Employment

Abstract

It is quite likely that social work clients will have experienced unemployment, underemployment or work which is unrewarding and low paid. This is because of a massive shift from full-time to part-time working, which meant that by the early 1990s only a third of the British workforce worked a conventional full-time working week (Hewitt, 1993). At the same time, British men, on average, have the longest working hours in the EC, 40 per cent of them in 1990 working an average of more than 46 hours a week (Commission of the European Communities, 1993). Among women, there is a trend towards more unpaid domestic work at home; and in employment, more part-time, relatively lower paid work in absolute terms and relative to men in similar work. This range of unsatisfactory circumstances is not recorded adequately in official statistics. The unemployment statistics tend to record those claiming unemployment benefit, when, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the level of unemployment should total all those seeking a job and available to work, regardless of their social security status.