A community survey aims to prove we are still economically active.

The Population, Employment and Earnings bulletin contains information on how we've been affected by the pandemic and its subsequent lockdown.

These are the main takeaway headlines from the document:

• In June 2020, 30,135 people were employed or self-employed in Guernsey compared with 31,544 in June 2019.
• 3,019 people were self-employed and 27,116 people worked for an employer (10.0% and 90.0% respectively). This compares to 28,523 employed and 3,021 self-employed people in June 2019, annual decreases of 4.9% and 0.1%
• The reduced number of employees were seen to result largely from lower numbers of people classed as permanent residents being in employment compared with June 2019.
• In June 2020, the median earnings of employees was 2.5% higher in nominal terms and 0.7% higher in real terms than a year earlier. The overall impact of having larger decreases in the numbers of employees in the lower earning brackets than in the upper earnings brackets is a higher median.
• The percentage of the workforce registered wholly unemployed (which is available sooner than employment data) had fallen to 1.8% by 3 October from a peak of 5.2% in late May.

Head of Data and Analysis for Guernsey, Helen Walton, has released the following statement:

“We’ve published these two reports alongside each other to try and give as full a picture of the economically active population as we can. We’ve been able to use the electronic census to provide some extra details to supplement what we routinely publish and help understand the statistics that are emerging. The survey results add an extra dimension, by showing the personal impacts of lockdown on employees and self-employees by sector, plus the experiences of those that were job-seekers or students during lockdown.

“We will continue to analyse the data in more detail and we are planning to issue further detailed reports with more findings from the survey later in the year.”