THERE is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about what is happening in our employment market. This is, perhaps, not too surprising in view of the complexity of the movements into and out of our, labour force the inflow from the education system the constant movement of people to and from employment outside Ireland the flow of women from the workforce to child care in the home and back again at a later stage the continuing decline of the numbers engaged in farming and the movements between work and unemployment.
These flows backwards and forwards are much larger than is generally realised. Thus, the quite modest net emigration of 4,000 a year between 1990 and 1995 reflected an average annual outflow of 39,000 people, offset by an average annual inflow of 35,000 returning after a period living abroad.
In most cases the period spent abroad is probably quite short, as in the case of students doing summer work, but in many instances it is long enough for those returning to bring with them children born abroad. (Since 1991 there has been an average net inflow of no fewer than 5,000 children a year adding more than 10 per cent to the numbers born here each year.)
Similarly with unemployment. The Live Register is, of course, a quite misleading indicator of the total level of unemployment one paradoxical reason being that many women who take up part time work after a period of child caring become legally entitled to unemployment assistance precisely because they have secured a job!
Nevertheless, the Live Register does give us some broad indication of the scale of movement into and out of employment.
FOR example, between April 1994 and April 1995 there was a drop of 28,000 in the numbers out of work, as shown by the more reliable annual Labour Force Survey, while the Live Register recorded a decline of 8,000 during this 12 month period. But that Live Register drop of 8,000 reflected no fewer than 327,000 new registrations rather more than offset by an outflow of 335,000 from the Live Register during that 12 month period!
Given this scale of movements into and out of work both at home and abroad, one can come to grips with what is happening only by simplifying these movements into net flows. Although this net approach drastically over simplifies what is happening, we can nevertheless learn from it quite a lot about the way our labour market has been functioning both in a recent recession period (1990-1993) and in boom years (1993-1995).
By taking this approach, and analysing the net annual changes in the job market, it emerges that during the first half of this decade the annual natural increase in the number of people over the age of 15, from which our workforce is drawn, has averaged 35,000-40,000. This has been offset by the rate of net adult emigration.
The outflow, especially of men, across the Atlantic has more than doubled, and the flow of returning emigrants from across the Irish Sea has reduced slightly.
Despite the consequent slightly smaller annual increase in our adult population between 1993 and 1995, the potential workforce has nevertheless expanded more rapidly in the last couple of years, as a result of a temporary halt in the previously accelerating rise in the number of retired people and more importantly, because of a much slower increase in the number of male students.
This latter phenomenon may in part at least have reflected an easing of the earlier pressures to remain on in third level, which has been brought about by the readier availability of jobs for men both at home and abroad in the recent period.
In the case of the female workforce, the numbers becoming available for work on completing their education have been added to by a substantial net movement of women from child caring back to paid employment. This flow was, paradoxically, greater during the recession period than during the recent boom.
The effect of all this has been to increase the labour force annually by 6-7,000 men a year and 16-17,000 women, more or less regardless of the condition of the job market.
This pattern is compatible with the results of an earlier and somewhat different analysis I made of employment flows during the 1980s, which suggested that during that decade employment of education leavers was surprisingly little affected by economic conditions.
In that decade, much the same proportion of education leavers secured employment in Ireland in recession periods as did so in boom periods with unemployment taking up most of the slack as demand for labour rose and fell.
Thus in the early 1990s, as in the 1980s, the whole of the gap between an almost fixed annual increase in the numbers available for work and fluctuating current demand for labour has been met by movements into and out of unemployment.
During the recent recession, unemployment rose by 11-12,000 a year for men and 6-7,000 in the case of women and after 1993 it fell by a broadly similar amount rather faster in the case of men.
It is interesting to note and this also emerged during the earlier, much more acute, recession in the 1980s that even in bad times female employment tends to go on rising, albeit more slowly than in good times it is male employment that declines in those circumstances. But in boom period, male employment increased on a scale that matches the rise of female employment.
In other words, it seems that virtually all the strains of fluctuations in demand for labour are taken by men, with male unemployment swinging sharply downward and upwards as economic growth accelerates and declines.
AS might be expected, part of the decline in full time male employment in a recession is offset by an increase in part time work for men, while in these conditions most of the extra jobs available for women are also part time. But the increase in employment brought about by a boom consists almost wholly of full time jobs, with part time employment rising no more rapidly than in recession conditions.
Finally, analysis of changes in the job market shows that the quite slow rise in total employment in the recession years 1990-1993 was actually caused by an unexpectedly sharp and sudden fall in the numbers engaged in farming for these years saw a drop of no less than 27,000 in an agricultural labour force that had remained stable throughout the previous four years.
While the increase in non agricultural employment between 1990 and 1993 did not match the increase that had taken place in the boom year 1990, it compared very favourably indeed with the pattern of the pre 1989 years.
For in the years up to 1989, the slack in the non agricultural workforce that had developed during the recession of the early 1980s had enabled output to be expanded rapidly without any increase in the workforce.
Finally, the huge employment increase of the last couple of years has been due primarily to a remarkable acceleration in the growth of employment in the private sector, but it has also been boosted by a major expansion of Government financed employment schemes.