… it triggers support for a policy of introducing a central, nationalised monopoly to take business away from a diverse range of different private firms.
In this case, the idea is that “All government and local authority jobs will only be advertised on a single government-run website” – in other words, throw market forces out the window, kill the market for government job ads, centralise everything, introduce a new government IT project and all because the Guardian gets quite a lot of money from public sector job ads at the moment.
In some ways it’s an interesting policy idea, but there’s a huge dollop of hypocrisy amongst Conservative supporters of it, because it looks as if they are throwing out the window most of the points they normally consider when assessing policy ideas just to have a go at The Guardian.
P.S. I do love this comment from ‘The Editor’ on the Conservative Home story saying the policy is needed so that, “the taxpayer stops funding Guardian journalism on a scale that every other newspaper is denied.” Well actually, it’s not ‘denied’ – it’s market forces at work, and The Guardian (oh the irony) happens to regularly wipe the floor with right-wing pro-market forces media in the public sector jobs market, providing a much better return on advertising expenditure than other newspapers.
(It’s a similar story in the IT area, where the Liberal Democrats have used the Guardian in the past, not because we’re denying money to other newspapers, but because you get more good quality job applications for your buck with them).
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7 Comments
And what about all those able people who don’t have access to the internet? Why should jobs only be advertised there?
I actually think it is a good idea. Having seen how my local newspaper treats the local Labour council so softly compared to their criticisms of the other opposition parties I am more than convinced that the large number of adverts and advertising revenue given to the local newspaper plays a part in this.
Use of public money to buy press support has to be crtailed and at least this idea addresses that.
As for those who do not have access to the internet the same could be said of those who have literacy problems with newspapers.
And I would have actually thought that the issue of Labour using public money to buy influence would have been an issue the party would take up enthusiastically instead of letting the Tories take the iniative.
This lack of focus on the government in office only adds to the impression that we are tied to Labour.
I’d have thought removing council job ad spend from local newspapers would undermine the viability of some of the smaller ones.
In some of our cities, attempts have been made by councils to get better coverage by threatening to remove ad spend from local papers. These almost always fail because councils need the job ads more than the paper does!
All Government and local authority jobs will only be advertised on a single government-run website
They really, really, can’t mean that. There is a huge turn-over in some of the jobs at the lower end of pay scales – cleaners, dinner ladies, bin men and so on – do they really want all these jobs advertised on a national website? Bonkers.
The cost of Guardian local governmnet ads is obscene, and they act as an effective monopoly. You cannot expect people to buy every daily newspaper to look for these jobs.
There should be a requirement though for local government jobs to be advertised in addition in the appropriate local newspaper.
Leave it as it is is what I say. I have always preferred using newspapers to search for job ads as I usually don’t know exactly what I am looking for and so flicking through the Guardian or the Sheffield Star is far easier than working out what search terms I want on a website and then being confronted with 25 pages of jobs half of which are of no interest (something you don’t know from the four lines of detail they give you before you click through for more information).
My bigger issue is if you are unemployed and Job Centres just don’t seem to have details on the sorts of things you are looking for. Yet, you have to convince them that you are looking at the job vacancies they have on offer if they are to give you any benefit. If anything they should be ensuring that more jobs are advertised at Job Centres.
Dear Mark,
I’m quite sure you are aware that the only reason the Guardian is chosen is because it is a left wing newspaper, it closes the circle on a system that perpetuates a dominant political thought in a service that is supposed to serve the whole nation. If we believe the work force should represent society then this should also include political thought. The status-quo is hardly fair or democratic.
Public service should not be about one dominant, left-wing, secular world-view which white washes over people’s deep concerns but actually attempts to engage with them honestly in a live and let live manner. Publicly delivered services should be a grass roots movement, which empowers and involves local people rather than being some ideologically, homogenistic imposition which disenfranchises the populace and arrogantly demands conformity from a compliant population.
This move is clearly against the Guardian and about time too. It is high time public services was opened up to a diversity of political thought and this is one small way of slowly bringing that shift about.