Connect Grumpy Take

Liz Parker, Bude
We need more workers not shirkers

My own grumpy take may not sit too well with some of your readers but will, I am sure, strike a chord or two with those that work hard for a living and those who are struggling to run their own businesses. I have just sold my own small café and gift shop for which I had had very high hopes, not of making a fortune but of running a small, friendly business and making a modest living from it. It was a lifestyle choice, swapping a desk job in a major city for my own small business by the sea. I invested all of my savings to buy it and put in an awful lot more and some very hard work to renovate the premises and prepare for trading. It had everything going for it on paper and could have done very well indeed but for the fact that it proved nigh on impossible to find and keep staff I could trust and reply upon. This meant that for most of last summer, bar a few weeks when I was able to employ a couple of fantastic Australian students, I was often to be found single handedly trying to operate both the café and shop. This was despite the fact that I was offering good wages, well above minimum with a share of tips and a bonus, plus regular permanent (year round) work for one of the jobs. I found out far too late that the staffing problem was far from unique to me, it is endemic in the region especially in the catering trade. The only businesses that can survive are family concerns which can call upon several generations from granny to twelve year old for assistance. Few of the unemployed want to inconvenience themselves by working legitimately when they can obtain so much in benefits and then boost their take with cash in hand jobs. Benefits, it seems, are both too easy to get and too high for an awful lot of people to even consider working for a living. Those that persist in employing “cash in hand” workers are equally guilty as they are aiding, abetting and encouraging these people to commit fraud as well as taking a subsidy from us all for their own ends. Remember the employer who pays cash in hand is evading employer’s national insurance contributions and is probably just as devious when it comes to collating the information for the filing of tax returns. No matter the government’s campaigns to target and prosecute those guilty of benefit fraud and tax evasion, there are hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of people gloating at what they are getting away with. Great example to set to their children, don’t you think …. but that’s another story.

One perfectly fit job applicant I saw would have gladly accepted a full time job with me for £3.00 an hour provided it was “off the books” but would not dream of taking the same job for more than double that because of the number of benefits, including one for incapacity, she would stand to lose. So she now expends her energies elsewhere “off the books” for a pittance as a cleaner, as a chambermaid and as a bar maid which, with her benefits, makes her very well off indeed. Another was keen as mustard to take on the early morning café slot but only if her wages could be paid in cash without deductions or reference to the “social”. She didn’t even expect to have to provide her real name or her address. How can that be right ?

It takes two parties to play this game which begs the question why there aren’t more unannounced visits and spot checks by the authorities on places of employment and larger penalties for those that habitually cheat.

Add to this mess the indifferent attitudes of younger staff who don’t seem to care whether they have a job or not or to have any future goals and what you have is a very real problem. All the bright youngsters go away to college or university and leave the region for career opportunities leaving few behind who seriously want to make something of their lives. All in a region that tourists from all over the country pour into during the season for well earned breaks only to find few establishments that have sufficient staff to serve them, let alone staff who are well trained and will serve them well. This is why a whole generation of locally raised people are now being bypassed completely for the much more willing, better trained and motivated staff that can be found overseas. Many of the waiters, chefs, kitchen porters, bar tenders and room attendants at larger hotels come from Spain, Italy, Croatia, and Bulgaria. The same is true in agriculture and in our health service and is also why an increasing number of hotels are being converted into self catering holiday apartments or year round residential flats.

It seems to me that our benefit system needs a radical re-think and that we must now insist that all claimants who are fit to work do work or wave goodbye to their benefits . If we don’t then all we will see is further decline, and those that do make the effort and take pride in working taxed to the hilt to support their disaffected, fellow citizens in comparative luxury.