Yes, far more than unemployment in the 70s by this metric and I think it’s a huge part of the crisis. I do think our official unemployment figures are heavily massaged in a way that was not the case back then.
Due to job centre workers literally being incentivised to improve their “out of work” figures, even if that’s by encouraging young people to become “students” rather than “unemployed” with no realistic hope of successfully managing a uni course let alone having a realistic idea of what they might hope to achieve post graduation even if they do and the risks of a student loan.
And even more so by encouraging people to consider themselves as unfit for work due to health issues (I know this as I am a GP and frequently have people coming to me saying they’ve been advised to get signed off as long term sick by the job centre even though their medical issues are in fact trivial, potentially curable within a relatively short time frame, or could easily be worked around with only minor adaptations needed in their usual field of work, or by moving to another field of work altogether (eg someone may no longer manage a warehouse job with lots of heavy lifting due to bad arthritis in their hips/knees but could be fine in a desk job though this does require retraining).
This comes together with a much wider definition of “disability” being socially and culturally accepted, and suddenly we have huge swaths of people, particularly in younger generations, who have never worked due to their anxiety or high functioning autism etc. When I think these people could absolutely manage at least some work in some capacity (I genuinely believe if we did not have a welfare state at all, not that I am advocating for that, many people would miraculously find themselves more capable of working and earning money to live on than is the case at present). Yes, not every job will be suitable and not every employer is understanding enough to make the required accommodations. But in my view that’s the side of things we should be focussing more on, encouraging employers to be genuinely disability-friendly while also encouraging people to not write themselves off forever from the world of work due to things like minor mental health issues or neurodiversity. Disability in my mind should not automatically equate to unable to work in any capacity in the way that it currently seems to be accepted.
I also think Starmer made a serious mistake bending so far to pressure from backbenchers over the plans to reform disability benefits. The government needs money from somewhere and it’s now going to have to come from somewhere else, and there are not all that many realistic options left open to them (think taxes rising generally is a given, I was also reading they plan to specifically try to reform inheritance taxes to make more money). Perhaps some further refining was needed in order for MPs to feel they could vote this reform through, without feeling that they would be leaving disabled people genuinely unable to work without adequate money for basic needs. Paired with a PR campaign for both the public and MPs to explain exactly why this reform is needed and showing the potential positive outcomes from this. Along with measures to ensure that disability discrimination among employers is stamped out so that disabled people capable of some work would realistically have job prospects as an alternative to surviving on benefits alone. And also measures to make sure that work does pay, and not only aimed at the working class, middle classes are increasingly working harder and harder for less and less real buying power.
In my view this sort of reform is much needed, and would have really addressed what is becoming a really serious problem with the economy, which is a lack of working age people actually working. Literally 23 percent of our working age population is now classed as disabled with almost half of these people unemployed, compared to over 80 percent of the non disabled working population. Of course some disabilities are very severe and there absolutely are people who are not capable of any form of work and never will be, but those people are not the bulk of the almost 1 in 4 working age people who consider themselves disabled.
The pandemic didn’t help, a lot of people with lost their jobs where work could not be done from home or businesses went bust etc. especially younger people living with their parents with no dependents and in casual zero hours type jobs, and moved onto benefits support out of financial necessity at the time as many of the usual work simply wasn’t available at the time. Many of these people have some sort of health issue that did not pose a problem for them working or they were able to work around it prepandemic, but in my opinion they have now become used to living on benefits at a similar level to the minimum wages they once made, have lost confidence, and understandably to some degree aren’t rushing to get back into the workplace. A lot of older people evaluated their lives during the pandemic and decided to take early retirement if they could afford it. So suddenly many people 50-plus have been removed from the working population at the same time as many people are now being classified as “disabled/unable to work” rather than “unemployed” per se.
So the headline unemployment figures not being crazy is absolutely obscuring a fuller story about work in the U.K.