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.
Key points:
- Nearly 600,000 people lost their jobs last month, while a further 600,000 saw their working hours cut back
- Unemployment jumped 1 percentage point to 6.2 per cent, which would have been much worse except that many people did not look for work
- In all, the ABS said 2.7 million Australians either lost their job, had their hours reduced or left the labour force last month
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, taking it back to levels seen as recently as September 2015.
The ABS said that was 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.
"The participation rate plunged from 66 per cent to 63.5 per cent, the lowest it has been in 16 years," observed Capital Economics analyst Marcel Theliant.
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.
With many businesses shut or struggling to stay afloat, job ads slumped by almost two-thirds in April, according to employment advertising website Seek.
Little surprise, then, that those laid off recently did not bother looking for work, particularly given government instructions to avoid leaving home unless necessary and the relaxation of "activity" tests for JobSeeker payments.
But it was not just a record fall in participation that prevented the official jobless number rising higher.
"What's more, all employees who received the Government's JobKeeper wage subsidy were counted as employed, even if they didn't work any hours," Mr Theliant said.
That was reflected in the ABS measure of 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.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiVWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA1LTE0L3VuZW1wbG95bWVudC1qb2JzLWFicy1hcHJpbC1yZWNlc3Npb24vMTIyNDcxNTTSASdodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTIyNDcxNTQ?oc=5
2020-05-14 02:32:49Z
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