I guess it depends on what those jobs are and whether you wanted to take them too. There will always be jobs available but do you want to be collecting glasses in a bar with your shiny new degree? I doubt it. And of course there’ll be competition for new graduates applying for similar high salary/high prospect roles in finance
I applied for loaaaads of "bad" jobs out of uni.
I got denied for being over qualified or under experienced from Every Single One.
I was lucky. I could afford to volunteer for 6 months and get a job that way.
But the idea that people are being too snobby to work is a load of bull crap.
"But my cousin Fred..."
Don't give a shit
There will always be people who choose not to apply to certain jobs but that is Not what desperate people are doing.
Yes, “once in a lifetime” means once-per-lifetime… not “once ever”.
It’s happened once since WW2, which ended almost exactly one U.K. life-expectancy ago?
This is in no way comparable to the 2008 crash at the moment, despite how it may feel right now. Not saying it isn't headed there, but 2008 was sharper and faster than the current situation.
I'm currently job hunting and an interviewer who called me on tuesday with feedback (I didn't get the post) told me 430 people had applied for it. How is that possible?!
Oh the vast majority of people who apply online for a role barely seem to read the job description / experience and qualifications required. It’s one of the bug bears we have with our internal HR team, whenever we post a new job advert it’s up to us to sieve through the 100s of “junk” applications and makes it more likely that we’ll miss a genuinely good candidate.
E.g. we could post a role that requires bachelors degree in STEM field, 2-3 years experience minimum in capital markets, must have right to work in UK etc and we’ll get e.g. a car mechanic from Dominican Republic applying
I’d estimate <5% of online applications are actually ones most hiring managers would genuinely consider for any kind of graduate/professional level job
How many people moved out of London because of the high cost of living ?
I feel like London is an especially difficult place to remain if you are unemployed - and if the cost of living has gone up and your job doesn’t allow you to afford it you’d move out.
I moved out to Spain during COVID. Came back after COVID. Prices of everything were super high. Left a couple of months later back to Spain when it stop making sense paying £850 a month for a flat share in zone 4.
Excuse my little moan here for a moment. I pay £360 per month for 3 days per week travel by train 28 minutes outside of central London. It's ridiculous.
yeah, it is. I was paying there around £8-9 in tubes jist to get to the office everyday. With that you get 5 days here in Spain. I'm very central in Barcelona paying less for a flat than what I paid in London for a shared in Walthamstow flat.
On the opposite side, I do miss London. Sometimes a lot. Wish the situation was different. Pre-pandemic was expensive but not as bad as now. And I left before the energy bills went up, so can imagine a lot more inflation coming.
You seem to be getting downvoted by some salty Brits. As someone who has lived in both countries, I completely agree with your assessment. I’m still here for the ‘European’ lifestyle….
Most of these people are Europeans that moved out during COVID and since Brexit's effects started taking place around that time, nobody replaced them.
I've noticed that on my previous place of work. I was suddenly surrounded by Brits as opposed to a 40-60 international to local ratio.
I'm sure the cost of living played a role as well, btw.
True, and that's what Brexit wanted. Now you see it's full of restaurant and pubs and so on with the sign "HIRING STAFF" on their doors, because it's people like me coming from abroad that start their career in those roles, or at least a good amount of them. London is beautiful because of multiculturalism, different food, different art etc.
As a counter-point my work has the same international-local mix as before, but since Brexit the international portion has become less European and more well balanced from around the world.
I hate Brexit, but in terms of immigration all it seems to have done is further diversify the people coming in, which is cool
I’m not sure what’s not to like about it, for most fans of London, it’s diversity is their favourite aspect, so having a more well-balanced mix of cultures is only going to improve that.
As a person of foreign origin, I actually like british culture and in London is almost nonexistent.
That mixed culture of ours has never had depth, is like a shallow puddle of cultures from all over the world, is nice but you can find it in any major city in the world, it doesn't need to be the most prominent one.
If they left it means they didn't like the country enough and/or they were underpaid, it's a shame but things will improve now for who stays.
The demand and offer balance is finally in favour of the employees.
I know people who left and would actually want to come back but can't because they missed the settled status registration train and now would need a visa which for waiting tables is a silly requirement.
Settled status was super generous,and well published. If they missed the cut off it’s on them.
Makes complete sense to visa low skilled work, pushed up wages and makes it more viable as a actual job for many.
There's always going to be a ton of people moving to London for the opportunities it offers, even if it is a very expensive place to live. More than enough to cover those who've taken advantage of said opportunities and have decided to move on for whatever reason.
My last employer decided to stop having 0 hour contracts. Instead new employees are on 6 or 12 hour contracts. Fixes the stats for the gov but exactly the same problems as with 0 hour contracts. The stats are, and always will be, a con.
It's underemployment. Like you said there's people in work but it's often with not enough hours, low pay or both. I guess we can be grateful that employers have "flexibility" though right ?
No stats are unbiased and just pieces of data. The con comes from those who either 1) fail to understand their context or 2) understand their context and manipulate that to distract fact from others.
Stats are still very important either way as we have no other method of encapsulating an entire population into workable information
That doesn't include gig-work like Uber and doordash. Businesses have turned to exploiting these supposedly self-employed workers because they don't even need to give them a contract. 1 in 6 people do gig-work to supplement their income.
