The number of people currently in paid employment in Northern Ireland is at an all-time high, official figures have confirmed.
Employee jobs increased over the last quarter by 0.9% and over the year by 1.1% to a record 831,780 in September.
The north’s unemployment rate for August-October also stood at just 1.6%, which is down 0.3% over the quarter 0.4% over the year.
The latest labour market statistics, published by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (Nisra), are understood to have seen some of the data reweighted.
And that has, in general, led to numbers slightly better than previously reported.
The number of employees receiving pay through HMRC PAYE in the north in November, at 806,200, was unchanged over the month and an increase of 1.1% over the year.
Employees’ monthly pay in November of £2,288 was an increase of £11 (or 0.5%) over the previous month and an increase of £158 (or 7.4%) over the year.
The total number of weekly hours worked in Northern Ireland was estimated at 29.7 million hours, an increase of 1.3% on the previous quarter and an increase of 2.2% on the equivalent period last year.
But the economic inactivity rate (that’s the proportion of people aged 16 to 64 who were not working and not seeking or available to work) remains a blight on the otherwise encouraging labour force numbers.
That ignominious marque increased by another 0.6% over the quarter and by 0.7% over the year to 26.6%.
The seasonally adjusted number of people on the claimant count was 41,300, representing 4.2% of the workforce, which is down 0.5% from the previous month’s revised figure.
The November claimant count remains 38.3% higher than the pre-pandemic count in March 2020.
The atest annual total of proposed and confirmed redundancies considerably lower than previous year, with 90 confirmed lay-offs in November.
Over the last year 1,690 redundancies have been confirmed, which was approximately two-thirds of the figure for the previous year (2,590).
There were 290 proposed redundancies in November, taking the annual total to 2,960, around 70% of the figure for the previous year (4,310).
Labour Relations Agency chief executive Mark McAllister said the statistics show a mixed picture, with some key measures remaining steady while others are not going in the right direction.
He said: “A great deal of the commentary in the business world at the moment involves the word ‘cost’ and it has featured heavily in discussions that I have had recently with both trade unions and businesses alike. By this I mean ‘the cost of living’ but also ‘the cost of doing business’ and central to both of these issues is pay.
“The context with which pay can be viewed can range from – minimum wage, voluntary real living wage, contractually negotiated or indeed set by a sectoral fair pay agreement.
“Today’s statistics regarding pay in Northern Ireland show us that earnings from HMRC PAYE indicated that Northern Ireland employees had a median monthly pay of £2,288, but there will be much argument about how this compares on a UK wide level and the impact of low pay on things such as productivity and good jobs.
“As we enter a new period of pay negotiations in public and private sector alike, ‘cost’ is, as expected, likely to feature heavily and the context informs everything in this arena including the cost of doing nothing. Some sectors such as education and health have already seen pre-2025 stress tests being applied and tensions are clear to see.”
