The political class have been boasting in recent weeks about the record high levels of employment in Britain.
But a briefing paper published earlier this summer by Migration Watch UK has exposed the Office for National Statistics’ data as “misleading”.
The record rates of employment reported by the Labour Force Survey (LFS) fail to recognise the real scale of underemployment in Britain.
The LFS counts the proportion of people aged between 16-64 who have done some paid work during the week in which they were surveyed.
The ONS does reveal that in April-June last year, there were about 1 million people working part-time who would have loved a full-time job.
This is almost double the rate recorded before the 2008 financial crisis.
However, this fails to record those who are either in part-time or full-time work, but who desire to work more hours each week.
Migration Watch UK suggested that this underemployment is as high as 3 million – and when the “traditional unemployed” are added, this means that around 4 million people in the UK are either out of work, or looking for more paid hours.
Add in those who are “discouraged” or only “marginally attached” to the labour market, and there are perhaps up to 5 million people who cannot secure the work they need.
The level of underemployment rate remains “noticeably higher” than it was before the recession, and is most acute amongst men in their late twenties.
Research by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2015 revealed that 1 out of 6 self-employed workers were doing so out of an inability to secure a decent job as an employee.
Last year, the number of self-employed workers peaked at 4.7million.
British jobs going to foreign workers
Migration Watch UK explain that this rising tide of underemployment correlates with the substantial increase in overseas workers arriving here in the UK in recent decades.
This seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labour from those less industrious countries has meant that employers have discriminated against British workers by offering pay and conditions that favour foreigners.
Migration Watch UK observed that while the migrant population from within and outside the EU swelled between 2008-2013, the jobless rate for British-born people stayed unacceptably high.
According to Nickell and Salaheen (2015), there is clear evidence that the growing migrant population sinks pay for British-born workers, particularly in the semi-skilled and unskilled services sector.
Shouldn’t we have a government and industry that backs the home-grown British worker to build businesses and our economy, as it did so successfully in the past?
After all, it was here in Britain that good capitalism was born, and it was the British that spearheaded the Industrial Revolution.
Does our economy exist to provide jobs for immigrants, or is it for the British people to fulfil their potential and provide for themselves and their families?
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