As the prime minister boasted about the coalition's jobs record, the reality was heading in the opposite direction
In the corridors of Westminster, you may hear a faint cackle, halfway between a laugh and a groan. Trace where it comes from and you’ll reach the door marked “Opposition Economics Team”.
Members of Labour’s front bench must be rueful when they look at today’s employment figures. They cover March to May, the quarter when the election took place and show that, as the prime minister boasted to voters about the strongest job creation record in the western world, so the reality was suddenly heading in the opposite direction.
Compared with the previous quarter, employment is down 67,000, the first fall for more than two years. The number unemployed has risen 15,000 (14,000 of that is an increase in the number of unemployed women) and the ‘adjusted’ Claimant Count – which takes account of the introduction of Universal Credit – for June is up 7,000 on the May figure.
If we look at different types of employment, compared with last month, the number of employees working full-time fell (7,000), the number of employees working part-time fell (21,000), the number of self-employed people working full-time fell (47,000) and even the number of temporary employees fell (by 9,000). Only the number of part-time self-employed people grew (17,000), which is hardly reassuring.
For the first time in over a year, the total number of hours worked in the economy has fallen for two months running:
Total hours worked (click to zoom)
And the ratio of the number of job vacancies to the number of unemployed people has risen for two months running, for the first time in over two years:
Vacancies and unemployment
It’s important not to get carried away about these changes, which are quite small. The ONS release includes a note warning that “in general, changes in the numbers (and especially the rates) reported in this statistical bulletin, between 3 month periods are small, and are not usually greater than the level that is explainable by sampling variability”.
For instance, employment fell 67,000 over the quarter, but sampling variability for quarterly changes in this measure is plus or minus 142,000. The employment rate went up 0.1 points, but the sampling variability for changes in this measure is plus or minus 0.2 points.
The combination of all these changes does suggest that something real is happening. But even if the figures are right it could be a real blip. Labour market statistics can be volatile these days:
Quarterly changes in employment levels
Employment growth was briefly negative at the start of 2013, for instance, but it started to grow again a few months later.
There’s a certain symmetry to the employment and pay figures. For a couple of years we’ve been worried that the jobs recovery has happened at the same time as earnings have fallen in real terms. Today’s figures showed average weekly earnings being 3.2 per cent up on a year previously; in May, the Consumer Price Index stood at 0.1 per cent and the Retail Price Index at 1.0 per cent.
If we had a strong recovery we should expect to see employment and pay both improving. It seems we are stuck in a rut where the best we can manage is one or the other. The risk now is that renewed austerity may return us to the experience of 2010-12, when the UK nearly entered a double-dip recession, in which case it’s the positives in today’s figures that will seem like a blip.
Richard Exell is senior policy officer at the TUC. Follow him on Twitter
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13 Responses to “The jobs figures: even if it’s a blip, it’s a worrying one”
dnspncr
Seriously, what do you know about the real world? I love my country but that doesn’t make me blind to the negative effects that a culture of greed has had on our nation. Britain is the only country in the world that has sold more than half its companies to foreigners. Privatisation has fleeced taxpayers out of billions, from the nuclear industry to security firms. Millions of pounds in subsidy are paid to train companies (much of which goes to shareholders); Britain’s energy and utility networks have been flogged off to companies owned by European governments (foreign exchequers reap the dividends while we all struggle with increasing bills); 89% of publicly-funded home care for the elderly is provided by private companies chasing profit. Neoliberal ideology has had a devastating effect on health funding… In 1990, rather than address the problems of institutional care for the mentally ill, the government closed down asylums and passed responsibility for the mentally ill over to cash-strapped local authorities and the profit making independent sector; The ILF has been scrapped passing care for the severely disabled (again) over to cash-strapped local authorities, forcing people to wear nappies and making them go to bed in the early evening to cut down carer time; We now hear that the financial assistance given to cancer suffers will be slashed.
In your world we should be raging about the 3% of welfare spending that goes to the unemployed. I loath anyone who seeks to exploit a system set up to provide financial assistance for people seeking work – long term claimants should be scrutinised and the 0.7% of fraudulent claims dealt with harshly. The government has no desire to fix the system though, they wish to destroy it by bringing in sanctions which treat every claim as fraudulent and using language that throws suspicion on all claimants – IDS is an expert at that; Look at these scroungers everybody, forget about the banks being the cause of mass unemployment within retail and manufacturing, don’t worry about them using billions of pounds of your money to keep their own jobs… oh, and never mind the 25bn worth of tax avoided by the wealthiest each year.
You don’t have to be a “lefty” to want a fairer society. It’s great that everyone owns a big TV and a mobile phone these days but let’s also get everyone a secure jobs (not force them into bogus self-employment and zero-hour contracts) and pay them a living wage (an actual living wage) and give them access to decent, affordable homes (5m people on social housing lists and we’ve got property developers conning councils out of affordable housing with complicated viability reports ffs)… What would spending a day with you be like anyway? If your comments are anything to go by you’ll just be moaning about immigrants all the time (which is strange, I would’ve thought you would be glad that the world is turning into one big cattle market of cheap labour). As for your African mate, I’m glad he’s doing well, I’m sure luck and support from others had fuck all to do with his success.
stevep
No, we need to understand our history to empower our future. You give young people less credit than they deserve. Given balanced information, they`re intelligent enough to make their own minds up.
Being force-fed with constant right-wing views is another matter.
Patrick Nelson
But ours is a system increasingly moving towards people being bought and sold. Get rid of the welfare state, the NHS and the other things that protect the poor and the workhouse and eventually bonded-labour are liable to follow.