Turns out just 60 minutes employment in the particular week of the month that the number crunchers in Canberra are out in force are all one needs to appear in the "employed" half of the ledger.
Oddly enough, this statistical quirk dates back to the 1950s when full-time work was the norm, particularly if you were male.
Still, the catch-all category may go some way to explaining how Australia's unemployment rate remains around 5 per cent, in jarring contrast to the experiences of many.
Indeed, the jobless rate for April fell to a one-year low of 4.9 per cent, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported, thanks in part to a recalculation of Australia's population growth.
The surprise drop - most economists were tipping the jobless rate would rise modestly to 5.3 per cent - made the budget estimates look pessimistic and make prompt the Reserve Bank to hold off on further rate cuts until it receives more proof of a weakening economy.
And yet economists - and the hoi polloi - rightly wonder what to make of a sharp half-percentage point drop in Victoria's jobless rate to 5.3 per cent in April. That state is bearing much of the brunt of a stronger dollar over recent years that's dented manufacturers and providers of education to foreign students alike.
'Work'
The mismatch between official statistics and the reality of many Australians can be explained by the definition of “work.”
According to the ABS: “Work is taken to mean work for one hour or more during the reference week, undertaken for pay, profit, commission or payment in kind, in a job, business or farm, or without pay in a family business or farm.”
Self-employed Melbourne vehicle refitter Jim Ioannidis dismisses that definition as "absurd."
Productive capacity of a population. Productive efficiency of workforce.
Its not a healthy economy if more people are in part time work and those left in full time work are doing more hours to make up for the loss. I mean, its a good statistic, if every job was 9-5, but most other countries do a lot better at measuring their employment data than Australia is doing. These are the cracks that start to appear that you will look back on in 5 years time and think... hmmm dam... the data was in front of us god we were stupid.
Turns out just 60 minutes employment in the particular week of the month that the number crunchers in Canberra are out in force are all one needs to appear in the "employed" half of the ledger.
Oddly enough, this statistical quirk dates back to the 1950s when full-time work was the norm, particularly if you were male.
It's a toughie.
Statistics are only valuable if they are comparable with previous statistics and (preferably) with stats from other places. In other words, it's actually more important that it means the same thing as it did last month than that the "4.9%" actually means that 4.9% of people actually don't have a job. It's the trend that's the real information in these numbers. If it goes from 4.9% to 5.5% you know that a lot of people lost their jobs. If you change the way it is measured, then you get a gap in the figures and can't even make that inference.
In the US they publish about 7 different statistics around employment, many on a weekly basis. The most important ones are:
Non-Farm Payrolls (how many people have jobs) Weekly new unemployment claims (how many people lost their jobs) Average hours worked. (on average, how many hours the people who had jobs worked)
The ABS publishes a lot fewer stats because it doesn't get the money to do it. The government doesn't give it the money, I suspect, because having lots of volatile numbers coming out every week is bad for the economy overall.
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem AREPS™
Productive capacity of a population. Productive efficiency of workforce.
Its not a healthy economy if more people are in part time work and those left in full time work are doing more hours to make up for the loss. I mean, its a good statistic, if every job was 9-5, but most other countries do a lot better at measuring their employment data than Australia is doing. These are the cracks that start to appear that you will look back on in 5 years time and think... hmmm dam... the data was in front of us god we were stupid.
I understand the sentiment overall, but I viscerally disagree with this sentence: "Its not a healthy economy if more people are in part time work and those left in full time work are doing more hours to make up for the loss."
Over a long career, at one time or another, I have been - a part-time worker resisting further work (e.g. while at school) - a "part-time" worker with 2 or even 3 part-time jobs stitched together yielding 50-70 hours per week - a full-time worker with a part-time job on the side - a full-time salaried professional working 50 -70 hours a week (for no specific extra pay) - a full-time worker with paid overtime opportunity limited largely by fatigue management rules.
To me, a healthy economy is one which provides as much work as I am willing to sign up for, with negotiated flexibility on both sides. That may involve part-time, full-time, or full-time-with-overtime arrangements.
Useful employers, to me, are those who provide fair and predictable arrangements--full-time or part-time--allowing me to organise my family life and other, outside work, around them. Employers to be avoided (for me) are those who require high potential availability for work, but don't guarantee that all of that availability will be called upon (and paid).
So IMHO, an economy providing plentiful employment on full-time, more-than-full-time, and part-time bases, all at once, is actually A Good Thing. Indeed, A Really Good Thing.
The real question is whether everyone who *actually* wants to *work* to participate in such an economy has the opportunity to do so. I like Andrew Forrest's idea of having "training courses" tied up front to actual jobs. That's a powerful idea that Labor should get behind, but seemingly can't because of ideological prejudice against "billionaire miners".
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