The Guardian view on full employment: fiction not fact | Editorial

The country followed a rabbit down the austerity hole, but there's no Brexit wonderland for Britain's workers

Has Britain turned a corner? If you believe the headlines it would certainly seem so. Wages are up, and unemployment appears the lowest for decades. If you believe the hype then the last decade has been a journey where the country followed a rabbit into the austerity hole and emerged into a Brexit wonderland. This is a fiction and the facts are more troubling. If Britain had full employment there ought to be a sharp rise in wage growth as businesses see the pool of labour - Marx's reserve army of the unemployed - dry up. Yet wage growth has dropped from 4.1% in April last year to 2.8%. Pay packets are still smaller than they were a decade ago. Total pay is 503 a week, well below the 522 a week workers took home before the crisis began in 2008.

The "employment miracle" hailed by ministers is in fact a symptom of a British disease of economic insecurity. Unstable, precarious, low-paying and temporary jobs have become the norm for too many. The number of part-timers who can't find full-time jobs is rising by 18,000 a month. In the middle of 2018, there were 781,000 people on zero-hours contracts. There are now 974,000. Then there is the growth in self-employment. In 2000 around 11.7% of those employed set up businesses on their own, where they earn considerably less than those with full-time jobs. That number is now 15.2%, the highest on record.