Incredible jobless numbers but pressure remains

ACTU assistant secretary Liam O'Brien. Picture: AAP

The unemployment rate has not been this low since Gough Whitlam ruled, Stevie Wright’s Evie topped the charts and Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee prepared to brutalise the Poms. It was August 1974, seven months before the country’s TV stations moved to colour.

According to the ABS, the economy added 88,000 jobs in June, and the jobless rate in Victoria and NSW fell to an incredible 3.2 per cent and 3,3 per cent respectively.

The number of unemployed has now fallen from one million at the height of the Covid pandemic to below 500,000, and there are almost the same number of unemployed people as vacant jobs. As business lobbyist Andrew McKellar observed, the labour market is white hot.

While the former Coalition government took a lap of honour when the jobless rate fell below 4 per cent in April, employer groups and unions barely acknowledged the amazing result before renewing their demands for action by the Albanese government at its jobs summit in September.

Business groups assert the flip side of record low unemployment is an economy at risk of hitting capacity limits because of a lack of workers.

Employers want targeted migration to fill critical shortages, including the speeding up of visa processing, and improvements in the operation of the skills system.

“A lack of workers puts a handbrake on new projects and stifles investment,” Business Council chief executive Jennifer Westacott says. “You can’t employ hundreds of Australians on a construction job if you don’t have a surveyor and you can’t tender for a new project without engineers or labourers.”

Unions express concern that without significant workplace policy changes, the jobless numbers will not translate into real wages growth.

ACTU assistant secretary Liam O’Brien says all the variables that workers were told would drive wages growth are now in alignment, but “we are still seeing real wage cuts stretching into the distance”.

“The reality is that wage growth is being held back by our bargaining system, which is broken,” he says. “With a functioning bargaining system, low unemployment, productivity growing and profits and bonuses at all-time records would translate into wage growth for working people.”

But ahead of the summit Albanese faces pressure from the labour movement to overturn the Morrison government’s decision to phase out pandemic leave payments. Unions are not just angry at Labor’s refusal to budge but a lack of consultation before moving to enforce the decision.

Union leaders cite new ABS data showing 776,000 people missed work due to illness in June, the second-highest number on record. O’Brien says “we are seeing a record level of people missing work due to illness, and all indications are that it is getting worse”.