Summary
Is unemployment in the developed world so low because people have simply given up on finding work? Ed Butler speaks to economist Danny Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, who says that a decade after the global financial crisis, workers in the US and Europe continue tp face a terrible jobs market that is not reflected in the official statistics.
Is the problem that all the well paid jobs are being created in a few rich, expensive cities that are simply inaccessible to the underemployed? That's the contention of Enrico Moretti, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. And according to Christina Stacy of the Urban Institute in Washington DC, even within these cities, service sector workers are finding themselves priced out of the property markets where the job opportunities exist.
(Photo: A homeless man sleeping on a sidewalk in San Francisco, California. Credit: Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Death in Ice Valley is returning. |
| 0:03.6 | We've been trying to find answers to an unsolved mystery. |
| 0:06.6 | And now we're back with an update on the case. |
| 0:09.6 | We'll be here to tell you more about it at the end of this podcast. |
| 0:17.9 | Hello there. I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, the jobs problem. |
| 0:24.6 | Repeated around the rich world, it seems, how the unemployed are becoming physically stranded far from where the jobs actually are. |
| 0:32.5 | Businesses, restaurants, Starbucks need employees to fill them. And now those job seekers live too far to really make it worth it. |
| 0:39.0 | And so people are being pushed further and further from where these jobs are. |
| 0:42.2 | Despite high official jobs figures, are Europe and the US facing an unemployment crisis at the moment? |
| 0:49.5 | People haven't been able to get enough hours and they haven't been able to get job security. |
| 0:54.1 | And they've had very weak wage growth. The less educated especially have just seen the |
| 0:59.6 | disappearing of these good jobs. What to do about jobs? Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:23.9 | There once was a time when finding work in the US or Europe seemed to be just a question of getting a trade, finding that local factory that would have you. |
| 1:42.3 | But that was the 50s, but that was the 50s, half a century ago, |
| 1:43.7 | since when gradually those factory jobs have been shipping out to cheaper parts of the world or simply have been replaced by automation altogether. |
| 1:52.2 | In the last few years, joblessness in the West has become an even more mysterious subject to economists. |
| 1:59.7 | Following the grey financial crisis, official jobless figures |
| 2:02.8 | have actually been surprisingly even suspiciously low. And yet ordinary people, especially the young, |
| 2:08.7 | seem discontent, struggling to hold down stable jobs in many places. Listen to these recent graduates |
| 2:15.2 | in Spain, for example, well educated, well qualified, but |
| 2:19.1 | frozen out of the sorts of jobs that they've been trained to do. |
| 2:23.3 | Right now, we have a lot of jobless youth. I would say in most of the areas, you only find |
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