Labour market

  • Labour market

    Say No to Workfare

    25th May 2012 — Filed under: Labour market, Society & Welfare

    Richard Exell Richard Exell

    The TUC’s new Charter on work experience and workfare sets out just why we are opposed to workfare and draws a distinction between bad work experience and good.

    Workfare – making unemployed people do unpaid work in jobs that would normally be done by paid workers – is triply unfair. Firstly, it is unfair to unemployed people –unpaid work is exploitation, pure and simple. Secondly, it is unfair to workers – when they have to compete with workfare conscripts some workers will lose their jobs, others will find that their pay, overtime or other conditions deteriorate (and the workers who lose most will be the weakest and lowest paid.)

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  • Economic Reports

    Labour Market Report #26

    24th May 2012 — Filed under: Economic Reports, Labour market

    Richard Exell Richard Exell

    We’ve just published this month’s TUC Labour Market Report. In this issue we look at the latest employment and unemployment figures. The worrying fall in full-time jobs is being disguised by a rise in part-time employment – but two-thirds of the part-time jobs are going to people who would have preferred to work full-time and there has been a particularly marked increase in the number of women in involuntary part-time work. Inflation has fallen recently, but this has not relieved the pressure on real wages, which have been falling since January.

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  • Labour market

    Employment Blackspots Update

    17th May 2012 — Filed under: Labour market

    Anjum Klair Anjum Klair

    The unemployment data released today shows that Clackmanshire is the hardest place in Great Britain to find a job, with over 50 claimants chasing each vacancy.  Clackmanshire has featured fairly regularly in the top 10 over the last year.

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  • Labour market

    Women, part-time work, and underemployment

    15th May 2012 — Filed under: Labour market

    Scarlet Harris Scarlet Harris

    While the unemployment figures make the headlines with depressing regularity, what is less well reported is the level of underemployment. TUC analysis out today shows that the number of people who are working part time because they can’t find full time work is rising dramatically.

    While there are still many more women than  men who report that they do not want full time work (854,000 men as opposed to 4,287,000 women at the last count), there has been a notable decrease in the number of women who do not want full time work. This is matched by an increase in women who are working part time because they can’t find a full time job.

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  • Labour market

    Record levels of under-employment show that the jobs crisis is far worse than the headline figures

    15th May 2012 — Filed under: Labour market

    Anjum Klair Anjum Klair

    TUC analysis published today using official figures, shows that the number of men doing part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work more than doubled to nearly 600,000 between December 2007 and December 2011. The number of under-employed women has increased by 74% to 780,000, bringing the total number of people in involuntary part-time work to a record 1.38 million.

    The proportion of women working part-time that don’t want a full-time job, often because of family and caring responsibilities, has also been falling. This shows that the recent rise in part-time employment has mainly come about through necessity rather than choice.

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  • Economics

    This Queen’s speech will not deliver growth

    9th May 2012 — Filed under: Economics, Labour market

    Brendan Barber Brendan Barber

    We needed a programme for growth in the Queen’s speech, instead we have an incoherent hotchpotch that will do little or nothing to deal with our fundamental economic problems or create jobs. The main obstacle remains the government’s mistaken policies of austerity that have sent the economy back into reverse.

    Even those proposals that go in the right direction have too often been watered down so we have a green investment bank that is not a real bank and executive pay curbs that lack teeth.

    What is worst is that ministers are wrapping up a real attack on rights at work as good for growth and employment. Those who opposed the minimum wage and rights for paid holidays are using the recession as a cover to introduce policies that they know have little support and that will be seen as nasty by most. There is no actual evidence that making work insecure does anything for the economy – easy fire will not lead to new hires.

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  • Labour market

    Big business still provides most employee jobs

    30th April 2012 — Filed under: Labour market

    Paul Sellers Paul Sellers

    I’ve heard it said twice in the last couple of weeks that small businesses provide most of the jobs in the UK. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is not actually born out by the figures.

    Rumours of the demise of big firms are premature. In fact, 49. per cent of private sector employees still work for large businesses (defined as employing 250 people or more), 15.5 per cent work for medium sizes businesses (50-249 employees) and 34.8,  work for small businesses (1-49 employees).

    Without underplaying the contributions that small enterprises make to the UK economy, it is also a fact that 3.4 million UK businesses are sole traders – eg they consist of 1 self-employed person working alone. Sole traders account for 75.6 of all UK businesses. Most will at best continue to be  “trundlers” rather than taking off in a big way.

    Finally, add the public sector into the equation, and we find that just 8,600 enterprises account for 52.2 per cent of all UK employees.

    Source: http://www.bis.gov.uk/analysis/statistics/business-population-estimates 2011.

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  • Labour market

    The labour market’s underlying weaknesses

    20th April 2012 — Filed under: Labour market

    Richard Exell Richard Exell

    In the latest labour market statistics, the number of people in employment and the employment rate both went up. Although the labour market improved this time last year but then fell away, it looks as though this is more than a blip: there’s been a slow improvement in the headline figures for about six months now.

    Even so, it’s very hard to get enthusiastic about this; indeed, when you look a bit deeper, there’s some very worrying trends. The big factor was summed up in Duncan’s labour market in one chart yesterday: the overall improvement is masking a longer-term stagnation in full-time employment. In other words, we’re paying for a slow improvement in unemployment with high levels of underemployment – it isn’t just part-time employment that’s been rising, it’s also the number of people who say that they’re working part-time because they couldn’t get a full-time job:

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  • Economics

    Employment Blackspots Update

    18th April 2012 — Filed under: Economics, Labour market

    Anjum Klair Anjum Klair

    The unemployment data released today shows that not only is West Dunbartonshire  still the hardest place in Great Britain to find a job, the number of claimants chasing each vacancy has increased from thirty one to thirty six.

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  • Labour market

    Alternatives to redundancy summit 26 April

    17th April 2012 — Filed under: Labour market

    Paul Sellers Paul Sellers

    As with previous recessions, far too many employees are still being made redundant. The latest ONS figures record 612,000 redundancies in the last 12 month period – up 30,000 on the previous year’s figures. 

    The human cost of redundancy for workers is very clear, but do companies really have to engage in a “sack-race” every time the economy slows down? This question will be the topic of the TUC’s Alternatives to Redundancy summit on 26 April.

    Racing to redundancy can cost businesses an awful lot of money. As well as the direct costs of paying off their workers, there are also the indirect costs of the management time spent implimenting the process. Once the redundancies are complete there is inevitable damage to staff morale and productivity in the subsequent period. Finally, when the economy begins to recover, there are the costs of recruitment and training to re-fill the jobs that people had previously been paid to leave the organisation.  

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