then:
Flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com
The recent employment numbers showed that the UK
has finally closed its jobs gap
– there are now as many people in work, as a
percentage of 16 to 64-year-olds, as
there were before the recession. But the headline
fi gure obscures the bad news,
says the Flip Chart Fairy Tales blogger.
There are regional variations: the recovery is weak
in the West Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland, and even the southeast
outside London still hasn’t recovered its pre-recession rate. Two thirds of the
jobs increase has come from self-employment and there are still fewer full-time
workers than there were in mid-2008. And pay remains in the doldrums.
Ernst & Young has predicted a lost decade, with
real-terms wages failing to get back to pre-recession levels before 2017. But
even this looks optimistic. Take the median wage and measure it against versions of the Retail Price Index that include
housing costs and wages don’t recover at all but continue to fall from their
post-2008 high. “Lost decade? We used to dream of a lost decade!”
Finally, there’s the rise of the machines. Optimists
say jobs lost to technological innovation will be replaced by work in the tech
industry, but it is now possible to build global behemoths like Google with a
workforce not much larger than that of a county council. You don’t need much imagination
to see the implications. So far, economic growth hasn’t done much for wages,
steady full-time employment or tax revenues. And there’s not a lot to suggest
this will change anytime soon.
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