Election 2022: Labour hire talk fails to stack up

Anthony Albanese’s claim that more people being employed by labour hire firms is contributing to a ‘massive rise in insecure work’ has been contradicted by official figures.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese insisted he wasn’t ‘exaggerating the level of insecure work’. Picture: Toby Zerna

Anthony Albanese’s claim that more people being employed by labour hire firms is contributing to a “massive rise in insecure work” has been contradicted by official labour force figures.

Speaking in Longford, Tasmania, on Tuesday, the Opposition Leader again insisted the strong labour market concealed a rising “casualisation” of the workforce despite official labour force statistics showing casual workers as a share of total employment has trended lower over the past five years, from 25 per cent to 22.5 per cent.

“We’re not exaggerating the level of insecure work and there’s a range of areas in which it’s happening,” Mr Albanese said, 24 hours after guessing the unemployment rate was at 5.4 per cent rather than the actual 4 per cent.

“Casualisation is one of them. Contracting out, with labour hire companies, is another. The third, of course, is the rise of the gig economy.”

Analysis by The Australian of Australian Bureau of Statistics workforce figures showed the incidence of labour hire firm employment has declined.

Collected every two years, the latest ABS survey showed 3.3 per cent of employees worked for a labour hire firm in August 2020, down from 3.8 per cent two years prior, and lower than 3.9 per cent in 2014. The ABS is yet to collect data on the number of Australians working through online platforms such as Uber, Airtasker or Uber Eats.

A survey commissioned by the Victorian government in 2019, however, found 7.1 per cent of respondents had registered to work on a digital platform in the previous year, although only 0.2 per cent were doing full-time gig work.

Speaking from Parramatta on Tuesday morning, Scott Morrison accused Mr Albanese of “going around at the union’s ­behest talking about rising rights of casualisation in the workforce, and he’s been caught out there again”.

The Prime Minister said official stats showed casualisation “had been about the same level for about 20 years”.

“His fundamental understanding of the economy is wrong. He doesn’t know what’s happening in the economy,” Mr Morrison said.

Addressing the media earlier that day, Mr Albanese ­remained on message.

“What we’re seeing around Australia is a massive rise in ­insecure work,” he said. “There’s more and more people having to work two, three, four jobs in order to get by.

“And I’d say to the government, who are dismissive of this, that they need to get out more and talk to people on the ground about how they’re really struggling with the cost of living.”

Analysis of ABS data backed Mr Albanese’s claims around the incidence of workers holding more than one job.

The number of multiple job holders as a share of total employed Australians jumped to 6.4 per cent at the end of 2021 – the highest proportion in the history of data going back to ­December 1994 – and versus 5.8 per cent on average over the two years pre-pandemic. 

ABS head of labour statistics Bjorn Jarvis said “partly it will ­reflect the increasing employment of young people later in the pandemic, given they are more likely to work multiple jobs”.