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Since 2011 the reported incidence of zero-hours contracts has risen rapidly, from 0.6% to 2.4% of the working population (Chart 6). What may be welcome flexibility for a company may be unwelcome insecurity for its workforce. •  While participation rates in the UK workforce have increased, in some cases they remain low by international standards. Female participation in the UK labour market remains well below our European neighbours, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. And compared to these same countries, the fraction of NEETs in the UK is almost twice as high. •  Finally on wages, real wages have yet to return to their pre-crisis peak. Rather, they are still 6% below that level. Since the crisis, we have seen one of the largest and longest squeezes on wages since at least 1850 (Table 1). •  Indeed, since the crisis real wages have fallen faster even than UK productivity, which itself has been extra-ordinarily weak having flat-lined for the past six years. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Put differently, labour’s share of the national income pie has fallen since 2009, from around 58% to 53% (Chart 7). •  That squeeze on real wages has been even more acute for some. Declines in median real wages among the young have been roughly twice as large as among the old. And workers in sectors such as construction, health and social work have seen far-larger declines in their take-home pay (Chart 8).