The ranks of the ‘economically inactive’ are needed if worker shortage is to ease | Business News

Unpicking the messages from labour market data is a full-time job in itself, but the latest release from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is unlikely to make anyone skip into work this morning.

Unemployment remains close to a 50-year low of 3.8%. Expect to hear this mentioned frequently by ministers – a vindication of the furlough scheme that sustained livelihoods through 18 months of COVID lockdowns.

But unemployment tells only part of the story. Just as significant is the number of vacancies, running at a record 1.3 million unfilled jobs.

The combination of fewer people out of work but actively looking, and companies struggling to fill roles, is what economists mean when they talk about a “tight” or “hot” labour market.

On the ground, it’s why sectors from agriculture to tourism and travel complain of a shortage of workers, exacerbated by the impact of Brexit.

BT Openreach is the latest major company to complain that the inability to easily recruit European workers is slowing down operations – in its case, the pace of superfast broadband rollout.

Whether it’s picking fruit, working security, lugging luggage or digging holes, repetitive, unskilled minimum-wage roles are not as easy to fill as they were.

In theory the tight market should give more power to potential employees able to ask for better terms and higher wages, and there are some signs this is happening.

Companies report having to seduce workers onto payrolls with bonuses and benefits because there is a dearth of applicants for jobs.

According to the ONS pay is up, on average 6.8% including bonuses and 4.2% without.

But the impact of inflation is impossible to avoid, so in real terms wages actually fell 4.5% in April.

That was the biggest decline seen since records began in January 2001.

Companies unable to fill jobs to drive growth and productivity, and workers’ pay eroded by inflation, is an unusual and corrosive combination, one that may explain another key feature of the labour data, the almost half a million people considered “economically inactive”.

This category broadly includes those unwilling or unable to work; those who are sick, students and the retired, with more than half aged over 50. (It also counts those “looking after family or home”, which given the central role in enabling work played by those in caring roles emphasises how economics has long ignored the home and historically the role of women.)

This trend has been termed the “great resignation”, a post-COVID reset by people of middle years who’ve decided work is no longer central to their goals and ambition.

This group is hard to quantify, and the impact of long-Covid and other sickness may be just as significant in driving the over-50s away from the labour market.

But an economy desperate for growth is unlikely to achieve it without them.