Statistics of Unemployment

Abstract

AT the Royal Statistical Society's meeting on December 19, Mr. J. A. Dale read a paper on the “Interpretation of the Statistics of Unemployment”. He suggested that there is a certain popular misunderstanding of the figures, in that it is generally supposed that 2J million unemployed are permanently out of work. The statistics which are most frequently quoted in public discussions do not, and from their nature cannot, disclose the way in which the actual personnel which they represent is constantly changing. It is a fact, however, that, although the total number of the unemployed may be about 27 million, the number of different persons unemployed in the qourse of a year is nearly six million, and a large part of the six million consists of persons whose unemployment is intermittent. Among those are to be included not only the ‘temporarily stopped’ workers and those whose employment is ‘casual’ but also many of the so-called ‘wholly unemployed’. But there nevertheless remains a group whose unemployment is persistent and prolonged. Mr. Dale estimates that this ‘hard core’, represented by persons who have been unemployed for eight or nine months, number at most a million during the past year, the remaining five million being less unfortunate. There are many more in proportion suffering from prolonged unemployment in the depressed areas; about 100,000 of them were last employed in the coal mines, and the shipbuilding and iron and steel centres contain more than their proportionate share. There is a preponderance among them of older and unskilled men. Mr. Dale directed attention to local contrasts in the quality of unemployment. In a depressed coal-mining town the registered unemployment was recently 3,700, or 47 per cent, while in a comparatively prosperous place of the same size it was 1,400, or 11-3 per cent; but the number of men who had been out of work for more than a year was 2,500 in the coal-mining town and only 117 in the other district. Cotton and coal are the industries in which short time is most common.