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Herbies gets £500,000 from Invest NI to create further 61 jobs

I'm not a mathematical sort of person but the sausage factory is currently producing, supposedly, £3.1mm in salary and benefits for NI. If the salary was roughly double or triple what is being paid in NI when the jobs were in London that equates to a loss for the overall UK economy. A loss which was funded by taxpayers' money. That is a loss even if the supposed NI dole queue reductions are taken into account although my understanding is most people left other firms or jobs for HS and just weren't replaced by those firms. Further, we shouldn't forget that the new jobs will inevitably be created at a loss to existing jobs in London. It's also an insult to view NI as offering nothing more than pairs of hands to staff these sausage factories as my experience has been that NI graduates tend to outperform the vast majority of their peers on the mainland. It's just a shame that so many NI graduates choose to remain in NI spending years in dead ends like this rather than looking for well paid training contracts in England. While these firms might be "mulling" the option of offering Institute or LPC training contracts, those firms will be mulling that from now to doomsday as it makes a nice carrot to dangle from a stick. Invest NI is basically just firing money at law firms to take advantage of NI's stagnant economy and keeping desperate graduates in NI on an unfair claim that these sausage factories will lead anywhere other than up the garden path. These are the same firms who will leave NI to open cheap sausage factories in Manila/Mumbai/Iraq/Iran or wherever the second these sausage factories take off and there arises the possibility of wages increasing above minimum wage. I lived in a provincial town/hamlet in NI and east Belfast, right in the middle of where the recent riots happened, for years working in poorly paid jobs before using the experience I'd gained and moved to London, leaving NI behind for good. If the people in these sausage factories aren't given serious consideration to doing the same then they should be but unfortunately most will continue to be strung along by HS and the like with their false claims of offering all things to all men.

1-Jul-2011

1:23 pm