Phil Taylor

It has come to my attention over the last few days that when teachers go on strike on 30th November and close your school, costing you a day’s holiday or a full day’s pay the teacher causing you this pain will only effectively lose half a day’s pay.

The national Ts and Cs for teachers in England and Wales, the so-called Burgundy book, specify that deductions should only be made at a rate of 1/365th. Section 3.2 reads as follows:

In addition to the provisions of Sections 4, 5 and 6, where authorised unpaid leave of absence or unauthorised absence (e.g. strike action) occurs deductions of salary shall be calculated at a daily or part-daily rate based on the day’s salary being 1/365th of a year for each day of the period of absence.

The upshot is that teachers are only really losing half a day’s pay. Teachers barely work for half of the days of the year. When they need training parents, outrageously, have to deal with so-called INSET days in term time. The 1/365th formula would be fair if teachers went on strike on a public holiday, on a weekend day or gave up a holiday day. Maybe they are planning the next teachers’ strike on Christmas day? But they don’t therefore they should be losing about 1/180th of their annual salary, twice as much as agreed.

Such pay deductions, as the recent New York labor posters clearly show, are legally treated as damages to reimburse the employer for the services lost due to withdrawal of labour. The loss to employers is a day of face time in front of children. This is worth at least twice as much as the deduction of 1/365th.

The number for non-teaching staff at 1/260th is also too generous. It does not account for annual leave and public holidays. Most public service workers get more than 20 days holiday plus 8 days public holiday so 28-40 days need to be lopped off the 260. Other public service workers are getting a 15% discount typically when they buy back a day of time when on strike.

The disparity between teaching and non-teaching staff shows how ludicrous this very expensive concession to teachers is. The school cleaner will be a lot worse off than the head on strike days.

During the last teacher’s strike over pensions on 30th June (another day’s holiday blown for the people who pay the bills) 850 Ealing teachers went on strike and the council saved £110K due to deductions from their pay. It should have been twice this much if the employers had negotiated a sensible set of Ts and Cs with this particular group of staff.

Overall the country will be paying out £100 millions for work not done on 30th November. Striking should be twice as expensive for teachers. They clearly like it too much at the current price.

Interesting piece on Coffee House blog yesterday.

It points out that the UK has the second fastest rate of growth of government expenditure in the EU. The left’s Plan B and too far, too fast rhetoric are simply nonsense.

The reason that we have the pain of cuts whilst public expenditure is growing is because we are having to pay more benefits and more interest on accumulating government debt. If the markets lost faith in George Osborne we would have to pay double to service our debts. Looking at this comparison there really is no room to increase public expenditure. Balls and co would have to visit massive new cuts on us with their Plan B.

We are hearing a lot about youth unemployment today after the latest ONS statistical release. The headline is 21.9% youth unemployment or 1.02 million people. These numbers are just statistical nonsense. If you are on unemployment make sure to review the texas unemployment benefits, so you can make sure to keep getting your benefits. They are also part of a decade long trend.

It is truly terrible that hundreds of thousands young people in this country are unemployed. I remember leaving school in 1980 and seeing many of my friends struggle to find jobs for years. I was lucky to work through my year off in 1980/1981 but still saw redundancies at the electronics business where I worked. I was doubly lucky to spend three years at university sheltering from the financial hardships of the early eighties.

The first thing that most people don’t know about these stats is that they are inflated by 40%, 286,000, by the “unemployed” youngsters who are in full-time education. The ONS bulletin says:

In accordance with international guidelines, people in full-time education are included in the youth unemployment estimates if they are looking for employment and are available to work. Excluding people in full-time education, there were 730,000 unemployed 16 to 24 year olds in the three months to September 2011, up 58,000 from the three months to June 2011. The unemployment rate for 16 to 24 year olds not in full-time education was 20.6 per cent of the economically active population, up 1.8 percentage points from the three months to June 2011.

The second thing that most people don’t know is that these numbers are 21.9% of non-students, not the total young population. It is not 1 in 5 young people who are unemployed as we keep being told. It is 1 in 5 of young people who are not in full-time education. The real youth unemployment rate is more like 12%. Not great but not quite as frightening as the almost 22% you might imagine.

This text from Eurostat explains:

Youth unemployment rates are generally much higher than unemployment rates for all ages. High youth unemployment rates do reflect the difficulties faced by young people in finding jobs. However, this does not necessarily mean that the group of unemployed persons aged between 15 and 24 is large because many young people are studying full-time and are therefore neither working nor looking for a job (so they are not part of the labour force which is used as the denominator for calculating the unemployment rate). For this reason, youth unemployment ratios use a slightly different concept: the unemployment ratio calculates the share of unemployed for the whole population.

It is really interesting to see how Eurostat’s 2010 youth unemployment rates translate in unemployment ratios. Suddenly countries such as France, Italy and Portugal which seem like disasters from a youth unemployment view look much better when you look at the ratio.

The third thing that most people don’t know is that youth unemployment on this measure bottomed out in 2001. Currently youth unemployment on this measure is 80% odd higher than its best. It has taken 10 years to get here.

You can see from the Eurostat figures that different approaches to education significantly change the youth unemployment ratio. It looks like in the UK we have a deep seated problem caused by our parlous education, education, education system. It isn’t the economy stupid. In other words youth unemployment looks to be a structural rather than a cyclical problem.