or even worse, the tories with an outright majority, come 2015.

The fookers haven't even got started yet on screwing the poor and the claims of saving money are simply a load of cobblers. Just look at how much they've managed to "save" so far

Well said Jerry. A friend of mine is unemployed and sometimes I help her look for work online. She's after anything really, part or full time doesn't matter. But an awful lot of part time jobs I've looked at for her don't specify an exact "shift pattern" eg mon - wed 9-5 or mon-Friday 9-12 and say the candidate will be expected to work weekends or evenings when needed and must be "fully flexible". Well that's probably fine if you're just looking for 1 part time job. If you want 2 or 3 to make up a full time working week it's almost impossible.

Quote ="LeighGionaire"How far do these t***s in Government think they can push people? Having not had a pay rise for seven years and having a day's less work due to my employer still struggling to find enough work to keep us in jobs I scrape into this category. If they have the audacity to call me into a Job Centre to see if I'm 'working enough' I swear it's gonna get nasty. www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... ing-enough'" You seem unhappy at your employer's inability to find you work - why don't you become the employer that way you will protect yourself?

Quote ="LeighGionaire"How far do these t***s in Government think they can push people? Having not had a pay rise for seven years and having a day's less work due to my employer still struggling to find enough work to keep us in jobs I scrape into this category. If they have the audacity to call me into a Job Centre to see if I'm 'working enough' I swear it's gonna get nasty. www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... ing-enough'" You seem unhappy at your employer's inability to find you work - why don't you become the employer that way you will protect yourself?

It didn't sound to me that he was unhappy with the employer.

There are always jobs available in the hotel industry in various departments, the hotel that my wife, and until recently my youngest daughter worked at is always recruiting, all of the three and four star hotels have horrendously high levels of staff turnover, always.

This might be a reason why ...

The hotel that my daughter worked at is not on a bus route or even within five miles of a bus route and so it was down to muggins here to get her to work and pick her up, that included breakfast shifts at 6am right through to pick-ups at 2am after wedding functions - she was on national minimum wage.

The alternative was that the hotel offered to pay half of the employees taxi fare, which she often took up especially after I drew the line at a 10pm curfew, but even paying half the taxi fare left her having to find £7 for each trip, thats £14 to get to work and back when you're earning less than £6 an hour (as a 20 year old), so you work an eight hour shift until 2am serving people who treat you like serfs and almost three of those hours are to pay for your taxi fare.

And here is the salt in the wound - you then get taxed on the half of the fare that the employer pays for as its perceived by the IR as a benefit in kind.

And I haven't mentioned the popular "breakfast and afternoon" shift where you do 6am to 10am, go home, then come back and do 2pm to 6pm, two lots of taxi fares, eight hours worked and almost six of them just to pay for your transport.


You can understand the high turnover of staff can't you ?




...and - all of this on zero hours with no guarantee of any shifts, rotas issued week by week and still subject to change at no notice dependant on bookings and demand.

Yep. But of course if she weren't able to live with you she'd, I imagine, have to claim benefits and be labelled a scrounger. But don't worry, that nice Mr Osborne has saved the British economy for us all.

Fortunately she's out of that line of business and into a salaried job in a law firm with her sister, I've bred two lawyers, what on earth would my father say ...

Quote ="LeighGionaire"How far do these t***s in Government think they can push people? Having not had a pay rise for seven years and having a day's less work due to my employer still struggling to find enough work to keep us in jobs I scrape into this category. If they have the audacity to call me into a Job Centre to see if I'm 'working enough' I swear it's gonna get nasty. www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... ing-enough'" You've had 7 years and done nothing to change things for yourself, and that is someone else's fault?? figures

Quote ="LeighGionaire"How far do these t***s in Government think they can push people? Having not had a pay rise for seven years and having a day's less work due to my employer still struggling to find enough work to keep us in jobs I scrape into this category. If they have the audacity to call me into a Job Centre to see if I'm 'working enough' I swear it's gonna get nasty. www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... ing-enough'" You've had 7 years and done nothing to change things for yourself, and that is someone else's fault?? figures

You don't know what avenues he might or might not have pursued.

Unemployment figures are still at 5-to-6 times the number of vacancies.
Wage increases have remained low or zero for years.
Zero-hours contracts are on the increase.
80% of jobs created in the last three years are part-time.
Looking for a pay rise in those conditions is much harder than it would otherwise be.

Yeah, being underpaid is always the person's own fault isn't it?
Haul 'em in and make 'em work 80 hours (in further jobs that don't exist), that's the solution.

They are getting bold, especially with Miliband making Labour un-electable in 2015 and the Lib Dem'as suicide in 2010, they know there is every chance of an outright win at the next election. It's not that they are any good, it's just that the alternative seems to be hell bent on self destructive infighting, rather than targetting the Tories failures. I think Ed & Ed are so devoid of ideas, they don't fancy winning in 2015.

You're a nasty piece of work.

Maybe if the national minimum wage was raised to a level whereby people could earn sufficient money over a 40 hour week not to have to claim in work benefits then the government would save some money.

Sadly, none of this discussion is considered by our politicians: they would state most comments here are ficticious.

Ministerial statement in last day:
"Minister for Employment, Mark Hoban, said: “This is a really encouraging set of figures, with the number of people in work rocketing by 80,000 in only three months. A rise driven entirely by a growth in full-time jobs.

“The private sector has created jobs for 1.4 million more people, and there are now more people employed in the private sector than ever before.”

That what they see as happening.

So how do we get them to see it differently?

Just tell them we [ibelieve[/i it to be different. Whats good for the goose an' all that, although it wasn't good for the goose yesterday a la Grant Shapps telling us the Loopy Lefty Brazilian didn't back her observations and statements up with proper research.

