Lies, damn lies, and job statistics
What makes these interpretations more confusing is that they all come from what could be loosely classified as the State side IDA Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and Enterprise Minister Mary Harney, respectively.
On that basis, any group of workers at the receiving end of a postbag of P45s would be pardoned for presuming the inventor of statistics was inspired by the elastic band.
Getting a grip on the reality of the jobs situation is no easy task when figures and forecasts can be pulled, stretched and shaped according to how commentators, politicians and business interests require them to fit their own particular perspective.
What is indisputable, however, is that 2003 was the year when "shock closure" became a cliche and the sight of white-faced workers gathered in small groups outside factory gates trying to come to terms with the word "redundant" became all too common.
A feature of the year's job losses was the sheer variety of businesses affected. Both traditional and hi-tech industries were hit, with employees from Gallaghers Cigarette Group in Dublin, Royal Tara China in Galway and Neville Brothers Bakery in Cork getting the same bad news as their counterparts in Square D Electronics in Ballinasloe, Flextronics in Cork and Lucent Technologies in Dublin.
Latest redundancy figures for the year only go to the end of November when they stood at 24,844, just 514 short of 2002's 12-month figure which represented the highest since 1988.
Even if the December figures are low enough to spare us from a 15-year-high, job losses for the year will still average out at about 560 a week. And those are only the notified redundancies the Department of Enterprise only collates figures where there are at least five redundancies in a firm of at least 25 employees. Nor are redundancies arising from lay-offs and short-time working included, even though two workers each put on half-time still means a job lost. Some of the job losses were offset by the creation of new jobs but the extent to which the two cancel each other out will not be known accurately until Forfás, the national policy and advisory board, complete their annual employment survey next June.
In the meantime, we can get an idea of the year from the likes of Enterprise Ireland, the support agency for Irish-owned industry, which helped create assisted with the creation of 8,200 new jobs during the year but suffered the loss of 11,400 others, meaning a net decrease of 3,200 jobs.
IDA Ireland, which supports foreign-owned industry in Ireland, helped create 9,182 new jobs but lost 12,193, leaving a net loss of 3,011. I n the case of both agencies, for every job created, one-and-a-third were lost.
This contributed to an average of 173,000 people on the live register in 2003, compared with 163,000 in 2002 and 142,000 in 2001, giving an unemployment rate of 4.8%, predicted by the Economic and Social Research Institute to reach 5% this year.
Overall job creation may turn out to be stronger during the year than those figures suggest because ESRI figures also show that the number of people at work is actually increasing from 1.74 million in 2001 to 1.76 million in 2002 to 1.79 million in 2003 with 1.8 million forecast this year.
But that has to be put in the context of an increasing population and/or workforce so a rise in the number of people at work has to be measured against an increase in the number of people available for work.
For those newly arrived to the labour pool, however, statistics can seem like way for the powers that be to talk in clinical terms about would otherwise be a highly emotive issue.
"You hear there are 20 jobs gone somewhere and people say it's only 20 jobs," says Padraig MacSamhrain, one of 650 people let go from 3Com in Dublin. "But that's 20 people and 20 lives that touch maybe 10 more lives through their family and the local shop or wherever so that's 200 people affected. Numbers alone don't tell the true story."
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