I am still catching up after being away in the UK last week. I will…
Working less hours is not the answer!
I did an extended interview the other day for BTalk which is a CBS on-line business news site on whether working less hours was the solution the rising unemployment. You will guess right that I thought that it was not an answer and only disadvantaged workers further.
If you are interested, the interview is now available on-line and you can listen to it – here or here.
Great interveiw Bill!
I think you hit the nail right on the head with “we don’t trust government to do anything anymore”. My own travells in (north) America confirmed to me what happens when this attitude is taken to extremes. The private sector fails to adequately and equitably provide many former public goods once they are given control of former public enterprises/services. You witness two countries in one in the US – all well-off one where most of the the wealth has obviously accrued and then the other one, which I would probably describe as “a second world country”. The way US cities were structured struck me as being like islands of wealth dotted through a sea of crap. Neat, clean wealthy suburbs and satellite cities with good public infrastructure contrasted starkly with vast, run-down, dirty slums with shockingly deteriorated streets and buildings, often only a few hundred metres away “accross the tracks” so to speak. It is difficult to take a photo in these places without including beggars and homeless in the frame, so numerous are they.
Anyway, I hope you are correct regarding the paradigm shift, and that sometime very soon, the fed sees the light and embarks on proper job creation programs. Gladstone is heamorraging jobs fast! As you are probably aware, 600 went the other day (probably more like 1000 when you factor in everything else) and I hear that more cuts – this time of permanent employees – are on the cards if the price of alumina and aluminium does not improve. In a place the size of Gladstone, the loss of a thousand well paid resource sector jobs is going to blast a whopping hole in local demand, leading to some serious flow-on job losses. I suspect that Newcastle is in a similar boat.