Australia’s unemployment rate goes down to 5.7%, but part-time jobs double

The Australian unemployment trend in June was altered in July with the joblessness rate going down. However, part-time jobs doubled at the expense of full-time employment over the past 40 years.

On Friday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported a 5.7 percent unemployment rate because of a large increase in hiring part-time employees. On the seventh month of 2016, 71,000 part-time positions were filled, causing part-time workers to comprise 25 percent of the country’s labor force, from only 15 percent in the late 1970s, reports The Australian.

For the same month, 45,000 full-time positions were lost. Reckoned from January, a total of 64,500 full-time positions have been lost, while 136,300 part-time positions were filled in as of July, data from ABS said. As a result, full-time employment is at a record-low of 68.1 percent of the Australian labor force.

Those numbers mean more than 1 million people are underemployed, while youth unemployment was higher than 13 percent, says Brendan O’Connor, Labor workplace relations spokesman.

Rather than view the phenomenon as bad for the Australian economy, Treasurer Scott Morrison says as more part-time jobs are created, it reflects how flexible the country’s workforce is. “Whether it is a part-time job or otherwise, a job is a job and for a family someone in work is very important,” Morrison points out.

Among those who found jobs in July were 70,000 polling officials hired for the July 2 federal election, reports Sydney Morning Herald. Many of them kept on working in the following weeks during the count.

But Bill Mitchell, director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity at the University of Newcastle, says with over 86 percent of total net jobs, created over the last 12 months, part-time, “it is clear that Australia is becoming a nation of part-time employment growth with all the attendant negative consequences.”

Kishti Sen, economist of BIS Shrapnel, defends the rise of part-time jobs as businesses’ cautious approach to have the flexibility to bring workers on and off their books and contain costs.

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Source: instaforex