Jane Norman goes bust and Thornton closes stores - another bad week!

Well at least in the UK we are top of the food chain!

We need to start manufacturing again, too many service industries these days

Did you see this at all?
BBC - BBC Two Programmes - Made in Britain

Fascinating stuff, and made interesting viewing.

In a nutshell, it dispensed with the myth of the loss of large scale volume manufacturing such as textiles etc, as more revenue is actually derived from design (done in the UK) marketing, advertising and purchasing. The least profitable portion, the manufacturing element is farmed out to developing economies, who can afford to pay workers tuppence hapenney for basic lowskilled jobs.

Instead we have transitioned to high value low volume manufacturing, such as defence, aircraft which has a much more specialised and upskilled workforce.

Although the conclusions were we don't have enough high value manufacturing to pay for imports, it's a step in the right direction.

Must admit, made me think about some of the stereo type manufacturing myths. Do we really want a factory full of thousands of women earning pennies, or do we want to be upskilling our work force (and dumping benefits )

Grrr Steve - on several grounds!

For good social and economic reasons, we need as near full employment for all sectors of the population as we can get. I'm all in favour of upskilling but not everyone's capable of doing highly skilled work - there should be room in the workforce for those that aren't, as well as for those that are.

I also think the minimum pay levels for any full-time job should be set at the level where essential bills can be met on one income, with a small surplus for savings and just having some fun.

If we told governments their job was to sort out how we could get full employment sustainably (all jobs paying decent rates) in a globalised market, they'd be following very different policies from the ones they currently are. For starters, they'd have to start thinking and doing some decent business / market / social research instead of just mouthing the usual party platitudes.

I admit it's a very over simplified view, but point I was making was if you decided tomorrow to be a clothing manufacturer, the route to market would be cost prohibitive for you because of the salary overhead.

But you will still generate UK employment by outsourcing your factory, but employing a wide range of people, including lower skilled, such as clerical, warehouse people, pickers etc.

Saving the overhead of rows and rows of people sat on sowing machines means you can grow and expand your business, which in turn will recruit and train more UK employees, plus offer much cheaper products (including to people on lower wages). Upskilling could be as straightforward as a shop floor worker doing basic but more productive clerical work.

We will always have a demand for a lower skilled labour market, but when the average UK consumer wants cheaper stuff, this ends up making making low margin high volume UK made products more expensive. Then everyone suffers, as factories close and businesses go bust.

To keep old style low margin high volume factories, either we have UK factory workers on

Steve... I am giving you a cynicism award for that one.