Doubt on coalition's '500,000 new jobs' claim

Generali

Shakethedisease wrote: »

As for your belief that employment is at an 'all time high' is accurate in the UK currently ? Surely you jest ? :rotfl:

Oh and will you look at that:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/december-2012/table-a02.xls (opens in Excel)

Column F, series MGRZ, "Total in employment". If you type the formula =MAX(F9:F508) then that will return the highest value in that data series. The highest figure is the one in cell F508, 29,600,907 which is the latest figure for total employment.

It is correct to state that the last employment figure is the highest ever number of employed. So no, I don't jest.:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

grizzly1911

Generali wrote: »

On re-reading, my post comes across as needlessly aggressive. It wasn't my intent and I'm sorry.

My point, made inelegantly as well as boorishly, is that the reasons for categorizing people as employed or unemployed as well as economically inactive are complex.

Take youth unemployment for example. On the face of it, youth unemployment rates are through the roof however it's complex: far more kids go to Uni than was the case 25 years ago for example. Uni students are almost all excluded from the denominator of potentially unemployed. That will tend to push up the unemployment rate massively.

This isn't to dismiss that there is a problem, clearly the UK has faced tough times since 2008 at least and is likely to continue to do so for a while. Misrepresenting the scale of the problem helps nobody.

I know it isn't your usual style;).

The point about "economically unactive" was only part of my original post, a contributory factor not the factor as people fall out of employment. I know why they are classified as such.

Generali

Where have all the Labour propagandists gone? I guess we're all agreed then, employment has never been higher.

DecentLivingWage

Generali wrote: »

Where have all the Labour propagandists gone? I guess we're all agreed then, employment has never been higher.

Depends if youre talking about genuine waged employment or tax-payer funded pseudo employment? Next unemployment projections are bringing a horrible shock...

Entertainer

DecentLivingWage wrote: »

Depends if youre talking about genuine waged employment or tax-payer funded pseudo employment? Next unemployment projections are bringing a horrible shock...

FYI the number of people on government employment schemes counted in the LFS employment numbers has gone up by 54,000 since 2010. It was 160,000 in 2010 and 214,000 in 2012. It's all there on the ONS website.

To get their 100,000 number, the Guardian did a neat little trick of taking the past year as their reference point when the numbers were artificially lower in 2011 due to the axing of the Future Jobs programme which was then replaced by the Work Programme. Because they would never spin a story so they could beat up the government would they? They are the saints of phone hacking after all.