Why job loss figures are not what they seem
According to the ABS, the official jobless rate ticked up only to 6.2 per cent during the lockdown but the finer print indicated the real level is much higher. Now it’s crucial we don’t let those losses become permanent, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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Some 594,000 people lost their jobs but the ranks of the jobless only rose by 104,000. How come?
Because the ABS defined the other 480,000 as “leaving the workforce” — that the way the world is seen and defined from a protected ivory tower in Canberra, they’d all decided they didn’t want to work.
In statistical officialise, they didn’t want to “participate”. Their supposed choice.
So according to the ABS, the official jobless rate ticked up only to 6.2 per cent — not great, but we’ve been there many, many times before.
In fact, the finer print in the numbers indicated that the real level of complete and partial
joblessness — the partial refers to those people who’ve been reduced to working a few hours when they wanted to work more — was closer to 20 per cent.
Importantly, none of this takes any account of the — according to treasurer Josh Frydenberg — “more than 6 million” now on JobKeeper and who are still defined by the ABS as all having a job.
Now true, all six million of those people would not have been sacked but for the $1500 a fortnight JobKeeper payment to their employer.
But a goodly portion of them would have been.
If we take just the treasurer’s figure of one million whose jobs were “saved”, and add that to the ABS numbers, it takes even the ABS (inadequately) defined jobless rate to about 15 per cent.
It would take my real jobless rate to something more than 25 per cent — that’s right in Great Depression territory.
And indeed it’s actually worse; because all the job losses have been in the private sector. Some two million working in state and federal public sector jobs have been untouched by the lockdowns.
So the real jobless rate in the private sector could be anywhere up to 40 per cent. And the longer it takes to get the economy working, the more likely those job losses will be permanent.