Public sector pays the price

It is not as though confirmation was needed of how the government’s recovery plan is basically flawed from an employment perspective, but the Chartered Institute of Personal and Development (CIPD) nonetheless obliges by highlighting how the number of public sector jobs lost since April is five times greater than the Office for Budget Responsibility projected for the entire year.

The current attrition rate suggests total employment losses will be 50% higher than forecast. The CIPD is calling on the government to scale back on public sector job cuts or risk “sapping the strength of those parts of the economy that were creating jobs in the initial part of the recovery”.

Private sector redundancies are also running at levels substantially above those projected by the government. Service and manufacturing sectors are equally affected with 52,000 people having to seek new work. 

There is no indication of the ‘employment migration’ that Cameron and Clegg told their respective parties would happen. Research indicates that public sector job losses in the second quarter of 2011 far exceeded net private sector job creation.

Nevertheless, Treasury officials have described themselves as “sceptical” about the CIPD projections – in much the same way they dismissed Institute of Fiscal Studies suggestions that ConDem deficit reduction plans were regressive and would damage future growth prospects (duh!).

In other words, and as Norman Lamont once held, unemployment remains a price worth paying in order to sustain a right-wing economic ideology.