Having said that I'd rather we had low productivity than the problems some of the Southern European countries have had with high youth unemployment.
The official ONS definition - which anyone can check on the ONS site - counts anyone who works one hour a week as employed.
The figures also include anyone who is self-employed for tax purposes, whether or not they have any income from work.
If we used 1970s metrics, where employment was defined as having a full-time job that comfortably covered basic living expenses, unemployment would be running at absolutely terrifying levels.
As I said elsewhere underemployment has been falling as well.
"The number of people in employment in the UK is measured by the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and consists of people aged 16 years and over who did one hour or more of paid work per week and those who had a job that they were temporarily away from (for example, because they were on holiday or off sick). The largest two categories within employment are employees and self-employed people; in recent years these two categories have accounted for over 99% of all people in employment."
The "self-employment" rate, which mainly consist of various low-paying gig jobs without the welfare benefits of a full-time job, is growing and growing: it was 12% in 2001 and 15% in 2017. And there's this poignantly beautiful graph about income distribution between full-time employees and self-employed people in Figure 3 in this ORS article: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor.... Ah, I like it when distribution graphs clearly tell more about economic situations than single-number statistics.
One should understand that the overall decreasing quality of jobs (and wealth inequality created by those crappier jobs) are really the main problem. Unemployment rates (in the definition that neoliberal governments use) are more of a propaganda at this point.
It was usually not worse than the EU's, often better with the years 2017/2018 as notable exception: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth
Set the graph to 25 years and take a look. Quarterly GDP is a pretty stable value - to the extent there's any sort of lower average since the recession (which is a bit hard to eyeball) which such a small difference level it can easily be a measurement artifact. GDP calculations get changed from time to time and the changes aren't marked on the graph.
As for low productivity growth in the UK, one of the reasons economics has a bad reputation is because of "mysteries" like this.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/productivity
Look at the 25 year graph. Growth flattens off around 2004. Gee, what happened in 2004?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_Europe...
Since 2004 the UK has had waves of unlimited immigration from ex-Soviet states that are extremely poor by comparison. It's been one of the most popular destinations for immigrants due to being English speaking, good at creating jobs and so on.
What do we expect in an environment where cheap labour is abundant? We expect, firstly, stagnant wages after adjusting for inflation:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
(look at the graph of real vs nominal in figure 1)
And we expect low productivity growth because you get that through automation, but why automate anything when wages can't rise because there's an endless queue of people waiting to take jobs.
There's no sign of this changing on the horizon. Johnson talks about changing the immigration system, but he is naturally very pro-immigration and always has been. With nobody to challenge him on the horizon and a bureaucracy so intellectually dominated by unlimited immigration thinking it actually can't say what the UK population even is, I would be willing to bet on a continuation of the UK's long term productivity stagnation.
From a purely productivity-oriented perspective though, the good news is that the productivity stagnation isn't "real" in the sense of "we don't know how to raise productivity", it's just delayed by the lack of any need to. In contrast US productivity growth has continued in a fairly stable way. There are plenty of ways to boost productivity lying around. If wage growth continues to accelerate for whatever reason, productivity growth will follow some years later.
Go to that chart, select 25 years then click on the graph button and select trend. It doesn't look healthy.
The differences we're talking about here are very small. GDP calculation is meanwhile way less precise than economists like to pretend.
For instance GDP per capita for the UK is frequently quoted as if it's a meaningful statistic. But ONS population statistics are labelled as "experimental". In other words the government doesn't know how many people are in the country, making GDP per capita (dividing GDP by population) a meaningless value.
Modern GDP is meant to include illegal activity, i.e. something governments try to wipe out when they find it. How are you meant to precisely add up the total value of all illegally exchanged goods and services? It can only ever be a wild guess.
UK GDP stats for Q1 are almost always wrong and get revised later in the year. This error is systematic yet it never gets corrected.
What I'm getting at here is that such a tiny trend in a field as unreliable as economics doesn't let us conclude very much.
Why did other EU countries not suffer the same around 2004?
Germany's looks like it skyrocketed. Same with Switzerland's.
France, Benelux and Spain show an increase in productivity.
Italy, which chose to not apply any restrictions in 2007 (RO/BG ascension) shows a massive increase post 2007.
Norway, which is not a popular destination, has a weird curve.
The United States has around the same percentage of immigrants per year as the UK - ~0.3% of the total population. Canada's is double that (and rising) at 0.65%. Explain their continued growth in spite of immigration? Or maybe it's due to it? Mexico's productivity is dropping, fwiw.
There's really only one sustainable path to increased productivity: technology. There are limits to how long people can or will work, so you have to get more out of them per hour. That means making them more efficient, which normally means better tools. It can also of course mean a society-wide reduction in wasteful non-work but that's harder to pull off.
The UK has seen massive levels of intra-EU immigration compared to other countries. It was one of only two countries that didn't impose transitional controls for years in 2004. The EU likes to talk about freedom of movement but actually almost every country except the UK chose to restrict it. If you look into it you'll see that for many years after 2004 most countries still restricted freedom of movement from the 2004 entry countries.
If you look at Germany then the end of their transitional controls is in 2011, in the middle of the huge productivity drop associated with the GFC. But after that recession ends and productivity returns to normal, productivity growth has completely ended. That aligns with the UK experience.
Most other countries were not hit with the same sort of sudden influx, due both to language issues (English is by far the most learned language) and due to their transitional controls.
Italy's data looks pretty odd to me. It's flat except for a large step change at the time of the GFC?
USA figures aren't comparable. USA only allows legal skilled immigration. For unskilled labor of the sort that can be automated, yielding productivity increases, it's mostly illegal immigration so won't show up in stats so easily.