Think the good jobs are massaged by Workfare? Think again

A somewhat amusing pastime, when one’s bored, is to look at the responses to any of George Osborne’s tweets. The internet may be full of irate ranters, but nothing inspires outrage and knee-jerk verbal abuse quite like a bit of positive No11 spin posted on Twitter.

 

While enjoying this activity over the last year, I’ve noticed that many of these responses accuse the government of boosting employment figures by shifting people onto controversial programmes such as Workfare.

 

One such tweet from this morning:

 

Other accusations include the claim that many of the new jobs are part-time or classified as self-employed when in fact they are not what most of us would see as “real jobs”.

 

So – are these criticisms fair?

 

In the final three months of last year, 161,000 fewer people were unemployed than a year earlier. During that 12 month period, employment shot up by 396,000.

 

And the unemployment rate fell from 7.8 per cent to 7.2 per cent.

 

Impressive, no? But how much of the improvement was accounted for by Workfare?

 

During that period, the number of people in government-supported training and employment programmes actually went down – falling by 22,000.

 

While there are 30.15m people employed in the UK, just 141,000 are on these government schemes.

 

Note also that many people on these schemes are paid – it’s not all Workfare. And people enrolled on schemes but who are still inactive – ie. if they’re not actually doing training or work – are not included in the 141,000, but are still classified as unemployed or economically inactive.

 

 

Another way of finding unpaid jobs is by looking at the number of people helping out with a family business without being paid a wage. This number is also down by 6,000 over the past year, to just 105,000.

 

And part-time work is also down, falling by 12,000 in a year – while full-time work has shot up by 408,000.

 

So if we look at government schemes (down 22,000), unpaid family workers (down 6,000) and part-time work (down 12,000) – that’s 40,000 off the employment numbers. And yet employment is up by 396,000.

 

However, it is true that self-employment has also jumped again:

 

While 273,000 more people are working for employers over the year, the number of self-employed people is up by 150,000. Some of this may be folk doing some freelance work because they cannot get a job that they want – a predictable occurrence following a downturn.

 

But surely we should not regard self-employment as somehow less valuable or less positive as a supposed “real” job.

 

Right then – nothing left to moan about, eh? Well, there is one thing. The Office for National Statistics estimates that, at the end of last year, over half a million people were on so-called “zero hours” contracts – which are basically deals with employers where you are paid by the hour but do not have a set, guaranteed number of working hours per week.

 

The ONS warns that the sharp hike in this figure – up from 250,000 at the end of 2012 – is likely influenced by the amount of media coverage that zero hours contracts have received.

 

Nonetheless, it’s a new stick to beat Osborne with. Sorry George, but we suspect you’ll see a lot of comments about zero hours contracts on your timeline in the coming days.