Unemployment number down

smipsy

it just means that there's more non-eu people coming now, that's all.

lisyloo

It's adding population rather than workers?

Figures 4a and 4b show more people coming with a job and looking for work respectively.

I think you have to be careful trying to find nuance in an ONS snapshot at the best of times and even more careful trying to compare different survey datasets.

Ok, but how do you conclude EU workers are going home as opposed to arriving in lower numbers but still adding?

jonnygee2

What I'm seeing in that migration is still adding workers.

Fact check: the actual numbers of EU workers is falling fall for the first time in a long time - 86,000 less than this time last year.
Source

However net EU migration into the UK is positive.

lisyloo

jonnygee2 wrote: »

Fact check: the actual numbers of EU workers is falling fall for the first time in a long time - 86,000 less than this time last year.
Source

However net EU migration into the UK is positive.

Ah right, you have a later release.
Thanks.

jonnygee2

That said, of course, there is no evidence whatsoever that it's low paid workers who are leaving (or none that I know of yet).

EU-15 workers in the UK have a considerably higher average hourly wage than UK born workers, and are still just under 50% of the EU born UK workforce.

lisyloo

There's this



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44230865


https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/may/27/uk-farmers-strawberries-migrant-workers-crisis


But other factors are at play. !!!8220;The big problem isn!!!8217;t so much the referendum as the fact that unemployment in countries like Romania is falling very rapidly,!!!8221; Marston said.

lisyloo

Also
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45162132

It surveyed 2,000 employers and found the number of applicants per vacancy had dropped at every skill level - low, medium and high - since last summer.

jonnygee2

It surveyed 2,000 employers and found the number of applicants per vacancy had dropped at every skill level - low, medium and high - since last summer.

Interesting. That's kind of the result I expected really. EU workers leaving doesn't necessarily mean low skilled / low paid workers leaving. It means losing people from every sector of the labour market.

Thrugelmir

jonnygee2 wrote: »

I feel, more likely, it's to do with automation than immigration. Because automation of jobs is actually a real issue / threat, albeit it one that doesn't sell newspapers or get votes.

Productivity isn't increasing though. The UK has one of the lowewst rates in new technology such as IA.

Graham_Devon

It's all about the tax credits.

Tax credits are the only thing that keeps this going, and allows one job to be shared between 2-3 people. It allows people to work zero hour contracts. It allows people to work in low security jobs - afterall, the main income isn't the money you earn from your employment - it's tax credits.

18 years ago, tax credits cost taxpayers £1bn a year.

In 2015, they cost £30bn a year.

It's now very difficult to find any recent figures.

This isn't all that difficult, but it seems no one in the business will mention this. Any system which means you "take home" less for working 30 hours a week than you do for working 16 hours a week is going to radically alter employment stats.

And this doesn't even scratch the surface of "self employed" people who are basically self employed for tax credit purposes. The ONS shows self employment is now responsible for around 25% of all newly created employment. That's simply not normal in the UK. It's claimed it's a success. But scratch just a tiny bit past the surface and you find people self employed earning £90 a week and actually taking home £26k a year due to tax credits, then getting housing benefit on top!

To wrap this up, if unemployment was genuinely at the lowest it's been for 40 odd years, then why is social welfare spending also higher than it ever has been in the same timeframe? If this was genuinely good employment news, social welfare spending would be falling, not rising.