The number of people working shorter hours or taking temporary leave from work at the request of their employer has trebled in the past year as the recession takes its toll on the UK’s workforce.

Cash-strapped companies have been encouraging employees to work fewer hours or take leave on reduced pay in a bid to cut costs without making widespread redundancies.

While this does keep workers in their jobs, it erodes their income, leaving families with less money to spend each month.

Some 123,000 workers were working “short-time” between January and March this year, up from 36,000 in the same period last year, the most recent official figures show. Men were the worst affected, with a 286 per cent rise in the number of short-time male workers.

The figures come only days before new unemployment figures are expected to show a further jump in the jobless total. Economists forecast that an additional 41,700 people signed up for unemployment benefits in June, taking the total to 1.58 million. The pace of unemployment has, however, slowed appreciably since the beginning of the year, when the number of people claiming benefits surged by up to 137,000 a month.

Despite the increase in short-term working, analysts believe that the overall jobless figure, which includes people who are not claiming benefits and is expected to have hit a 13-year high of 2.3 million in June, will continue to soar to more than 3 million next year.

Some analysts said that the increased prevalence of short-time working had played a part in the slowdown, with companies trying to hold on to their workforce so they were in a strong position once the recovery began in earnest.

Colin Ellis, chief UK and European economist at Daiwa Securities, said: “Short-term working means that companies can avoid redundancies, and save on the search costs of increasing their workforce once again when the economy picks up.”

But short-term working still hits the economy as household incomes drop. “Either way, firms are cutting costs, household incomes fall and that hits spending, which is the engine room of the UK economy,” Mr Ellis added.

Workers in the manufacturing sector have been the hardest hit by the increase in short-time working as factories have slowed production. Car manufacturers have been at the forefront of this move Honda shut its factory in Swindon for four months.

About 18 in every thousand workers in the manufacturing sector are working short-time, up from about three in the first three months of last year.

But it is not only factory workers who have been affected. The number of managers and senior company officials working shorter hours has quadrupled in the past year, while the number of professional workers on shorter weeks has more than doubled.

Unions are lobbying the Government to implement a short-term working subsidy in a bid to further stem the rise of unemployment. Under the scheme, workers who were put on a short working week would have 60 per cent of their wages for the days not spent at work paid by the Government.

The CBI, Britain’s biggest employers’ organisation, said that such a move would be too big a drain on the public purse. It has proposed allowing employers to let workers take “holidays” of up to six months on £130 a week, with the Government and the employer equally splitting the cost.

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