Employment figures are due out later this week, but the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has pre-empted the official line with an assessment of the impact of the recession on the UK labour market.
The report notes unemployment has not kept pace with the overall fall in production. This means the relationship between the economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s and the unemployment figures of the day have not been echoed this time around.
CIPD chief economist John Philpott put this mismatch down to the willingness by the country’s employed population to accept reductions in incomes for everyone over job cuts for some. He termed it the Shared Pain Recession.
The demographic that is most at risk of redundancy is male, full-time, blue collar, unskilled and elderly or young.
There are three forecasts from the CIPD about how the country will emerge from the current recession:
- Jobs-lined recovery: sustained growth matched by steady improvement in employment and a return to pre-recession job levels by 2012. Not very likely.
- Jobs-light recovery: a modest economic growth supported by a corresponding gradual increase in job creation, returning to pre-recession levels after 2015. The most probable outcome.
- Jobs-loss recovery: a weak economic growth insufficient to persuade employers to invest in jobs. Unemployment continues to rise to a peak of 3.5million in the next decade and no return to pre-recession employment levels for the next decade. Possible but not probable.
Speaking to Philpott last week, he made a few predictions on the job market in the near future:
- The current altruism employees are showing by taking the pain of the recession together will not last forever. Should more prosperous times return quickly, workers will return to a more selfish attitude about work.
- If we slide into a jobs-loss recovery, employees will eventually become disengaged and their willingness to be flexible about pay and working conditions will melt away. According to Philpott, this is a finite resource.
- The winners of the current job market contraction won’t see a sustained dominance. Older workers who escaped the chop because of the shared pain approach are still vulnerable to employers wanting to focus on bringing in staff with less miles on the clock.
- Women as a segment of the employable population have been more likely to avoid redundancy so far because there are more female staff in public sector employment. Expected cuts in public spending will level this out.
(Pic: masochismtango cc2.0)
