Thoughts on what is a sobering report on jobs coming up. Stay with me. I’ll start on twitter, might give you a blogpost for Christmas if at least 100 people promise to read it.
First, we need to control this population growth. A 5.4m million person (or 6%) increase in the Labour force is a problem, unless the economy is growing at 10% minimum.
Let’s get the real bad news out of the way. 32% of the 9.7m that spent the year doing nothing have been like that for at least 3 years. That’s a real concern. That’s where any social intervention programme should start.
Another problem, people in employment only grew by 400k in one year, from 69.1m to 69.5m. That’s a real concern there, suggests the economy isn’t absorbing anywhere close to the required numbers.
If anything helps to cushion this problem, it’s the breakdown of unemployed people. Of the 20.9m, 11.1m did some work, but it was under 20 hours a week. I suspect that’s where those agric jobs are parked.
That’s the real problem with agric if it’s not all season. The hours worked are simply not enough to be considered as FT or even PT Employment. Especially without having a strong agro-processing sector.
Also worrying, seems FT job losses only affected women. Men gained 4.9m jobs within the year, women lost 4.5m. There are sub-plots in this report that require a deep dive. Why women?
Also, 18% or the 966k who lost previous jobs, were employers. That’s 177,551 people who closed their businesses in the last year. Of all our job loss categories, this is the most important.
But the real issue is 8.8m who have never worked. The first job is probably the toughest to get; and 8.8m suggests a very inexperienced pool of willing Labour. Headache inducing stuff.
Youth unemployment (29.7%) and underemployment (25.7%) means 55% of young people are struggling to find opportunities.
This is going to require some trade-offs and tough solutions. I’ll do that blogpost with policy suggestions when we have 100 people who will read it.
