- Employment and Unemployment | | We now turn our attention to the labour market and consider why people find themselves out of work and cannot find a paid job. Unemployment imposes heavy economic and social costs; we look at which policies are likely to be most effective in keeping unemployment as low as possible.Defining and measuring unemployment Officially, the unemployed are people who are registered as able, available and willing to work at the going wage rate but who cannot find work despite an active search for work. This last point is important for to be classified as unemployed, one must show evidence of being active in the labour market. There are two main measures of unemployment in the UK: 1. The Claimant Count measure of unemployment includes those unemployed people who are eligible to claim the Job Seeker's Allowance (JSA) or who have enough National Insurance Credits. People who satisfy the criteria receive the JSA for six months before moving onto special employment measures including the New Deal Programme. The Claimant Count is a “head-count” of people claiming unemployment benefit. 2. The Labour Force Survey covers those who are without any kind of job including part time work but who have looked for work in the past month and are able to start work in the next two weeks. The figure also includes those people who have found a job and are waiting to start in the next two weeks. On average, the labour force survey measure has exceeded the claimant count by about 400,000 in recent years. Because it is a survey (albeit a large one and one that provides a rich source of data on the employment status of thousands of households across the UK), we must remember that there will always be a sampling error in the data. The Labour Force Survey measure is the internationally agreed definition of unemployment and therefore the measure that best allows cross-country comparisons of unemployment levels.Under-counting the true level of