12/09/2012 Newsnight Scotland

take it out of their hands. Thank On Newsnight Scotland tonight,

unemployment's up a bit, but not much.

The real mystery - why are there so many more private sector jobs when

we're supposed to be in a recession?

And would you believe we've went and got a Dutch princess what'll

tell us how to talk proper! Good evening. The number out of

work here rose by 4,000 in the three months to July. It's not a

large increase, but it does check a recent run where unemployment was

falling. It's also the first time Scottish unemployment has been

higher than the UK average since the beginning of the year, although

the rate is still lower than in many areas of England, including

London and the Midlands. The proportion of people in work in

Scotland is still higher than the UK average, but it's 71.4%. It's

only fractionally higher. But it does point to something very

curious going on in the world of work, and if you've recently lost

your job or can't find one, then apologies for even asking this

question - but why are so many people still employed? After all,

we are in the throes of a double- dip recession. Public sector

employment has been falling and is likely to fall further because of

cuts in public spending, but private sector employment has been

increasing at a rate that has economists bemused. The Bank of

England calls it "particularly puzzling." That's Central Banker

speak for "What on earth is going on?" Everyone hopes there is a

simple explanation. The economy isn't in nearly as bad a state as

the growth figures imply. I think it's in the nature of the change of

work. I think companies are more reluctant than they used to be

around taking on permanent, full- time staff, and they now are

seeking to have tasks done and will bring in staff on short-term

contracts in order to fulfil these tasks. There is one contentious

implication in all of this - in effect, we're now employing more

people to make less stuff, to provide fewer services. Now, if all

of those people can simply produce more once the economy picks up,

there's not much of a problem, but if there is little compare capacity,

to use the jargon, that won't happen. Maybe a whole swathe of the

economy just disappeared during the financial crash and won't come back

- in which case, even if the employment figures are better than

expected, we could be in trouble. I'm joined now by Ailsa McKay,

who's professor of economics at Glasgow Caledonian University, and

by John McLaren of the Centre for Public Policy for Regions. Now, you

have produced a list of reasons as long as your arm for why this odd

thing might be the case that we're in a recession, but private sector

employment is going up quite strongly. The interesting thing,

isn't it, that none of them really account for it. None of them

account for it - things like a move to part-time work because of the

productivity in terms of pay-out work is declining as well. I think

there are a few that are more persuasive than others - for

example, output in the North Sea has gone down a lot. There's hardly

anybody employed there now. Output in financial services has gone down

a lot. They're quite well paid, so those would both bring productivity

down. As well on the self-employed - there is a big rise there, and we

don't really know how much these people are earning, so they may be

sort of like jobs, but certainly not very well-paid jobs, not like

self-employed jobs in the past. However, even if those and a few

other things help explain it, it's still very difficult to come to a

position where the economy - GDP - is flat lining and employment is

actually going up. That is particularly strange. It is, isn't

it? Have you got any thoughts on this? Again, we should say that net

employment is going up even though right across the UK there's a

rather large fall in public sector employment because of the cuts -

despite that, employment is going up. I would agree with the comments

made by David Bell in the video about the nature of jobs being

created, and our labour market is significantly different from five,

six years ago. Those types of jobs are less secure, more volatile,

things like zero air contracts. Sorry. What's... Zero air contracts

- people who are employed but they get paid if they work an hour.

They're contracted to work an hour. They're officially employed, things

like my own industry, lekturing. People can be on zero air contracts.

They're used more and more. That's directly hitting women. Women who

are in the public sector have seen their terms of conditions

deteriorating significantly. Those who can retain their jobs are

finding their conditions curtailed, so it's not sustainable. One of the

paradoxes of this is I'm sure what you're saying is part of the

explanation, but in fact you quote figures showing that actually the

number of hours worked is going up, so it can't just be there's a lot

more people doing very little. There's... Maybe part of it.

There's a whole series of things - there hasn't been much new

investment, so the mash threens are getting older, less productive.

There may have been innovation because small companies are

struggling to find the finance and spending all of their time just

trying to stay alive rather than innovate, so all of these things

can - when normally that would feed in, but still... There is wire here

as well, isn't there? Just on that point, one possible explanation is

banks forebearing on basically pulling the plug on businesses

because they still, despite everything, feel some sort of

obligation not to do that but doesn't there tend to be a thing

where when the economy starts to grow again, the banks pull the plug,

so we could actually see a spike in unemployment? We could do, but I

think it's also an issue about how we measure productivity, and what

do we mean by that and how do we - as economists, we traditionally

measure increases in output by how much stuff, as you say, we produce,

and the market value of that stuff. We're moving, as I said, our labour

market is shifting quite significantly, and we're moving

more towards a more service- orientated sector, which is

extremely important to sustain local communities. How do we

measure the productivity of caring for an elderly relative or the

productivity of childcare, the numbers of children who go through

the system? It's not an adequate or accurate measure of the amount of

activity and hours people spend on that activity. Yeah, but again,

that's true, but we're still left with this slight mystery, aren't

we? I think that helps explain part of the mystery because productivity

is particularly poorly measured in the public sector, so it always has

lower - often zero productivity growth. Now, if that's been

maintained, and the private sector has shrunk, that'll reduce

productivity. It doesn't work so much in the last year when it's the

private sector jobs that have been coming back, in but they could

again be poorly paid private sector jobs, so that is part, I think,

of... The quite contentious issue in this, isn't it, is whether - if

you take the view that there's lots of spare capacity in the economy.

