Richard Exell
I’ve recorded this video taking a look at May’s employment figures. The headlines were very worrying, with employment down and unemployment up. But the news on average earnings was even more depressing. Record low increases in average earnings give a hint that Britain may be moving towards a low productivity, low quality, low paid economy with stagnant living standards. This country desperately needs a plan for growth.
Richard Exell
Getting onto the Path to Work is a new TUC report by Christopher Schwartz. In it he looks at the international experience of job creation programmes, focusing on job guarantees. He concentrates on programmes in Denmark, Flanders and Wales, with briefer reviews of schemes in France and Finland.
One of his lessons is that countries that are accepted as having successfully used ‘activation’ strategies to tackle unemployment haven’t relied on punitive measures, but instead have used a “cocktail of measures to facilitate access to employment.” The analysis and the recommendations are worth reading in full and you can find the report here.
Richard Exell
This month, employment figures took a turn for the worse and average earnings reached a new low; the number of employed people fell 34,000 and there are 20,000 more unemployed young people.
Paul Sellers
There have been rumours that the Government may freeze the NMW this year. I find them very hard to credit. Whilst it is certain that some employers’ organisitions like the British Chambers of Commerce and the usual right-wing think thanks will have lobbied for a freeze, as they have done for a number of years, the politics and economics of such a course simply do not add up.
The economics are that the UK is currently demand-deficient, and there is no credible evidence that the current rates are holding back job creation*, so freezing wages would make no sense at all. The politics are simply that the local election campaign is just about to begin, and any shrewd politicean would not think it wise to open the campaign with bad news. Therefore i expect an increase to be announced shortly.
Richard Exell
This month’s Labour Market Report looks at the latest employment and unemployment statistics.
In this issue:
View the full report online at the TUC website where you can also download a PDF version of the report.
Richard Exell
I have a post over at Left Foot Forward, looking at yersterday’s labour market statistics. For over a year economists have been trying to understand why the employment figures have been moving in the right direction when GDP has been stagnating. This month’s figures show unemployment rising a little, youth unemployment rising a lot and pay stuck in the doldrums. It’s too early to say definitely that the latest figures are more than a blip, but many economists expect unemployment to start rising again.
Christopher Schwartz
Today’s budget talked up job growth, but the OBR’s March 2013 Economic and fiscal outlook published alongside the budget lays out the grim job statistics accompanying the Chancellor’s upbeat prognostications: the ILO measured unemployment rate will barely budge from the 7.9% posted in 2012 until 2016, when it’s expected to (finally) start to fall… to 7.4%. Until then, the OBR estimates it will hover just around the 8% mark. The claimant count likewise will float around the 1.6 million mark until 2016.
While talking up job growth, the budget unfortunately failed to actually take any concrete measures to deal with many of the demand-side hurdles facing job seekers, especially those lacking formal skills, those with a severe skills mismatch to the market, or those out of the labour market and finding it difficult to re-enter.
Richard Exell
In his Budget speech, George Osborne said
“We’ve helped business create not a million new jobs, but one and a quarter million new jobs.”
The reality is that private sector job creation has been good, but not that impressive. As it happens, new statistics on public and private sector employment have been published today, so we can look in some detail at this claim.
Caroline Davey
Today Gingerbread is publishing new research that looks at single parents’ experiences of the package of government-funded employment support, from the Work Programme and Jobcentre Plus. It explores the job-seeking journeys of single parents and questions whether the support on offer is delivering for them and, ultimately, for the taxpayer.
Around one in four households in the UK is headed by a single mum or dad: that’s around 2 million parents bringing up children on their own. No small minority by anyone’s standards.
But despite their ubiquity the statistics show that single parents are still struggling in the job market.
Richard Exell
Over at the UNISON website there’s a fascinating new report called Public Sector Pay Premium: Fact or Fiction? that I’d really recommend you read. It’s a model of union-commissioned research – commissioned from Incomes Data Services – and it doesn’t dodge difficult findings in other reports, which makes its findings all the more persuasive.
Every few weeks there’s a newspaper story claiming public sector workers are higher paid than private sector. Of course, Coalition politicians, eager to support the government’s public sector pay freeze, are quick to use these stories. Many of these stories are based on the Office for National Statistics’ Average Weekly Earnings data, published every month.The average earnings figures are a little higher for the public sector. However, as the report notes, the composition of the public and private sector are different – there aren’t many wholesale, retail, hotel and restaurant staff in the public sector but this low paid sector (average total weekly pay £309, compared with overall average of £472) accounts for 23% of all employment.
