KPMG report on job market shows there are fewer jobs and the likelyhood of an increase in unemployment.

The labour and employment market in the UK weakened significantly in October as industry appears to be 'battening down the hatches' in the face of recession.

This is according to October’s Report on Jobs, from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and KPMG.

Both permanent and temporary staff appointments fell at survey-record rates as demand for staff contracted sharply.

Not only are vacancies down but indications are that wages and salaries are also down. Wages and salaries declined for the first time in over five years, pressured by rapidly rising levels of candidate availability.

The KPMG report is based on original survey data provided by recruitment consultancies and is seen as one of the most accurate windows into the labour market.  

Kevin Green, Chief Executive, Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) says, "the REC is calling on the Government not to remove the VAT concession in April and push back the deployment of the Agency Workers Directive until the economy has started to recover."

According to Mike Stevens Mike Stevens, Partner and Head of Business Services at KPMG, there is a real threat that employers will now start to consider going down the redundancy route when taking a longer view and realising the recession could still be with us well after next year.

"As UK companies are increasingly under pressure and economic conditions are getting worse, many employers won't have any choice than making large-scale redundancies. Job losses will most likely affect all sectors across the economy with only a few exceptions.

"Support services companies for example could be relatively protected as they provide essential but modest value services to the corporate and public sectors; even they however are feeling the squeeze and their margins are often too thin to absorb any level of corporate failure in their customer base."

Share this: digg   del.ico.us   Newsvine   Reddit   Furl   technorati   Facebook

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name (required)

Email (required) (not published)

Website

Title

POST

By posting on this website you are agreeing to abide by our website comment policy and all posts are subject to the approval of the website editor. We will remove posts that contain offensive or threatening language, personal attacks on the writer or other posters, posts that are off topic and posts that are considered spam or specifically used to promote any commercial products or services. Any poster who repeatedly contravenes the policy will be banned from posting on the website.