Unemployment and Peripheral Work

A spell of unemployment appears to restrict job choice. We use British Labour Force Survey data for 1979-89 to model whether, after controlling for age, qualifications and other variables, the jobs that unemployed people get are different from the jobs of people who have not been unemployed. We find that they tend to be of lower skill level and more often temporary or part-time; for men with good qualifications they are also more likely to be of self-employed status. During the 1980s the skill profile of the British workforce tended to improve, but not so the jobs of recently unemployed men and women, so that, despite government training schemes, the relative chances of an unemployed person getting a low skill job increased. The strong association between recent unemployment and `non-standard' forms of employment suggests that the labour force is to some extent polarised into secure `core' and insecure `peripheral' jobs, but, despite deregulation in the private sector and the weakening of union power, we found no evidence that the degree of polarisation had increased between 1979 and 1989.