Today was a busy day for employment related statistics, with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishing its monthly bulletin and set of data.
And overall, it’s still a fairly good news story on the employment front, with those in some form of employment rising, and unemployment falling to 6.8%*, the lowest since early 2009. As the Governor of the Bank of England also confirmed today, however, there is still plenty of “slack” in the economy – recall that for around 9 years under the last Labour Government (1999-2008), unemployment was under 6%, and for nearly 2 years under 5%.
The number of those in employment rose by 283,000 on the last quarter (October to December 2013). But the eye-opening news is that once again, most of the increase – nearly two-thirds – was in the self-employed. We have been writing about this for some time, but we can now see that it is a well-entrenched pattern. Of the 283,000, only 99,000 were employees – the remainder were self-employed – 105,000 full-time, 77,000 part-time.
So are we seeing a major change in the labour ecosystem, with the self-employed taking over the habitat of the employee – a declining species?
And year on year, we find that the number of employees has risen by 351,000, or 1.2%, while the number of self-employed is up by 375,000, a whopping 9%.
Here is our chart showing the changes and “split” between employment and self-employment since the July to September 2013 quarter, i.e. over the last 6 months. We recently looked at who are the newly self-employed and it appears that around half are in more skilled areas, and the rest in what may be more marginal or lower paid areas.
Employed and self-employed 2013-14
For more exciting employment charts, read and look on! All data sourced from ONS.
Here is a chart showing the sharp rise in self-employment over the last 6 months. After lying flat for a year to mid 2013, we can see how it has shot upwards since last July.
self-employed Jan-March 2014
