June Labour Market Statistics: Comment from the Institute for Employment Studies
14 Jun 2022
Commenting on the figures, IES Director Tony Wilson said:
“This is really grim news on pay and is only likely to get worse. Despite the tightest labour market on record, nominal pay is broadly flat meaning that rocketing inflation is leading to the largest cuts in real pay in at least two decades. The picture is particularly bad for public sector workers, with real pay falling by nearly 6% year on year. At the same time while employment is starting to pick up, there’s still a million people missing from the labour force compared to pre-pandemic trends – particularly older people, those with health conditions and overseas workers. The large rises in long-term ill health are particularly concerning, with a quarter of a million more people outside the labour force than before the pandemic.
“With inflation and interest rates both continuing to rise, the tightest labour market on record, economic growth flat and a ‘missing million’ from the labour force, the crises that we’ve got are not the ones that we prepared for through the Plan for Jobs. So we need urgent measures to boost labour supply rather than to dampen demand, and in particular to reinvest the £2 billion underspends on measures announced to tackle unemployment since the Plan for Jobs.”
Read the detailed IES Labour Market Statistics briefing note here