Ireland's true unemployment rate???

clairefontaine

Hi,

I was listening to Joan Burton today on the radio and she mentioned that the rate at which there is NO ONE working in the household is at 22%. Im wondering if this is the true figure. Does it include people on one parent family,. on CE schemes and internships too or does it not include those people. If not, what is the real unemployment rate when you do include those people?

Farmer Pudsey

This is the a figure for households where there are childern and either the lone parent or both parents are not in employment. It includes unemployed, lone parents disability etc etc. It is a frightening stastic and you wonder what will be the long term work ethic of these childern.

However the reality is that in low pay situtations if one parent is not able to get ajob then both are better of unemployed. Due to our welfare benifits and the cost of going to work a family woulf want an income of 40K+ to be as well of working as being unemployed.

In the last budget the government too about 1K offa working family and 250 off an umemployed family this would be the figue if there was two adults and two childern

nesf

She's referring to an ESRI report based on 2010 numbers which was mentioned in the Irish Times here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1211/breaking2.html

Godge

What the report does is expose the relatively high proportion of households and families in Ireland who are career social welfare recipients.

Not one bit of reform has tackled this problem.

NIMAN

Does the figure include those working/getting income from the black economy while receiving social welfare payments?

barneystinson

NIMAN wrote: »

Does the figure include those working/getting income from the black economy while receiving social welfare payments?

Ummm, presumably not, how could they be expected to incorporate that?!

Dwork

barneystinson wrote: »

Ummm, presumably not, how could they be expected to incorporate that?!

They could hire an economist to predict the amount. Economists are used to working with limited information and yet still having a "crystal ball", howerver blurry, for the future. Sadly, the accuracy of the figures produced would still be in the region of economists usuall accuracy, ie barn door at fifty paces.

longhalloween

NIMAN wrote: »

Does the figure include those working/getting income from the black economy while receiving social welfare payments?

There's no way they could reliably predict that.

ilovesleep

Godge wrote: »

What the report does is expose the relatively high proportion of households and families in Ireland who are career social welfare recipients.

What an ignorant response. Just because a report shows there is 22% of those on social welfare, coming from the one household, does not make all & every single one of them career social welfare recipients.

The possibilties are endless as to why a family might be on social welfare but it doesn't mean that they are career social welfare recipients & lazy tax thieving scum never
intending to work a day in their lives.

The possibilities are endless.
- maybe both parents are unemployed and any offspring are reaching the age that school/college/studies are finished but employment is hard to come by.
- maybe there is one parent absent from the household through seperation or death, the remaining parent is on a single parent payment or a widows payment. Again any offspring could be at an age that school & studies are finished & are unemployed.

ilovesleep

- maybe theres a parent on disability, another on carers, and another on unemployment.
- maybe there is a child who is disabled and it's a parent on carers. And another on unemployment payment.
The possibilities and combinations are endless.

Maura74

Just as long as they do not implement a program like this one in the UK, costing billions for the tax payer to give large payments to private contractors and getting very little results.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21532191

Farmer Pudsey

ilovesleep wrote: »

What an ignorant response. Just because a report shows there is 22% of those on social welfare, coming from the one household, does not make all & every single one of them career social welfare recipients.

The possibilties are endless as to why a family might be on social welfare but it doesn't mean that they are career social welfare recipients & lazy tax thieving scum never
intending to work a day in their lives.

The possibilities are endless.
- maybe both parents are unemployed and any offspring are reaching the age that school/college/studies are finished but employment is hard to come by.
- maybe there is one parent absent from the household through seperation or death, the remaining parent is on a single parent payment or a widows payment. Again any offspring could be at an age that school & studies are finished & are unemployed.

We have a serious issue with long term unemployed and households where either both parents are unemployed or where there is a single parent and they are unemployed.

In the case of the long term and both parent recipents there is a huge discentive to go back to low paid work. First both in the house hold must ge employment and reach a household income in the 50K++ bracket for it to pay them to return to work. Net if they leave benifit they lose all the add on such as back to school, fuel allowance, rent allowance and local authority rent relief, maybe a bin waiver, medical card and have all the costs associated with work child minding, transport costs and other minor costs such as work wear, lunches etc.

In the case of lone parents and these do not appear on the live register (I think) because of the structure of the payment and the benifit of being able to work parttime there is a discentive to return to full time work while the child is with the specified age limits. Government has started to tackle this. However it is a huge issue especially where parent manulipate it by having 2,3 or 4 childern spread apart by age. This has become a lifestyle choice by some people. Have achild at 16 or 17 and leave home get rent allowance or a LA house and have childern into your 30's.

nesf

ilovesleep wrote: »

What an ignorant response. Just because a report shows there is 22% of those on social welfare, coming from the one household, does not make all & every single one of them career social welfare recipients.

