Labour markets, employment policies / The British Approach to Unemployment

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The ongoing problem of unemployment in developed countries is caused by the declining relative earning power of the lowest skilled, brought on, in turn, by worldwide developments in technology and trade. To stand in the way of progress would be to deprive society as a whole of enormous benefits, besides, in all likelihood, falling to help the lowest paid anyway. To cure the symptoms by preventing wages from adjusting to changes in supply and demand would merely exclude the unskilled, more or less permanently, from the labour market. Any long term strategy to tackle the phenomenon has to have three aims: 1) the liberalisation of the labour market; 2) the implementation of a benefit system encouraging people to take available jobs by making benefit conditional on actively job-seeking; 3) reform of the education and training systems.