nobody wants to do physical jobs today

joe sod

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It is harder and harder to get people to do physically demanding jobs today especially as the economy has improved. This may also partly explain the difficulty in getting houses built even though these jobs are reasonably well paid now. It is also a big issue in the agriculture and horticulture industries although these industries cannot pay high wages. At the same time we have an obesity problem with people eating too much and not doing enough physical tasks.

Then on another point over 50% of irish population is on welfare of some sort and this ratio is increasing all the time. I think we are reaching a tipping point where people are choosing not to work or not to work full time and to fall back on the welfare system. There are less and less people prepared to work full time to finance all this. So we have people on welfare and on the housing list and these people refuse to take up jobs to build those very houses. Somethings gotta change
 
The unemployment rate has fallen from 16% to 5%, according to official figures. The notion that there are less and less people prepared to work is pure fiction.
 
The unemployment rate has fallen from 16% to 5%, according to official figures. The notion that there are less and less people prepared to work is pure fiction.
Yes but there are a certain amount of people who either are not willing to work or alternatively for various reasons are unemployable. This could be because they are of ill health, general dossers, criminals etc.
Those of different levels of ill health might be able to do part time if able. I am familiar with a few cases where people suffering from depression were able to do 15/20 hours a week but it would be too much to put heavy demands on them. It is unrealistic to expect any employer to take on criminals ezpecially those with convictions for theft or violence
 
Yes but there are a certain amount of people who either are not willing to work or alternatively for various reasons are unemployable. This could be because they are of ill health, general dossers, criminals etc.
Those of different levels of ill health might be able to do part time if able. I am familiar with a few cases where people suffering from depression were able to do 15/20 hours a week but it would be too much to put heavy demands on them. It is unrealistic to expect any employer to take on criminals ezpecially those with convictions for theft or violence

even if you are only working a few hours a week you are classed as employed and not included in the statistic for unemployed even though you are not paying tax and still dependant on the welfare system. That is why the unemployment rate is now a virtually useless statistic and has been manipulated lower than the reality. Therefore looking at the number of people actually receiving welfare gives the real picture of what is happening. Effectively the bar to receive welfare has been lowered , there is no problem filling non manual low paid jobs, but fewer and fewer people are willing to do the tougher physical jobs even for higher wages. And those physical jobs wont be replaced by automation because they are too difficult to automate so people will still have to do this work. Back in the early 2000s we got the east europeans to fill this gap and they did this work but that has dried up.
 
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Yes but there are a certain amount of people who either are not willing to work or alternatively for various reasons are unemployable. This could be because they are of ill health, general dossers, criminals etc.

True, but that changes the narrative of the OP which claims that there are less and less people prepared to work, instead, fall back on the welfare system. This is a bogus assertion.
While alot of people are in paid employment that pays inadequate wages to sustain a reasonable living standards in this country thus are reliant on welfare to keep a roof over their heads, that is different from the assertion that more people are opting not to work or choosing the welfare system over work.
This is simply bogus. The reliance on welfare is a consequence of wages not being able to sustain and advance living standards.
 
even if you are only working a few hours a week you are classed as employed and not included in the statistic for unemployed even though you are not paying tax and still dependant on the welfare system. That is why the unemployment rate is now a virtually useless statistic and has been manipulated lower than the reality.

If the unemployment rate is a useless statistic, can you provide the statistic that you are basing your assertions on?
 
I think it's a mistake to link physical jobs, obesity and unemployment...

I agree with you with the poverty traps the welfare state produces but for example getting in a car and commuting for an hour to an office job isn't ideal from an obesity perspective either.
 
As a person who laboured on building sites in the UK back in the day, Labourers were never paid enough and were always seen as lesser beings and paid accordingly. There is very little to be said in favour of hard servile work, digging foundations, mixing cement, dragging building bricks, hauling sand, lifting scaffold items, being covered head-to-toe with dried mortar. Try it sometime, then put yourself in a Labourer's position not just all day or all week, but all year every year. Believe me, you'll be glad to pay a Labourer.

The only thing I can say in favour of labouring is you have the earliest suntan, the earliest funeral and years of pain.
 
Time and money. the older I am getting the higher price I am putting on my time. I watched a documentary one evening about minemumlisim and it made perfect sence to me. I don't live like a monk just don't buy stuff that I don't need, clutter free living. Easy living still enjoy a few pints in local maybe 4 instead of 14
 
As a person who laboured on building sites in the UK back in the day, Labourers were never paid enough and were always seen as lesser beings and paid accordingly. There is very little to be said in favour of hard servile work, digging foundations, mixing cement, dragging building bricks, hauling sand, lifting scaffold items, being covered head-to-toe with dried mortar. Try it sometime, then put yourself in a Labourer's position not just all day or all week, but all year every year. Believe me, you'll be glad to pay a Labourer.

