From Unity, 27 February 2010

Public sector set for crippling jobs massacre

by Gary Dennis

The public sector is set for a crippling jobs massacre as the pace of cuts throughout the economy doubles this year, a managers’ organisation has predicted.
     The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development warned that the job market was in dire straits, with the transfer of British jobs to lower-wage economies set to pile on more misery.
     According to a CIPD survey conducted among more than seven hundred employers, there will also be a “substantial” fall in public-sector employment.
     The head of public sector at KPMG, Alan Downey, who helped with the research, said: “These figures clearly show that the starting gun for a public-sector recession has been fired. It is now only a matter of time before we are faced with the deepest and most prolonged cuts in public expenditure that anyone can remember.”
     The chief economic adviser of the CIPD, John Philpott, said: “The jobs market is still on the ropes, with a public-sector fall in employment now a reality as it feels the impact of the longest recession in modern times.
     “Despite the jobs market proving resilient in recent months, this represents a mere pause for breath, with the number of redundancies easing in the private sector and spending cuts yet to be felt by large swathes of the public sector.
     “Unfortunately, there are more testing rounds ahead.”
     He added that with many private-sector companies seeking to export jobs abroad, the jobs market needed all the support and protection it could get from the government.
     The report was published before new unemployment figures that are expected to reveal that about 2½ million people are out of work.
     The general secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber, has warned that the recession will not be over until workers are “working the hours they want and earning decent wages.”
     The leader of Britain’s 7 million union members emphasised that the results of a new government study classing a massive 2.8 million workers as “underemployed” was a “huge concern.”
     The report of the Office of National Statistics revealed that the number of employees who were working fewer hours than they either needed or wanted had increased by a colossal 700,000 in the three months to September 2009; and it estimated that the present figure could be even higher.
     Almost 10 per cent of the work force is now considered underemployed, compared with 6 per cent five years ago.
     Barber pointed out that “in the recession, shorter working hours, part-time and temporary work may be better than the dole queue, but they still mean far less money in people’s pockets.”
     Unity says that working people continue to bear the cost of the recession caused by the financial sector and the banks, which have been bailed out using billions of pounds of public money.
     The privatisation and cuts in the social services, health care and the public sector continue while we spend billions financing illegal wars and military bases overseas.

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