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17 July 2013updated 22 Oct 2020 3:55pm

Real wages down and unemployment stubbornly high, but could that be good news?

Unemployment's fall has stopped, but that could signal a recovery in productivity.

By Alex Hern

The ONS has released the latest labour market statistics, showing a 0.2 percentage point decline in the unemployment rate to 7.8 per cent in the last three months (2.51 million unemployed people, down by 57,000 people). The employment rate, however, was also down by 0.1 percentage points to 71.4 per cent over the same period (29.71 million employed people, up by 17,000 people).

Other headline stats show long term unemployment increasing by 15,000 to the highest level since 1996, youth unemployment decreasing by 0.2 percentage points to 20.9 per cent, and total pay increasing by 1.7 per cent, leading to a 1 per cent decrease in real wages.

As you can see from the first graph above, the quarter-on-quarter fall in unemployment is largely reversing the rise that was reported this spring. If you look at the month-on-month statistics, designated as “experimental” by the ONS due to their habit of fluctuating fairly wildly, we can see that unemployment was down by slightly over half a percentage point since April.

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That’s important, because it adds further support to the theory that the long-term improvement in the labour market has been replaced by stagnation. Economics reporters tend to focus on the fact that unemployment is down from a high of 8.4 per cent, even against a background of stagnant GDP. And indeed, for over a year, that decline was nearly constant. But the unemployment rate hit a low in December of last year, and since then it has been fluctuating in the high sevens.

That’s bad news for Cameron and Osborne, because falling unemployment was frequently used as a fig leaf to cover the atrocious GDP growth. All the signs indicate that next week’s GDP figures will be good, but they may not be good enough.

But it might paradoxically be good news for the country. The disconnect between employment and growth was due to productivity in Britain plummeting. In simple terms, a British worker doing an hour’s work simply wasn’t producing as much value after the recession as they were before. There’s a lot of theories as to why, ranging from low morale and lazy workers to insipid investment and low demand, but regardless of why, they all point to the same conclusion: if GDP is to properly take off, productivity has to recover. The hope is that slowing decline in unemployment could be because the recovery is coming to productivity; and our catch-up growth might finally be around the corner.

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