Money, fund the freaking Colleges! But first industry has to commit to employing apprentices.

‘Money’, indeed! But how is industry going to commit to employing apprentices when the margins in so many industries are already so tight they’re having trouble just keeping people who are already trained employed?

Funding the Colleges is commendable, to be sure, but that isn’t going to ensure those who are trained therein are ever going to be employed at what they’ve been trained for.

Even if industry DID make a commitment to employ all apprentices, in all likelihood a very hollow committment it would quickly turn out to be.

Why?

Most larger industries operate on bank credit, many smaller industries do, too, and in the overall scheme of things ALL businesses, even those that are individually ‘debt free’, are totally dependent on there being a continued access in the economy as a whole to that bank credit.

Considered as a ‘flow’ ~ which it actually is ~ the totality of loans BEING made CANNOT fall below the level of loans that HAVE BEEN MADE, or those previous loans will not be able to be fully amortised as businesses have committed to do.

But bank loans, which are time based in their terms of repayment of the principal sum advanced, as well as any interest charged, depend on the borrower being profitable over that period. For it is from a division of that profit that the loan will be paid off.

Now it is true that ‘new’ industries do create employment (in that individual enterprise). But have you ever heard of any existing industry borrowing money for the primary purpose of creating more employment? I never have, not unless that industry was also being subsidised by the taxpayer for that express purpose with a grant, or forgiveable loan, or some other like incentive. Something that allowed it to profit more from that than from whatever it was actually producing or providing. Something that marked that business, as WAC Bennett used to call it, as a “hot house industry”. Totally dependent on some artifical condition for the plant to survive.

Industries that are investing are investing with the very laudable purpose of increasing productivity. But every increase in productivity means, and can only mean, that there HAS TO BE a net displacement of labour. The goal is more output with less labour input, and especially less overall labour COST input.

The only problem with this is that overall labour cost that’s being reduced WAS someone’s INCOME. And when incomes, in general, fall from this ever ongoing process, SPENDING from those incomes also falls. And it is from that spending that the profits industries need to be profitable enough to amortise their loans come. When they are not, in general, in any industry you care to choose, profitable ENOUGH, those businesses fail.

They are often consolidated into larger businesses, with the idea of further cost reductions. Or to try to monopolise some market so the price for the product can be set high enough to assure an ongoing profit. It will never, long term, ever work.

Our governments and our industries are at cross purposes with one another, as governments seek, for ‘moral’ (and political) purposes, “full employment”. And industries, for ‘economic’ purposes, and as a matter of individual survival, seek to eliminate as many ‘jobs’ and the COST of those jobs as possible.

We’ll never truly solve this problem until we forget about trying to change ‘economics’ that can’t be changed by the simple provision of more jobs, and find a better way to DISTRIBUTE to ALL Consumers what IS really the fundamental issue here ~ INCOMES sufficient to fully liquidate ALL costs, and separate that distribution from its sole dependence on overall employment incomes that are going to continue to decline.

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