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Jobs miracle? What jobs miracle? ConDem Ministers from David Cameron down are guilty of a giant con.
Take the Prime Minister’s boast that there are two million extra jobs in the private sector.
The small print under official statistics points out that they include the Royal Mail.
Not a single new job was created when the postal service was flogged off.
But at the press of a keyboard button 150,000 jobs were cut from the public sector and added to private enterprise.
I’d chuck in the Queen by privatising the Royal Family. But it would be another distortion to massage the figures.
The small print lists tens of thousands of other transferred workers flaming up Cameron’s numbers.
Staff at the Lloyds Banking Group and in further education and sixth-form colleges were switched between columns to bolster Cameron’s hype.
Nor does it stop there.
Two-fifths of the rise in employment is people mainly forced to become self-employed after losing their jobs.
Three million people are working fewer hours than they want.
And then there is the explosion in zero hours-zero pay contracts, with upwards of one million unsure whether they’ll be paid a penny in a week.
The gloss fades from McDonald’s announcement of 8,000 jobs when most in its fast-food restaurants are on zero-hours contracts and pay is as low as 1p above the £6.31 minimum hourly rate.
A TUC study last year found four-in-five new jobs were in sectors paying less than £8 an hour.
Today, a new TUC study charts a sharp drop in job creation – down nearly one-third on pre-2008 financial crash levels.
Fewer people are leaving jobs and are clinging on to what they have.
I’ve heard heartbreaking stories from scores, perhaps hundreds of workers, who were made redundant and now scratch a living, earning far less than before.
Month after month since the ConDem regime started in May 2010 wages have gone up by less than prices as living standards are eroded. The last published figures put RPI inflation at 2.4% including housing costs – more than triple the meagre 0.7% growth in earnings.
There hasn’t been a single month under the ConDems when the pay of a typical worker topped inflation.
On the couple of occasions when the lower CPI inflation measure was outstripped by overall earnings it was due to the fatcat bonus brigade distorting the headline number by tax-avoiding.
David Cameron and his Chancer of the Exchequer, George Osborne, are turning Britain into a miserable economy of low-paid, insecure jobs.
What’s good for the speculators and turbo-capitalists financing the Tory Party is bad for families with rent or a mortgage to pay.
The jobs miracle is simply a ConDem fiction.
