Compare and contrast these 2 views on employment prospects:

The first is the current (optimistic) view as expounded by the Bank of England; the second is 1 week older, and is vastly more pessimistic (thank you to Emily for sending the news clip). Both have something to add to your essays:

http://news.sky.com/story/1371766/cost-of-living-pay-rises-outpace-inflation

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.