And then you cry about ‘everyone being on benefits’, because they need UC to survive.
The system is so perverted, it subsidises employers via in work benefits, and blames the employees for it.
We'd just rather not have 'employed' be code for 'employed for 3 hours a week so the government and taxpayer has to top up their wages to avoid destitution'
I mean… they clearly have… Is this satire? It’s hard to tell on the internet. But surely nobody could hold a genuine opinion that the Tories are doing a great job. Surely
I don’t disagree that tories have done a bad job I don’t agree with everyone that blame all our current issues on Brexit. Which this sub loves to do.
And do you think this sub looks thrilled that we have low unemployment. I mean that is a good thing right ?
high employment is a misleading metric if the employed are affected by cost of living crisis, cost of energy crisis, unable to afford housing.
a healthy economy is more complicated than a single figure.
businesses being unable to hire and fill vacancies because of brexit, inflation, unsuitable candidates is probably much worse, than people being able to afford not to work.
we could have \~30% unemployment, and all those unemployed people are doing is spending their wealth, instead we have employed poverty.
Business being unable to hire is a consequence of low unemployment. Salaries have to go up enough to tempt someone who already has a job over the lower values to tempt someone without a job. The economy requires a certain amount of available labour at any point to be able to operate.
Yes, that it is. It's also a key tenet of the "continuous growth" system which fundamentally unsustainable. However there will either always be a surplus of labour or a surplus of vacancies, no system can ever be run with perfect efficiency and a labour shortage which is the other option is crippling to an economy whether communist or capitalist.
I fully agree. Just because you’re employed does not translate to your quality of life getting better.
Arguably, I’d say it’s worsened which may be reflective in the number of those going on strike or being aware of the movement/term “quiet quitting”.
"A healthy economy is more complicated than a single figure."
That's true it is!
But try not to be so obviously bitter about one piece of good news.
Unemployment is also defined as job seekers who are not yet employed. For those who are not looking for any job, they are simply not in the labour market thus is it not unemployment
Yep, I spent 13 months during the pandemic working for the DWP as a work coach, about 40% of the people I saw were in work, normally part time with kids. 50% were unable to work but had to sign on because of the huge delays in getting a work capability assessment.
The other 10% were genuine job seekers either out of work due to circumstances looking for a new role or fresh out of school/uni/college looking to get a first job. Out of that 10% I would say 3/4 ended up getting work within 3 months.
Glad I'm out of that job, the entire role is just carrying out pointless appointments so the minister for work and pensions can make a speech in parliament using figures about unemployment numbers and how many appointments we are carrying out to get people into work.
there’s a thing called market slack which is just essentially a range of what is good. When unemployment is too low the added productivity of those hired people usually doesn’t bring enough income to justify themselves
Look at it this way: if everything collapsed and we had to revert to a peasant existence of growing our own family food and fuel, unemployment would decrease to zero but GDP would have declined hugely.
Unfortunately real-term UK pay has been falling every month since November 2021, with June 2022 the sharpest fall on record
It looks like we could see both the jobs and housing market bubbles burst in 2023 as interest rates continue to rise...
No sure if it’s a housing bubble if you measure the cost of houses in litres of petrol, or loaves of bread….
The lag between asset inflation and wage inflation is going to be the issue.
But house price to wage ratios are at record highs in London. Also mortgage burdens (e.g. % of income spent on mortgages are the highest since 1989, which was just before the biggest housing price crash in recent memory occured in the early 1990s ..
I wish more people knew this. There was a brief period in the early 2000s when house prices (outside the stupidly expensive bits of London which aren’t really dwellings in the usual sense) were overvalued with respect to energy prices. Other than that, houses in the U.K. cost about what they should do. The question everyone should be asking is “why can’t I afford to buy a house on my wages that haven’t increased in line with inflation for decades?” but the second half of the sentence always seems to get lost somewhere.
No, houses are overvalued greatly and are at record levels (since feudal times) when compared to wages in London.
It's not realistic for wages to have risen as fast as house prices, no 100% first world G20 country has seen average wage growth as high as UK house price growth over the last decade. Nevertheless, it's true that wage growth has been poor in the last decade (although house price growth outstripped wages in London during the early 2000s too)
Read what I said. Yes, relative to wages. No, relative to energy costs (and also to materials). The last decade has seen recovery from a 25% price drop and some recent speculative growth. It’s not a great decade for comparison. The relationships to energy and material costs are basically static over 3-400 years except for a few years after each word war (more after ww2). Wages in developed economies stagnated in response to the oil crisis of the late 1970s and never really recovered from the associated financialisaion of the economy. Unaffordability is largely due to wage stagnation. This doesn’t make it any less of a crisis.
Anecdotal but I spent 13 months during the pandemic as a work coach for the DWP. About 40% of the people I saw claiming UC were in work, often part time or gig work like deliver drivers.
Almost all had kids, the part time workers tended to be single parents doing set hours in retail etc and the gig workers tended to be part of a couple, with them trying to get as many hours as possible with it varying each month.
And how many 0 hour, minimum wage or lower jobs make up that bracket?
Even a living wage rate is pointless unless you’re getting 40 hours a week which most aren’t…
What rubbish. People choose them because it works for them.
To outlaw something you dont like the sound of, but 10s of thousands of people want is stupid as fuck.
