UK unemployment has increased to 2.64m, a rise of 128,000 in the three months to October, the highest level since 1994, with 1,027,000 youth from 16-24 out of work, the highest since records began in 1992.
The jobless rate is now 8.3% up from 7.9%. However the unemployment rate for the 16-24s is now at 22% up from 20.8% in the three months to August.
The number of workers who have been able to force their way onto the JobSeekers Allowance rose by 3,000 to 1.6 million in November.
The total number of people of all ages in employment fell by 63,000 compared with three months earlier, to 29.11 million. There were 67,000 sackings in the public sector. The private sector added just 5,000 jobs over the same period, giving the lie to coalition propaganda that the private sector will provide millions of jobs.
Youth continue to bear the brunt of the unemployment crisis caused by the banking collapse.
The worst however is yet to come with production set to slump sharply in the new year, and to continue plunging throughout the New Year as the great EU banking crash emerges into the open.
The unemployed are suffering a devastating fall in their living standards, while the millions at work have become the working poor with average pay rising by 1.8% while the official monthly inflation rate increases at around 5%.
Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey said: ‘These disastrous unemployment figures mark a bleak end to 2011. The government’s policies mean things could be even worse in the New Year.’
He concluded: ‘Britain urgently needs a major change in direction. Tragically we will get more of the same or worse.’
Dave Prentis, the Unison leader commented: ‘These figures deliver a cold hard dose of reality. . . The 54,000 increase in youth unemployment shows that young people are also bearing the brunt, creating a lost generation that the Government will struggle to curb.’ He added: ‘We need urgent action to kick-start the economy and prevent a new year unemployment record.’
The RMT responded: ‘These latest shocking figures show that all the Government’s promises on jobs and apprenticeships are as hollow as a chocolate Father Christmas.’
It added: ‘Nowhere is the Government’s inaction and impotency more graphically illustrated than at Bombardier in Derby where their kowtowing to the EU and Siemens has left thousands of manufacturing jobs and apprenticeships on the block. They are a total disgrace.’
The GMB’s Paul Kenny commented: ‘Instead of attacking pensions and employment rights and making it easier to sack people, the Government should be pursuing policies to create jobs which is something it is failing miserably to do.’
He added: ‘A double-dip Osborne recession, rising unemployment, rapidly falling living standards are the Tory/Lib Dem miserable Christmas gifts to the nation. The millions of workers without jobs face a miserable Christmas and a bleak New Year.’
The GMB leader continued to state: ‘I doubt if the electorate had any notion that a change of government would lead to a loss of 376,000 jobs across the UK in the public sector in such a short time. Same old Tories returned to power and with them the philosophy of “if it’s not hurting it’s not working”.’
It may well be the ‘Same old Tories’, but it is also the same old trade union leaders telling the working class what they already know, that they are to have a miserable Christmas and that much worse is on the way in the New Year.
They combine this talk with appeals to the ‘same old Tories’ to change their policies when they know that the exact opposite is about to happen – the policies are to become even harsher.
The trade union leaders love to call the unemployed youth, ‘the lost generation’. They are wrong: these youth are part of a revolutionary generation, who are already leading the fight to get rid of the source of the crisis, that is the capitalist system.
The revolutionary youth in the early stages of the road to the socialist revolution will also rid the trade unions of their completely useless rotten reformist leadership in the fight for a general strike to bring down the coalition. The party that is leading this struggle is the WRP. Join it at once.