There is more to it.

If you look at page 25 of the Parliament report (link below) you'll see that the UK's unemployment rate was below 3% from World War II until the late 1970s. Now it's 8%, which doesn't sound like a huge increase, except that you have to remember that the UK population has grown since the '70s, so 8% of a larger population is unemployed.

"The total population of the UK rose by 17 per cent from 50.2 million on census day 1951 to 58.8 million on census day 2001." (See census figures below) This means that if your man in the pub was born in 1950 and was 20 years old when he was looking for a job in the '70s, he competed with fewer people, mostly men.

As the other person said, the jobs were more labor-intensive, so they needed more workers at that time, to produce the same value of goods.

And since that time, immigrants from former British colonies have been moving to Britain, competing for jobs which now needed fewer people. In the 1971 Census, the population was 5.8% foreign-born; by 2001 it was 8.5%, a small but significant increase.

In addition, the 1970s were when the UK stopped exporting economically-disadvantaged children to its colonies like Canada and Australia. From 1869 until the 1960s Britain exported tens of thousands of poor or orphaned children to its colonies (see below).

And of course we all know that the internet has made it possible to "offshore" knowledge jobs that would once have been done at home. Not only data entry clerks, but programmers, tutors and even attorneys are watching their jobs being done in poorer countries.

So now you have more and more workers, native and foreign-born, men and women, clawing each other for a slice of the pie. No wonder it's bloody difficult to get a job.

I agree and I dont really know. There is a Kurt Vonnegut book called "Player Piano" where machines are so effective and do so much that the huge bulk of the population has nothing to do. They just sit around all day, and are miserable, but machines do the work so much better that there literally are almost no jobs, I don't mean no jobs available, I mean no jobs - nothing for humans to do.

1 - Globalization and Education in the former "3rd World". It is much easier for companies to ship jobs overseas. Almost any kind of job besides government, education, health and local niche. By spreading English across the globe, average Americans and Brits have suffered from job loss. Now, intelligent and motivated people all across the world can learn English and get skills to do most of the manufacturing, engineering and customer service jobs we used to do at home.

2 - De-unionization in much of the western world.

3 - Automation and increased productivity. Most workers accomplish much more now than they did a decade ago in an hour of time. Computers, smarter workspaces and tools and smarter employees have made work much more productive.

You are right.