You can tell the paleolithic right is feeling frisky when the old nonsense about lone parents starts up again. You know, the rants we used to get from Michael Portillo and others about feckless teenage girls getting themselves pregnant (amazing how they manage it by themselves, but there you go).
Of course, its all the [...]

Filed under: Child poverty, Inequality, Social exclusion, Welfare | No Comments »

New research shows that Pathways to Work – the Government’s main employment programme for disabled people – is being undermined by the determination to contract-out provision to private and voluntary sector organisations. The people who need the most help are losing out as a result and the pressure on resources is hurting the quality of [...]

Filed under: Labour market, Privatisation | No Comments »

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Guardian’s “Citizen Ethics” series, including an important article by Julian Glover (“Liberty is equality’s intractable opposite.”) The article is a good example of a certain strand of liberal criticism of the current government, and it’s worth going into why it’s wrong.

Filed under: Equality, Politics | No Comments »

I once heard a ‘radio expert’ say that most successful business people would be diagnosed as sociopaths if they were not rich. He confirmed my prejudices, so I was reluctant to decide this was one of those media facts – announced confidently, but with nothing to substantiate them. Today’s news has me wondering whether he [...]

Filed under: Financial crisis, They Just Don't Get It | 1 Comment »

Unemployment has been quite stable since last summer, with another small fall in today’s figures. As Nicola has reported, the results so far have been nowhere near as bad as most people expected at the start of the recession. It isn’t surprising that many people ask whether the unemployment figures tell the whole story – [...]

Filed under: Labour market | No Comments »

Reporting of pay trends in recent months has fallen back on a bunch of shared assumptions about what people have been paid last year and are likely to be paid this year. Unfortunately a lot of them are just plain wrong.
Here’s my top ten pay myths – see how many you can spot in your [...]

Filed under: Earnings, Recession | 1 Comment »

Last year’s pay reality was never as simple as some newspaper stories suggested. This year union pay negotiators will face the possibility of the return of inflation and rising unemployment, and a conflict with the Government over public sector pay. The TUC and IDS are organising a conference on Pay Bargaining in 2010 on 16 [...]

Filed under: Earnings | 1 Comment »

One of the Opposition’s key job creation policies is a National Insurance ‘holiday’ for new businesses; they claim that it would create tens of thousands of jobs. But we’ve been here before, last time there was a Conservative government, and it only managed to create just over 2,000 jobs.
At last year’s Conservative conference George Osborne [...]

Filed under: Economics, Recession | No Comments »

It is very hard to predict what tomorrow’s employment and unemployment figures will look like and very risky to pull out one month’s results and announce that we have either turned a corner or that things are worse than ever. These figures shift about a lot and there are plenty of ‘blips’ – odd months [...]

Filed under: Labour market, Recession | 1 Comment »

Yesterday’s figures capped was another month of mixed results. Once again, youth unemployment defied the pessimists and failed to pass the one million mark, the claimant count again showed signs of improvement, the number of people in employment rose and there was a tiny increase in vacancies. Other figures still look gloomy, especially for long-term [...]

Filed under: Labour market, Recession | 2 Comments »