getting poorer

Full time workers across Britain have suffered a drastic drop of as much as 28 % in their living standards over the last four years, due to “bankers' recession” and delayed economic recovery, a study issued by GMB union revealed.

The average fall for Britain is 5.9% and 6.2% for England when income rises were compared to inflation. Hammersmith and Fulham in London faced the highest figure of 28.6%, followed by Herefordshire with 22.7%, Bedfordshire with 20.7% and Nottingham with 20.5%. The worst regional fall was in North West as its full time workers have suffered 9.1% in the real value of their average gross earnings between April 2007 and November 2011. South West workers faced the second worst drop with a fall of 8%, followed by the West Midlands with a fall of 7.6%, east of England with 7.3 % and Yorkshire and Humberside with 7.1%.

Paul Kenny, GMB General Secretary, said “Full time workers in all regions in the UK have seen the value of their earnings drop when they have a job. Things have got a lot worse in the past year as the recovery underway at the time of the election stalled and the UK is mired in a new recession.”

Meantime, the recruitment website Totaljobs.com, has said that the British are engaged in an intense fight for employment, with the private sector failing to hire redundant State workers in sufficient numbers. It said that almost 4 million people are looking for jobs and the jobs that draw the attention of most applicants are the ones, which require no professional skills.

On average, the report said 46 people apply for each customer service job, 45 for each secretarial job and 42 for each retail job. Overall, the website says there are 23 applications for each job, but the reality is far worse in some parts of the country. For example, there is an average of 33 applications for each job in the South East.

John Salt, director of Totaljobs.com, explained “Since March, the whole market has frozen, with companies reluctant to risk a rise in head-count when consumer confidence is taking a battering - and uncertainty around the future of the euro threatens to pull the whole economy back into recession”

John Philpott, chief economic adviser of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said, “The combination of worsening job shortages for people without work, mounting job insecurity and a further fall in real earnings for those in work may test the resilience and resolve of the UK workforce far more than it did in the recession of 2008/09”, Philpott said. He added that there is a 'serious risk' of a surge in private sector redundancies 'given the fragile state of business confidence'.