The road to a jobs recovery is longer than it seems
James Plunkett
This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post
For anyone hoping to sift a nugget of gold from recent economic data, employment stats have been the place to look. In the past year, the number of people working in the UK has risen faster than at any time since 1989, a remarkable performance from an economy with close to zero growth. Not only have these figures befuddled economists, prompting much debate of a productivity puzzle, but they've also encouraged a sanguine view of the jobs recovery. As the prime minister and leading commentators have been fond of pointing out - and rightly so - employment is now back to pre-crisis levels, making this one of the few economic indicators not keeping the Chancellor up at night.
Yet step back from a narrow focus on the number of people in work and the challenge we face on employment is daunting.
Why We Need to Take Another Look at Older Employment
Giselle Cory
This blog originally appeared on the Huffington Post
More people are working for longer. One in eight people now work past their retirement age, up for one in 12 in 2000 according to new stats from ONS. This is good news. Working for longer is to be welcomed at a time when people are living longer, healthier lives. But before we congratulate ourselves on supporting longer working lives, two important factors need to be taken into account.
Firstly, gender counts. Nearly two out of three of the 1.4m older people in work are women. Across the age profile, female participation has been going up for quite some time so we would expect this trend to be reflected within older age groups. But there is another factor at play. The UK has a relatively low female state pension age (SPA).
More than a minimum?
Gavin Kelly
This post first appeared on Gavin Kelly's New Statesman blog.
Once in a while a policy moves from being partisan and divisive to representing the mainstream consensus in a very short period of time. That is, or at least was, the case with the national minimum wage (NMW). It wasn’t so long ago it was denigrated by much of the business community and the then Conservative opposition - but only a few years later it acquired a very different status as a statement of the bleeding obvious. The result, according to a timely new report by Professor Alan Manning, is that it has ‘settled down into a premature staid middle age’ following a noisy infancy without ever having passed through a teenage rebellion.
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