Employment
Employment, unemployment and jobs
Start by explaining what your document is doing.
A person is defined as being employed if they are aged 16 or over; and working every week. Need to be more precise than this. How many hours?
Here are some examples of employment, or having a job working for an employer, and paying National Insurance contributions through their employer; self-employed and paying National Insurance contributions directly to the government; Do you think the minister needs more detail here?
Persons belonging to the above categories, but who are temporarily away from work, are still categorised as being employed.
The headline employment rate is the proportion of the working-age population who are in employment. This defined as all men aged 16-64 plus all women aged 16-59. It’s not clear what you are referring to here. What about the situation in which someone has more than one job?
Measuring employment
Employment statistics are gathered from a number or sources, principally:
The Labour Force Survey (LFS);
Employer surveys;
Administrative data from government departments.
The LFS is a survey carried out by the Office for National Statistics at three month intervals. It surveys a sample of UK households, asking respondents to give their own perception of their employment status. Since it is a household survey only, it has the shortcoming of missing persons living in hostels or communal accommodation. Good discussion of measuring employment here.
The ONS conducts the Quarterly Public Sector Employee Surveys (QPSES) of the civil service, local authorities and other public institutions; Short-term Employment Surveys (STES) of employers in various private sector businesses; Annual Business Inquiry (ABI) carried out yearly. This is rather hard to read because of all the acronyms – a bulleted list would have been better.
Persons not in work are classified as either unemployed or economically inactive. These are defined as follows:
An unemployed person has no job and is actively seeking work;
An economically inactive person has no job and is not available for work.
Thus the number of unemployed people in the economy is the number of working-age persons without a