It is young people who have been most dramatically affected by the jobs crisis

YESTERDAYS AWFUL figures on jobs and joblessness push out the timeframe for recovery and make the challenge of shrinking the legions of unemployed all the greater.

The unemployment numbers came as a shock, with the jobless rate rising by a full percentage point in just three months. Although weakness has been evident across the economy in recent months, nothing suggested that joblessness would jump by the biggest margin since the worst of the employment shock in the first half of 2009.

According to earlier data containing the monthly count of dole claimants, in which an estimate of the rate of joblessness is included, unemployment was high but stable during the second half of last year.

Those numbers were subject to a significant revision yesterday as the more definitive but less timely Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS) was published. In the final months of 2010, we now know that the unemployment rate rose steadily to reach a 17-year high.

Chart 1 illustrates the sharp uptick in the rate of joblessness in the second half of 2010. It also shows that joblessness among women is now rising as rapidly as among men – a marked change on earlier phases of the recession when male construction workers were disproportionately affected by lay-offs.

According to separate figures covering 34 economies, published yesterday by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (chart 2), Ireland is now suffering the second highest jobless rate among countries in the developed world.

Between the third and fourth quarters of 2010, Ireland overtook Estonia and Slovakia to arrive at that unwanted position. Only Spain, which also became construction-dependent during its property frenzy, has a larger share of its people idle.

But it was not only the surprise headline rate of unemployment that gives cause for gloom. Almost everything else in the QNHS did, too.

The news on the numbers at work was hope-crushing. As chart 3 shows, from the extreme of the 75,000 net job loss suffered in the first three months of 2009, the violence of the shake-out in the labour market had been easing until six months ago. In the third quarter, the trend was halted.

Sectorally, the usual suspect accounted for the biggest single share of the final quarter’s job losses. Net employment in construction fell by almost 5,000 in just three months on a seasonally adjusted basis. The latest figures show that the peak-to-trough jobs change in the industry has reached a staggering 164,000.

No sector is generating consistent employment growth and others – construction included – have yet to hit bottom. Job destruction is set to continue well into 2011.

If there is cause for intergenerational grievance, nowhere is it more obvious than employment. As chart 4 shows, it is young people who have been most dramatically affected by the jobs crisis, while the more mature have, in relative terms, been spared.

The number of teenagers at work has fallen by more than half. Early twentysomethings have fared little better. At the other end of the spectrum the late fiftysomethings is the only age group to have registered an increase in numbers working.

The news on the long-term unemployment was predictably grim, following the trend observed since recession took hold.

Economists find consistently and across all economies that the longer one is unemployed, the more “detached” one becomes from the labour market. In plain English, that means that the longer you spend out of work, the lower are your chances of getting back into employment.

In that regard, among the most depressing figures from yesterday’s thoroughly depressing publication was that those unemployed for more than a year for the first time outnumbered those who have been out of work for under 12 months.

Given that there has not been any significant change in the number of students over the past two years, according to the same data source, there is no evidence to suggest that the legion of youngsters lured into the building industry during the boom are reskilling in large numbers.