Where we are Losing Jobs

It has been conventional wisdom that the rise in unemployment has primarily been related to the fall in the construction industry. The arguments of political and business leaders stress that the bulk of the economy is in good shape and we are simply going to have slower growth for a while.

The figures from the Dept of Finance, raised in the Business Post yesterday, suggest that this is not altogether justified wisdom. The first four months of this year saw over 11,000 notificiations of redundancy (made to the Dept when posts/workers of more than 2 years duration are being terminated), well up on last years figure and an indication that the downturn is affecting those who worked through long periods of the Celtic Tiger.

This is bad enough but more interestingly the breakdown of those losses suggests that tourism, service and manufacturing jobs are disappearing as fast as Construction work and high-skill, high-wage jobs in Finance and Services that are also disappearing.

Despite the scale of the slowdown in the sector, the construction industry did not account for the highest number of redundancies on a sectoral basis. The services sector, which consists of hospitality, tourism and general services, was hit harder - with 3,589 redundancies for the period.
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Some 317 jobs were lost in the banking and financial sector, while 233 jobs were lost in agriculture and forestry. The manufacturing sector was hit particularly hard, with more than 2,600 people made redundant in this sector in the first three months of the year - 1,708 men and 920 women.

The credit crunch will take some blame for financial cut-backs, most banks have a freeze on the summer hiring programmes which see students take up posts in the bank during summer months, while traders and other staff face the chop in order to find some black ink for the balance sheet.

Even this picture needs to augment the fact that we now have a number of high-unemployment blackspots in the Midlands and West of the country which are running and two and three times the national level. These areas have failed to see much of the boomtime and are going to see plenty of any downturn. Regional development was talked about and reported on but little materialised until very late on in the Tiger economy. Any economic policy which seeks to restructure and reignite the economy must focus on these areas as a national priority.

Nonetheless, it belies the conventional wisdom that we are broadly in good shape - Ahern in the US last week - and can “tough it out”. Instead we need to get our heads together, appraise the reality and decide how to haul ourselves out of a downward spiral of unemployment and lower spending.