Employment

With the number of those unemployed in Britain over 3.3 million, and still rising, the significance of the jobs issue scarcely needs underlining in the present context. But when the resource centres were developing their strategies and allocating their priorities in the mid seventies, the objective evidence, in terms of those registered as unemployed, was considerably less stark than now, although the situation was deteriorating rapidly. Unemployment in Britain had been rising since the sixties, but the rate was 3 per cent at the beginning of 1975. 1 From then onwards, however, the total of those unemployed rose steeply with over a million unemployed by the end of 1975, reaching 1 1 2 million in 1976.