There's a nice summary in yesterday's FT, if you can be bothered to register.
In brief, number of jobs 'created' since 1997 = 2.7 million
Number of migrant workers = 1.3 million (splitting difference between possible lower and higher figures)
Number of additional jobs in 'Public administration, education and health' from Spring 1997 to Winter 2006 = 1.9 million (column L of this)
By subtraction, number of additional jobs in private sector since 1997 = 0.8 million
Right.
Creating that many new public sector jobs would be bad enough*, but even assuming that migrant workers primarily work in the private sector, at least half a million migrants must be working in the public sector
The bottom line? Nulab have been creating public sector make-work jobs to suck in immigrants and keep them happy.
* To massage the unemployed stats, to create an army of captive voters and to achieve Nulab's socialist Big State ideals etc etc.
Local Council Efficiency
2 hours ago
10 comments:
I'm not so sure it's the migrants doing the make-work jobs - I think much of it is in fact the chattering classes who have moved up in the world from library assistant and Job Centre receptionist to Executive Equality Resource Manager and Climate Change Services Officer. The immigrants fill the old jobs now vacant.
That is a good point.
But it is still sucking in immingrants indirectly. The net effect is the same.
I'm not sure how you get your figures. If you look at the first 3 columns you can see the size of the workforce and the percentage employed in the public and private sectors.
The workforce has grown from 26,352,000 to 28,812,000 and the percentage of public sector jobs risen from 23.2% of the lower figure to 24.8% of the higher figure.
I make that 1,428,288 new private sector jobs and 1,031,712 new public sector jobs with 2.46 million new jobs rather than your figure of 2.7 million new jobs.
Not that this detracts from your main point, and in fact you've missed something - NuLabour want to give these economic migrants a vote in our General Elections. I wonder why...?
Wildgoose, you are looking at the wrong column.
You have to look at Column "L", this includes all the para-statals, the quangoes, the universities, the state-funded charities, GPs etc etc. who technically are not public sector!
The figure of 2.7 million is from the FT article. Maybe it's only 2.5 million.
Very good point on foreigners' votes. I didn't put it in the original post because I try to keep them short'n'snappy.
There's another issue not addressed in the spreadsheet or Mark's argument: those of working age but not working.
NuLabour claim that the number of "unemployed", ie those on the dole, has fallen. But the number on incapacity benefits and those school leavers dragooned into further studies have both increased.
Without being able to reconcile those numbers as well, we could be seriously over/under-estimating the problem.
Personally given the way this government screws things up, I'd guess Mark's underestimating but without the numbers one cannot tell.
The number of working age people on benefits has stayed just above 5 million since 1999 (see link to Benefit claimants in my 'Statistics and stuff' section!
Increase in student numbers is only a couple of hundred thousand. I think for the purposes of your argument, we'd have to find out how many more are getting grants than ten years ago.
The interesting question is, who are those two or three million people neither on benefits nor in work/taxpayers? Well, it's married full time mums and students from better off households. Which is the right-wing spin on universal benefits!
Ah, I see what you mean.
Something else to consider is the news that a "third" of the food we buy is wasted.
Of course, there is an alternative explanation for the gap between the amount of food we buy and the number of people in the country.
There could be far more people in the country than the government is prepared to admit!
How many of the migrants are filling new jobs as builders needed in the property boom?
WW, there might be a property-price boom, but there's no construction boom.
Look at the link for employment stat's in the original post, numbers in construction up from 1.9 million to 2.3 million over last ten years.
But it's a fair point - surely a significant fraction (half?) of construction workers are foreigners.
Hmm. Not sure what to say now, short of making a wild guess.
WW, having given this some thought, one possible answer might be that all of the increase in construction jobs (400,000) is foreign workers.
Assuming there are an extra 0.8 million foreign workers in the private sector overall (i.e. 1.3 million minus 0.5 million in public sector), then there are another 400,000 foreign workers in catering etc etc.
But actually, this doesn't make much difference to the overall argument.
My point was, the increase in private sector employment (as defined by me) over the last ten years is less than the number of additional foreign workers.
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