Huge drop in unemployment

[David Johnson]

Our Great Leader, David Cameron announced today "the biggest ever quarterly increase in the number of people in work in our country".

People flocking back to work in droves in your area then? If so, what jobs are they doing?

[Zorro]

For us sales are up, consumer confidence appears to be the highest we have seen for years, and we have employed a new member of staff. Talking with our suppliers, we are not alone in feeling this.

There are signs of recovery, a long way to go yet, but signs of recovery.

Which as far as we are concerned is GOOD

[cockneygeezer2009]

"Huge drop in unemployment"

Mainly due to part time work and zero hour contracts methinks. The unemployment rate is actually higher in London than the national average. Strange but true.

[Gentleman]

Also the ever growing level of sanctions against claimants can make people disappear from from the figures alongside any training courses they are placed on.

[Bob Singleton]

David Johnson wrote:

> Our Great Leader, David Cameron announced today "the biggest
> ever quarterly increase in the number of people in work in our
> country".
>
> People flocking back to work in droves in your area then? If
> so, what jobs are they doing?


Not long ago there were over 300 applicants for 6 part time jobs at my local Waitrose mini-supermarket. The area being Walton (part of the safe Tory Esher & Walton constituency... Dominic Raab MP) I dread to think what the job market is like in less affluent areas!

[Dave Wells]

This is absolute Tory bullshit. The figures are clearly massaged with people being stopped benefits or moved benefits. These Tories must be stopped !

[Gentleman]

The general election, let's face it people were stupid enough to put them where they are now and thanks to the continual hate mongering and revisionist history of where all our cash went i.e world economy collapse all labours fault things are looking bleak.

[Arginald Valleywater]

In the last few days I have seen one thing and heard another. Our local paper had 85 jobs advertised last Friday, the most for many a year and in some cases very lucrative to boot. However I have been at a conference today and the County Councillor who made the welcoming speech advised us that 1in 6 Cumbrian households have an income of LESS THAN ?10k per annum. I know we have a rapidly ageing population so single pensioners and equally school kids will take a large chunk out of the average but in reality things are pretty grim. And before everyone attacks the coalition it was like this under Nu Labor aswell. Our County seems obsessed in opening supermarkets be it Lidl, Aldi, Tesco or Sainsburys. Jobs yes but most part-time and most under ?8 an hour. Even 35 hours a week equates to a meagre ?14560 a year. Or less than some Premier League players earn in a day....
Not so much a North South divide as postcode to postcode.

[David Johnson]

Cameron and Osborne's end of recession seems very strange.

Coming out of recessions in the past in the UK typically happens thus:

1. After a period of no growth, growth in terms of increases in GDP occur.
2. Employment increases as does productivity.
3. As a result of employment increases, people feel a lot flusher as confidence in the economy increases.
4. Extra spending results in inflationary increases as you have more people chasing goods and services.
5. The government considers increasing interest rates to dampen down inflation.

This hasn't happened in this recession/recovery. Cameron has been banging on about over a million jobs "created" by the coalition for years. There has been no increase in productivity. If anything, despite this increase in well over a million jobs, there has been no inflationary pressure. In fact, inflation has been going down and it is currently at 2%, the lowest for many years.

So what are all these people in work who weren't in work, actually doing?

I suspect there are broadly speaking two types of "job"

1. Zero hours and/or minimum wage work. Some companies like Sports Direct, for example, are 90% zero contract employees. These people have very, very little in the way of employment rights and therefore cannot go out and make big purchases because they don't know how many hours they are going to have in weeks to come.

2. Self-employed. Apparently 50% of all the jobs created in the last quarter were self-employed jobs. I suspect that large numbers of these people cannot get an employee role, are pissed off with being unemployed and are having a go at being self-employed. A lot of such jobs tend to end in failure because the people concerned are not "entrepreneurial" in any way. Alternatively, they are people in the building industry and other service industries who cannot find work without going via agencies where they have to be "pseudo-self employed".

That is why we have a large drop in unemployment over the last year or so and no increase in inflation. Starvation wage jobs are being created, not well paid, skilled industrial, manufacturing etc. jobs.

[Gentleman]

Regarding the self employment channel 4 did a documentary on scams agencies use on workers and an example they showed was amazon who used an agency for couriers which had tge employees as self employed which also meant they had to pay the agency petrol and other costs for use of the van and and also had a set amount of deliveries they had to make taking no consideration of the time involved for a set price.