Unemployment in the UK fell to 1.44m in the 3 months up to November 2018, a far cry from the 1980s where unemployment figures of 3m were common – giving the perception that a corner has been turned in tackling the problem of unemployment.

However, as the saying goes, there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Unemployment figures are skewed by factors like involuntary part-time work, where people are working part-time simply because they cannot find full-time employment; this figure is 40% higher than it was ten years ago. Many are now working multiple jobs to simply get by or increasingly using food banks despite working full time, such as NHS nurses.

Factor in the rise of the ‘gig economy’, with people working zero hour contracts without a guarantee of how many hours they will work in a week, and you find many being one bad day away from financial disaster.

Simply counting the number of people in work doesn’t reflect the state of people’s lives. A UN report in 2018 stated that austerity in the UK had inflicted ‘great misery’ on its people. Just like most things within secular liberal societies, everything is measured through an arbitrary scale without looking deeper – beyond the statistics. It is for this reason that capitalism uses employment levels as a yardstick to show the success of policies.

However, today’s reality means if you are to work and lose part or all of your housing benefit, lose income from Universal Credit and have to pay for your prescriptions and other medical care, it is sometimes best to stop trying and to rely on the state instead!

It is easy for such people to be deemed ‘spongers’, but when the incentive to work is unbalanced by an unfair system of taxation and financial burden, it is not surprising that some will take such a route.

When measuring problems such as unemployment, Islam looks at each person as an individual and not just a large data set. Even if levels of unemployment are low under an Islamic Khilafah, the state would never stop looking at individual circumstances and just assume that everyone must be doing fine.

A state based on the Islamic creed will provide employment for all subjects holding citizenship of the state. Company employees and those self-employed have the same rights and duties as employees of the state. Everyone who works for a wage, irrespective of the nature of the work, is considered an employee. Salaries will be determined according to the benefit of the work, or the benefit of the employee, and not according to the knowledge or qualifications of the employee.

This Islamic state will guarantee the living expenses of the one who has no money, no work and no relatives responsible for his/her financial maintenance. The state is responsible for housing and maintaining disabled people.

Take home message:

Poverty is common in the West, with many unable to even put food on the table. Instead of allowing the corporate elite to cut jobs to grow their pockets, the Islamic system ensures
opportunity for the common man and rights for the disadvantaged.

This Islamic state will guarantee the living expenses of the one who has no money, no work and no relatives responsible for his/her financial maintenance. The state is responsible for housing and maintaining disabled people.