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Worklessness and work - putting demand and supply together
17 October 2008
By Paul Miller
I'm presenting at an LGIU seminar on worklessness next week. There are close to 100 people there - I wonder how many have been turned away?
Clearly this issue is important and becoming more so.
There's always a difficulty doing a presentation like this on a topic that is so important for so many people. The difficulty is the expectation that I cannot meet. There's is no silver bullet . There is only a large amount of very hard work.
What I can do is give my own view of what that work might look like. And it's about getting down amongst the numbers - really understanding who you've got and what you've got.
It is interesting that questions about the numbers that we get most often are associated with very nitty gritty detail about people. Who are the unemployed? How many lone parents? What is the ethnicity? What occupations do the workless normally fill? And so on.
This questioning reveals two things. Firstly, a concern about the 'supply side' of the equation which is not balanced by a concern about the demand side. And secondly, very considerable understanding about the data on the workless which, again, is not balanced by an understanding about the data that's available on the demand side.
The demand side? The solution to worklessness is work. And work comes from businesses. Worklessness exists because there is a greater supply of workers than there are jobs in businesses. This may be obvious when you read it, but it's not so apparent in the questions that are asked of us. And it is most certainly not apparent in the relative volumes of data that exist on the workless on the one hand and businesses on the other.
Having said that, we can do a lot. We can derive considerable intelligence from combining data about the demand for work and the supply of workers. But data gets us only so far. We have to get better at talking to businesses in language that they are familiar. And we have to engage with them at the right level.
Permalink: http://www.gavurin.com/work (copy'n'paste)
Comments (1)
At 02:11 PM on 29 Oct 2008
Author: Derek Francis
Wrote: Whereas I agree that there is a serious deficiency of demand side analysis, I am not too sure about your comment regarding the solution to worklessness being work.
It seems to me that worklessness is a convenient term which tries to encompass too many ideas leading to confusion of thought.
The workless as currently defined appear to have but one thing in common - working age people receiving DWP benefits not currently in any form of paid employment.
There is of course no one reason as to why these individuals are not in employment. The rise in the worklessness figures during a time of rapidly increasing job creation indicating the availability of work being but one of them. Unless the other causes are fully understood and addressed then attempts to reduce worklessness by increasing the amount of work alone will continue to struggle.
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