Let’s start with the facts. Employment levels didn’t just recover after the deepest recession in living memory: they’ve gone on to exceed the high point before the crash when we were supposedly at full employment. As the report sets out, there are three million more people in work now than in 2008 and the employment rate is three percentage points higher. [...]
One might also add the growing ease with which employers can offshore production, not to mention the onward march of automation. Indeed, this is an era in which pundits breathlessly predict wholesale replacement of the human workforce with robots. They may be proved right — eventually; but thank goodness for authors like Bell and Gardiner, who attend to things that are happening on a relevant timescale. [...]
As the report itself makes clear, the employment surge is concentrated among lower income groups, who also saw stronger earnings growth than the rest of the population. So while the authors make a strong case for the income shock hypothesis, they under-emphasise the role of welfare-to-work policies. [...]
Instead of organising UK economic policy around access to a limitless supply of cheap labour, the priorities need to be reordered around investment in people and the communities they live in. Therefore we should be open to global talent, but not use immigration as a tool for suppressing wages; rather than weakening workers’ rights, we should strengthen their preparation for the world of work; and instead of funding transport links that facilitate outsourcing, we should concentrate on local infrastructure that boosts the competitiveness of domestic supply chains and thus the market power of British workers.
No comments:
Post a Comment