According to official statistics, unemployment in Britain is on the decline. But is the British experience all that it is cracked up to be? Reading Britain's monthly unemployment statistics gives, upon initial inspection, some cause for celebration.
The numbers out of work and claiming benefit have more or less continued to decline by a monthly average of between 30,000 and 40,000 over the last few years. On this basis, the former Conservative government claimed that its approach - namely that governments cannot create jobs and that job creation should be left solely to the market - was bearing fruit.
The new Labour government, under Tony Blair, has also underlined the need for a flexible labour market. With employment standing at over three million in the early 1980s, the official figure is now under two million, or 5.3 per cent of the active population, below the European Commission's stated target of 7 per cent.
On further scrutiny, Britain's record appears to be not so impressive. According to an independent inquiry published by the Council of Churches for England and Ireland earlier this year, the real number of unemployed people in the summer of 1996 who would like to work was nearer to 4.5 million, and this in a country where the number of people of active age is declining.
Additionally, while many jobs have undeniably been created in Britain, a significant proportion of these have been of a part-time rather than the traditional full-time nature. Some of those in part-time work are there out of necessity rather than choice. The report also stressed that job creation of any kind is not necessarily the way forward. Rather, the challenge to society was how to provide the necessary number of quality jobs, while at the same time maintaining a reasonable standard of living for the people who fill them through reasonable wages.
In other words, the British model is not one that necessarily creates safe and secure employment.
Even among the better-paid jobs there has been a trend towards short term contracts, the lengthening of probation periods in a system not far removed from the American model where, according to the OECD, the incidence of in-work poverty is a fact of life. Among the report's recommendations were:
a reform of the tax system to encourage more employment in the private sector more employment in the public sector financed by higher taxation
a programme for creating good jobs for the long term unemployed
better conditions of work and fairer bargaining over pay priority in the education system to provide basic skills for all young people.