Vol. 470 No. 7
53 Mr. Sargent asked the Taoiseach the reason for the delay in detailed statistics from the Central Statistics Office in relation to the failure of the recently published labour force survey to state whether new jobs being provided within the national economy in the past year are of a part-time, temporary or lowly paid nature; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [19896/96]
The preliminary results of the 1996 labour force survey show that the number of persons at work increased by 45,000 to 1,284,000 in the year to April 1996. A feature of the results is the increasing labour force participation of women, with 33,000 more women at work; and the participation rate of women increasing from 36.4 per cent to 38.6 per cent between 1995 and 1996.
These preliminary labour force survey results are based on the advance processing of selected details from the labour force survey. The details selected for advance processing include the principal economic status classification and the broad sectoral classification of those at work. More detailed information on questions such as part-time work only becomes available at a later stage, after the full details of the survey have been processed and published by the CSO in the annual LFS report.
The detailed annual LFS report includes information on part-time employment and on the breakdown between regular and occasional jobs. The LFS report for 1995 was published in May 1996 and it is hoped that the corresponding report for 1996 will be published in the first quarter of 1997.
No information on wages or earnings is collected in the labour force survey, as such questions may adversely affect the response rate to household surveys.
