©GeraldineBanksJune2024
Chapter 11 Confidence ?
They’re used to be endless surveys on business confidence and consumer confidence. Haven’t seen any of these for while, have we lost our confidence? We certainly haven’t lost our surveys , there’s a lot of them about, phishing for information. Who are you? What do you do? What do you want?
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), bless them , does and has published regular surveys about the general business situation and confidence. Obviously for an election called by the Conservative Government they had to be pretty upbeat for the last quarter, up by 4% having in the previous quarter bombed to -14%. Of course it’s all lies and statistics particularly with an election looming and the threat of the Conservatives ( traditionally the party of the members of the CBI.) losing.
If you link business confidence to consumer confidence then you see the bigger picture. If consumers aren’t confident then they aren’t going to spend their money and this will be reflected in the performance of the private business sector. Which having always worked in the private sector I can assure you has been pretty dire and has deteriorated over the last thirty years. No matter what the Government economists say.
Con is short for confidence and it’s natural for people running business’s to be confident about their plans and prospects. Is it a con? Are they trying to hide the reality of poor sales figures and increasing costs under a false bravado that things will get better, they must get better, or else.
There are many mechanisms for Senior Managers in the Private Sector to walk away from a business that is failing, before ;that is; they’ve taken the brave steps to cut the workforce, change working practices and cut costs in all areas at much emotional cost to themselves.
When it still hasn’t worked they acknowledge they have tried and failed and will get a six figure compensation package to retire to the country and recover from the emotional trauma of failing. This has been the pattern for a number of years.
It’s definitely a them and us situation. The workers have never felt more stretched or unstable, while those that managed to get into a position where they decided the future of the workers have given up on working altogether , either to retire and follow whatever dreams they had or more likely to buy a big house, with a bit of land and spend their time like landed gentry in the Countryside, eventually getting bored with it all and deciding to start their own business , employing people on minimum wage or play the stock market and put their profits into tax havens abroad.
This is where we are at the moment, the workers ( who are needed) supporting propertied gentry in order for them to exist and do nothing to help the economy but do plenty to help themselves. Their wealth is dependent on keeping land and property prices high. They want cheap food production from some of this land to feed their workers. The rest of the land is their play thing, their ornamental garden. They are the achievers and they deserve it. They will pass on their hereditary land to future generations and the assets which they’ve gained remain in the family.
That is a pretty ancient model, and the confidence in it; is; I think waning. I touched in a previous chapter on the phenomenal increases in rental property prices and the reluctance to offer watertight tenancies. Tenants have little security and owning property has become unaffordable for many. A lot of people feel cornered by the current system, they are seeing their children left without the prospect of being able to afford a house and being at the mercy of disreputable landlords, not to mention being employed by disreputable employers.
Take for example a young lad I know of who after leaving school with reasonable qualifications, just wanted some work experience before deciding what he wanted to do. He got a job with the Council Library, however, it was very flexible , they would call him in when they needed him. It was in effect a zero hours contract. He was lucky if he got one shift a week, not enough to help him save towards anything. For example a holiday , move out of his parents or indeed put something away to save up for University.
Eventually, he gave up on the Library as what shifts were available were given to existing staff who were indeed older ( nice to know how local Council’s youth prioritise youth employment) and got a job in a local amusement arcade which had food outlets as well as entertainment and bars. This gave him slightly more hours , but it came with the responsibility of locking the place up at night and having to get the bus home at unsociable hours . Sometimes it was so late the buses would not be running. Did the employer care? No.
Sadly, young people will take up the gauntlet of a challenge, but disreputable employers use this “spirit” to do the jobs that a paid manager should be doing( the manager’s pay incorporating the responsibility or the inconvenience.) The job itself may not have any prospects so this “spirit” may fall on fallow ground and have the opposite effect of leading to disillusion. The young man who I am thinking of had the sensible approach of getting experience in all areas of the business and using that experience to apply for another job with another company , hopefully with better conditions and more hours.
Perhaps we have had the free market economy in operation for many years and there has been an assumption that everyone should look after themselves. Or as I prefer to regard it , we have a dog eat dog workplace mentality, the worse environment to get anything done well.
From an economic point of view I don’t think the Free Market has lead to increased growth or to better sales or better working conditions. It’s basically being a free for all.( except it was never free and we’re all having to pay for it now).
It’s main result has been abuse, abuse of the system and abuse of people. In fact, it’s followed more of an inevitable Human Nature model , where those who ” dominate”(not always the brightest tools in the box) have as is their inclination abused those who they see as lesser mortals.
This is probably a soft socio-economic model , but certainly one that would be interesting to map out now, include a few of Society’s megalomaniacs , Bob Maxwell, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Rupert Murdoch and Phillip Green to name a few who have impacted the economic confidence in this Country, not to mention the people that started me on this track Kwasi ,Kemi and Liz.
In summary , our confidence in the current system has been seriously knocked, it seems that corruption has won the day and that normal people are having to fight for the crumbs that they are being thrown. The natural question for everyone now is what can we do?
thenotsomightyom 