Australia's unemployment rate has posted its steepest monthly rise on record, with 594,300 people losing their jobs in April as restrictions to limit coronavirus shut thousands of businesses and affected many more.
However, the official jobless rate published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics only climbed by 1 percentage point, from 5.2 to 6.2 per cent in April, because of a slump in the proportion of people looking for work.
"The large drop in employment did not translate into a similar-sized rise in the number of unemployed people because around 489,800 people left the labour force," observed Bjorn Jarvis, the head of labour statistics at the ABS.
Mr Jarvis said that the 2.4-percentage-point slump in the participation rate — those people either in work or actively looking for it — was unprecedented.
"This means there was a high number of people without a job who didn't or couldn't actively look for work or weren't available for work," he explained.
But it was not just a record fall in participation that prevented the official jobless number rising higher.
Employers slashed the working hours of their employees, with hours worked slumping 9.2 per cent between March and April.
When taken together with the fall in participation, the ABS said around one-in-five people who were employed in March either left employment altogether or had their hours reduced, affecting 2.7 million Australians.
That has shown up in much more dramatic increases in the key measures of underemployment and underutilisation, which are both at record highs, even greater than the levels seen during either the global financial crisis or early-1990s recession.
Underemployment — those with a job who wanted more hours of work — surged by more than 600,000 to 1.8 million people, taking the rate to a record high of 13.7 per cent, up nearly 5 per cent in just a month.
Underutilisation, which adds unemployment and underemployment together, also jumped to a record high of 19.9 per cent.
More to come.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiVWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA1LTE0L3VuZW1wbG95bWVudC1qb2JzLWFicy1hcHJpbC1yZWNlc3Npb24vMTIyNDcxNTTSASdodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTIyNDcxNTQ?oc=5
2020-05-14 01:35:00Z
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