Credit Management November 2019

VIEW FROM THE SEA FRONT
AUTHOR – David Andrews
one in three of those in work have wonga reserves
of just £500. The news piece was based on research
put together by an employee benefits’ organisation
called (unimaginatively) Salary Finance.
The company’s research (I use that term
guardedly) revealed that workers with financial
worries are more than four times more likely to be
suffering from anxiety and panic attacks, and 4.6
times more likely to be suffering from depression.
Inevitably, financial wellbeing has a significant
knock on effect on absenteeism, productivity and
staff retention. But one in three workers suffering?
It’s a big number.
While I am sceptical as to whether that £500
war chest in reserve for a third of working people
figure will stand forensic scrutiny, what is not in
dispute is the fact that we – currently at least –
have an employment rate of 76.1 percent. That’s
the joint-highest on record since comparable
records began, way back in 1971. Economists do
not yet know how the current Brexit mess will
impact on employment figures (lay-offs would
seem inevitable) – but as at June 2019 we had
32.81 million people aged 16 years and over in
employment. The recent collapse of Thomas Cook,
with all hands-on deck, will of course dent these
employment stats – around 9,000 workers have lost
their jobs in the wake of the consignment of this
once proud name to the High Street reject bin of
history.
And, sitting under the lengthening shadows of
the awning of Dave’s Comics in Sid James Street,
I ponder that, in sociological terms at least, street
beggars, homeless people and those unfortunate
I ponder that,
in sociological
terms at least,
street beggars,
homeless people
and those
unfortunate
enough to be at
the lowest strata
of society are
deemed to be
highly socially
invisible.
enough to be at the lowest strata of society are
deemed to be highly socially invisible. Which
seems to me an anthropological paradox. I mean,
they couldn’t be any more visible…could they?
DESPERATELY TROUBLING
The ever-deepening rift between the haves and
the have nots in our society is not just desperately
troubling, it is surely no longer tenable.
As the full extent of the salary and obscene
bonus raid on the Thomas Cook coffers by the
now defunct firm’s senior executives is rolled out
from the boardroom and into the public domain,
together with the shoddy and brutal way loyal
employees were left high and dry, it is staggering
that lessons from the past have not been learned.
Following the financial collapse in 2008, those
investment bankers – most of them, as it turned
out – who held onto their jobs, continued to enjoy
inflated incomes and perks, while Joe Working
Public was condemned to a decade of austerity.
Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs. Now, a
decade and more on, clearly, no lessons have
been learned. And we are witnessing yet another
prime example of wholesale collapse due for the
most part to successive corporate bungling and
mismanagement.
That recovery to a full employment economy
has come at great cost, month by painful month
– yet it now appears to be gravely imperilled. A
winter of discontent looms.
David Andrews is a published author and former
Personal Finance Editor of the Daily Express.
The Recognised Standard / www.cicm.com / November 2019 / PAGE 29