Australia’s labour market continues to romp back to recovery, with the unemployment rate falling to its lowest level since just before the start of the global financial crisis.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released on Thursday showed the jobless rate fell by 0.5 percentage points to 4.2 per cent last month.
Increased competition for talent should spill over into higher wages, as xjmtzywbusinesses try to attract new staff and retain existing workers, experts claimed.
“This is the lowest unemployment rate since August 2008, just before the start of the global financial crisis and Lehman Brothers collapse,” ABS head of labour statistics Bjorn Jarvis said.
“The continued recovery in employment was also seen in strong increases in hours worked.”
The ABS said 65,000 people gained work last month, following on from a huge 366,000 increase in November, when a large number of people who were attached to a job re-entered the labour force.
Mr Jarvis said the number showed the state of the labour market in the first two weeks of December, before the big spike in Covid-19 cases later in the month.
Recovery in NSW and Victoria’s labour market continued to have a big influence on the national figures, he said, with employment in these two states around where it had been in May, having fallen 250,000 and 145,000 during lockdowns
During the pandemic, changes in employment and participation rates have been particularly large for those aged 15 to 24, the ABS said.
“The youth unemployment rate fell by 1.5 percentage points to 9.4 per cent, the lowest since November 2008, and the youth participation rate increased by 0.4 percentage points to 70.5 per cent, the highest it had been since September 2008,” Mr Jarvis said.
Callam Pickering, APAC economist at job site Indeed, said the tight labour market had created a headache for recruiters but could be hugely beneficial to jobseekers.
“Employment in Australia is currently 1.9 per cent higher than it was before the pandemic began,” Mr Pickering said.
“Forward-looking measures, such as job vacancies and job advertisements, suggest that the labour market is only going to tighten further.
“Record creation of new jobs, combined with labour supply issues, should push the unemployment rate into the low 4 per cent or even high 3 per cent range in the near-term.
“Increased competition for talent should spill over into higher wages, as businesses try to attract new staff and retain existing workers.”
