Get this into your head: We are now short of workers, not jobs

Last week, something strange happened without anyone noticing. We got the best monthly report on the jobs market we’ve ever had, and it was greeted with dismay. The message we’ve yet to get is that, when it comes to the need for jobs, our world has been turned on its head.

Every month, the Australian Bureau of Statistics gives us the latest figures for what’s happening to employment and unemployment, based on a huge sample survey of Australia’s 10.5 million households. The figures we got last week, for September, showed that the number of Australians with jobs increased by more than 64,000 during the month, to 14.5 million. The number of people unemployed – wanting a job, but unable to find one – fell by 9000 to a bit under 620,000.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

Why was this the best jobs report we’ve had? Because the proportion of the working-age population with a job reached an all-time high of 64.4 per cent. During September, the number of full-time jobs grew by 51,000, to reach 10 million for the first time. So, more than 80 per cent of the extra jobs were full-time.

If the economy was booming, this strong growth in employment wouldn’t be so surprising. But the Reserve Bank has been applying the interest-rate brakes since May 2022, and the economy’s growth has been very weak for the past year or more. The only thing that’s been growing strongly is the population – which makes the limited worsening in unemployment all the more surprising.

The new Minister for Employment, Murray Watt, boasted that more than a million extra jobs had been created since the Albanese government came to office in May 2022. “This is the most jobs ever created in a single parliamentary term by any Australian government,” he said immodestly.

So why was last week’s good news greeted with dismay? Because it was taken to mean the Reserve Bank will be in no hurry to start cutting interest rates. You know the media: always look on the dark side of life.

Rates will come down in due course, of course. And with the jobs market holding up as well as it has, it gets ever harder to fear the economy will drop into recession. Silly people judge recession by whether the economy’s production of goods and services – gross domestic product – starts going backwards. But what makes recessions something to be feared is not what happens to production, but what happens to employers’ demand for workers. To the rate of unemployment, in other words. It’s when people can’t find work that they feel pain even greater than the pain people with big mortgages are feeling at present.

When the pandemic lockdowns ended and people were finally able to get out and spend the money they’d earned, businesses started hiring more workers and unemployment fell sharply. By the end of 2022, the rate of unemployment got down to 3.5 per cent – the lowest it had been in about 50 years.

But here’s the surprise: despite the big rise in interest rates designed to slow the economy and stop prices rising so fast – despite consumer spending becoming so weak – 28 months after the brakes were first applied the rate of unemployment has risen only to 4.1 per cent. That’s still much lower than we’ve seen during most of the past five decades. After the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s, unemployment got up to about 10 per cent. In the 2000s, we got used to a rate that started with a 5.

For about the first 30 years after World War II, our problem was finding enough workers to do all the work needing to be done. Since the mid-1970s, however, we’ve learnt to live with the opposite: not enough jobs for all the people – including married women – wanting to work.

By now it’s become deeply ingrained in our thinking that there can never been enough jobs. Every politician and businessperson knows that, if you want to get your way, you promise to create more jobs.

But here’s the surprising news: the unusually low rates of unemployment we’ve experienced this decade aren’t the temporary product of the ups and downs of the pandemic and its inflationary aftermath. They’re here to stay. That’s why the jobs figures are holding up so well.

The half century in which jobs were always scarce has ended, and we’re back to the opposite problem: not enough workers to do all the work that needs doing.

Why? In five words: the ageing of the population. Because the proportion of people too old to work is growing, while families are having fewer children. Old people don’t stop consuming. They need more spending on services such as healthcare and aged care, which requires more workers.

For years we’ve made up for our low fertility rate by allowing high rates of immigration. And we’ll keep seeking from abroad the many doctors and nurses and aged-care workers we need.

Trouble is, all the rich countries have the same population-ageing problem we do. For different reasons, even China has a big ageing problem. So, the world competition for young skilled workers is likely to get a lot more intense.

But isn’t that a problem off into the future sometime, like climate change? Don’t be so sure – like climate change.

With the high cost of home ownership and a shortage of rental housing, right now we ought to be building a lot more additional housing than we are. What’s the problem? A shortage of skilled workers, with many people who could be building homes off working on the state governments’ big infrastructure projects.

And now that the Albanese government has approved the expansion of many coal mines, this will further reduce the number of skilled workers available to build homes.

A shortage of jobs is no longer our problem. It’s a shortage of workers.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor.