Full Employment

During the past quarter of a century, an extraordinary change has taken place across much of the developed world. It has been the huge growth in unemployment, particularly in Europe, matched by the fatalism with which this has been accepted by most of the population. In early 1998, about 11% of all the EU’s labour force was registered as out of work. About 19m people were looking for jobs. In the US, the level of registered unemployment was much lower. In the spring of 1998 it was 4.7% — about 6.5m people. It was a little higher for men than for women — 4.8% to 4.6% — and considerably greater for people under 25 — a total of 11%, again with a rather higher proportion of men than women out of work, 12.1% compared to 9.8%. Across the board, non-white members of the labour force were a little more than twice as likely to be out of work as their white counterparts. All the same, viewed as a whole, the job market seemed to be working much better in the US than it was the other side of the Atlantic. Whether this is a correct perception is another matter, but at least the very high number of people without jobs in Europe has concentrated attention on the availability of good quality jobs in a way which is not true to nearly the same extent in the US.