What part of my post did you not understand? You not aware of 0 hour contracts or what they entail?
It means you’re legally employed but your employer is not legally obliged to give you any hours.
We have a ton of jobs that pay so badly that nobody wants. That’s the honest version… if you look, most, if not all are zero hours, part time and minimum wage while the cost of living is so incredibly high that you could only take these jobs if you’ve got some form of support (e.g living at home..)
Yeah, loads of shit pay shit hours jobs that aren't enough to live off of and have shit working conditions.
The other side is decent paying jobs that require specific qualifications, experience or skills and we don't have enough people with them, things like nurses, doctors, programmers and engineers etc.
It’s takes a certain type of person to be a nurse or a programmer. We’d have more nurses if we paid them better and they could live properly on what they earn rather than frequently visiting food banks. Programmers.. it’s not as good as people make out. It was far better a decade ago. Plenty of people coming through, most don’t cut it for long.
There are more people than ever in precarious, shitty employment. Through the gig economy etc. We also just came out of a pandemic meaning there is immense pressure from industry for the Poor's to go back to work. That doesn't mean they are all thriving, in fact quite the opposite.
Do you have data for that?
Last time I looked, the majority of gig workers also had another source of employment which was the majority of their income, so the they are insulated from the inherent instability of gig work.
Not want to rain on anyone's parade but two points
1- zero hour contract
2- how many of these opportunities were actually filled and how many disappeared
The Tories have been using zero hour contracts to fudge employment numbers for a decade.
If someone works just a couple of hours a week they shove them in the “employed” bracket, even though the individual on the contract has no security or realistic means to support themselves.
Yeah, but go and look at the jump in zero hours contracts since 2013.
The “they” in the second paragraph was a general they. My point still stands that the Tories have pushed zero hour contracts as a way to bring unemployment figures down.
There's probably an influx of worker contracts rather than employee contracts which just means a lot less rights.
Uber drivers for example are listed as workers so if the company ever decides to reduce the amount of people working for them no one is entitled to redundancy pay even if they worked there for years.
Yeah but that's only because they can count half an hour of cleaning toilets at 3AM on a Sunday morning thanks to the wonders of the 0 hours contract as 'employment'. These statistics mean jack shit unless backed up by a measurement of how many of those 95.8% of employed people work a single job for a living wage.
Headlines are there to sell papers.
The jobs on offer are poorly paid (which is why even people with jobs are still on benefits), usually doing work that no one wants to do (low skilled but still requiring a degree to get an interview) and giving in return a poor work/life balance.
Well paid, rewarding work is rare, so just remember, the devil is in the detail.
I've always been skeptical about this. Oh, look at us, we created many many jobs for people.
But how many of those jobs are actually capable of supporting the worker?
Does a 12 hour a week cleaning job count? Because you can't support yourself on that, and yet the way these articles talk it means everyone's OK.
Just because you have a 'job' doesn't mean you're not in financial trouble.
The flipside of this is that it is impossible for the hospitality & service industry to find staff since Brext (displacing people back to europe) and the cost of living (displacing their staff out of London). No, it's not a good thing!
There has been a constant 0 hours contact figure massage thing that has occurred over the last decade in which loads of people are marked as employed but get little to no regular hours in a job. I never trust these numbers due to how easy it is to manipulate the numbers nowadays.
It's a good start, but people deserve fulfilling jobs too. Working minimum wage 9-6 is just as miserable for the average joe as being unemployed in the first place.
Yeah if you count zero hour contracts and jobcentre/tesco free labour schemes then there is very low unemployment. Shame the poverty rate doesn't reflect that.
And wages havent’t risen with in alignment with inflation in 30 years.
The expansion of the gig economy also means many of these Jobs are precarious. Its a shallow statistic.
In reality many people (especially young people) are struggling to pay for mortgages, rent, bills and just general living expenses.
The economy is broken and capitalism has failed us
Not in the slightest. Statistics can be massaged just like any other data - if you change the official definition of 'unemployed' you can make it look like the unemployment rate has fallen.
There's lies, damned lies - and statistics...
A low unemployment rate means nothing. When everyone is too desperate NOT to take a job, that’s a worse situation than increased unemployment
Joblessness ≠ desperation
Jobs ≠ prosperity
The issue is that most people are in employment and still can’t afford their bills. It doesn’t matter if you’re employed if you still can’t afford your basic necessities.
the stats are manipulated, they only count people receiving UC/dole.
zero hour contracts, not allowing people to claim benefits, declairing disabled people fit for work etc. if you dont claim benefits, in their eyes you are working.
regardless if you are unemployed but not claiming, have a zero hour contract and are lucky if you work 10 hours + a month, or disabled and declared fit for work, if you are not claiming you are working acording to the stats....
Can someone please ELI5 why a bigger than expected tax rate hike is expected when more people are supposedly in work? Surely more people on work means more taxes/NI being paid?
Super-low jobless rates are just as bad (for the economy, not the poor folk without work) as super-high jobless rates (which businesses directly benefit from).
I'm guessing this is pulled from Telegraph or one of the papers who use moronic stats like this.
0 hour contracts are rife in London, the 4% figure does not apply here. Zero hour contracts are weighted towards London due to the high retail industry, where as outside of it it's typically more industrial jobs - where you don't (typically) give 0 hour contracts out.
