From yesterday's FT. I'm not sure why they contrast this with the increasing number of pensioners, but what the heck.
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UPDATE: Curmudgeon mentions that official unemployment figures have been massaged by shifting people onto Incapacity Benefit. To put the official number of unemployed of 2.7 million into perspective, here's Parliament's official chart showing the number of IB claimants since 1979:
We don't need no stinkin' objectivity
1 hour ago
11 comments:
Hmm yes - people in the plus 65 age group represent it would seem about one fifth of the population and yet this age group only accounts for one twenty-fifth of the number of people registered as unemployed - shocking !
Er, any chance of informing us who don't have access to the FT in print or on line what point they were trying to make - they undoubtedly explained because the FT wouldn't just "publish some fun graphs" without explaining the context for doing so and what they illustrated, would it ?
Anon, your maths is out of whack. The graph clearly says that about 4% of over 65s are registered unemployed x 12.5 million people = 500,000 people which is over a sixth of the registered unemployed of 2.8 million.
Heck knows why people entitled to old age pensions would register as unemployed. The more salient point the article makes is that 12% of people over state pension age are still working.
Far be it from me to suggest a deliberate misreading of the graphs for the purposes of making the point "but what are they trying to say" .. anyway, thanks for confirming my proper reading that suggested that quite a lot of people aged 65 plus are registered as unemployed (because they are "actively looking for work and can't find it") and that a significant chunk, almost an eighth of the total 65+ age group, are still working. Or as I saw elsewhere recently "a study shows that times are hard for the young and the old just now, with people who would have expected to have retired by now having to carry on working and a substantial number of people of retirement age actively looking for work to help boost their incomes" ...
Anon, that's another clever aspect of Home-Owner-Ism.
Actually, it's the Baby Boomers age 45 - 65 who are behind it, but they use proper old people as human shields (see: Poor Widow Bogey, the state should fund old age care so we can inherit their overpriced houses etc etc). Proper old people with just a state pension and f- all interest on their savings haven't done nearly as well out of the house price boom and the recession as the 45 - 65 age group, who have won on the interest rate and house price swings and lost little on the unemployment roundabouts.
"Heck knows why people entitled to old age pensions would register as unemployed."
They're not "registering as unemployed". The current headline unemployment figure comes from a population survey and is the number of those actively looking for work, not those claiming benefit. If you're over 65 and actively looking for work, you're included.
C, thanks for additional info. The FT credit 'Nomis' as the source, are they the people who do the surveys?
I don't know exactly how the surveys are done - no doubt Google could help ;-)
The current claimant count unemployment is about 1.6 million, whereas in the depth of the early 80s recession it was over 3 million, so things are not as bad now as then. BBC report here.
However, bear in mind that, unless you have zero or minimal savings, Jobseeker's Allowance only lasts 6 months, so once people have exceeded that period they will have to fall back on savings and the support of relatives.
C, the figure of 1.6 million is just people on JSA, the official total jobless is 2.8 million, per the BBC. The balance is people on IS, IB and so on.
Irritatingly, in that BBC report, Red Ed blames this all on the Tories, when it is more fair to say that unemployment shot up in the last two years that Labour were in government and has barely changed since. Which is hardly surprising, given their Home-Owner-Ist polcies, which includes mass immigration to stoke demand for housing and pushes lower paid out of work completely.
2.7 million, not 2.8 million, sorry.
"The balance is people on IS, IB and so on."
But they weren't in the early 80s 3 million either. Although it's often said that in the 1980s there was a deliberate policy to shift people from unemployment to invalidity benefit.
Also the 2.7 million doesn't include all those on IB, only those claiming to be actively seeking work.
C, that's the problem with unemployment statistics, they invent a new way of massaging the figures down every year, so while a short term comparison is meaningful, comparing the headline figure today with that of thirty years ago probably isn't.
For example, the idea of shifting older unemployed people onto IB was a Tory idea to mask unemployment figures in our former "industrial heartlands", and unsurprisingly enough, the number of IB claimants under Labour remained absolutely unchanged. Labour's other wizard wheeze was pushing more people into higher education, which worked a treat until it stopped working. Add to that 2 million make-work non-jobs which Labour created (and the Tories don't dare get rid of)...
But what is clear is that young people are pretty much f-ed. And the current government couldn't really give a shit either because these people aren't homeowners.
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