Jobless rate remains steady!!!

Australia’s unemployment rate remained steady at 5.8% however it appears that those actively looking for work has reduced!

It seems as though companies are holding onto their staff amid pensive optimism of a recovery, all the while putting recruiting plans on hold. The jobless rate of 5.8% though has remained static for some 5 months. Economists predict this [current] rate will increase to 7% next year. Still this is lower than the Federal Governments forecast of 8.25%.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), in the 12 months to August [2009] 217,000 full time jobs were lost, however this was offset by the addition of 181,000 part time positions. The report goes on to mention that the weaker labour market conditions are attributable to significant falls in work hours…this of course presents increasingly tough conditions for job seekers.

These seem to adversely affect the ‘participation rate’ (the amount of job seekers actively engaged in seeking work). Ostensibly this figure has reduced as a growing number of job seekers become discouraged and ‘drop out’ of the hunt for work.

There are conflicting views upon the health of the labour market; the number of full time jobs shrank (for the fourth consecutive month), and so aggregate hours worked have reduced by four (4) million, in August. This is the 13^th consecutive monthly decline, as employers sought to absorb the effects of the global economic downturn by moving staff to shorter hours.

Notwithstanding, the nation has thus far avoided the levels of lay-offs experienced in the recession of the 1990’s which has therefore helped to drive optimism.

Although the Australian unemployment rate has worsened from 4.2% in 2008 to 5.8% today, we can take some solace in the fact that we are better than all other countries, bar 6 (Austria, Denmark, Japan, Netherlands, Norway and South Korea). For the record the European Union and the United States have an average unemployment rate of 9.5%.