In Rail magazine, issue 646 (16-29 June 2010) 'Industry Insider' (pseudonym) writes that because of the recession/cuts "there will be some gains [in rail use] from people who have to travel longer distances to find work". Not sure if he really means to find work - perhaps he means to get to their job, with there being fewer jobs, but what a perversity of the current system!
It seems pretty basic that all the things that need doing should be in a database, along with all the people that can do them, so that the two can be matched. The idea of "finding" vacancies is quite ridiculous in a technological age. Why are we hiding them? Do we not want to find the best person for the job? Why do job seekers - even the name suggests the wrong-headedness of the system - have to trawl through umpteen separate sources of vacancies, some advertising the same posts. It's just a waste of resources.
But the idea that it is somehow good to waste time and resources travelling further because it benefits the railway is just absurd. I am not criticising 'Industry Insider' particularly, but a system in which we apparently make it deliberately harder to do the things that need doing to be done and wasting resources is OK if it makes money or creates jobs. I am assuming for the sake of argument that these people are doing or seeking to do things that need to be done - ie things that have a social return. If not, it's worse still. Further true progress would be to get machines / computers ("cybernation") doing as many of the things that need to be done ("have a social return") as possible. Whyever not?
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