Richard Exell

Employment has not been as prominent an issue as it should be in this election. Long-term unemployment blights lives and mass long-term unemployment blights cities and regions – it is the key issue of the moment.

It isn’t only how much time or how many column inches are devoted to jobs; it is also about the degree of thought and ingenuity going into questioning the Parties on this issue. How realistic are their plans? Are the leaders serious about full employment or have they decided to accept high unemployment for a long time to come?

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Richard Exell

Download the 1st Economic Report

Today the TUC has launched a new bi-monthly Economic Report, which takes the place of the popular Recession Report. The first edition presents some of the main economic data and takes a look at the various manifestos have to say about jobs and welfare-to-work.

A weak recovery

During 2009 as a whole, GDP contracted by 4.9%. In the fourth quarter, it grew by 0.4%, with stronger than originally estimated service sector and manufacturing growth in December. The official first estimate of GDP growth in the first quarter of 2010, however, showed growth falling back to 0.2%.

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• Help Robin Hood hold up your election candidates
  The Robin Hood Tax campaign have this email action out for the election. Use it to ask your candidates their views on a financial transaction tax, and put your contribution on the map.
• 28 April: Workers’ Memorial Day
  The ITUC reckon that worldwide 270 people die *every* hour as a result of workplace accidents or from illnesses related to their work. Hazards Magazine have published this site to commemorate today, Workers' Memorial Day.

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Richard Exell

Today, the TUC joined a coalition of charities, including the Equality Trust the Child Poverty Action Group and Barnardo’s to ask the leaders of the main parties to commit to a Fairness Test on any tax rises or spending cuts they would introduce in government.

We know, from the experience of previous rounds of cuts, that cuts in public services tend to hit the poorest the hardest. Services – such as Sure Start – are often designed with poorer families in mind; cuts in these services therefore tend to be particularly regressive. The lower your income, the less likely you are to be able to afford any alternative, so cuts tend to reduce the freedom of the poor far more than the rich.

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Nicola Smith

Download the 2nd TUC Labour Market Report

Today we have published our second Labour Market Report, providing a brief overview of the latest labour market trends. Unemployment remains high – between Dec 09 – Feb 10 2,502,000 people were unemployed by the ILO measure (up 43,000 on the previous quarter) and long-term unemployment continues to rise. However, short-term unemployment and redundancies are falling – and the labour market picture is far better than we would have seen had the recession followed the trends of the 80s and the 90s downturns.

Now the recession has ended, the key risk is that growth is not accompanied by job creation. Demand for labour remains weak – the total number of workforce jobs is still falling across the economy. Maintaining public investment will therefore be vital to securing a sustainable labour market recovery – a key challenge for the next Government.

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Ben Moxham

The G20 labour ministers, meeting in Washington earlier this week, have come up with a decent list of recommendations to get the world back to work, and strengthen our fragile economic recovery. Yet with treasuries and the IMF sharpening their budget cutting knives, will these recommendations just hang in the air like so much volcanic ash?

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• The IMF: more than expected, less than hoped for
  Owen has a guest post at Ekklesia, reacting to the IMF's interim report "A Fair and Substantial Contribution by the Financial Sector", and discussing the difference between the FAT tax and a Financial Transaction Tax.

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Nigel Stanley

Earlier this week the CBI published a brief saying that the proposed charging structure for NEST pensions would put people off joining.

I’m genuinely puzzled by why the CBI published this. Not only are its arguments flawed, but I do not see what purpose it serves.

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Nicola Smith

Today’s labour market figures are, as with previous recent releases, mixed. While unemployment on the ILO measure has risen, the claimant count continues to show sharp falls. This partly relates to the periods of measurement in question – the claimant count data is for March 2010, while the ILO data refers to the December 2009 – February 2010 period.

It also turns out that ONS’s claimant count data has experienced some significant revisions in recent months. First, we had the widely reported 23,500 rise in JSA claimants in January of this year. In last month’s ONS release, this was revised down to an increase of 5,300. This month, the increase is back, with today’s data documenting a rise of 16,200 between December and January. The upshot of this is that there does appear to have been a jump in the number of claimants towards the end of last year, and this is now being reflected in today’s ILO figures, which cover this period.

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Nicola Smith

Recent statistics suggest that the claimant count peaked at 1.63 million in September 2009, the last month of the recession. This high point was around 1.32 million people less than 1990s and 1.45 million fewer than the 1980s – even though the GDP drop during the recent downturn (over 6 percentage points) was greater than either of the previous two.

The number of people claiming Unemployment Benefit in the 1980s continued to rise for more than five years after the recession ended in April 1981 – peaking at over three million in June 1986. And during the 1990s, the number of people claiming rose for over a year after the recession ended in October 1991, peaking at 2.96 million in November 1992.

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