Average hours worked per week in the UK has fallen from around 32 hours per week to 31.5 hours per week. This decline in average working hours is shown by the blue line in this week's chart. Working around half an hour less per week on average does not sound like much, but it really adds up.
Suppose that rather than the average worker working fewer hours, that instead employers had sacked staff to achieve the same overall reduction in total hours worked. How many workers would this equate to? The red line in our chart answers this question. It represents the difference between actual employment and those workers that could have been laid off so that average hours worked remained constant. This can be thought of as a measure of "over employment". The data are quite noisy, but they suggest that over 400,000 people in the UK are currently surplus to pre-credit crunch requirements. Had these workers been laid off so that average hours worked had remained around 32 per week, and if all of these workers had registered as unemployed, then the ILO's measure of the UK's unemployment rate would not stand today at 7.8 per cent but instead at 9.3 per cent.
