Labour Market Report

Labour Market Report

Section 1

Earnings: wages plus overtime pay, bonuses and commission

Employment: Those who are in paid work

Unemployment: Those who are out of work

Economically active: Working age people who are either employed or unemployed

Economically inactive: Working age people who are neither in employment, nor unemployed, and so are not part of the labour force

Labour Force Participation rate: The Proportion of working age people who are economically active

Section 2

Unemployment tends to centre on certain areas more than others, Office for National Statistics have done a recent report to find the unemployment level in the UK. Birmingham tends to have the highest unemployment rates in the UK with two areas getting high attention; Hodge Hill (10.4%) and Ladywood (11.9%), Sparkbrook (9.3%) and Erdington (8.9%) also are very high and within Birmingham. Other highly affected areas in the UK include Middlesbrough and Liverpool which peak at highs of around 7-8%.

Just under half of those who are unemployed are classified as youth, which has been steadily on the rise since late 2003, but it has dropped off slightly in the last few months.

The graph below shows the unemployment rates for the working age population (people aged 16 to 64) and for three smaller categories - 25-49, 18-24 and 16-17. The 24-49 age group has a very low unemployment percentage, but it is clear that the 16-17 and 18-24 age groups are much more sensitive to the state of the economy. The unemployment rate is higher for the younger groups and the size of this gap widens during a recession.

The graph also shows that the unemployment rate for the 16-17 and 18-24 age groups has increased by more than the unemployment rate for older groups since the beginning of the recession.

Looking at the year before the recession and the year after its start, the graph below shows that the proportion of people who are unemployed rose, for all ethnicities, for men and for women, and regardless of whether they were born in the UK or outside.

The largest increase by ethnicity is for the Black Caribbean group, where a higher proportion of people were already unemployed. But the second highest is in the Indian group, where unemployment was previously low.

So while it wouldn't be correct to say that all groups have been hit equally, it is true that unemployment has affected the whole population, with no one ethnic group and neither gender being hit disproportionately.

The latest figures show that there are 77,000 less jobs in the public sector than last year. This comes after two years of rises, which have kept unemployment numbers steady. Nationalising large financial institutions, growths in education and health have all played a major part. The latest figures, however, show every public employment falling in every industry compared to last year - apart from the education sector, which has grown by 20,000 people in the last year.

There are 1.48 m unemployed men in the UK, this is up 43,000 in the last three months and there are 1.02 m unemployed females in the UK, this is up 6,000 in the last three months.

Section 3

Youth unemployment has hit a record high. The total number of adults under 25 who are out of work neared to the 1 million mark recently, rising by 32,000 to 951,000. This pushed the youth unemployment rate up to 20.3%, which is also the highest level since 1992. There was a particularly sharp rise in the number of 16 and 17-year-olds that are unemployed, rather than in employment or education, up to 204,000 from 177,000.

The most likely cause of the high rate of youth unemployment isn't that youngsters are work shy or have been priced out of the labour market by the minimum wage. It is rather that the older generation already in work have accepted pay freezes, or even pay cuts, in order to stay in their jobs. The effect of that has been that employers have been able to keep on most of their workers, which is why the overall unemployment rate has been lower than expected during the recession.

The gender pay gap is there not due to the difference in work quality between men and women, but it is due to other factors