Employment Figures

[Fittster]

"If anyone is daft enough to think that today’s fall in the claimant count measure of unemployment means that the labour market is improving, one fact should disabuse them - the number of full-time employees fell by 82,000 between November-January and February-April.
This means that only 47.7% of the working age population, and only 36.5% of the adult population, are full-time employees.
In other words, what we were brought up to think of as “normal” is, in fact, a minority activity, and is only barely a majority activity even for working-age men, only 55.8% of whom are full-time employees.
This low proportion is not merely the result of the recession. Even before the slump, the proportion of men who are full-time employees was falling slightly.
This is not because of an increase in self-employment; this ratio has hovered around 10% of the population for some time. Instead, it’s due (statistically if not causally speaking) in part to increasing numbers of students and part-timers."

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One day that large state that ensure people don't have to work if they don't want is going to fail in a hopefully entertaining way.

[Engineer1]

Ranting about high unemployment at a time when companies are still restructuring is a little rich. There are still people losing jobs and probably still more to come, companies are still struggling, one of my friends has been made redundant from a bank (she was one of the tellers/ counter workers in a branch). I'm not 100% that all the job losses from bank takeovers have shaken out. It will take probably 18months to two years of growth before unemployment starts to drop as companies will have laid off all the unnecessary employees and probably improved efficiency.