Labour Force Survey

And since then, you've been keeping a close eye on the youth unemployment number.

Yeah, and it was from a monthly survey conducted by the big dogs, the ABS, and it's called the Labour Force Survey.

And the most recent survey was from last month.

What did it tell us? So overall, it told us that the national unemployment rate is now at 4.7%.

This is such a fundamental question for Andy Burnham's government and John Healey's budget about how do you tackle the NEETs crisis, young people out of work, for example.

How do you tackle the welfare bill if you don't know why people are out of work? Now, the numbers that we use for our workforce are based on something called the Labour Force Survey, which I know is just an incredibly sexy title.

But it's basically just guys from the ONS ringing people up and trying to track them over the years how their employment changes.

But often what happens is they actually miss people who are working.

Mm.

Um, so we've had this problem with the Labor Force Survey, like our, our headline, uh, labor market survey for a few years now, which is just that fewer and fewer and fewer people have been responding to it, and that got a lot worse, um, during and immediately after the pandemic.

Mm.

And, uh, there's ongoing work to try and fix that, and the response rates have come up a little bit, but they're still very low.

And that means, A, just these sort of error margins on the numbers that we get for things like employment, unemployment, inactivity are significant.

But also that there's a risk that the types of people who aren't responding are different to the ones who are responding in ways that can introduce bias as well.

So almost every time I want to look at the UK labor market at the moment, I need to look at- The Labor Force Survey, the Family Resources Survey, throw in the Understanding Society survey as well, then the HMRC data that comes from payrolls.

Because I know that they're, they're probably gonna disagree with each other.

And as our Joshua Williams tells us, it's an issue labor officials are looking to address.

The Bahamas National Statistical Institute releasing its first quarter Labor Force Survey, providing updated employment, unemployment, labor force participation, and other key labor market indicators across The Bahamas.

It covers the period from January to March this year.

So why is it important? It provides policymakers, researchers, service providers, and taxpayers with valuable data to better understand the characteristics of the labor market throughout The Bahamas.

Precisely.

The primary tool they used was the Labor Force Survey, and this survey relied heavily on human memory.

They would ask individuals how many hours they worked the previous week.

And humans are terrible at remembering that.

I have to push back on this entire corporate reporting philosophy for a second.

Okay, let's hear it.

We just spent a significant amount of time discussing how relying on companies and individuals to self-report their data via the old labor force survey completely ruined the nation's productivity metrics for an entire decade.

That's true.