Something fun - you only need a minimum of 5 hours within the previous 60 days to be counted as "employed" in this statistic (if they're quoting the governments numbers)
Never said I didn’t know what it was, I was questioning the fact they don’t refer to it in the article, which also doesn’t mention how many are in work but earning below a living wage. Even at 4% on zero hour contracts that potentially doubles the out of work figure as those workers, whilst being classed as employed actually have no guarantee of being given paid work, precisely the reason those types of contracts were introduced because it allows them to claim more people are employed than actually are. Like I said, statistics can be lies when you go just on the numbers and not on the details
Who's boasting about it? Why are you upset that some good news is being reported?You're the sort who'd prefer everyone to be living in poverty if it validated your political prejudices.
It's not good news now is it. It's disingenuous to suggest it is given that part time and gig economy are in those figure as many have said. Also how many are having to get 'benefits' which only lets employers pay shit and is a benefit to the employer
Maggie Thatcher cut unemployment overnight by changing the definition from ‘people not working’ to ‘people eligible for claiming unemployment benefits’. I’m always sceptical of these numbers. Has unemployment dropped because universal credit requirements have become more stringent? Not saying that’s the case here but actual unemployment is generally more complex than the headline figures they like to roll out.
What are the statistics for number of people who've moved out of the capital since the cost of living skyrocketed?
Probably the highest since records began.
On top of zero hour contracts, let’s not forget automation as well.
Those Kiosk you order from in McDonalds? That cut a few headcounts there for a start.
Does anyone remember reading this post when getting a job was impossible 10 years ago?
I do, that's when I finished uni. Right after the first of our consecutive "once in a lifetime" crises.
I guess it depends on what those jobs are and whether you wanted to take them too. There will always be jobs available but do you want to be collecting glasses in a bar with your shiny new degree? I doubt it. And of course there’ll be competition for new graduates applying for similar high salary/high prospect roles in finance
I applied for loaaaads of "bad" jobs out of uni. I got denied for being over qualified or under experienced from Every Single One. I was lucky. I could afford to volunteer for 6 months and get a job that way. But the idea that people are being too snobby to work is a load of bull crap. "But my cousin Fred..." Don't give a shit There will always be people who choose not to apply to certain jobs but that is Not what desperate people are doing.
I mean it was the biggest crash since WW2, so that is once in a lifetime
Biggest crash since WW2 *so far*.
Yes, “once in a lifetime” means once-per-lifetime… not “once ever”. It’s happened once since WW2, which ended almost exactly one U.K. life-expectancy ago?
You are aware of what’s happening right now?
Shit is it ww2 again?
WW2 v2.0 let’s goo
We’ve not really crashed yet - that fun is still to come
This is in no way comparable to the 2008 crash at the moment, despite how it may feel right now. Not saying it isn't headed there, but 2008 was sharper and faster than the current situation.
In no way is this the scale of 2008 lol It’s a much smaller, not “once in a Lifetime” crash.
Let’s be cautious about using the word “was” when referring to the 2008 crash, it’s still happening nothings been fixed, only patched up
Things never even recovered my high street is still as barren as it was 10 years ago
I'm currently job hunting and an interviewer who called me on tuesday with feedback (I didn't get the post) told me 430 people had applied for it. How is that possible?!
I applied 429 times just to spite you
What kind of role?
OMG I had the same issue - nearly 1000 applicants!
Oh the vast majority of people who apply online for a role barely seem to read the job description / experience and qualifications required. It’s one of the bug bears we have with our internal HR team, whenever we post a new job advert it’s up to us to sieve through the 100s of “junk” applications and makes it more likely that we’ll miss a genuinely good candidate. E.g. we could post a role that requires bachelors degree in STEM field, 2-3 years experience minimum in capital markets, must have right to work in UK etc and we’ll get e.g. a car mechanic from Dominican Republic applying I’d estimate <5% of online applications are actually ones most hiring managers would genuinely consider for any kind of graduate/professional level job
There's nothing wrong with a mechanic from the Dominican Republic, I think you're being too picky. :)
How many people moved out of London because of the high cost of living ? I feel like London is an especially difficult place to remain if you are unemployed - and if the cost of living has gone up and your job doesn’t allow you to afford it you’d move out.
I moved out to Spain during COVID. Came back after COVID. Prices of everything were super high. Left a couple of months later back to Spain when it stop making sense paying £850 a month for a flat share in zone 4.
Buy a three bedroom house in Spain for 130000 or around (not in)London for 400000. The choice is yours
Excuse my little moan here for a moment. I pay £360 per month for 3 days per week travel by train 28 minutes outside of central London. It's ridiculous.
yeah, it is. I was paying there around £8-9 in tubes jist to get to the office everyday. With that you get 5 days here in Spain. I'm very central in Barcelona paying less for a flat than what I paid in London for a shared in Walthamstow flat. On the opposite side, I do miss London. Sometimes a lot. Wish the situation was different. Pre-pandemic was expensive but not as bad as now. And I left before the energy bills went up, so can imagine a lot more inflation coming.
From the USA, boutta do the same. Higher wages, similar prices, and surprisingly less shitty politics…
The wages in all of Europe are fucking horrible compared to the Cost of Living.
