UK Unemployment
Labour Market Statistics
June 17 2009 - The unemployment rate rose to 7.2% - up 0.7% over the quarter and 1.9% on last year.
29.11 million people were in work in the period February to April according to the labour force survey (LFS).
The number of people employed fell by 271,000 this quarter and was down by 399,000 on the last year.
The working age employment rate is 73.3% - down 0.8% on the last quarter
and down 1.5% on the last year.
ILO-defined unemployment in February to April was 2.26 million (7.2%) -
up by 232,000 unemployed on the quarter and 605,000 from this time last year.
The claimant count for key out-of-work benefits was 1.54 million in May -
up by 39,300 on last month, and up 726,100 on last year.
Earnings growth over the year to April (including bonuses) was 0.8%.
Commenting on the rate of unemployment among 18-24 year-olds (16.6%), TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:
"Economists may argue about whether we are now out of recession and into recovery, but in the real world of Britain's workplaces people are still losing their jobs and finding it harder and harder to get new ones.
"Unemployment is now at its highest level since Autumn 1996 and it will take years, not months, to recover. If we are to avoid the 10 per cent unemployment rates of the 1980s and 1990s it is imperative the Government continues to invest in tackling unemployment.
"Youth unemployment is now at its highest rate for 15 years. And it will get far worse when millions of fresh school leavers and graduates start looking for work in the coming weeks.
"Unemployment leaves a permanent scar on young people's lives and Government must do all it can to stop joblessness blighting another generation's lives.
"The Government's job guarantee should soon start to help young people who lost their jobs at the start of the recession - it's exactly the right priority. But people leaving school or college this summer will need help with training and advice long before the 12 months that they will have to wait for the jobs guarantee."
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John Philpott, Chief Economist at the CIPD commented that the figures were 'grim but not unexpected' but added that figures for the number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance (the claimant count) were 'amazingly good given what we know about the state of the jobs market, though too puzzling to yet be seen as a genuine 'green shoot'. His analysis:
Overall labour market situation and outlook
"Anyone looking for green shoots of recovery in today's jobs figures will have little to grasp at. The recorded quarterly fall in employment and rise in unemployment still ranks amongst the worst seen in the post-war era. Vacancies are drying up at a rapid rate and redundancies go on rising. The grim news thus continues, though this is not unexpected given the dire state of the economy at the turn of the year.
"There is little in today's figures to suggest that unemployment will not rise above 3 million next year. The one glimmer of hope is the claimant unemployment count. Not only is the count increasing much more slowly than might be expected but remarkably the number of people flowing onto the count actually fell in May. If indicative of underlying economic factors - rather than the result of the way in which benefits are administered or a reduced propensity for unemployed people to sign on at Jobcentres - these claimant figures are amazingly good given what we know about the state of the jobs market, though too puzzling to yet be seen as a genuine 'green shoot'.
A year of jobs market recession
"The horrible human impact of the first full year of the jobs recession is now known. In all 0.4 million fewer people are in employment. The toll on the private sector has been horrendous - almost 0.7 million jobs have been lost. The public sector by contrast has added more than 0.25 million jobs (a 5% increase) - although as the CIPD warned earlier this week the public sector is likely to shed 0.35 million jobs in the next five years.
"The burden of net job loss has fallen entirely on full-time employees. The total level of self-employment and part-time employment is broadly unchanged from a year ago. It has also generally been a 'man-cession'. The redundancy rate for men has more than doubled. The number of men in work has fallen by 2%, the number of women in work by 0.6%. The number of men unemployed has increased by 45%, the number of women unemployed by a quarter. This pattern is mainly explained by the relative buoyancy of part-time employment and the growth in public sector employment, types of employment in which women are strongly represented.
"Young people aged under-25 have fared far worse than the over-50s, though the latter have seen relatively larger increases in unemployment because they have fewer education, training or employment options if they do lose their jobs. Migrants have also prospered relative to non-migrants. The number of UK born people in work has fallen by 1.8% during the course of the jobs recession so far, while the number of non-UK born people in work has increased by 3.5%.
"The manufacturing sector has shed 0.2 million jobs - a 6.7% decrease. The other big job shedding sectors are distribution, hotels and restaurants and finance and business services. These sectors each shed 2.8% of their workers. While this was a recession triggered in the finance sector, as in most previous recessions it is the real economy, and manufacturing in particular, that has suffered most. The amount of job losses in manufacturing is also noteworthy because this is the sector which has shown the greatest effort on the part of employers and workers to seek alternatives to redundancy, such as pay freezes, pay cuts and short-time working. Without such welcome action the impact of the recession on UK manufacturing employment might have been far greater still.
"Manufacturing workers have also experienced the fastest rate of decline in the rate of growth of average earnings since the recession began. Excluding bonuses, manufacturing pay-packets were increasing by an annual rate of just 1% in the year to April - much less than the 2.9% gained by those in private sector services and 3.5% in the public sector."
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