07:28 Wednesday 17th October 2012
Bigger Breakfast Show
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire
PAUL STAINTON: It’s hard if you’re chasing a job. As many as 66 young people chasing every retail job. Tony Bonsignore’s here from our Business Unit. That’s a lot of kids for jobs, isn’t it, that don’t exactly pay a lot?
TONY BONSIGNORE: No, and they don’t. It really is. This research today we’ve got from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, coming just a couple of hours ahead of the latest unemployment numbers. Now what they’ve done, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, they sent out 2,000 job application from fictional candidates. But very typical young people, five decent GCSEs, but to real jobs, more than 650 real jobs, everything from sales assistant jobs in retail stores to cleaning jobs to kitchen jobs. And this is what they found. They found to an extent that it depended very much on the level of unemployment in the area as to how much competition there was for each job. But in the worst areas, you mentioned there that number, 66 young people applying for every retail vacancy. Even in the areas that they looked at with the lowest rate of unemployment there were still 24 young people chasing each job. Similarly, office jobs, office administrator type jobs, 44 people up to applying for each position. And very often Paul these jobs just disappeared within a matter of days, or even hours of being posted on the internet, just underlying I think how difficult it is for young people in the jobs market at the moment. How difficult it is even to get what are one must assume relatively low paying jobs.
PAUL STAINTON: And there are so many youngsters unemployed, as we know too well.
TONY BONSIGNORE: Yes, absolutely. And yet at the same time of course we’ve got the headline numbers saying unemployment’s falling. We’ve had this for a few months now. And it’s really really difficult to square these two things off. On the one hand we’ve got the economy still in a double-dip recession. And yet at the same time unemployment is going up. And yet at the same time again we seem to have certain areas, youth unemployment, part-time work, growing very quickly. So I think we can expect a bigger political row again as the day goes on, as people try and make sense of what are some very very confusing numbers.
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