The New Job Contracts Expected When The Economy Returns To Growth Will Provide Different Packages To The Ones Before The Slowdown

Posted on November 13, 2009
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Pensions provisions have long since been a dilemma for businesses who have seen over the last 10 years a huge fall in investment returns in their pension funds together with an ever increasing life expectancy and therefore mushrooming pension liabilities for these depleted funds to cover.

We have seen companies try to deal with these issues by re defining benefits and asking their staff to accept the planned changes. However a lot of the staff are discontented with the proposed changes and see any decrease in their pension availability (and other benefits) as unreasonable. Indeed in the UK at the moment there are huge problems with our postal workers, currently striking in order to guard the long time postal workers benefits. Royal Mail obviously saw problems looming a considerable amount of time ago. The employment contracts issued over the last five years provide employees with much less entitlement to benefits (including pensions) than workers who have been with the organization for a longer period of time. So we have an perculiar situation within the organization at the moment, some workers out on strike to guard benefits they themselves are not actually entitled to.

We have just come through the worst period of job losses that the UK has experienced for decades and following this depression we will see the initial stages of a recovery over the next few months. However the businesses looking for new staff over the coming months will not be just replacing like for like in the job offer and benefits stakes. They will be looking to raise employee numbers, but keep a firm check on the benefits that they are tied into for the long term. Pensions offers will be much less attractive, to stop the growth of the current problems and employment contracts may well be for short periods.

There might be some positive outcomes from the new style contracts too. As more and more businesses make use of the power of Internet Business we will see some new organizations start to enlarge and offer a large amount of flexibility to the employee in terms of hours of work and place of work. This is particularly possible when looking at online businesses. These have normally fared well throughout the recession as they have generally a lower amount of overhead. Indeed a good number of them have in fact sprung up within the recession plugging gaps that the closure of more conventional organisations have left.

Opportunities to work whenever suits the individual are increasing with these new business models and even the capacity to Work From Home is on offer, not only giving excellent opportunities for people who have other commitments but also keeping the business expenses down at the same time. This kind of flexibility will also make sure that the organisations keep hold of as many of their female staff as possible. Those who wish to have children are often in a difficult position when trying to return to employment and these new, much more flexible contracts and Online Jobs will at least be a helpful thing for these staff even though some of the other conditions may be inferior to post downturn job offers.