The only thing I can say in favour of labouring is you have the earliest suntan, the earliest funeral and years of pain.

There are many people who work as labourers when they are young and then acquire skills and make their time more valuable.
If you are working as a labourer for 10 or 15 years then it is your fault that you are not more highly paid. Higher skill = higher pay. If you want more pay then get more skills.
The Dole is €5.50 an hour. Many people don't want to work for an extra €4.45 an hour. Another issue is that some people are so unskilled that they are not worth a wage of €9.55 so they are effectively unemployable.
 
The original post reminded me of this article ..

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/whatever-happened-to-the-teenage-summer-job-1.3585707

Maybe it's another case of Millennial bashing, or whatever this generation are labelled as.

Thats an extension alright of what I was talking about, smart phones have ruined the young in that they dont want to do anything physical .Its actually more serious than that in terms of higher skills if you are dumb as to how the physical world works, you cant be a doctor an engineer, an architect. You dont discover new ways of working or new building techniques or actually any new ideas peering into a smart phone. Its like the phones are smart but the users are dumb.
 
Hands Up those who ever spent a full week digging a trench, foundations with a pick-axe and shovel. How many of us operated a pneumatic drill on a tarmacadam or concrete road over a few days? When was the last time you wheel-barrowed top-soil continuously into a skip over two or three days having loaded it with a shovel? When was the last time you saw a grave being dug using only a shovel?

Newsflash! Those days are gone and to those of us who did all of the above on a fulltime basis Good Riddance to such toil! There are health & safety regulations now and what was entirely manual labour is now done by machines operated by a person sitting at control levers/buttons. The machines cost. The manhood of Ireland has gone soft. We want our garden posts set in a metre of concrete, our gardens landscaped, our trenches dug by labourers for a cheap as we can find. They should be happy to work for almost nothing. Sure, all they can do is dig and use a pick-axe.

I am by no means soft, but our garden fence was blown down in one of our storms. I can inform you digging holes for wooden support posts is not easy and to be honest, I wouldn't expect anybody else to do ours. OK, what I did cost less than a quarter of quotes I had received. But, I was knackered. Try some hard labour and I bet you will come away with a different point-of-view.
 
Newsflash! Those days are gone and to those of us who did all of the above on a fulltime basis Good Riddance to such toil!

...our trenches dug by labourers for a cheap as we can find. They should be happy to work for almost nothing. Sure, all they can do is dig and use a pick-axe.

So are those days gone or not?

I can inform you digging holes for wooden support posts is not easy and to be honest, I wouldn't expect anybody else to do ours.

That's for sure, if I was doing it again I'd still do it myself, but I'd hire a post auger. You know, embrace progress and do as good a job in less time.

Back to the OP, it's harder to get people to do most jobs these days. It's taking us a lot longer to fill highly paid IT roles at the moment, the volumes of candidates is way down and for some roles, 50%+ of applicants are coming from abroad.
 
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Back to the OP, it's harder to get people to do most jobs these days. It's taking us a lot longer to fill highly paid IT roles at the moment, the volumes of candidates is way down and for some roles, 50%+ of applicants are coming from abroad.

Are highly paid IT roles physically demanding? Are those roles not being filled because prospective candidates are opting not to work but instead fall back on welfare?

If not, then its hard to know what this comment has to do with the OP.
 
If you read the first sentence, there's a clue in there.

I did. I understand your point, although I disagree. Unemployment rate has fallen from 16% to 5%. Indicating at least that if there is work available people will generally take it up.
Of course, and if, as asserted by another poster, the official unemployment rate is a useless statistic then the statistic that that poster provided shows that there are at least 119,000 actively seeking more hours to work.


Back to the OP, it's harder to get people to do most jobs these days. It'

This is your opening sentence. You have broadened the terms, fair enough. So my questions to you apply.
Are highly paid IT roles not being filled because prospective candidates are opting not to work but instead falling back on welfare? Are highly paid IT roles physically demanding jobs?
 
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This is opening sentence. You have broadened the terms, fair enough. So my questions to you apply.
Are highly paid IT roles not being filled because prospective candidates are opting not to work but instead falling back on welfare? Are highly paid IT roles physically demanding jobs?

I doubt too many well educated people are choosing a social welfare lifestyle in place of an income double or more the industrial average. Perhaps some do for a time to game the housing system, it might make sense at the more junior level where even those on good incomes would struggle to rent or buy property in Dublin. I've seen nothing that would suggest this is happening to any great extent though.

My point was that my experience in the IT market suggests a significant element of the difficulty in filling roles at the moment is driven by a shortage of suitable candidates. With employment levels where they are currently, that can't be ruled out as a factor for physically demanding roles either.
 
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