UK Election Podcast 3
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the More or Less Election podcast, number three, a collection of interviews that were first broadcast on Radio 4's PM programme with Eddie Mair. Tim Harford and Ruth Alexander took turns to shine a light on the numbers of the campaign. On Friday the 17th of April, the Office for National Statistics published its final set of Labour figures before the election. Ruth Alexander was invited on to discuss them.
So employment's up, as we know. There are more than 31 million adults in employment now. That gives us a rate of 73.4%, the highest employment rate since comparable records began in the 70s, 1971. One of the big trends is rising self-employment, and the unemployment rate is down to 5.6%. That's the lowest it's been since July 2008, and much lower than the Eurozone average, and better than the US.
And David Cameron says he's overseen a jobs miracle.
He does, yes. The Conservative campaign message is that two million jobs have been created since 2010, about a thousand jobs a day, as they also like to say, and it's about right. But it's politically difficult for David Cameron that about half of these jobs have gone to people who weren't born in the UK, although a good chunk of these people are UK nationals. So about a third of Cameron's new jobs have gone to non-UK nationals. Taking a longer term view, it's interesting, the number of non-UK nationals working in the UK has tripled since 1997 when new Labour came into office. There were almost a million then and almost three million today, making up just under 10% of the workforce. And this is in large part down to new countries entering the EU with their populations gaining the right to work here.
Labour argues the new jobs are low quality.
Yes, although we struggle here because there's no official job quality indicator we can turn to. What we do know is that part-time jobs were a fifth of all new jobs over the past year. However, 16% of people with part-time jobs, 1.3 million people... said that really they wanted a full-time job but hadn't been able to get one. That's dropped a little over the past year or so, but these numbers are still higher than they were before the economic crash. There's a lot of concern about zero-hours contracts, isn't there? And Ian Duncan Smith saying today he suggests that they just need a rebrand and be known as flexible-hours contracts. Anyway, unfortunately, it's hard to work out what the trend is in terms of how many people are on zero-hours contracts.
A survey of workers found there were 700,000 people on them, a bit more than 2% of people in employment. This was a big increase on the previous year, but it might be that people are just familiar with the term now and so more likely to say, oh yes, I'm on a zero-hours contract.
Is the UK jobs market experiencing a 'miracle' with record employment figures?
But we can look at pay, I suppose.
Yes, and the Green Party's Natalie Bennett made a point about this in the election debate on BBC One last night. She was expressing sympathy for new graduates on the hunt for jobs.
You're going out into a workplace where one in five workers is on less than a living wage. People aren't paid enough money to live on. They're indeed stacking up debts just to meet their basic costs.
Is she right that one in five workers is earning less than the living wage?
Yes, pretty much it's an estimate by KPMG, but a fairly good one. It's not a solid number, an estimate, but still. The living wage, in case you're wondering, is £7.85 an hour, and it's said to be what you need to earn to cover basic needs. It's more than a pound higher than the national minimum wage, the legal requirement, which is £6.50 an hour. Turning them both into full-time annual salaries, the living wage is about £15,000. The minimum wage is about £12,500.
So those figures are easy to quantify. More difficult, I suppose, is working out how people feel about their working lives.
Yeah, we've been making inquiries today. Apparently the most significant research in this area is the Measuring National Wellbeing Survey from the Office for National Statistics.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:40
2
Is the UK jobs market experiencing a 'miracle' with record employment figures?
2:40–5:35
3
How much of the jobs growth is due to non-UK nationals and what does that imply?
5:35–9:36
4
Are new jobs full-time and high-quality or driven by part-time and zero‑hours contracts?
9:36–13:36
5
How do wages compare to the living wage and what does that mean for graduates?
13:36–16:42