The Guardian view on UK jobs: quantity, but not quality

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/15/guardian-view-uk-jobs-quantity-not-quality

Version 0 of 1.

Lies, damned lies and jobs statistics. That was a frequent, and frequently justified, complaint in the 1980s. The Thatcher government fiddled definitions and shunted thousands on to incapacity benefits to keep the dole queue down. Today’s glowing employment data firmly establishes that the same thing is not happening this time – or, at least, not in the same way.

Ministers no longer directly manage the production of numbers, which tally up jobs in every conceivable way. They record, for example, that there are twice as many people who are unemployed as there are signing on for jobseeker’s allowance. The downward trend, though, is the same on both measures, with the total having dropped just below 2 million on the first count soon after it sank below a million on the second. So-called “economic inactivity” once concealed millions of jobseekers who’d given up on the seeking, but this is now close to a record low. And with private-sector jobs growing faster than the public payroll has been cut back, the overall employment rate is now within a whisker of the pre-crash record.

Few economists, whether “marketopian” or Marxist, would have predicted that jobs could bounce back this strongly while industry remains in recovery mode. Most political analysts would have assumed that David Cameron and George Osborne would be strolling towards easy victory at the ballot box in the face of such strongly recovering employment. After all, they rolled big government out of the way and, just like they said, private enterprise has come up with ways to keep the workforce busy. As it is, though, after a brief conference wobble, most of the polls are once again showing Labour ahead. Where the mood of the country is concerned, jobs would not seem to be doing the job.

The reason why not, a reason coalition ministers such as the welfare reform minister, Lord Freud – whose career was on the edge of imploding today – seem incapable of grasping, is that the job quality is just as important as job quantity, and the trends here are less benign. There are, those same official employment figures also record, roughly a million more people than before the slump either toiling on temporary contracts because they can’t get a permanent post, or else underemployed – that is, working part-time – and denied the hours that they need. Even as inflation falls back, stagnant average earnings continue to lag behind prices. There has not been a more severe and sustained squeeze on real wages since the 1860s, the decade which saw the last fatal run on a British bank before Northern Rock, and Lord Palmerston at No 10.

All of these problems afflict people who have actually got employed positions – there are others for whom things appear worse. The bulk of recent jobs growth is accounted for by self-employment, and this is overwhelmingly true outside of London and the south-east. Some of this reflects professional baby boomers doing a little consultancy into their 60s, and some no doubt reflects genuine entrepreneurship. Some of this freelancing, however, represents the last recourse of the desperate, after they discover a welfare state that doesn’t care when there are no decent jobs around. Tales of hotel chambermaids and shepherds being told by employers to go away and come back as hired guns make the point with anecdote, official figures recording a 22% dip in average self-employed earnings since 2008 reinforce it with hard data.

With unions weak, and the breathing space once provided by benefits deliberately restricted, those with labour to sell have a weak hand. Through deregulatory measures such as limiting the ability to claim unfair dismissal, the coalition has further strengthened the employer’s position. When the remarks of Lord Freud, about seeing what could be done about disabled workers, who were only “worth” a sub-minimum wage of £2 an hour, were publicised today, the immediate row was about the offence he had caused. The more illuminating aspect, however, was the apparent instinct to search for some sort of get-out clause from the rule book, so that more people could have the chance to labour for less.

If the government can claim credit for the impressive number of jobs, it is also substantially responsible for the fact that many of them have been getting worse.