4 March 2015

The hollow victory of falling unemployment was brought up in a debate on the labour market statistics in Wales

In Parliament today (March 4) the Conservatives were congratulating each other on the latest employment figures

However Labour MP for Ynys Môn Albert Owen commented;

“The unemployment figures in my constituency have been coming down for the past 15 years, with the exception of the recession years between 2008 and 2012, but many of those jobs are zero hours, part time and for agency workers.”

Owen Smith, MP for Pontypridd added; “I think workers in Wales are heartily sick of this Tory propaganda. The truth is that of the 100,000 new jobs in Wales, as the Office for National Statistics said last week, 90,000 are zero-hours contracts paying, on average, £300 less per week than full-time jobs. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies said this morning, the average family incomes of workers in Wales have declined under this Government.”