The chief executive of the Work Foundation has urged UK firms to reconsider their approach to applicants who have endured long-term unemployment, claiming many find themselves unfairly stigmatised.
Stephen Overell criticised employers for harbouring suspicion towards the unemployed and pointed out that job seekers come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and cannot be lumped into one homogenous group.
“Massive generalisations on the unemployed are first of all unfair and secondly highly impractical,” he explained. “The longer you are unemployed, the harder it is to get back into the labour market.”
Mr Overell added that it remains unclear just what the short-term future holds for the British jobs market, but acknowledged that the level of adults out of work appears likely to increase “substantially” over the next few months.
Last month, the Office for National Statistics revealed that the employment rate declined by 0.1 per cent in the third quarter of last year – the first drop since the three months to April 2010.
Posted by Cameron Thomson
There isn’t enough sense of urgency from the STATE sector (eg JobCentrePlus) about providing intensive help from Day 1 of their unemployment to get the unemployed back into good quality work as quickly as possible. The state’s guiding theory seems to be – let them find their own way out of the mire (most people will do so eventually) and only intervene with offers of real help and support when all else fails.
This approach is counter-productive. It harms both individual and the state (which has an interest in as many of its citizens as possible being fully productive).
Very many people have such a small financial cushion they will be in real difficulty if the huge drop in income created by unemployment lasts more than a few weeks. Hope, self-confidence and useful business contacts disappear quickly, making the search for employment harder. Skills fade (most advanced level training is funded or part-funded by employers).
Yes, it would cost a lot to improve the current provision of state employment support. It costs all of us an awful lot more to allow the present position to continue.