---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 17:29:41 +0000 From: Ivan Turok <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: unemployment-research <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Unemployed disguised as sick The following letter published in today's Herald includes one or two figures that may be of interest. Misleading figures on unemployment Your editorial and Alf Young's commentary on the fall in registered unemployment yesterday failed to mention the substantial growth in hidden unemployment over the last two decades. For various reasons, including pressure to reduce the headline 'claimant count', there has been a sizeable diversion of people from unemployment-related benefits to sickness benefits and premature early retirement. The number of sickness benefit claimants has risen from 0.5 million to nearly 2 million in Britain over the last 20 years. In several parts of Scotland more than one in five men of working-age are on sickness benefits. This shift has also reduced the ILO measure of unemployment. As a result, there are now over 200,000 people in Scotland who are recorded as economically inactive but who say they want to work. None of them are counted as unemployed, but many of them should be on any objective measure. The effect of adding them in would be to more than double the ILO measure of unemployment, which is itself 50% above the flawed claimant count. This also explains the apparent perverse fact Alf Young mentions that the employment rate - the proportion of the population in work - is still well below its level in the 1970s. Unemployment remains a huge challenge for Scotland, especially in our older industrial cities and towns. We would need about 160,000 additional jobs in Scotland to raise our employment rate to that of the South of England. Professor Ivan Turok Department of Urban Studies University of Glasgow 25 Bute Gardens Glasgow G12 8RS Scotland, UK tel: (+44) (0)141 330 6274 fax: (+44) (0)141 330 4983 http://www.gla.ac.uk/urbanstudies/
