Britain's employment problem would on the surface appear to have been solved. Officially just one in 25 Britons are now unemployed, the lowest rate since the winter of 1974-75. Younger workers look to be finding jobs more easily than ever. Older workers are staying in employment for longer. Although the economy has created over 1m jobs since 2010, real wage growth remains flat. Britain is a jobs factory but for insecure, low-paid work. More people are employed, but on static real – that is, inflation-adjusted – wages. Real wage growth averaged 2.9% in the 1970s and 1980s, 1.5% in the 1990s, 1.2% in the 2000s. It is zero today. This is not normal, yet the authorities are determined to believe it is so.
The Conservative party’s achievement has been to strip away bargaining power from employees and have them work on the terms offered by employers. The result has been widespread use of zero-hours contracts, self-employment and other forms of underemployment. Economic insecurity is now a way for life for millions in the UK. One recent study estimated that two in every five workers did not think “that they can maintain a decent quality of life, now and in the future, given their economic and financial circumstances”. Underemployment has seen a measurable increase in depression among those desperate to work longer. It also helps to peg back wage inflation because if employers need more labour all they need to do is ask employees who want extra hours to work longer at existing pay rates. Leading academics reckon the unemployment rate would be double that counted today – with one in 13 Britons unemployed – were underemployment taken into account.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/14/the-guardian-view-on-record-unemployment-not-the-whole-picture
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