Sorry State Of UK / Jobs Market

I’ve written this post because it’s been on my mind for a while, of course I have no doubt many will disagree.

I run a business of about 40 people, predominantly exporting but with some UK work also. I have been doing this since 2001 (much smaller then).

This is without doubt the hardest time in that period. We are, for the moment, busy. We have taken on work that has a negative net margin in order to protect our staffs jobs, scattered with a few jobs which are a little better.

Our total wage bill is about £1.1m. Nobody is on minimum wage, some are circa 10% above it.

Our product, fortunately contains relatively small amounts of labor compared to its overall value, something that has protected us for a while along with the decline in sterling.

Today however is looking bleak; orders are drying up, even the ones we were using to keep the factory busy.

Minimum wage might be increasing by 8-9% again.

Who knows what will be in the budget, but frankly, while I consider myself slightly right of centre, not much of it seems negative, apart from the possibility of a 2% employer NI increase.

I always have tried to create and maintain reasonable jobs, which is hard to do competing with Turkey and China.

Staff want to do in the main the minimum, not the maximum, which makes it increasingly hard.

If something doesn’t give I expect in January to have to maybe for the first time ever have to make some redundancy’s. Maybe 40%? Plus with the NMW increase and NI increase many may end up on minimum wage.

The whole country in the main is screwed; we cannot compete except maybe in some Limited and protected sectors. The cost of basic items for people, especially housing is so high, people need increases to live and it’s feeding a monster.

AMA.