Of Job Losses

13 January 2009 - Of job losses

Thus far in this diary, losses in the UK job market have been ignored. Not because they do not matter, nor because they are not related directly to the credit crunch crisis. Rather because, like businesses going under, a list once started ought in all fairness to be continued and also since such a catalogue is so depressing to compile and read. Nevertheless, things are getting so bad now that the subject cannot be ignored. Yesterday the announcement of jobs lost or under urgent risk can be totalled as nearly 4,000. As worrying as the bald statistic is that they now reach out way beyond the financial and retail sectors. In order of magnitude of the number of jobs reported as going or very likely to go were:-

Land of Leather           (retail of sofas)

Wincanton                   (logistics ie trucks)

JCB                              (diggers)

Findus                          (fish fingers)

Waterford Wedgwood (tableware)

Waterstone’s                (bookseller)

deVries Honda             (car sales)

Christie’s                      (auction house)

Pearson                         (publisher)

And all this in just one day. A day in which, by the way, the Government said there were "10,000 new vacancies every working day". Of course to get them you will need a passport to cloud cuckoo land.

It is worth noting that rather less than 0.5% of new shares in HBOS and Lloyds/TSB were taken up by the ordinary shareholders and so we, the taxpayer, now own 43% of the new megalith.

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. Actually it’s falling all over Spain. The unemployment level is 13.4% or three million people out of work. Spain needs to raise 70bn euros on the bond markets (see yesterday’s diary) and is heavily dependent on the new housing and tourist market. Anyone who has been on holiday lately in the eurozone will understand the significance of this dependency.