Soft landing for the labour market
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Paul Mason’s superb blog “Idle Scrawl” on the Newsnight website asks whether the UK labour market will prove to be more resilient that expected in the face of a downturn.
In one scenario, the brunt of the job losses are felt by migrant workers who may already be looking to head home in large numbers. There are also millions of hours of overtime that can be cut by employers anxious not to curtail their payroll if it means losing skilled workers they spent time and money recruiting in the first place. Another factor to bear in mind is the positive employment impact of major infrastructural projects such as Cross Rail and London 2012 which will kick in over the next couple of years.
And finally, the true test of a flexible labour market is how it responds to difficult economic times - specifically whether workers who may lose their jobs have enough geographical and occupational mobility to find fresh employment reasonsably quickly. In contrast to the mass unemployment of the early 1980s and 1990s, Paul’s piece is guardedly optimistic. And in a week when the papers have been full of headlines of thousands of workers facing redundancy, it is a welcome counterweight to the general gloom and doom.
He writes: “large parts of UK industry and services have a more skilled and versatile workforce than 25 years ago.”
See also: “Flexible workers bend unemployment trend” (Telegraph)
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Unit 2 Macro: Cyclical and Structural Economic Issues Facing the UK [23 May 2012]
Unit 2 Macro: Evaluation on Supply-Side Policies [21 May 2012]
Unit 2 Macro: Migration and the UK Economy [20 May 2012]
Unit 2 Macro: Positive and Negative Multiplier Effects [20 May 2012]
Unit 2 Macro: The Importance of Productivity [20 May 2012]
Unit 2 Macro: Measuring Unemployment in the UK [20 May 2012]
Q&A: What do we need to know about output gaps? [20 May 2012]
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