Sure, there are a myriad of reasons why someone might not be working. A blind couple, a person with a serious disability and so on. The problem is that even during the boom we had a much higher percentage of households in this position than the rest of Europe. We're not particularly sicker, blinder or more unlucky than the rest of Europe accident wise so what gives?

padma

This may seem very simple, and I'm no good with mathematics at all at all, but..if we have a working population of 1.9million, and we have an unemployed population of 450,000 give or take, that would make our overall working population at 2,350000 right. So, .45 of a million divided into 2.35 million, would this not give us our current unemployment rate?

So, is it correct to say that we have 2 million people over the age of 65 and under the age of 16 with a percentage of that 2 million on disability, in fas courses, in college and in CE schemes not currently on the live register. So our real unemployment figure is the above paragraph. Is this correct or am I way off?

nesf

padma wrote: »

So, is it correct to say that we have 2 million people over the age of 65 and under the age of 16 with a percentage of that 2 million on disability, in fas courses, in college and in CE schemes not currently on the live register. So our real unemployment figure is the above paragraph. Is this correct or am I way off?

A bit more complicated than that but essentially yes except neither the over 65 or the under 16s/still in full time education at whatever age and spouses working in the home would ever be included in our "real unemployment figure." People on disability, blind pension etc or other forms of payment that assume they're not able to work and thus not going to be included on the live register unemployment number which only includes people who in theory anyway and able to work and are out looking for it actively (this obviously describes the great majority of those unemployed at the moment) would be included in such a figure.

padma

nesf wrote: »

A bit more complicated than that but essentially yes except neither the over 65 or the under 16s/still in full time education at whatever age and spouses working in the home would ever be included in our "real unemployment figure." People on disability, blind pension etc or other forms of payment that assume they're not able to work and thus not going to be included on the live register unemployment number which only includes people who in theory anyway and able to work and are out looking for it actively (this obviously describes the great majority of those unemployed at the moment) would be included in such a figure.

I understand that, I should have been clearer, the 2 million figure is the remainder of the poulation ie, if we have 2.35 million as a working population those unemployed on the live register and those in employment, there is another 2.15 million not classed as the working population, would this be the elderly and underage, in school, college and courses etc funded by the state.

So, our true unemployment rate is the 450,000 out of the 2350000? I can't work that out I'm an early school leaver who hated mathematics.

mlumley

Godge wrote: »

What the report does is expose the relatively high proportion of households and families in Ireland who are career social welfare recipients.

Not one bit of reform has tackled this problem.

And the jobs are where? There may be jobs in Dublin, but down here in Tipp, we've just lost another 250 jobs. You cant get people working if there are no jobs to give them.

Wicklowandy

A lot of people are working short contract - period of unemployment - short contract because essentially the few employers hiring dont want to make long term commitments regarding labour. Many more employers are getting free employees from jobsbridge, so why create positions?

Its foolish to believe that pretty much whatever you do, and however experienced you are, if you lose your job right now, it will take a time to find a new one, and the new one may be for far less terms and conditions.

People that believe all unemployed people are lazy etc. smack of a tremendous sense of entitlement; if they were to find themselves redundant tomorrow, the above rules would apply

A more interesting live register figure might include people who are under employed (eg moved to part time) or unemployed men whos wives are working (common).

Specifically I have to exclude people who have been unemployed since boom times. Its fair to say some people have never worked and should be targeted by DSP. But its patently unfair to treat everyone going through perhaps an extended period of unemployment; put simply there isn't enough jobs and the jobsbridge scheme seems to have removed entry level / minimum wage jobs.

Lets hope the 333 point action plan turns out to be more than the bottle of smoke it appears:)

Head The Wall

ilovesleep wrote: »

The possibilities are endless.
- maybe both parents are unemployed and any offspring are reaching the age that school/college/studies are finished but employment is hard to come by.
- maybe there is one parent absent from the household through seperation or death, the remaining parent is on a single parent payment or a widows payment.

Don't be so naive to the amount of "real" single mothers out there, the bulk of people on these payments are not single. They just choose to be for the payments.

NIMAN

barneystinson wrote: »

Ummm, presumably not, how could they be expected to incorporate that?!

It was a rhetorical question.

djpbarry

padma wrote: »

So, our true unemployment rate is the 450,000 out of the 2350000? I can't work that out I'm an early school leaver who hated mathematics.

