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Showing posts from November, 2024

Labour's 'Claimant Commitment': Achieving Sustainable, Compassionate Welfare Reform

Less than six months after taking office, Keir Starmer's Labour Party are proving every bit as "nasty" as the "Nasty Party" the Conservatives of the past 14yrs managed to become infamously dubbed; most visibly in their narratives around people who are currently unemployed owing to disability. Now, it is not unreasonable, to most people, to feel that "almost everyone can do something!" - but gainful employment isn't about whether people can  do something; it's about whether employers are happy to let people  "do something", and, more importantly, amenable to paying them a living wage   for  "doing something."   With Rachel Reeves' recent increase in Employer National Insurance contributions , and the persistent shambles that is the process of being able to secure funding for necessary workplace accommodations for disability via Access to Work , which is seeing people waiting up to nine months or more without the means to ...

Working Through Winter

  It can be easy to dismiss the memes that centre "we could be hibernating right now, but nooooo, we had to invent CAPITALISM and CUPS!" as "just more Gen Z whining", and further evidence that "people are lazy and just don't want to work", and sure, some people actually don't  want to have any  kind of job. That's a thing - people are allowed to feel resentful about the idea that they are obliged  to do something they find to be either very intrusive, or actually harmful to their wellbeing. A lot of people will just be posting those memes as 'engagement-scrapes'; complaining about work we don't really  have too much issue with is part of human nature, and probably has been since we first started engaging in planned, focused, longer-term-thinking activity, rather than merely surviving day by day.  People like to bond through sharing low-key frustrations, so these memes will generate a lot of comments, shares, and likes - all of which...

One Year On, Five Year Plans, and Barriers

Today, 12th November 2024, marks one year since our first "problem solving post" on this blog; you can read that post  here . Our very first post as The Productive Pessimist on this blog was a general intro post, published on 5th November 2024, and The Productive Pessimist Ltd was formally registered as a company in February 2025; however, writing, and helping teams, people, and organisations achieve their potential are central to how I undertake my responsibilities with The Productive Pessimist Ltd, and so I choose to mark the one year anniversary of the first "how to solve a common problem" post on this blog. I've also put out a YouTube video - which you can  watch here  - I hate  doing videos, I have no  skills or competence in doing videos, my sight loss causes significant practical challenges with doing videos - but, every so often, I'll do a video, because we never get better at things by avoiding them, and because the videos provide a nice contrast to...