If the numbers in work keeps going up at this rate, well, by this time next year, Rodney …

Entire post emailed in by Bob E.

The publication of the Labour Market Statistics for September 2012 by the ONS has seen the traditional hurried raft of “cut,n’paste the press release” newspaper pieces and the equally traditional politicos currently in power desperate to get their carefully pre-prepared sound bite statement of “the good news, how the numbers in work is rising and how that justifies all the government’s policies and special measures and proves they are working” reported, ideally on the Six O’Clock news. And today the “headline” good news was really really startling … and no it wasn’t “look what hosting the Olympics has delivered” although there was some attempt to try and suggest an immediate positive benefit of that £10 billion (and counting) outlay. The really big news was

The number of people in work increased by 236,000 to 29.6 million, which is the largest quarterly rise for two years.

Well there you go! The number of people in work has gone up, and massively so. Unconfined joy all round. Well not quite all round as a few people found this massive leap in the numbers in work difficult to reconcile when set alongside certain other stats and were left scratching their heads:

The jobless total fell by 7,000 in the quarter to July to 2.59 million, an unemployment rate of 8.1%.

The Office for National Statistics said the number claiming Jobseeker's Allowance last month was 1.57 million, down by 15,000 on July – the largest monthly fall since June 2010.

Other figures revealed the number of part-time workers increased by 134,000 to reach 8.12 million – the highest since records began in 1992.

The number of Britons working part-time because they could not find a full-time job also hit a record high of 1.42 million.

The figures also showed the number of people out of work for over a year was the highest for more than 16 years – at 904,000, up 22,000 on the previous quarter.

And alongside those, we shall call them apparent inconsistencies; there was also other data around on the UK economy which was even more difficult difficult to square with the “massive jump in the numbers in employment”. The Guardian was so confused (Latest UK jobs figures raise the 'productivity puzzle') it opened to the matter up to public debate, by posing the question of its readers If the economy is shrinking, why have firms continued to create jobs, albeit many of them part-time? thus immediately answering its own question – although it required a reader to point out that they had done so :-

... if you take 1 million people in full time employment, sack them, re-employ them on 18 hrs per week at lower wages, recruit another 2 million on the same lower wage, unemployment is decreased by 2 million. Chances are [the] deficit will increase (less taxes and no NI contributions), GDP will fall, yet magically unemployment falls. Simples.

Which explanation would have been evident to anyone bothering to actually read the ONS bulletin rather than just quote the press release as it points out for anyone who cares enough to actually read it that since the last "peak" employment figure was registered the overall increase in part time (which includes "zero hours contracts") jobs doesn't even match the fall in full time jobs since

Between March to May 2008, when the number of people in employment reached a pre-recession peak of 29.57 million, and May to July 2012:

• the number of people in full-time employment fell by 640,000
• the number of people in part-time employment increased by 628,000
• the number of unemployed people increased by 978,000

and better yet that bulletin published today includes a graph illustrating what is actually going on...So, if the numbers ‘in work’ keeps going up at this rate, well, this time next year... ooh nasty but don't expect that to persuade the politicos to drop their obsessive insistence that "the only figure that matters is the number of people 'in work'".