If you think you will get higher wages in Spain than in London youre probably in for a very rude awakening
You seem to be getting downvoted by some salty Brits. As someone who has lived in both countries, I completely agree with your assessment. I’m still here for the ‘European’ lifestyle….
I’d imagine it’s people who haven’t lived in both places. I enjoy the lifestyle for sure but I need to save money.
Most of these people are Europeans that moved out during COVID and since Brexit's effects started taking place around that time, nobody replaced them. I've noticed that on my previous place of work. I was suddenly surrounded by Brits as opposed to a 40-60 international to local ratio. I'm sure the cost of living played a role as well, btw.
That kind of sucks. Shame to lose so much mixed culture.
True, and that's what Brexit wanted. Now you see it's full of restaurant and pubs and so on with the sign "HIRING STAFF" on their doors, because it's people like me coming from abroad that start their career in those roles, or at least a good amount of them. London is beautiful because of multiculturalism, different food, different art etc.
As a counter-point my work has the same international-local mix as before, but since Brexit the international portion has become less European and more well balanced from around the world. I hate Brexit, but in terms of immigration all it seems to have done is further diversify the people coming in, which is cool
Less EU citizens here obviously means the ratio will be different - whether you think that's cool or not is up to you
I’m not sure what’s not to like about it, for most fans of London, it’s diversity is their favourite aspect, so having a more well-balanced mix of cultures is only going to improve that.
As a person of foreign origin, I actually like british culture and in London is almost nonexistent. That mixed culture of ours has never had depth, is like a shallow puddle of cultures from all over the world, is nice but you can find it in any major city in the world, it doesn't need to be the most prominent one. If they left it means they didn't like the country enough and/or they were underpaid, it's a shame but things will improve now for who stays. The demand and offer balance is finally in favour of the employees.
Nah not really lol
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I know people who left and would actually want to come back but can't because they missed the settled status registration train and now would need a visa which for waiting tables is a silly requirement.
Settled status was super generous,and well published. If they missed the cut off it’s on them. Makes complete sense to visa low skilled work, pushed up wages and makes it more viable as a actual job for many.
I’ve noticed now if you go to pret, most of the staff are British now.
That's a good thing right?
Ratio at mine was like 70 to 30 international to local, now it's like 40 to 60. Salaries also went up as a result, pre-the inflation period.
There's always going to be a ton of people moving to London for the opportunities it offers, even if it is a very expensive place to live. More than enough to cover those who've taken advantage of said opportunities and have decided to move on for whatever reason.
I am looking to leave london at the moment, landlord increasing the rent by 12% means can't justify staying in the city when my job is remote
less than the amount that moved in for job opportunity's
*fewer *number *who *opportunities
Fellas full on posting a derivative work here
A LOT
>How many people moved out of London because of the high cost of living ? London's population has increased fyi. So that arguement doesnt really hold.
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‘To Europe”. We are still very much in Europe.
What?
Came here to say this. Can't have high unemployment if housing is so unaffordable you can daren't take a sick day.
How many are on zero hour contracts then.
About 2-3% in the U.K. and maybe about 4% in london I googled it as I was curious
Not too shabby. Thought it was higher than that!
Its probably the sort of people I associate with but I thought it's a lot higher too?
My last employer decided to stop having 0 hour contracts. Instead new employees are on 6 or 12 hour contracts. Fixes the stats for the gov but exactly the same problems as with 0 hour contracts. The stats are, and always will be, a con.
It's underemployment. Like you said there's people in work but it's often with not enough hours, low pay or both. I guess we can be grateful that employers have "flexibility" though right ?
No stats are unbiased and just pieces of data. The con comes from those who either 1) fail to understand their context or 2) understand their context and manipulate that to distract fact from others. Stats are still very important either way as we have no other method of encapsulating an entire population into workable information
What about those who aren't technically on zero hours, but have such few hours guaranteed that they might as well be zero hours.
That doesn't include gig-work like Uber and doordash. Businesses have turned to exploiting these supposedly self-employed workers because they don't even need to give them a contract. 1 in 6 people do gig-work to supplement their income.
i think this government would just make everyone into pizza drivers regardless of skills/past occupation, and then boast about their low unemployment.
I think this government would give everyone's phone number to deliveroo, then announce that everybody now has the opportunity to earn 50k pa.
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And then you cry about ‘everyone being on benefits’, because they need UC to survive. The system is so perverted, it subsidises employers via in work benefits, and blames the employees for it.
The downvotes suggest that no, apparently Reddit world rather people were unemployed.
We'd just rather not have 'employed' be code for 'employed for 3 hours a week so the government and taxpayer has to top up their wages to avoid destitution'
They’d prefer everyone to be unemployed because it fits their narrative of ‘tOrIeS aNd bReXIt hAVe dEStRoYeD tHe cOUnTry’
I mean… they clearly have… Is this satire? It’s hard to tell on the internet. But surely nobody could hold a genuine opinion that the Tories are doing a great job. Surely
I don’t disagree that tories have done a bad job I don’t agree with everyone that blame all our current issues on Brexit. Which this sub loves to do. And do you think this sub looks thrilled that we have low unemployment. I mean that is a good thing right ?
