squidzin ….. you are again only seeing what you want to see, starting with everything here is shite, whereas in the Eurozone everything is OK, which is factually 100% incorrect.
Firstly the Guardian link you provided CONFIRMED everything I said re the job creation and how much better the UK is doing versus the Eurozone, but they then mention “worrying trends”, some of which you mention e.g. the rise in ‘Self Employed’, when we are increasingly in a digital/internet age where people can work from anywhere and if hasn’t changed, it can be more tax efficient to take a salary as an annual company dividend, plus other tax allowance perks.
Next this myth about unemployment being “offset by Zero Hours”, that no one seems to know what the figure was in 2010, in fact for a Contract that began in the late 1990’s, no one in Labour appeared to give a shit they existed, as I can’t even find it in their 2010 manifesto – and what was the recent count, around 600,000, many wanting that flexibility and some having two contracts – and that rose from 2010 by how many?
As for the UK versus the rest of the Eurozone, percentage wise, the UK has far, far, fewer non permanent workers than across the channel, and the last time I looked, the UK’s permanent job add per month was around 80%-90% of total.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that far more European workers on temporary contracts, really have more ‘rights’ than here?????
Aug 2015; ”The New World of Work:recovery driven by rise in temp jobs”
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b2171222-31e4-11e5-8873-775ba7c2ea3d.html
”They call it the “precariat”. In a continent known for strong employee protections, more than half of the eurozone’s young workers are in temporary jobs, churning from one shortlived contract to the next.”
”In France, permanent jobs account for just 16 per cent of new contracts, down from a quarter in 2000. In Spain, almost seven in 10 young workers are on temporary contracts. The share of the eurozone’s 15 to 24-year-old workers who are temps is the highest on record, at 52.4 per cent.”
”Now that the eurozone’s recovery is at last under way, the question facing policymakers and politicians is whether the painful reforms of the last few years will do anything to address this.”
”But in parts of Europe, where temporary and contract work is unusually pervasive, economists say there is a dark side to the trend.”
”A deep fracture has emerged in Spain, France, Italy and Portugal over the past 20 years, with an older generation of highly protected permanent employees on one side and a younger generation forced to settle for insecure jobs on the other. That is one reason why youth unemployment surged when the crisis hit.”
“The rules for open-ended contracts in Europe are considered too stringent by employers and they sidestep those regulations by creating non-regular jobs,”
If you really want to see an unsustainable employment stats ‘fix’ destined to fall apart at the first major recession, I’d look at the 13-years before 2010.
Looking at the FORTH CHART on the link below where government employment from the early 2000’s rose in percentage terms more than the private sector, and when the private sector jobs were being lost during the crash, the Labour government then tried to mask the figures by going on a government/public sector HIRING spree – when they should have been looking to CUT the costs of government and give the masses tax breaks to offset the fall in real earnings from 2008.
www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-22/uks-holiday-cheer-in-four-charts
Re “the mythical deficit” the above losses of tax paying jobs and creation of 100% tax funded jobs goes someways to explain the size of the 2010 budget deficit, which fyi is calculated like in any household, by deducting your annual expenditure from your income – so its neither mythical or rocket science.