Recruitment businesses supplying into the public sector- how to see through the lean times?
Under the labour government, we saw unthinkable increases in labour demand for the Public Sector. Secretly we knew that this was too good to be true and frankly, it was just another tax payer initiative to mask the increase in unemployment. Although we can argue that money earned has a spending factor of 4, boosting the rest of the economy, we have to somehow face the facts that it is merely delaying the obvious. As a nation, we are unproductive, over paid and lazy. The NHS employs in the region of 1.5mil people, that is nearly 8% of the entire UK workforce. If we extrapolate their losses as a result to sick pay of £1.5bil, this equates to £18bil per annum.WOW. I am all for work life balance, flexible working conditions but the emphasis has to be on "Work". We need to be more competitive that other AAA rated economies and more importantly, have to be extra creative to substitute unproductive jobs for value adding jobs and up-skill our talent to create more value adding jobs. Now that we outsource low-end functions and import commodities (negative trade balance), we need to find a niche in the global economy that sets us apart from other service delivery economies.