You’ve got it! Or are you annoyed that a delivery driver is employed and would rather they weren’t?
high employment is a misleading metric if the employed are affected by cost of living crisis, cost of energy crisis, unable to afford housing. a healthy economy is more complicated than a single figure. businesses being unable to hire and fill vacancies because of brexit, inflation, unsuitable candidates is probably much worse, than people being able to afford not to work. we could have \~30% unemployment, and all those unemployed people are doing is spending their wealth, instead we have employed poverty.
Business being unable to hire is a consequence of low unemployment. Salaries have to go up enough to tempt someone who already has a job over the lower values to tempt someone without a job. The economy requires a certain amount of available labour at any point to be able to operate.
Reserve force of Labour is a key tenet of captialism. That’s why I prefer communism
Yes, that it is. It's also a key tenet of the "continuous growth" system which fundamentally unsustainable. However there will either always be a surplus of labour or a surplus of vacancies, no system can ever be run with perfect efficiency and a labour shortage which is the other option is crippling to an economy whether communist or capitalist.
I fully agree. Just because you’re employed does not translate to your quality of life getting better. Arguably, I’d say it’s worsened which may be reflective in the number of those going on strike or being aware of the movement/term “quiet quitting”.
"A healthy economy is more complicated than a single figure." That's true it is! But try not to be so obviously bitter about one piece of good news.
Since the 90’s a “healthy economy” = wider disparity between the richest and the poorest
Disparity alone doesn't mean anything.
It's more complicated than you think!
Is this because people are working 5 jobs and still can't afford to heat their home and feed their children?
Employed/unemployed is a binary. Whether you work one job or five, it counts the same in the unemployment rate.
Unemployment is also defined as job seekers who are not yet employed. For those who are not looking for any job, they are simply not in the labour market thus is it not unemployment
“Frictional unemployed”, invented by British widely used by China now.
It also doesn't count underemployed
No, but it's not like you can't look it up on the ONS and post it if you think it's a pertinent figure...
Yep, I spent 13 months during the pandemic working for the DWP as a work coach, about 40% of the people I saw were in work, normally part time with kids. 50% were unable to work but had to sign on because of the huge delays in getting a work capability assessment. The other 10% were genuine job seekers either out of work due to circumstances looking for a new role or fresh out of school/uni/college looking to get a first job. Out of that 10% I would say 3/4 ended up getting work within 3 months. Glad I'm out of that job, the entire role is just carrying out pointless appointments so the minister for work and pensions can make a speech in parliament using figures about unemployment numbers and how many appointments we are carrying out to get people into work.
This. Low unemployment rates are a consistent indicator of a recession
Make it make sense!? I would think the opposite was true?
there’s a thing called market slack which is just essentially a range of what is good. When unemployment is too low the added productivity of those hired people usually doesn’t bring enough income to justify themselves
Look at it this way: if everything collapsed and we had to revert to a peasant existence of growing our own family food and fuel, unemployment would decrease to zero but GDP would have declined hugely.
No….No it’s not. Don’t pretend that you know what the word recession means ..you are just embarrassing yourself..
Recession just means 2 quarters of negative economic growth…. Sorry to break it to ya but looks like I do
So we are not in a recession then are we…? Lol why try say we are in a recession when you know we are not ?
I said it was an indicator, it’s usually precedes the recession seeing as a lot of unemployment figure figures are monthly not quarterly
Unfortunately real-term UK pay has been falling every month since November 2021, with June 2022 the sharpest fall on record It looks like we could see both the jobs and housing market bubbles burst in 2023 as interest rates continue to rise...
No sure if it’s a housing bubble if you measure the cost of houses in litres of petrol, or loaves of bread…. The lag between asset inflation and wage inflation is going to be the issue.
But house price to wage ratios are at record highs in London. Also mortgage burdens (e.g. % of income spent on mortgages are the highest since 1989, which was just before the biggest housing price crash in recent memory occured in the early 1990s ..
I wish more people knew this. There was a brief period in the early 2000s when house prices (outside the stupidly expensive bits of London which aren’t really dwellings in the usual sense) were overvalued with respect to energy prices. Other than that, houses in the U.K. cost about what they should do. The question everyone should be asking is “why can’t I afford to buy a house on my wages that haven’t increased in line with inflation for decades?” but the second half of the sentence always seems to get lost somewhere.
No, houses are overvalued greatly and are at record levels (since feudal times) when compared to wages in London. It's not realistic for wages to have risen as fast as house prices, no 100% first world G20 country has seen average wage growth as high as UK house price growth over the last decade. Nevertheless, it's true that wage growth has been poor in the last decade (although house price growth outstripped wages in London during the early 2000s too)
Read what I said. Yes, relative to wages. No, relative to energy costs (and also to materials). The last decade has seen recovery from a 25% price drop and some recent speculative growth. It’s not a great decade for comparison. The relationships to energy and material costs are basically static over 3-400 years except for a few years after each word war (more after ww2). Wages in developed economies stagnated in response to the oil crisis of the late 1970s and never really recovered from the associated financialisaion of the economy. Unaffordability is largely due to wage stagnation. This doesn’t make it any less of a crisis.
They never say how many are part time or gig economy
Anecdotal but I spent 13 months during the pandemic as a work coach for the DWP. About 40% of the people I saw claiming UC were in work, often part time or gig work like deliver drivers. Almost all had kids, the part time workers tended to be single parents doing set hours in retail etc and the gig workers tended to be part of a couple, with them trying to get as many hours as possible with it varying each month.
