ACTU Jobs Report December 2011
19 December, 2011 | Report
In 2010, the Australian economy was a jobs machine – 362 300 more Australians were in work at the end of the year than at the start of it.
This was the biggest increase in employment in a calendar year on record. Even better, 300 500 of these additional employed people had full time jobs.
Unfortunately, the labour market spent much of 2011 treading water. It was always expected that jobs growth would be slower in 2011, but a range of factors (like natural disasters and the Euro-zone mess) led to the slowdown being more severe than expected.
Employment rose by 40 400 in the year to November 2011, but the working age population grew by 225 400.
This meant that the proportion of the population in work fell, from 62.6% to 62.1%. Although this is still extremely good in historical terms (63% is the all-time high, reached in April 2008 before the GFC), the slight erosion of 2010’s gains has been disappointing.
All of the net additional employment in 2011 was in part time work, with full time employment falling by 14 900 over the year to November.
The ups and downs of the jobs market haven’t been spread evenly across industries, with some sectors like manufacturing doing it particularly tough in the current conditions.
However, the Australian labour market is still in a far better state than virtually any other developed country, with unemployment at 5.3%, a rate that some economists insisted was impossible a few short years ago.
This Jobs Report forms part of a new suite of regular reports by the ACTU, along with a Wages Report and an Economic Report, each of which will be released quarterly.
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