UK ‘may need 92,000 extra public workers if fall in productivity continues to 2030’
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/may/19/uk-may-need-92000-extra-public-workers-if-fall-in-productivity-continues-to-2030
Posted by topotaul
UK ‘may need 92,000 extra public workers if fall in productivity continues to 2030’
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/may/19/uk-may-need-92000-extra-public-workers-if-fall-in-productivity-continues-to-2030
Posted by topotaul
9 Comments
Well they’ve tried forcing people back to the office, and forcing people who can’t work into roles that are totally unsuited to them, and now they are attempting to force prisoners to do unpaid slave labour, I guess the natural next step (as there is an upcoming population crisis on top) is for Labour to continue the tory and reform playbook once again and force women to breed to get more of those peasents into servitude.
I mean it’s not like they can do something like address the underlying issues in society that cause poor productivity such as poor health, low levels of investment, cascading living standards, collapsing welfare, social, ecological, economical, and political instability on a local, international, and global level of which the fall could be softened, better protections for employees, better benefits and pay from those that can afford it, improved and fairer taxation towards the wealthy and those dodging their fair share.
Nope fuck that shit, let’s just keep kicking at risk groups and victim blaming. It’s what MPs do best.
The amount of redundancies I’ve seen to jobs that have been outsourced from the UK to overseas companies, specifically within the Tech and IT sector but in other sectors aswell with the reasoning being “becoming more efficient” or trimming the fat and you’ve you got the gall to witness and make such a statement,
The people are there, you’re either not paying enough for people to survive off of or are attempting to keep costs down and aren’t hiring enough, or both.
Every week feels like more shit keeps getting flicked in the eyes of every person in this country.
Have they considered arresting the fall in productivity instead by investing in public services?
Throwing more people into a department with declining productivity is actually likely to exacerbate the issue, not fix it. It’s a phenomenon called diseconomies of scale.
People under financial stress tend to be unproductive.
If your choices are working hard and being broke or doing just enough and being broke. You going to do the minimum.
On top of that work loads have increased. Between the 2 you have a perfect storm. Then your going to have a even more problems as the effects of burnout hits.
someone please set me right here, but it feels like the modern way that companies make changes to become ‘more efficient’ (i.e. more productive), is to get rid of people and dump more on the current staff
this has always felt like it will lead to a reduction in efficiency to me. with a more stressed and underpaid workforce, how can you expect people to be healthy and willing to work hard? overwork tends to lead to health issues and underpaying leads to disconnection
I’m private sector, but in my previous job we were stretched so thin that you were essentially doing three peoples jobs, just none of them very well.
Pair that with the fact that I think there’s been a creep into preventing people from switching off and you’re bound to get burnout across the population.
Services have shifted all of the admin work to their customers. Rather than just phoning someone to solve your issue, you’ll now be speaking to a bot for half an hour or more before you get through to anyone.
Self checkout tills put the work onto you. 20mph speed limits everywhere mean that you’ve now got to hyper focus on speed limits everywhere..
I could go on, but my point is that individually, these things may be fine, but once you lump them all together, you can essentially never turn off, inside or outside of work.
I’ve tried to read these statistics but they’re meaningless.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputandproductivity/publicservicesproductivity/datasets/publicserviceproductivityquarterlyuk
There’s no context or guidance in how to interpret them. Normally there would be some analysis that goes along with it (I worked on banking statistics, including ONS publications, for 10 years). There is also a note that says they are “experimental” so they are probably worthless.
Get all those lazy gits of the pension and out working with brooms. Saw it in China, super fit the oldies are.