Employment returns to pre-crash levels

Employment has almost entirely recovered to its pre-recession peak, according to today’s new figures. Total employment for May to July stood at 29.56 million — up 236,000 on the previous three months and just 12,000 shy of the 29.57 million peak of April 2008. This recovery is thanks to the expansion of the private sector, which has added over a million new jobs in the last two years, and now employs 381,000 more people than it did before the crash. Public sector employment, meanwhile, has been cut by 628,000 since the coalition took over, and is now at its lowest level since 2001. The scale of private jobs growth — and public job cuts — in the last quarter is exaggerated by the reclassification of 196,000 further education employees from the public sector to the private sector. Stripping this effect out, though, doesn’t make much difference to the big picture: private sector employment would still be at a record high (with 874,000 jobs added since the election) and public sector employment would be down to 2002 levels (and down 432,000 since the election) But while overall employment is back to the happy days of early 2008, the detail is a bit less rosy.