Every day, it seems, brings a new announcement of job losses from housebuilders. Totting up the numbers for the past week or so gives a figure not far short of 10,000, and this is not counting the thousands of self-employed sub-contractors who were building and fitting out new homes until the sector hit the buffers.

The job market is turning, though in a quieter way than it used to. Readers with long memories will recall the News at Ten job maps of the 1980s, when it was possible to pinpoint how many jobs were being cut and where. In a service-based economy, that is harder. People are quietly let go.

Even in Britain’s factories, where employment has dropped by an average of nearly 12,000 a month over the past decade, the process has been much less visible than it used to be.

This week we will get the official labour-market statistics, which will almost certainly show another rise in unemployment, though probably a modest one. The question is whether we are on the brink of something bigger.

There is another question, which is whether migrant workers will make the job-market adjustment in a sharply slowing economy easier or harder.

Ahead of this week’s figures, the most recent official numbers showed a 38,000 rise to 1.64m in the wider Labour Force Survey measure of unemployment over the February-April period.

The claimant count, still the more widely followed measure, rose by 9,000 to 819,300 in May and is up by 24,400 since its low point in January. The unemployment rate on this measure is 2.5%, bang in line with what economists have traditionally thought of as full employment.

That is important. In the recession of the early 1990s unemployment started rising from a high base, just under 1.6m, double its recent lows. This downturn starts from a position of low unemployment.

It also starts from a position of record employment, more than 29.5m, driven by the private sector. In the past two years, private-sector employment has risen by 632,000, while the number of public-sector jobs has dropped by 74,000.

So where do we go from here? Two sectors, housebuilding and financial services, are in the eye of the storm, though other parts of the economy are being affected by the slowdown. The Home Builders Federation (HBF) estimates that 300,000 people are directly employed in new housebuilding, which coincidentally is roughly the same as the number employed in the City and Canary Wharf.

How many of these are vulnerable? Probably a greater number in housebuilding, where activity has halved, than in the City. There will be collateral damage across the wider housing market among estate agents, surveyors and mortgage brokers. But a wider slowdown affects most sectors. When economic growth slows below around 0.6% a quarter, unemployment can be expected to rise. Growth in the quarter just ended is unofficially estimated at 0.2% and will continue at best at this rate over the next two or three quarters.

John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), with his finger on the pulse of the job market, reckons the slowdown will push the claimant count up by 200,000 or so over the next 18 months.

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