Editors Blog

Yesterday's news that the government moves somebody off benefits and into work every three minutes caught my attention for all the wrong reasons.

Like many such stories, the Labour spin machine creates bespoke versions of the media release to suit regional and local press. Frequently, I will receive an email media alert declaring a huge success in Scotland, the same huge success in the North East, the same in the Midlands and so on for each and every region.

My first communication from the Department of Work and Pensions yesterday read:

New Deal helps someone find work every three minutes

A restaurant owner was forced to make a grovelling apology after diners received a bill with an abusive message written by staff.

A group of diners at Joe Delucci's Italian restaurant in Lichfield discovered the words "S**k my d**k f**k face" itemised between the Sauvignon Blanc and the £4.95 fish cakes on their bill.

What is the HR link you may ask? It is tenuous, I will give you that, but one of the diners, Claire Watkins, is an HR manager who told the BBC she thought the item on the bill may have been in response to the group complaining about poor service.

"I couldn't believe it. The bill read 'fish cakes', which one of us had for a starter, and it was written right above it - absolutely disgusting language," Watkin said.

Carolyn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, and David Robinson, chairman of hi-fi retailer Richer Sounds, join the CIPD's director of research and policy Linda Holbeche to speak about how companies can cope with uncertain times.

I'll be covering the speeches live - feel free to add your comments at any time, from 4:30pm today.

The publication of the latest UK jobs market figures has prompted renewed speculation of just how high unemployment will go.

Now standing at 1.82 million for the three months to September 2008, the prospect of two million out of work by Christmas is now very real. Earlier this week, 5,000 job cuts were announced in one day, with rumours that Vodafone is also preparing to swing the axe among its workforce.

CIPD chief economist John Philpott predicts that unemployment will hit at least 2.25 million by spring 2009, and potentially peak at near 3 million towards the end of the year. Combine this with the grim news that recruitment activity has virtually ground to a halt, and the outlook is bleak.

As my colleague Michael Carty on XpertHR's Employment Intelligence blog says, the next round of unemployment figures, due on 17 December, means that Christmas cheer could well be in short supply.

'Green shoots of economic recovery' aren't exactly the words most people would use to describe the current business climate, following announcements of thousands of job losses last week.

And government minister Baroness Vadera's 'insensitive' and 'embarrassing' remarks on the economy last week rightly earned her the reputation of 'living in a parallel universe'.

Regardless of the intention behind her comments, Personnel Today's new redundancy tracker shows the harsh reality - with the shocking statistic that more than 76,000 jobs have been lost since September 2008.

And the news that demand for HR jobs has slumped to a record low might not come as a surprise either as firms put a block on hiring.

As unemployment hits 1.92 million, and another government minister is criticised as being out of touch with stark reality of the downturn by saying there was "light at the end of tunnel", one man brings a little more sense to the debate about getting people back to work.

Chris Humphries, as chief executive of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, is warning that we could be about to make the same recession mistakes as Labour did in the 1970s and the Tories followed in the 1990s.

He's worried about employers and government initiatives providing the wrong sort of training in an effort to reduce dole queues. Watch this video from UKCES to find out more.