Less people at work
Socialist Press1980 1980-08-06Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 5 →
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The total number of workers employed in Britain fell by over 150,000 in the first quarter of this year, to 22.06 million.
Even the public sector and service industries in the private sector which have steadily enlarged their workforce over the last ten years have now begun to contract.
And manufacturing industry has cut back a staggering 300,000 jobs since last June.
The latest government figures confirm that while the working population is now growing at a rate of 200,000 per yeat, the numbers actually employed are falling.
The employment figures also reveal an important discrepancy: the fall in jobs is much larger than the official increase in the number of unemployed.
While government officials claim that this is largely due to older workers taking earlier retirement, a much more significant cause seems to be the wholesale redundancies facing married women who are not eligible for unemployment benefits and thus are not reflected in unemployment statistics.