An interesting article by Tim Colebatch, in yesterday's AGE. I've often wondered why the Liberal's claims about the creation of so many new jobs under their IR regime & the subsequent reduction of unemployment rates is taken at face value. And rarely questioned by Labor & the media. So many of those jobs aren't fulltime positions (& many are casual contract positions, too). Not exactly the rosy picture the Libs like to paint.:
Making Australia Work:
The country's employment rate is not as high as it could be. We need policies to use the workforce's potential, writes Tim Colebatch.
......
Australia is not remotely in full employment. The Reserve (Bank) notes that the unemployment rate is at or around a 30-year low, at 4.6 per cent. But that is only one bit of information about the labour market, and not the most useful bit.
Look again at the figures I began with. Just over 10 per cent of job growth over the past three years came from reducing unemployment. Almost 90 per cent came from migrants, school leavers, and others defined as not in the labour force. And the same will be true in the next three years.
The unemployment rate does not tell us whether or not resources are fully employed. To do that, we need a better measure, so I have invented one: the full-time equivalent (FTE) employment rate.
The concept is not new. In the public service, schools and hospitals, governments already measure employment by converting the number of part-time jobs into full-time equivalent jobs (e.g. two part-timers each working 19 hours a week equals one full-time equivalent worker). It is time the Bureau of Statistics did the same for the whole workforce.
You'd need a computer to process its detailed data on how many hours part-timers work. But roughly speaking, part-timers average 19 hours of work a week, so two part-time jobs roughly equals one full-time equivalent. Using that rule of thumb,
At first sight, the Reserve is right. That's the highest employment rate ever in the 30 years since the bureau began monthly employment surveys, topping the 61.6 per cent in 1989-90. But it's certainly not full employment.
It's nowhere near the employment rates in Scandinavia or Switzerland, which are close to 70 per cent, and well below New Zealand (63.8 per cent). We have a long way to go yet.
But wait, there's more. Among
females, the FTE employment rate has surged from 38.6 per cent in 1978-79 to 50.8 per cent in 2006. It has fallen among teenage girls, who are now studying, has stayed flat among 35 to 44-year-olds, who now have small children, but has risen sharply among 25 to 34 year-olds and all age groups over 45.
And if employers could shed their bias against hiring
older workers, the rise so far would be just the tip of the iceberg: far more women over 45 could be working in future.
But for
men, it's quite the reverse. Employment rates are way lower than in the past.
In 1978-79, men aged 15 to 64 had an FTE employment rate of 80.2 per cent. But two recessions shattered that, and even in 10 years of the Howard Government, male employment has rebounded only marginally, to be 73.2 per cent in 2006.
We are not short of capacity. We are short of policies and hiring practices that make the most of it.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/making-australia-work/2007/03/26/1174761374971.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