It's just there isn't enough demand. Companies are keeping workers on.

When things pick up, they they'll start producing more and

productivity will rise again. It's kind of OK, isn't it? It's this

other view that seems to be around that part of the economy has just

gone. There isn't much spare capacity, and actually, there is

very little scope for increases in productivity when the economy

recovers. I think that the big issue behind all of this still is,

is there really growth there? And if not, then how do you get the

growth to return? Again, if you looked at the borrowing figures,

they kind of back up the GDP figures because borrowing has

increased again largely due to low taxation, which means low profits

from companies, I think, so I think that - I think that the tendency is

more to the look - the labour market figures - the figures are

overly optimistic, I think, at the minute, and the GDP... Do you think

that is case? Yeah, I think sustainable economic growth is what

we're talking about when the economy maybe comes back to a point

when you're saying that we can make more stuff, and do we have enough

people and enough productivity to make that stuff? I think we can't

rely on the private sector to do that for, and as we continue to cut

the public sector, and as we continue to cut jobs for women in

the public sector, then we're not going to stimulate the economy in a

way that the economists tell us that that particular investment

will do. There's too much volatility and uncertainty in

global financial markets for us to rely on private sector investment.

I am curious as to whether it's your sense - look, only a few

months ago everyone was saying it's very curious - it looks like the

economy is doing very badly, but anecdotal evidence is things are

getting better, and all of these things like purchasing managers -

indices were showing actually the economy wasn't doing as bad. That

seems to have stalled. People were saying, as John was saying,

actually, things are looking as bad as the GDP figures are saying. I am

curious what your sense is of that. I have just come from the woman's

summit on employment today where the First Minister addressed the

conference about women concerned about their role in the Scottish

economy. We do have a problem with regard to women's employment and

with regard to sustainable economic growth. So my sense, in terms of

your question, is the situation is getting bleaker for women and women

in local communities in Scotland, women as workers. I heard stories

today from women who are trying to retain their jobs, women who are

trying to get back into the labour market, is it's access and

retention, but also from employers who are finding the cost

associated... The figures today show that actually employment for

That's one particular quarter and one particular statistic. It could

be a blip. The long-term trend since the recovery period is that

women are loseing their jobs at a faster rate than men. And male

employment is on the increase. almost, the biggest increase by far

was for women employment in the last year has been for part-time,

self-employed work which is hardly likely to be profitable. We come

full circle. Scots, Gallic, Doric, the lists of languages and dialects

is extensive. Very often we're judged on the way we speak and

write. The nation has a problem with literacy. This International

Literacy Day David Allison reports on the tension between diversity of

culture and the increasing need for global communication.

In days gone by in the era of manual labour you could argue

literacy was less important than in today's globalised world where you

need to be able to read and write to participate. The gap between the

literate and illiterate is widening. It's something the Scottish

Government is committed to tackling with the aim of seeing a real

difference in literacy and numeracy standards by 2020. Whereas maybe in

a very simple society, for want of a better way of putting it, one

could muddle by, I think, now it is much more difficult. You need, you

know, greater levels of sophistication to get into a job.

Projects like this, adult literacy programme, as well as education in

prisons, can help, but the problem is huge. One in four Scots

experience problems with reading. What about culture? Language varies

in terms of dialect, accent, grammar, vocabulary and that's just

in Scotland. What's the danger of standardising it? And what's the

danger if you don't? The issue of course is not just a Scottish one.