The number unemployed is about 320k, not 450k - some people on the live register are in employment. The total workforce is approximately 2.16 million, so that gives an unemployment rate of:

[latex]\displaystyle\frac{320,000}{2,160,000} \times \frac{100}{1} \approx 14.8\%[/latex]

Wicklowandy

Take into account the underemployed, people dependent on spouses and ileligible for support, and people undertaking useless courses that wont lead to employment(under the guidance of DSP), even disregarding emigration.

The rate that this would produce would be much more telling of the state of emloyment in the country.

Farmer Pudsey

djpbarry wrote: »

The number unemployed is about 320k, not 450k - some people on the live register are in employment. The total workforce is approximately 2.16 million, so that gives an unemployment rate of:

[latex]\displaystyle\frac{320,000}{2,160,000} \times \frac{100}{1} \approx 14.8\%[/latex]

This is not a true reflection of the dependancy rate . It excludes single parents and those on disability. It used to exclude those on job/training schemes as well. It is like everything else the government is involved in Quango's PS wages, no in the PS etc it is very hard to get true figures.

It is not just unemployment that is the issue in Ireland it is the dependancy rate which is quite high as we fail to police welfare right.

djpbarry

Farmer Pudsey wrote: »

This is not a true reflection of the dependancy rate .

I never said it was?

But if it's a dependency rate you're looking for, roughly half the population of the country is dependent on some form of welfare payment, according to the latest available data:

Over 1,467,100 people were in receipt of a weekly social welfare payment at the end of 2011. As these payments included increases in respect of over 197,700 Qualified Adults and over 516,300 children, along with Family Income Supplement and Guardian’s payments made in respect of over 67,000 children, there were over 2,248,200 beneficiaries in all.

Manach

Speaking in general in the context of statistical analyisis, my understanding is that there is no need to count the entire population to get an accurate (within the error bounds) picture but instead use the appropriate sampling methodology.

clairefontaine

Hi again.

I found this link here which says it is now at 14.1%.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/ireland/unemployment-rate


There is a note at the bottom which says this:

"Unemployment Rate

The unemployment rate can be defined as the number of people actively looking for a job divided by the labour force. Changes in unemployment depend mostly on inflows made up of non-employed people starting to look for jobs, of employed people who lose their jobs and look for new ones and of people who stop looking for employment."

I would take it that means people on One Parent Family, Job training, and Disability are not included since they are not considered to be actively looking for work?

Is there a figure which includes those?

Wicklowandy

I'd feel the reduction from 14.8% to 14.1% in the unemployment rate is only the massaging of figures.

From what djpbarry quoted above, the truer figure emerges.

clairefontaine

I wonder if they include part time work as employed and what the real stat is.

It does look like Rome is indeed burning.

mariaalice

Is it all down to how you define the issue, for example if you are a loan parent who works 25 hours a week and clams family income supplment.... however your employer could give you a full time job at 39 hours a week but you have opted to stay on the 25 hours contract and clam family income supplements as this it the most financially advantages position for you because of childcare costs.

Are you

(A) underemployed

(B) dependant on social welfare ( family income supplement is a social welfare payment )

(C) partly underemployed.

nesf

mariaalice wrote: »

Is it all down to how you define the issue, for example if you are a loan parent who works 25 hours a week and clams family income supplment.... however your employer could give you a full time job at 39 hours a week but you have opted to stay on the 25 hours contract and clam family income supplements as this it the most financially advantages position for you because of childcare costs.

Are you

(A) underemployed

(B) dependant on social welfare ( family income supplement is a social welfare payment )

(C) partly underemployed.

Interestingly that loan parent wouldn't show up in the numbers the ESRI published. They'd have to be working 10 hours a week or less to be included. Regardless, the above loan parent is (depending on their earnings and whether they still qualify for the One-Parent Family Payment and such) drawing less money from the State than if they were solely on benefits. As the child grows older they'll probably move to full time employment when childcare costs are less of an issue due to age.

clairefontaine

So what percentage of the total population is actually working full time?

Geuze

www.cso.ie

Latest QNHS:

http://www.cso.ie/en/qnhs/releasesandpublications/qnhs-calendarquarters/

Geuze

Headline labour market indicators


Quarter 4 2012 Annual change

Employed 1,848,900 + 1,200

Unemployed 294,600 – 19,200

In labour force 2,143,500 – 18,000

Not in labour force 1,453,000 + 19,800

Hate to work out the dependency ratio

Head The Wall

So unemployed goes down 19,000 and not in labour force goes up 19,000. Does this mean they were just moved onto schemes line Solas, btea ?