Reasons for unemployment

[dave50]

As far as i can see the reasons for unemployment and why it will never be brought back under control are:
1. The rocketing house prices in the last ten years, meaning families need both partners to work to pay for a roof over their heads. Thirty years ago it took only one main wage earner to pay the mortgage.
2. People are now being made to work to an older age to recieve their state pension and paying off debts partly due to point 1, thus there are less employment opportunities for younger people to step on the employment ladder if fewer are retiring.
3. Lastly, the huge rise in immigration.

[Squitty]

The minimum wage has a big impact on unemployment.
The minimum wage isnt 6.08 to the employer - they have to pay a further 12% on top of that for employers NI. There are an awful lot of small companies with less than 10 employees that cannot afford to employ an extra person to allow the business to grow. This is where the government needs to add some help - just reduce employers NI for the first 5 employees or something like that

[venator]

Other factors -

We have exported jobs in manufacturing industries.
Most consumer goods are made in the far East, and their economies are booming.

We have allowed many UK companies to be bought by foreign companies, who protect their own factories in times of recession.

[RATTER15]

Eddie51, Im not in a union and never will be, I saw what they done to the country in the 70s and 80s. I have spoken to ACAS and then my Manager. My Manager has agreed to delete that part of the contract, it was a mistake apparently. We will see.

[Old_Geezer]

If one needs to underpay someone to get one's business to grow, then maybe growing that particular business isn't viable. One should not abuse another's desperation to achieve riches for oneself.

[owdhamer]

I was talking to a guy the other week, he was a bit loud and flash a true jack the lad, and he was telling me he ran his own business selling fireplaces, i can sell sand to the arabs, ice to an eskimo,etc, and most people that come into the shop go out with a fireplace.The problem is customers are just not coming in any more, and i am going to have to lay some staff off.It is a sign of the times

[venator]

Many of our jobs are now in distribution, retail and service industries - see my post above.

These are low skilled employments where the minimum wage is the norm, and length of service counts for very little.

Buy British?

[rov1100]

When the country's biggest employer, the State, decides to axe thousands of jobs unemployment will rise also.

As the biggest sector in the UK is the service industry why is it wrong for the State to supply services which could keep hundreds of thousands in their jobs? There are many entrepenaurs would could run it and make a profit in the long run!

[Kromovaracun]

I haven't yet had time to read the question, but I do have a factor in unemployment to introduce which doesn't seem to have been discussed - technology. Productivity-increasing technology is costing low-skill manual jobs to some degree or another in all of the developed world. Before the recession, for instance, I seem to remember both France and Germany sustaining unemployment rates of about 7-9% (if I remember right), and much higher in Spain while comparable in Italy. And I'm not even sure about Eastern Europe but certainly in America I think it's pretty hard to deny that sectors which previously relied on large-scale and low-skill labour are employing less and aless people and has been for years - which is partly because of global competition and partly because of technology.

Obviously technology creates jobs too - it creates particular kinds of jobs which are higher skilled (i.e. require more training) and more specialised. Personally, I think this explains the fundamental difference that makes immigration affect unemployment the way that it does - it introduces unwelcome competition for increasingly scarce low-skilled (and I suppose lower-paid) work that a huge number of people (including 'natives') are competing for; but sectors based on higher-skilled work (the ones normally cited here are medicine, but also services, IT etc etc) have grown so much they can easily afford to absorb the new labour along with 'home-grown' ones.

But I have to say often get the feeling that people are a little unwilling to discuss the impact of technology on this issue because it's much more complicated and solutions (if there are any) are far more ambiguous and difficult...