Blue Monday can’t disguise economic growth

Anna Scott

The third Monday in January is usually accompanied by a press release describing it as ‘Blue Monday’ – the worst working day of the year and one on which people are most likely to look for a new job.

This year, that press release came two weeks early and the first Monday back to work after the Christmas and New Year break was highlighted as the bleakest day. 

Regardless of the truth in this marketing campaign that appears annually under various guises, attempting to get back into a work frame of mind after a fortnight of consumption is not easy, even if returning to our desks provides welcome relief from the season’s excesses.

It was not made easier this week by Chancellor George Osborne’s speech on Monday in which he described 2014 as “the year of hard truths”, announcing five more years of the government’s austerity programme, starting with £17bn worth of cuts imposed this year.

Less than a month after the government hailed the record-breaking 30 million people in work in the UK, Osborne warned that we must not say “the worst is over, back we go to our bad habits of borrowing and spending and living beyond our means”.

The next day, however, the British Chambers of Commerce gave us something to smile about. Responses from 8,000 UK businesses show improvements in most areas for both the manufacturing and services sectors, and that all balances for the fourth quarter of 2013 were stronger than their long-term averages and higher than their levels before the 2007 recession.

Employment and employment expectations in the manufacturing sector were up by 33% and 31% respectively. In the services sector, the employment balance rose by nine points to 29%, an all-time high.

While the government continues unabated with reshaping the benefits system – and the associated rhetoric – even in the face of staunch criticism, companies are ambitious to grow and are looking to hire to meet that growth.

Firms are confident they can expand and need the support of the recruitment sector to get the right candidates in place.

Even if it was a Blue Monday for much of the UK workforce on the 6^th January, for recruiters dealing with a higher volume of applications it was anything but.