Coronavirus: The jobs most at risk from coronavirus
Tracking COVID-19’s spread is only part of the story. We have yet to get our first glimpse of the net effects of the shutdown.
March 2020 will be remembered as the month that ended Australia’s longest boom and exposed the fragility of our economy.
The months ahead also will test our social cohesion and resilience. The virus that seemed so distant during the bushfires has visited our shores and now claws at our wellbeing and wealth.
More so than any other kind of disaster, the coming of the coronavirus is a demographic issue: every day we count the infected and the dead by age, by sex and now by postcode.
But the grim tracking of the contagion’s spread is only part of the story. There are other measures that will be tallied across time, such as the virus’s effect on mental health, domestic violence, household savings, property values and employment.
At the end of February the Australian economy was as big and robust as it had ever been. More than 13 million were in work and just 5.1 per cent of the labour force (or 710,000 workers) were unemployed.
Then all hell broke loose.
Within a single month COVID-19 has caused the shutdown of the economy, the collapse of entire businesses, the mass standing-down of workers, a shift in the nature of work from workplace to home, and a surge in the workload for some whom we now classify as essential workers.
The problem is that while we can map the virus’s pathway via daily health statistics, the broader economic (and social) impact will be revealed slowly and painfully across weeks, months, even years.
We will get our first glimpse of the net effects of the shutdown and of the stimulus packages on April 23 with the release of Australian Bureau of Statistics labour force estimates, which will include an estimate of the unemployment rate at the end of last month.
Whatever figure that is, it will surely rise further this month and further again next month as the multiplier effect (of the initial shutdown) reverberates throughout the economy, quietly killing off jobs and businesses.
Until then (two or three weeks hence), we can only speculate about the scale of the carnage that is being wreaked on our formerly robust economy.
To my way of thinking there are four categories of jobs that we need to understand better to measure the impact of the coronavirus on the Australian workforce.
● Exposed workers: These are mostly healthcare jobs that place the worker in a situation that exposes them to a greater risk of contracting COVID-19. The ABS, in conjunction with others, has ranked the 1300 occupations that comprise the workforce by this measure. Unsurprisingly, the most at-risk jobs are those such as dental hygienist, GP and even hospital orderly. Low-risk jobs include tree-feller and illustrator. The number of exposed workers in the healthcare sector suggests Australia needs a bigger stockpile of face masks and personal protective equipment as well as the capacity to manufacture locally.
● Essential (and surge) workers: there is no official classification of what jobs are considered essential but it’s easy enough to guess that this would include jobs such as GPs, nurses and shelf fillers. Elsewhere the ABS does cite examples of jobs in high demand including checkout operators, food and drink factory workers and pharmacy assistants. The thing I like about essential workers is that this function requires both the highly skilled (such as doctors) and those with few skills (such as shelf fillers): everyone has a part to play in a pandemic.
● Shutdown workers: these are workers who have lost their jobs because of the necessity to shut down places of public gathering, and/or because of a drop-off in demand attributable to the coronavirus. Such jobs include sales assistant (general), the largest single occupational group in Australia; waiter; domestic cleaners; car drivers; and tourism and travel advisers. It’s remarkable how many jobs rely on close-proximity interaction with others.
● Work-from-home workers: in the 2016 census about 500,000 workers or 5 per cent of the (measured) workforce said they worked from home, including 32,000 livestock farmers and 2700 authors and editors. Five per cent of the February workforce places the WFH community at 655,000 immediately before the shutdowns. It’s unlikely that we will ever get a firm estimate of the WFH movement at its peak but it could exceed 25 per cent, or more than three million or five times the usual number. What the COVID-19 crisis has revealed is the extent to which the Australian economy (and lifestyle) is predicated on the assumption of continued prosperity and the sovereign right to congregate. Take these things away and, like a house of cards, the economy tumbles to the extent that it requires a rescue package.
We won’t know how the coronavirus, and the government’s responses (including the JobKeeper package), netted out across the workforce until June 25 (11 weeks hence), when the ABS publishes employment by occupation for the March-April-May quarter.
And so while the media tallies the number of infected and dead daily, another figure quietly is being assembled: the jobs lost in a silent battle being played out between the rising and the falling parts of the economy. In these turbulent times the greatest attribute an unemployed worker can have (apart from immediate support) is access to an expanding niche in the labour market. We need to know which jobs precisely are in hot demand from supermarkets, hospitals, essential goods manufacturers, courier businesses.
The spread of the coronavirus last month is, in some ways, fortuitous timing. The virus’s effects will be relatively quickly and cleanly measured by the ABS’s quarterly labour force survey, which kicks off a new quarter in March.
We can wait until June to get the job data needed, or we could ask the ABS to conduct a special one-off mid-quarter update of this survey to see where the virus’s damage has been inflicted. It would also give immediate insight into jobs on the rise at this time.
We’re a bit like the Titanic. We know we’ve hit an iceberg; we’ve initiated survival measures (such as the $130bn JobKeeper program); but we don’t know the extent of the gash under the waterline and right across the workforce. A one-off survey of the workforce on a job-by-job basis to produce a dataset that can be directly compared with the end-of-February baseline figures would show where the net damage has been greatest. We’re tossing around billions as if they’re millions. Give the ABS whatever it needs, commission a damage report and recalibrate survival spending as required.
This isn’t about saving money; it’s about getting targeted, timely information to ensure that the Australian economy is well steered through this crisis.
Australia’s 28-year boom ended on February 29. A pandemic on this scale, we are discovering, requires leadership to grasp the gravity of the situation, to act immediately and to set in place the data-capture systems needed to ensure that we’re getting the best bang for our borrowed buck.
Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group. Research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan.