The UK labour market – a new statistic underscores its less than robust health

Kudo’s to the British ONS (Office for National Statistics). They have a new, interesting economic statistic: the Job to Job Flow Rate (JJFR), “the number of people who remained in employment over the quarter but have changed job”. As can be seen, the variable is cyclical sensitive and a downward change of this variable may help to answer questions about why people stay working for Amazone or accept crappy wages or crappy bosses.  A high rate of JJFR might however indicate a movement from declining industries into more interesting or more productive jobs or at least into jobs with a better future: from finance to healthcare. The increase of the rate after the spring of 2012 indicates that labour might have gotten more clout during this period. Recently, however, employment in the UK is declining again, the flow out of unemployment is at a post 2009 low and the JJFR is stalling at a level which is clearly below the pre 2008 level. Not good.