The underemployed feel they under achieve as part-time workers

Making sure the plank fits

Britain now has a sizeable proportion of the workforce not working as they would like. It probably works out at about 20% , and not 10.5% as suggested, of those who find their earnings not completely satisfactory. First there is the section that are unemployed and looking for work, then the officially recognised underemployed, followed by the low paid minimum wage earners and then the contract workers with gaps in their work schedules.

The government, or more accurately the Office of National Statistics, is to be praised for highlighting this feeling of being underemployed by conducting a study which shows 3,050,000 workers want to work more hours each week, out of a total workforce of 29.41 million. However, there is more honesty required in the whole attitude to work and jobs. Governments talk about jobs being created by companies, but in reality a great many new jobs are just filled by people switching. There is still a swathe of the workforce struggling to earn a decent salary or make enough profit to maintain a business or just find a job in the first place.

I think the days are gone whereby governments can get along by massaging unemployment figures and spinning the facts about job creation. A disgruntled workforce is not an efficient workforce. If David Cameron wants to succeed in this aspect he might consider that the labourer is worthy of his/her hire. All too often this is not the case. And it is exacerbated by the crazed greed of people like George Entwistle who appear incapable of putting anyone or anything before their desire to extract the very maximum for, almost I fear, the very minimum when they feel hurt and betrayed. Exorbitant bonuses and inflated payoffs just make a nonsense of employment rights.

We need a situation whereby everyone pays there fair share and everyone earns according to skill and ability and responsibility. If we are all in "this" together, let it so. Currently some are well out of it either by subterfuge or by situation.

Posted in: job satisfaction,jobs,Office of National Statistics,unemployment