Rise of the mid-life shirkers: Can Labour succeed where Jeremy Hunt failed?
Still at the golf course? Worklessness among the over-50s hasn’t budged since Jeremy Hunt told them to put down their putters and get back to the office.
The latest figures show that 3,622,000 people aged 50 to 64 were economically inactive – neither working nor looking for work. That is up by more than 300,000 since the start of the pandemic.
Oddly enough, there are circumstances where a substantial increase in shirking could benefit the whole country.
7 comments:
I was a 'shirker' through voluntary redundancy until I retired. I was fed up with the slide in attitudes at work and (probably) damaged my health through trying to achieve the unachievable.
Why should the Government care? Probably because they cannot farm me for even more tax. I felt that there was some prejudice against 'old men' - strange how they are missed for their 'contribution' once they have left.
DJ - yes, the government just wants more tax. I was a shirker through walking out at 57 because I'd decided on that some years before, also after trying to achieve the unachievable.
Same situation here - I took redundancy in my late 50s. And the government was probably partly responsible, having introduced so many initiatives and ways of checking up on us that the job was undoable by anyone with a sense of self-respect.
The downside of a lot of others following suit, though, is that they will bring in foreigners in order to boost the gross GDP figures.
Ditto for me! Strange how we've all had the same experience of the workplace in later life isn't it? Almost as though there's a pattern discernable.
Sam and Tammly - and many online comments tell similar stories. Capable people in their fifties see no point in carry on with a job which has become unrewarding and other employers don't want someone with enough experience to point out the stupidity.
@Tammly
What particularly bugged me was all the new people parachuted in with new ideas did not like the fact that us old ones had been through those 'new ideas' in the past and knew the problems they would cause. The classic tension between pragmatism and ideology that has snapped because only ideology (business or political) is 'real'.
Aint that just the truth.
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