Two contrasting articles in the latest Business Week, Speed Bumps on the Road to More Jobs and Britain's Amazing Job Machine.

Actually (with no evidence other than my own experience, conversations with friends and what I've read), I think there's a jobless recovery going on in both countries for similar reasons. Key quote in the US article is "businesses are getting around these costs [health insurance and social security] by depending more on contract workers and temporary help." My American aunt and uncle both confirmed to me this weekend that health insurance costs are a big consideration for US firms these days, and I suppose not such a concern for UK companies, thanks to the NHS.

But I think the supposedly healthy rate of UK job creation could prove to be a bit of a red herring as well. Key points in the article about the UK are: "over the last seven years, public sector employment across Britain has risen by 7% to 5.3 million" (that's nearly 10% of the UK population, and nearly 15% of the working population folks). How much longer will this be the case once Gordon Brown's reorganisation of the civil service takes effect? Not to mention the large amounts of money swilling around in the public sector for employing private sector consultants (yes, thanks very much, XXXX development agency paid a lot of my mortgage last year too). This might get cut as well. The other factor mentioned is the creation of more jobs in the City - again. Well, easy come, easy go.

My experience, from which I am therefore extrapolating big time, is that the UK looks healthy jobwise because large numbers of white collar professionals did not bother to sign on when they became unemployed over the last 3 years, and are now self employed. And companies are quite happy with being able to buy little bits of people, without having them on the payroll. When they do hire, they are very very specific about what they want. Similarly the self employed have to be very very specific about what skills they have to offer. And the longer you are self employed, the less likely you are to have the specific skills wanted by companies for their full timers (must have managed X number of people, budget of X million, worked in a large US multinational etc).
I'm not saying this is a bad thing - being self employed has lots of pluses. But you do miss out on the health insurance, pension, maternity leave, nursery vouchers etc etc - a substantial proportion of the related benefits that the government has introduced to help working parents. So my big plea to the UK government is to recognise this trend, and make sure that all the child related benefits are available to the self employed.