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Underemployment is a long-term problem - It's not just the recession
Date Posted: 20/02/2012
I think there's something significant missing from the commentary on this week's employment statistics. That's the fact that underemployment isn't new, and isn’t just a feature of the 2008-onwards crash.
It seems pretty clear. The overall total number of people who are unemployed dropped gradually from 1993 to 2004, then started rising gently, and then bumped up in 2009. What's really interesting is that across that period, the two lightest sections – part-time workers who want to go full-time, and the economically inactive wanting a job – remain roughly constant. Consistently across the period (1993 to 2011), two million or so people fit into this category.
What does this mean? Well, our current unemployment is still bad. Obviously. But it also means we have had a serious lack of jobs for a sustained period. In the long term, that is a bigger, and arguably much scarier, problem.