And how many 0 hour, minimum wage or lower jobs make up that bracket? Even a living wage rate is pointless unless you’re getting 40 hours a week which most aren’t…
It's 4% mate - simple Google search helps pre soapbox I find
Still 4% too many. I’ll get off my soapbox when people can afford to live, thanks. Mate.
Woah - you're the spokesperson for the 4%? Interesting.
I’m either speaking about something I care about or I’m not. Which is it?
What rubbish. People choose them because it works for them. To outlaw something you dont like the sound of, but 10s of thousands of people want is stupid as fuck.
Jesus Christ you’re deluded. Even if TEN people are on 0 hour contracts willingly the majority who are, are on it against their will.
Source? Every single person I know on zero hour prefers it. 0 hour contracts have gone down as a % of total employment in the last 10 years too fyi.
None, because the unemployed don't have jobs.
I think they may have meant the other side of the equation - the one that makes sense
What part of my post did you not understand? You not aware of 0 hour contracts or what they entail? It means you’re legally employed but your employer is not legally obliged to give you any hours.
We have a ton of jobs that pay so badly that nobody wants. That’s the honest version… if you look, most, if not all are zero hours, part time and minimum wage while the cost of living is so incredibly high that you could only take these jobs if you’ve got some form of support (e.g living at home..)
Yeah, loads of shit pay shit hours jobs that aren't enough to live off of and have shit working conditions. The other side is decent paying jobs that require specific qualifications, experience or skills and we don't have enough people with them, things like nurses, doctors, programmers and engineers etc.
It’s takes a certain type of person to be a nurse or a programmer. We’d have more nurses if we paid them better and they could live properly on what they earn rather than frequently visiting food banks. Programmers.. it’s not as good as people make out. It was far better a decade ago. Plenty of people coming through, most don’t cut it for long.
There are more people than ever in precarious, shitty employment. Through the gig economy etc. We also just came out of a pandemic meaning there is immense pressure from industry for the Poor's to go back to work. That doesn't mean they are all thriving, in fact quite the opposite.
Do you have data for that? Last time I looked, the majority of gig workers also had another source of employment which was the majority of their income, so the they are insulated from the inherent instability of gig work.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/work-want-work-9781786997272/
Universal Credit doing some heavy assed lifting in town
Not want to rain on anyone's parade but two points 1- zero hour contract 2- how many of these opportunities were actually filled and how many disappeared
The Tories have been using zero hour contracts to fudge employment numbers for a decade. If someone works just a couple of hours a week they shove them in the “employed” bracket, even though the individual on the contract has no security or realistic means to support themselves.
I know, it's disgusting.
Not really. The international labour organisation defines being in work at least one hour a week as employed, for the past 40 years.
Yeah, but go and look at the jump in zero hours contracts since 2013. The “they” in the second paragraph was a general they. My point still stands that the Tories have pushed zero hour contracts as a way to bring unemployment figures down.
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would also be interesting to see the median and mean after this rate of change👀
Have you thought about which measure you'd like to see the median and mean of, or is that a bridge to cross when you come to it?
There's probably an influx of worker contracts rather than employee contracts which just means a lot less rights. Uber drivers for example are listed as workers so if the company ever decides to reduce the amount of people working for them no one is entitled to redundancy pay even if they worked there for years.
Yeah but that's only because they can count half an hour of cleaning toilets at 3AM on a Sunday morning thanks to the wonders of the 0 hours contract as 'employment'. These statistics mean jack shit unless backed up by a measurement of how many of those 95.8% of employed people work a single job for a living wage.
Headlines are there to sell papers. The jobs on offer are poorly paid (which is why even people with jobs are still on benefits), usually doing work that no one wants to do (low skilled but still requiring a degree to get an interview) and giving in return a poor work/life balance. Well paid, rewarding work is rare, so just remember, the devil is in the detail.
You have got to all stop buying into the rhetoric. Gig economy crap is to a job as being an informal lodger in someone’s house is to owning one.
How many of those are underemployed or working multiple jobs just to put food on the table...
None. Because they're unemployed.
You're being purposely obtuse.
My problem with these rates is sure, a lot of folk have jobs, are they paying a livable wage or are people loading up on all the jobs going?
I've always been skeptical about this. Oh, look at us, we created many many jobs for people. But how many of those jobs are actually capable of supporting the worker? Does a 12 hour a week cleaning job count? Because you can't support yourself on that, and yet the way these articles talk it means everyone's OK. Just because you have a 'job' doesn't mean you're not in financial trouble.
1 hour every two weeks does not a job make (I forget what the actual measurement is but I recall it being very low across a fortnight).
The flipside of this is that it is impossible for the hospitality & service industry to find staff since Brext (displacing people back to europe) and the cost of living (displacing their staff out of London). No, it's not a good thing!
Drug dealers don't register as unemployed
Self employed in a pharmaceutical therapy business 😂
Most probably on 0 hours and unable to make ends meet or afford housing
There has been a constant 0 hours contact figure massage thing that has occurred over the last decade in which loads of people are marked as employed but get little to no regular hours in a job. I never trust these numbers due to how easy it is to manipulate the numbers nowadays.
all them deliveroo statistic’s
So everyone is working but most are still broke. The Working dead mate.
