The UK unemployment level has already topped the psychologically crucial three million mark (external website), and actually stands at 3.4 million, according to new research from the Industrial Communities Alliance, the Observer reports. This is in contrast to the prevailing view among economists that unemployment currently stands at just under 2.5 million (on the ILO definition) and will peak at around three million during 2010.
The Observer reports:
The [Industrial Communities Alliance] study said that its 3.4m jobless calculation was arrived at by taking the 1.6m on the claimant count and adding 900,000 people classified as jobless under the government's alternative unemployment measure and a similar number of people hidden on incapacity benefits.
A breakdown of these recalculated unemployment data by industry sector reveals that the manufacturing sector has been hit hardest by the 2008/2009 recession. And analysis by UK region reveals the following:
[W]idespread lay-offs in the manufacturing sector have widened the north-south divide in the labour market. [... T]he list of the top 20 districts for unemployment was 'like a roll call of Britain's industrial heartlands'. None is south of a line from the Wash to the Severn.
It is likely that some economists will question the validity of the recalculated official data used by the Industrial Communities Alliance. But whichever measure of unemployment is used, it is certain that unemployment will continue to rise over the coming year. As our colleagues at CELRE - XpertHR's specialist salary survey unit - recently noted:
Unemployment is a lagging indicator, meaning that it will continue to rise, even once economic recovery is fully underway.
It seems inevitable that the current recession will take unemployment above three million. How soon it reaches this point depends on just how you choose to measure it.
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