Why people are unemployed?

Some see the unemployed as lazy, entitled, scroungers who take without putting into the system. This post looks at why people are unemployed, positing some reasons (other that those above) why people might be unemployed.

Francis Alÿs. Turista (1994)

1. Some unemployed people are temporarily between jobs.

People might be made redundant, finish fixed term contracts or face unemployment when their employer ceases trading. According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK unemployment rate is 3.8% (May-July 2019 - the most recent figures at the time of writing). Those who like to scapegoat and demonise the unemployed might be surprised that this figure is so low. Even if 100% of these people found employment tomorrow (and were obliged to take it), the unemployment rate still would not be 0%, as other people would be made redundant /finish fixed term contracts and other employers would creese trading. It is therefore unrealistic to have an unemployment rate of 0%... unless you don't count the short term unemployed. Let us suppose that only 1.2 of the 3.8% currently unemployed fall into this category. That still leaves 2.6% of the population unemployed: why aren't they working?

2. Some unemployed people are working, but are not being paid.

JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter while signing on. Clearly, this was time week spent. Even if you don't like the books or the films, the London School of Economics estimates that the Harry Potter brand is worth £4bn to London's economy. Rowing herself recently dropped off the Forbes billionaire list, with Forbes citing Britain's higher tax rate and Rowling's $150 million charitable donations as the reason. Clearly, Rowling has paid back more than she took out.

But there aren't that many JK Rowling, are there? Maybe not, but if only one in 1,000 authors on the dole become billionaires, they pocket an average of £1 million pounds each. That's not a bad investment, is it? Even if we funded 10,000 authors for the same return, that would be economically viable. This argument focuses exclusively on economic return, but unemployed authors contribute in so many other ways. Some will write good books. Others will go on to work in other fields where knowledge of what is like to graft away as a writer will be useful:
perhaps as teachers or journalists. They also enrich society by their being able to think and live differently to those for whom full time work occupies so much of their time and effort.

Not convinced that there is an army of unemployed writers working to better our society? Fair enough. Their numbers might be fewer that I'd like to imagine. But what about artists? University lecturers in fine art are expected to first gain professional experience before they can teach it. This might be feasible for architects and designers, but most artists (especially at the beginning of their careers) will run at a loss. "The artist's apprenticeship" is a term applied to these early years working to build a reputation with no income other than unemployment benefit. JK Rowling might have become a billionaire in her own lifetime, but her contribution to culture age the UK economy will live on, and is immeasurable. Look at how Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso and others still contribute towards the French economy today. Impressionists emblazon banknotes; tourists flock to see Monet's garden; or where Van Gogh painted "that cafe" abdicate his bedroom; still more tourists pay to visit the Picasso museum in Paris. Now that both Picasso and Van Gogh were immigrants that have become synonymous with France's image as a country of artists.

Some of those 3.8% unemployed will be writers, artists, poets, inventors, scientists, or even future entrepreneurs. It's impossible to tell how many. Let us suppose that they account for another 1.2%. So now we have a remainder of 1.4% of the populating not working, for reasons yet to be ascertained.

3. Some people cannot find work, or hold down a job, because they lack the most basic skills and/or motivation.

It is well-known that many low-skilled jobs (as well as some not so low-skilled jobs) have been replaced by machines and, more recently, robots. Many of the people who would have worked in repetitive and often mundane agricultural and manufacturing jobs can no longer find jobs. Some of them can retrain, of course, but some cannot: they simply lack the communication skills to work in the service industry, or the IT skills to work in many other sectors.

Others, who were more highly skilled workers, have seen their industries diminish. Where they had valued skills, they are now no longer needed. This feeling of being undervalued, coupled with their former pride in their work and a loss of identity (they identified as coal miners, or ship wrights etc) can prove to have devastating consequences, such as depression. It can be difficult to motivate yourself to apply for a job in a call centre, or McDonald's when you previously had a purpose building warships, for example. Although many people seem to have little sympathy and feel that such unemployed people should stop feeling sorry for themselves and take any job on offer, the psychological effects cannot be so simply dismissed - especially with older workers who find it harder to retain and feel that they may never work again.

We are still feeling the effects of de-industrialisation. Some of those who lost their jobs, their professions, in the 1980s really did never work again. This must have had some effect on their children, who will have internalised their parents' bitterness and this will have doubled down in the cases when they too found it hard to find work.

Could this category account for the remaining 1.4%? After all, it's not a huge percentage. 

There are others, it's true, who are unemployed for less relatable reasons. There are criminals, benefit cheats, the lazy, the entitled and the scroungers. But having read the case above, what percentage of the 3.8% do you really think they account for?