Reeves Jobs Bloodbath Continues as Currys Forced to Outsource to India
The jobs bloodbath continues as Currys is forced to outsource more British staff to India as a result of Rachel Reeves’s “tax on jobs”, the Chief Executive of the electricals retailer has said. The Telegraph has more.
Alex Baldock said the rising cost of employing people in the U.K. meant Currys would rely more on “offshoring” in the near future.
He said: “We’ve already got the best part of 1,000 colleagues in India – all the usual central and IT functions that you would expect – and they do a cracking job for us, and we’re delighted to have them. You can expect, as U.K. people costs inflate, to see more of that, that’s just inevitable.”
The retailer has previously warned that it faces £30 million in extra costs as a result of the Chancellor’s October Budget, at which she announced a £25 billion National Insurance (NI) raid on employers, as well as a 6.7% increase in the minimum wage.
Mr. Baldock said that while it was important to invest in staff pay, he warned that some of the new costs announced by Ms. Reeves would be harmful to jobs.
“The National Insurance tax is a tax on jobs that doesn’t benefit colleagues at all and actually depresses hiring and boosts offshoring and automation.
“We don’t want to employ fewer people in the U.K. We don’t want to depress hiring in the U.K. We want to employ more people. We want to be in the box seat for powering growth in this country. We want to invest more, hire more, and help the economy grow faster. What we’re asking for is the environment to allow us to do that.”
Mr. Baldock also warned of potential “unintended consequences” of policies being brought in as part of Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill, which will strengthen workers’ rights from day one in a job and includes new powers for unions.
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I think it’s the jobs that are outsourced, not the staff.
‘Your job is going to be moved to Kolkata. This will probably affect your commute. Don’t be late.’
Some companies will not be able to outsource.
Indeed- they will pay people less and/or make lower profits which means less corporation tax revenue and lower share prices which affects private sector pensions). So much for helping working people.
Some jobs also can’t be outsourced and these will often be rather poorly paid and menial tasks. It’s possible to outsource IT operations to India. But not toilet or shop-floor cleaning. This means Reeves is creating incentives to turn the UK economy into one centered on low qualification/ low quality service tasks.
Perhaps we’d be better off offshoring some of the most useless roles… like say, politicians? Perhaps it’s already done in a way to the WEF and others, however I’d say that’s likely the opposite of low cost
“unintended consequences”
The main aim of laws strengthening “worker’s rights” (the right to be made redundant because your firm has been taxed out of business) is political- to appear to your voter base (the coalition of the fringes) that you care about workers. A possible other aim is simply to wreck our country.
“wreck our country.”
Of course this is what is going on. This is the message I keep repeating but so far it has not made the mainstream of opinion.
Passing off every ridiculous policy initiative as incompetence reminds me very much of all those who in the early days of the Scamdemic considered everything done by Johnson’s government as cock-up. That eventually bombed out for the utter garbage that it was. And in due course even some of the MSM will come round to this view. We even had an article on DS last week stating in guarded terms that national destruction was increasingly the only conclusion.
TINA 😀😀😀
Yes the Tories shouldn’t be let off the Uni-party hook.
“The Conservatives plan to introduce a period of creative destruction in public services” Danny Kruger.
“The PM & deputy Clegg want their “people power” revolution to unleash ‘chaotic’ effects across local communities, chaotic therefore in our vocabulary is a good thing” Nicholas Boles.
Also don’t forget the 77th dude who tweeded before deleting something along the lines of “the days of high growth & low taxes are over”…..Whenever he is interviewed on GB News he is never questioned about that, or the covert spying on MPs and journalists by the 77th Brigade.
I guess Reeves is a gambling woman. She is betting that most companies will suck up the additional tax burdens, and carry on as before (albeit less profitably). I think she has made a mistake.
Or to claw it back from the customers, hopefully slowly enough to mitigate inflation – unless they are clever enough to forecast that inflation will fall, so grab an opportunity!
Indeed.
I think there’s an option both of you (klf and JohnK) missed. I work for a US company and have a certain, fixed gross salary. If the cost of employing me goes up, ie, the state wants a larger share of my gross salary, the amount of money I’ll get “after taxes” will go down accordingly. I believes this should be a rather common case: It’ll be neither employers nor customers who’ll take the hit but employees.
Yes, I see what you mean.
Well with the increase in Employers NI it’s a bit more subtle because the tax hit falls to the firm – they can either pass on that cost to customers, take the hit and reduce profits, or cut costs by laying people off or simply give you a much smaller payrise (or none) next time you’re due an increase.
This is totally unsubtle. The money I get is my gross salary minus whatever the state takes away from that. I’m also paying my own “employer pension contributions” or rather, the so-called employer pension contribution is deducted from my gross salary. I also have exactly 0 holidays.
That’s how this kind of stuff tends to work out in niches in the real world. If I had any formal holidays, it would be made known to me that actually taking them wouldn’t be appreciated. That was even a British company, BTW.
Ah ok so they basically have decided how much in total they want you to cost them and you get what’s left after all deductions? Interesting system – have never heard of that before. I guess they must offer a reasonable deal overall though otherwise you and your colleagues would have gone elsewhere.
I’ve also never heard of firms discouraging staff from taking holidays.
No, the employer is supposed to pay half, and you pay half, of your pension contributions. They only deduct your half of the contributions from your salary, and the other half you will receive when you either leave the company or start claiming your pension, unless the American company you work for is breaking the UK rules.
