Hundreds of thousands more paid carers needed as population gets older

The welfare workforce is becoming an economic driver in its own right, employing more than 550,000, or 4.4 per cent of workers.

Generic pic of a nurse talking to a woman in a nursing home.

The welfare workforce is fast becoming­ an economic driver in its own right, now employing more than 550,000, or 4.4 per cent of the total working population, the AIHW 2019 report found.

But the sector will require hundreds of thousands more paid carers­ in coming decades, as the frail-aged population rapidly rises.

The nation’s welfare workforce had already increased by 72 per cent between 2008 and last year, the report found, compared with the total workforce, which grew by 18 per cent over the same period.

The welfare workforce comprises residential care workers (179,000), preschool education and childcare workers (185,000) and 186,000 workers in other social­ assistance services. It is a ­female-dominated sector, with 87 per cent of workers being women compared with 47 per cent of the total workforce, and predomin­antly part-time. Two in three in the welfare workforce work part-time, compared with one in three workers overall.

The sector’s workforce profile is changing slowly over time, with a slight reduction in the average age of workers from 41.7 years in 2008 to 41.2 last year. This was a result of the increased proportion of younger childcare workers enterin­g the sector.

“Childcare workers were the occupational group with the youngest average age (35.5), ­nearly six years younger than the average age for the total welfare workforce,” the report said.

“In 2018, 2.8 per cent of the welfare­ workforce identified as being an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Australian, compared with 2.4 per cent in 2008. Welfare support workers had the highest proportion identifying as indigenous, at 7.7 per cent.”

A 2017 PwC report on social infrastructur­e projected that by 2040, more than 120,000 extra nurses and 400,000 extra aged-care workers would be required to meet the demands of an ageing population. The AIHW report found wages in the welfare workforce sector to be much lower than the national average.

“The welfare workforce was also paid less per hour compared with the same occupations working in other industries ($32.02 per hour compared with $41.28 per hour),” it said.

Registered nurses had the highest average earnings per hour of the selected occupations last year ($48.87) and childcare workers had the lowest ($25.13).