I'm actually starting to think that the Lib Dems might do a lot better than people expect at the next election.

It looks more and more likely that the next election campaign will be fought against an expectation of a hung parliament. Unlike last time round, when a hung parliament was a distinct possibility but was largely ignored, Labour and the Tories are likely to have a strategy for such an eventuality. And the media will be much more probing about which of their manifesto proposals might be ditched to enable them to form a coalition, which of the Lib Dem policies might be acceptable to them.

It will be very difficult for Labour or the Tories to take on the Lib Dems. There'll be a lot more "I agree with David". The old argument that a vote for the Lib Dems is a wasted vote will not wash when both parties will be courting the Lib Dems.

Of course, it all still depends on how the economy is doing at the time of the election. But if growth is around 2% I think the Lib Dems, could do a lot better than seemed possible during the last three years.

Ah yes. Good old Grant Shapps. The man who makes up different identities to 'divide' between his business and political careers. Even though that might be confusing when, say, he takes a party of business partners for a tour around Parliament – under a different name.

Anyway, [url=http://zelo-street.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/grant-shapps-tells-more-porkies.htmlShapps was telling porkies about this incident.[/url

I doubt the electorate won't be reminded of the Lib Dems hypocrisy over tuition fees and their complicity in what is going on with the NHS which according to something I read the other day could be a huge issue by 2015 if things carry on as they are.

If the coalition government has proved anything it is not that a Lib Dem vote is a wasted vote but it is as good as voting Tory.

If there is a portion of the electorate who do not want the Tories returned to power I doubt they will view voting Lib Dem as a way to achieve that. They will simply not know which way the Lib dems will jump.

Instead of doing what they did last time which was to simply form a coalition with the party with the most seats they should state which of the two main parties they feel most aligned with before the election. If that meant after the election the Tories were still the biggest party but the Lib Dems had aligned with Labour then a minority Tory government should be what we end up with. Otherwise we end up with what we have now. A minority Tory government that actually has a working majority due to the Lib Dems!

Had the Lib Dems done this after the last election which as soon as they saw the proposed changes to the NHS they should have, we'd have probably had another election by now and have avoided much of the damage inflicted by what is in effect a very right wing reactionary government.

As to the notion of people in work not doiing enough work another category of people who may fal foul of this are teaching assistants and administrative staff in schools.

In my area these people are part time workers and are paid part year as well. So they aren't paid for the school holidays unlike teachers. Their salaries are however spread across 12 months so as a monthly wage they will easily drop below the threshold of a 35 hour minimum wage level.

It seems to me under these proposals they would be expected to go and do another job after a day in school or take on work at weekends to make up the difference between their actual employment and what the government thinks they should earn. If they can find a job that is.

There is also an anomaly in educational employment in that in some areas such people as these are [inot[/i part year but are paid for as teachers are for the full year.

The Lib Dems rely on a rather large student vote in some areas. There's a realistic chance that Clegg could be without a seat after the next election, seeing as his constituency is where the Sheffield University Halls of Residence are. All it takes is a couple of bright sparks to coordinate a campaign to vote for a certain candidate and get enough students behind it.

Clegg had a majority of approx 15,000 last time. He had roughly 27,000 votes, the tories had 12,000, labour 8,000, assorted loonies 3,000.

Which certain candidate will the students back? The tory? How many students are there in Hallam?

Lib Dem MP's will undoubtedly lose votes to Labour in 2015. But that might not necessarily cost them their seats. The constituency where I used to live bucked the trend at the 2010 election in that it switched from Labour to the Lib Dems, with a tiny majority. Clearly at least a view thousand of the Lib Dem voters will switch to Labour in 2015. Its very likely that the Lib Dem MP will be kicked out, especially since he hasn't exactly covered himself in glory. But 6,000 voters voted Tory at the 2010 election. A long way back in 3rd place but still a sizeable number. Many of them probably did not envisage ever being in coalition with the Lib Dems, some of them probably wish they still hadn't. But perhaps a significant number of them might decide in 2015 that it would be in their interest to vote Lib Dem?

Pretty much the same in my constituency which has a LibDem MP with a 9000+ majority in 2010, with the added gloss that he is quite well respected in the area as an MP who is not frightened to vote against or abstain from voting if he disagrees with a party policy, he's also very good at publicity, lives in the constituency, works a lot on local issues and generally puts himself in the spotlight so that you know who he is and what he is doing for the area - I'm no supporter of political parties and I'm no supporter of the LibDems but I like the cut of his jib and would certainly vote for him again and fook anyone who thinks you should only vote on party lines and party manifesto's, which, as we all know, get binned on the evening of every election.

Tory dogma is that people work to make them rich without having to do the work them selves. (see under monarchy, aristocracy)
The idea that paying workers and caring for their well being is anathema.
If they could bring back slavery , and this lot are trying to give it a go, then they would be very happy indeed.
Just remember that when slavery was abolished, there was compensation given out.
Guess who got it?

The limp dems will go into meltdown come 2015, even their own MPs are deserting them (Sarah Teather).

Tory membership is haemorrhaging to the point that Shapps will not confirm membership numbers to a senior backer like Lorf Ashcroft. They will undoubtedly lose far-right votes to UKIP, while many middle class votes will swing back to Labour.

While the tories will conduct a dirty campaign, given the strategists they've brought on board. I think it is essential for Labour to take their campaign back to the doorsteps, not just in marginals but in every seat they fight.

As an aside, I thought Armando Ianucci's descriptionof Nigel Farage was spot on: Alan Partridge's unmarried uncle