There are even British companies which have absolutely no trouble with breaking any UK rules they can get away with breaking. A lot of stuff happens ‘in the economy’ that’s not supposed to happen on paper. But, as a German saying goes, paper is patient¹. Example I can freely talk about because it was a real long time ago: There’s something called a minor occupation (geringfügige Beschäftigung) in German law. People who work in one pay neither taxes nor social security contributions and they’re only allowed to earn a certain, small amount of money, DM500/ month by the time I did this. That was a job for a German food processing/ production company. I – like everybody else – was obviously really working full time there, ie, 8 hours per day 5 days per week. Actual pay per month was restricted to the legal amount and extra hours which would have led to a monthly salary in excess of that were being kept track off. They continued paying me the legal amount long after I had stopped working there until they had settled their debts with me, something I still very much appreciate because not everybody is that honest in… Read more »
Necessary addition: Working is not a hobby but a necessity because $money is needed for $life. Because of this, conditions for working are determined by the people willing to pay someone to work. Enforcing work regulations is something the state would need to do if the people controlling it were serious about that. As they typically aren’t, that’s that. People who need money will be willing to work under any condition that’s not grossly negative for them, because for them, this is literally a matter of surivival.
Companies don’t pay costs, people do. Some will be shareholders, some will be workers and some will be consumers.
The people of England will pay, the only question is how it is broken down, and the best bet is the poorest will suffer most.
Good point.
Basic business/economics. Not at all complicated, but something that many fail to understand as they are so detached from things because of specialisation. Someone running a small business will understand this very well.
I think it’s no mistake, and that she hasn’t a clue. She’s just following orders from the Puppet Masters.
We’re losing our heavy industries to other countries because successive governments have made it impossible/unviable to operate here. And now they’re driving desk jobs away.
In 5 years time the country will be destroyed.
2TK, the foul commie bastard came into office with less than 10% of the vote, promising change – here’s change all right, a bit like the wildfires are modernising Los Angeles…
‘…promising change…’
Spare some change Sir?
A change where everybody has a stake, but you can’t eat a steak!
Jobs heading east to India from the UK. Migrants without jobs heading west to the UK from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Somalia, etc, etc, etc.
What more could possibly go wrong, Sir Two-Tier-Jobless-Migrants-Welcome-Here?
UN Agenda 21/2030 in action. “Levelling Down” the West is going just as they intended.
I feel sorry for the workers but not the people behind these Companies who played along with the Labour Govt and are now realising, too late, that the bells tolls for them as well.
Well, “companies” are not real things that suffer. “Companies” are owned by shareholders, many of whom will be “ordinary people”, either directly or via a pension fund or some other investment vehicle. If you mean the very well paid decision makers deserve to suffer, I agree – but they won’t. Maybe some will get lower bonuses or lower pay rises, or might get made redundant – but there are not many destitute ex-CEOs around that I have noticed. Those that suffer will be the workers, the shareholders and the customers.
I know these people and the Company bosses love to swank at the football, opera, horse racing, Glastonbury etc and they now realise they have less status and power than a train driver! Believe me it will hurt these wank*** to realise they are on the train that goes nowhere.
As you say it will also help to sink the private pension pots of the teachers & university lecturers, another plus.
Less status and power than a train driver? I doubt it. As I said, where are all the destitute CEOs? They will maybe end up slightly less rich, that’s all.
It will help to sink my private pension pot – I don’t consider that a “plus”. I don’t want teachers and university lecturers to all end up destitute because that means they spend less money.
For some good news, I never thought I’d like an article from the Guardian
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/major-banks-are-abandoning-their-climate-alliance-en-masse-so-much-for-woke-capital/ar-AA1xeV8E?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=4cdb4298661d47189edff2ac5f5e8d46&ei=27
They’ve definitely got the knack of making a very depressing time even more depressing. Everyone on the dole or working in some tinpot gig economy. I find it hard to believe that they believe that there is anything positive about their agenda. Managed decline is a reality. I remember 25 years ago people in high finance talking about the inevitable transfer of power eastwards. This Anglo-American attampt to vling to uniploraity is a huge mistake. Europe is rich essentially because it needs to be so because of the climate. You take it away and you’re looking at a barren wasteland.
So Currys have already been quietly outsourcing 1000 IT desk jobs to India, and see how Baldock praises them! That’s been the plan all along. Here’s the result: “The group was fined £400,000 by the Information Commissioner in January 2018, as a result of UNAUTHORISED ACCESS to the PERSONAL DATA of over THREE MILLION CUSTOMERS in 2015. A further security breach, said to affect 1.2 million customers, was reported by the company in June 2018. The number of customers affected was later increased to 10 MILLION.” Just like UK banks outsourced their call centres to India, and customers’ personal bank details ended up being sold on the backstreets of Mumbai. Remember how Boeing outsourced all of its IT computer programming to India, after forcing its Ethnic European = white American staff to train their Indian replacements, then brutally sacking the highly competent American staff who had worked there loyally for decades. Then Boeing jets started falling out of the sky. The same thing happened to British Steel, criminally allowed to be bought by Indian billionaires who stole all its technology and built complete replica plants in India, forced the British staff to train their Indian replacements, then put on a solemn… Read more »
They never oursource the Chief Executive and similar roles. That’s because these people are paid similar amounts Worldwide. It’s only staff who have direct impact on the customer who have to take the pay cuts
Sick to death of talking to Indian IT help who call themselves Diana and cannot speak or articulate English clearly. I want only Brirish people on my call centre phone.
I suppose much of this will be the internal IT processes of Curry’s, and this means Britons not getting these jobs, and the experience it provides so they can change to other jobs and climb the management tree. Our country is massively damaged by such policies. These communist twats must be of average IQ because they cannot see the consequences and unintended consequences of their cretinous decisions.
Any future conservative leaning government must repeal all the vile constitutional changes since Bliar, and add in any of this Communist-Labour mob. All into one bug repeal bill and trash the lot. There will be great benefits from reducing government and establishment mismanagement
Time to dust off those “Labour isn’t working” posters.