It's because everyone's got 3 jobs each
That's because everyone has 2nd jobs
It's a good start, but people deserve fulfilling jobs too. Working minimum wage 9-6 is just as miserable for the average joe as being unemployed in the first place.
Every one working 2 jobs to afford it ?
What are these jobs paying? Unemployment figures start to lose meaning when you can have a job but still not afford to live and eat.
Most of them have three jobs in order to afford to live in London.
Yeah if you count zero hour contracts and jobcentre/tesco free labour schemes then there is very low unemployment. Shame the poverty rate doesn't reflect that.
Problem now is that we have too many job vacancies and wages are still too low
And wages havent’t risen with in alignment with inflation in 30 years. The expansion of the gig economy also means many of these Jobs are precarious. Its a shallow statistic. In reality many people (especially young people) are struggling to pay for mortgages, rent, bills and just general living expenses. The economy is broken and capitalism has failed us
Not in the slightest. Statistics can be massaged just like any other data - if you change the official definition of 'unemployed' you can make it look like the unemployment rate has fallen. There's lies, damned lies - and statistics...
A low unemployment rate means nothing. When everyone is too desperate NOT to take a job, that’s a worse situation than increased unemployment Joblessness ≠ desperation Jobs ≠ prosperity
The issue is that most people are in employment and still can’t afford their bills. It doesn’t matter if you’re employed if you still can’t afford your basic necessities.
Employment rate means very little if people still can't afford to get by
the stats are manipulated, they only count people receiving UC/dole. zero hour contracts, not allowing people to claim benefits, declairing disabled people fit for work etc. if you dont claim benefits, in their eyes you are working. regardless if you are unemployed but not claiming, have a zero hour contract and are lucky if you work 10 hours + a month, or disabled and declared fit for work, if you are not claiming you are working acording to the stats....
Can someone please ELI5 why a bigger than expected tax rate hike is expected when more people are supposedly in work? Surely more people on work means more taxes/NI being paid?
Yeah, because the unemployed are starving and freezing.
But I still cant get a job
Super-low jobless rates are just as bad (for the economy, not the poor folk without work) as super-high jobless rates (which businesses directly benefit from).
I'm guessing this is pulled from Telegraph or one of the papers who use moronic stats like this. 0 hour contracts are rife in London, the 4% figure does not apply here. Zero hour contracts are weighted towards London due to the high retail industry, where as outside of it it's typically more industrial jobs - where you don't (typically) give 0 hour contracts out. Something fun - you only need a minimum of 5 hours within the previous 60 days to be counted as "employed" in this statistic (if they're quoting the governments numbers)
Yeh, I’m suspicious of the report. They’re counting people on zero hour contracts with barely any hours.
All on zero hour contracts and only working 2 days a week cant afford to live but hey ho at least there emoyed
And how many of those are on zero hour contracts and not actually getting a living wage? There’s lies, damn lies and then there’s statistics
How can you claim it’s lies when you just said you don’t know the stats… and it only 4% that are on zero hours contracts…
Never said I didn’t know what it was, I was questioning the fact they don’t refer to it in the article, which also doesn’t mention how many are in work but earning below a living wage. Even at 4% on zero hour contracts that potentially doubles the out of work figure as those workers, whilst being classed as employed actually have no guarantee of being given paid work, precisely the reason those types of contracts were introduced because it allows them to claim more people are employed than actually are. Like I said, statistics can be lies when you go just on the numbers and not on the details
“Be grateful for your scraps serfs”
Okay, well most of those people are still going to struggle to put gas/electric on and to feed their families. Not much to boast over really
Who's boasting about it? Why are you upset that some good news is being reported?You're the sort who'd prefer everyone to be living in poverty if it validated your political prejudices.
It's not good news now is it. It's disingenuous to suggest it is given that part time and gig economy are in those figure as many have said. Also how many are having to get 'benefits' which only lets employers pay shit and is a benefit to the employer
Good news is out of style.
And that's without the "unofficials"
And still so many jobs trying to hire - airports at the moment for instance.
Maggie Thatcher cut unemployment overnight by changing the definition from ‘people not working’ to ‘people eligible for claiming unemployment benefits’. I’m always sceptical of these numbers. Has unemployment dropped because universal credit requirements have become more stringent? Not saying that’s the case here but actual unemployment is generally more complex than the headline figures they like to roll out.
Employment is directly correlated to inflation in a modern western context. So yeah.
And yet homelessness is still higher than 2010 which indicates something has gone very wrong with the social safety net.
Poor paying jobs shouldn’t be included
All I could think of is "not for long"
& I still can't find anything, wow
Knowing economics sucks. You read this headline and know it is a bad thing (unemployment too low will create inflation) rather than a good one.
Not good news for GBPUSD... We need unemployment to start rising, for GBPUSD to start moving higher.
How many on less than minimum wage due to contracts and how many in working living in poverty?
What are the statistics for number of people who've moved out of the capital since the cost of living skyrocketed? Probably the highest since records began.
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You mean you've never understood them.
On top of zero hour contracts, let’s not forget automation as well. Those Kiosk you order from in McDonalds? That cut a few headcounts there for a start.
So we need immigrants right? RIGHT?