The Office for
National Statistics (ONS) has this morning released the latest set of UK labour
market data, mostly covering the three months October to December 2014.
The UK labour
market recovery is continuing to bring good news to jobseekers but also
continuing to disappoint wage earners.
The quarterly 103,000
rise in employment represents acceleration in the pace of job creation at the
end of last year, helping to cut unemployment by 97,000 to a rate of 5.7%. With
the number of people in work now close to 31 million the working age employment
has risen to 73.2%, a joint record
But although the
December bonus season pushed growth in total average weekly earnings above 2%,
underlying pay pressure as measured by regular average weekly earnings (i.e.
excluding bonuses and a better guide to the state of the labour market) fell
slightly. Economy wide the underlying rate of growth of average earnings dipped
from 1.8% to 1.7%. In the private sector the dip was from 2.2% to 2.1% and in
the public sector from 0.8% to 0.6%. This suggests that the jobs rich economic
recovery is still failing to boost labour productivity, which does not bode
well for long-term improvement in UK living standards even if very low price
inflation is at present helping to raise real incomes.
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