It's European wide. Today a Dutch Princess, who's passionate about

literacy was in Edinburgh calling for a target of 100% able to read

and write. The UNESCO Special Envoy and chair of the literacy group

says cultural diversity should be no excuse for literacy. Language is

a moving target. It's constantly developing, always has over the

venchries and centuries. We need to treasure that. We need to encourage

that development. That is all fine for you and I to have an SMS

conversation and that we have our abbreviations, which becomes a

language in itself, but you cannot do, write an application letter to

find a job in your SMS language. Similarly, in dialects or in own

languages, if you want to apply for a job where they don't speak that

dialect, you need another language. So for me, it's always been the end

-- and, and approach not the either-or approach. People almost

need to be multilingual even in their own language. Absolutely.

someone hears "I have went" and that's their normal, how much

should you challenge things like that in terms of creating an idea

of common literacy? And how much should you accept something like

that? Again, the crucial thing is understanding that we teach young

people to understand what's appropriate when and know and

recognise the difference and then be able to move between those two

different approaches. I don't think it helps at all to stigmatise

perfectly respectable good dialects. Indeed we all enjoy a good dialect

done well, why would we want to stigmatise that and make people

feel ashamed of having it? Advocates of literacy point out

illiteracy isn't just a problem for the person concerned. It's bad for

the economy. It can be expensive picking up the pieces and it's

socially devicive. But that doesn't mean finding a solution is any

easier. I'm joined now by Sue Ellis of

Strathclyde University who's a specialist on how children learn to

be literate. First of all, I mean, part of me -- apart from the

obvious, reading and writing, what do we mean by literacy? There are

different definitions. One is a basic definition that you can

decode print. That's what England's education policy seems to be

working to Atkins -- at the moment. There's another one that said you

can decode and understand it and use to to think critically about

the world and to help you. I know, look, your specialism is with the

younger, we hear all these stories about university lecturers,

employers saying that people they take on and students they have

don't have basic standards of literacy. It's that second sense

that people are missing. Now, the current jobs that you need, you

need to be very much more literate than in the past. So, that's a big

part of being literate. But, so I don't know that actually true that

people are less literate than they used to be. Is it just that what,

for example... The expectations are higher. 30, 40 years ago, I don't

know, maybe 7% of people would have gone to university, now what almost

50% go into higher education. Is it a product of that? Or is there a

change in literacy levels? I think literacy levels are getting better.

They're not getting worse. I think that the real issue is about how we

engage children in literacy. The biggest problem facing Scotland is

that socio-economic status predicts how quickly a child will learn to

read and write. Isn't that true everywhere? Yeah, but it doesn't

necessarily need to be so. would you tackle that? One of the

things that the PISA report shows is that if you can engage children

in literacy and improvement engagement you can mitigate, 30% of

the effect of socio-economic status and 70% of the effect of gender.

What you mean when you say engage them in literacy, I mean is it

about for example getting children to read books and get in the habit

of reading books rather than just know how to... It's about people

who want to read, who have the books they want to read available

to them, the time to read and the place to read. Schools can do a

huge amount to teach for that. It needs teachers who are

knowledgeable about the books that out there and the books that are

recently publish ready out there. It needs teachers who understand

about who can make literacy part of the social fabric of the classroom.

So you say to children, not just I want you to read this book, but

getting children to recommend books to each other. If you think of the

last few books you read, you probably were recommended to read

them by your friends. So having friends who recommend books for you

is a very important thing to do. We know that if you can improve

literacy engagement - I can just imagine a primary school teacher

watching this, making a face and saying "Oh, yeah right, in your

dreams." Absolutely not. Primary teachers do it all the time. It's a

major part of primary teaching getting kids to read and love

reading. It's a major part of what we train teachers to do. Has there

been a problem Where we have perhaps a generation, which you

might be trying to correct who maybe don't do that? In society

there are different views about what reading is for. Some say

reading is about relaxation and pleasure and enjoyment. Others will

say reading is important, but it's important to get a job and it's

about work. When children bring those different attitudes to the

learning situation, then they are going to take very different things

from it. Schools have to think hard about how they're going to

encourage children to actually see reading as pleasurable and relaxing.

There's a lot more in modern society competing for children's

time. Probably when you were young, you got a bedtime story read to you

regularly. We know that parents now will read to their children when

they're at nursery. When the children begin in primary one, they

will do the reading home work, but they don't actually read to them,

they'll dot home work. And the other drop-off point is when the

child is about seven or eight and they can read independently and

then parents think they don't need to read to their children any more.

That is a terrible, terrible punishment for learning to read to

not have anyone read to you. When you're seven? Yeah. Seven, is that

an important age? If you don't get it by that point, do you have

problems? No, children tend to be independent readers by seven, eight.

That's the point where parents will drop off and stop reading to the

child. That's really important because reading, if you take even

the average book written for a seven-year-old or eight-year-old

child it will contain more rare words and multisyllable words than

the conversational speech of a university professor. The only

thing that beats a novel written for an eight-year-old in terms of

complicated vocabulary is expert testimony of a witness in court. L

Conversational speech of a university professor. Thanks very

university professor. Thanks very much indeed. Quick look at the

front pages: The Sun, there it is, all the front pages about

Hillsborough, the disaster and the inquiry. 23 years after

Hillsborough, the real truth, cops smeared. The Sun is profoundly

sorry for false reports. The scotsman, today the truth, tomorrow

justice. Hillsborough families call for prosecutions as police cover up