Your leader rightly questioned inefficiencies in Britain’s labour statistics (FT View, November 3). However, the problems begin at the conceptual level. The article refers to “measures to tackle Britain’s rise in worker inactivity”. To any sensible layman who suggests that more people are doing nothing or no work of any kind. That is incorrect.
If a woman, for instance, ceases to clean somebody’s house because she has to do more work caring for a sick relative, this is recorded as an increase in “inactivity”, even if she works more hours than before. Calling it inactivity is an insult to the English language and does not help in policy formulation. Why should it be regarded as a problem to be “tackled”? And as it happens, the measured “inactivity rate” is well below what it is in some other big countries.
Separate data collected by the Office for National Statistics for its satellite accounts shows that the value of unpaid care work comes to well over a quarter of national income — quite a contribution from all that inactivity.
There are other reasons for saying that our standard labour force data are unfit for purpose. One reality is that in today’s globalised labour market they do not measure the UK’s real labour force. Phone up a public or private service company and you are likely to talk to someone in Bengaluru or Goa. Consider cloud labour, with millions of tasks contracted online to people doing them in the Philippines or elsewhere. They are not counted in the UK’s labour force. It is the migration of labour without the migration of workers. We have no idea of the potential labour supply to Britain! So the measured unemployment rate is a misleading indicator.
Just as the notion of gross domestic product was devised in the 1930s as a supposed measure of what resources could be mobilised for war — and was the reason women doing care work was not part of the measure — our labour statistics were also devised for an industrial age of closed economies and are therefore not fit for purpose in today’s world.
Guy Standing
Professorial Research Associate, Soas, University of London, London WC1, UK
