I find this really irritating these days !

[Murdoch]

On another of the inside the factory programs they visited a large schneider factory in the UK where they stated they made parts for the UK and eire

Thing is too many people buy on price rather than quality or source of supply.

Take Amazon for example ....... we all know they pay hardly any taxes, and as for business rates don't get me started .......... unless we the consumer stop using them nothing will change.

 

[Blue Duck]

On another of the inside the factory programs they visited a large schneider factory in the UK where they stated they made parts for the UK and eire

Thing is too many people buy on price rather than quality or source of supply.

Take Amazon for example ....... we all know they pay hardly any taxes, and as for business rates don't get me started .......... unless we the consumer stop using them nothing will change.

Amazon has paid less tax in 10years than M&S has in 1 year...

That said I think there is some argument that Amazon and alike make UK employment figures look good.

 

[binky]

lots on minimum wage jobs for the masses, at the expense of high street jobs - so no net gain and a definet net loss on tax revenue. EU is shutting down these loop holes, which I think are in the order of about £23 Billion a year, whilst we have been arguing about how to leave.  

Amazon, E bay, Uber, Costa, Google, etc etc, all avoid UK tax. No wonder the UK is skint! 

 

[Murdoch]

 EU is shutting down these loop holes, which I think are in the order of about £23 Billion a year

I’m not sure I agree with that. The EU principles mean that any company in the EU can declare its profit where it wants to, hence all the agreements in Luxemburg and Eire

Imho only complete cooperation at the international level will ever fix this

 

[Evans Electric]

There are two major modern developments that enable companies to go almost anywhere  and use unskilled labour .

Computers .

Robotics .  

Which is must be what the Luddites thought when they started smashing up basis farm implements & machines .   Years ago  I saw a documentary  on the Toyota plant in Japan ...what stuck in my brain was  the plant was in darkness  at night  but the track was running , in the dark ,  control lamps showing , & spot welder flashes going on . 

Lights our to save power .   No human being on the car body production line unless  for maintenance.  

Back in Britain , Longbridge car plant were still striking over the colour of the new bog rolls .  :C   

Went to a local factory making insulation board & engineered plastics  .....a huge drawing office with the drawing boards etc abandoned  ....replaced by couple of design guys on computer   ......wages & personnel office  replaced by one lady with a PC .  

 

[Phoenix]

Its a double edged sword, Deke, Do you oppose progress because it'll elimnate jobs? Or embrace it because it will replace a lot of mandane tasks, things happen faster and there are more jobs doing more interesting tasks?

I beleieve it was you who told us about in the sixties, the amount of effort it was to get a fixing on site with a rawl-plugging tool, etc. Now we all carry battery drills and things get done faster, but its not like there are cronic shortages of work these days if someone told you back then what we would be doing in 2019, no, more gets built, more goes in (data cabling, much more fire alarms and emergecny lighting etc). We just arn't stuck doing a particular boring and repetative task over and over again..

We now have onerous and mistaken health and safety interpretations, green washing and political correctness to add extra time and costs to jobs

"Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis."

 

[ProDave]

When I was a boy I remember two things:

Nuclear power would make electricity so cheap it would not be worth metering it.

Robots would mean we only had to work a couple of days a week and have much more leisure time.

Now I am older and wiser I would know not to trust lies like that again, as neither were in any way true.  In spite of robots and other forms of automation, we still seem to have found work for everyone to do, we have record high employment at the moment.  Mind a lot of those jobs just seem to be serving coffee and burgers to each other.  I am certainly glad to have had a "proper" job.  I think it will be a loooooong time before robots start doing electrical installations.

 

[Phoenix]

 I think it will be a loooooong time before robots start doing electrical installations.

Yes and No,

We are not going to have R2D2 working next to us on site .  But the workload will be reduced by pre-fabricated stuff made in factories, with soem degree of automation, which is already a part of stuff. I.e. instead of wiring an office full of lights, we put up a multigang klik box, it probably wont be long before the fittings some preflexed ready to drop it in, then it might become the job of the general labourer to put fittings in ceiling and klik the connectors in. When I was at college the chap teaching up told us when he first started, the apprentices would make up pendant sets of rose, drop flex and lamp holder while on the bus into work, no one would do that these days, we even take a pendant set and chuck away the rose if attending to a broken lamp holder!

We welcome a lot of these things as they make our lifes easier / the job cheaper, thats only really ok if this is going to be balanced out by more of these jobs which arn't each so labour intensive, so far its seemed to have worked that way, but will it always? Of course the flip side is that these pre-fabricated systems come with more automation, and we then need folk to commision them, as well as fix the damn things when they break a few years down the line!