Women ahead in jobs race, mining, South Australia, WA in trouble

Women ahead in jobs race

At a pinch, you could call it a ­Bunnings-led recovery.

Voters are satisfied with Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership style and have confidence in his vision for the economy so far, and in the November quarter they took to the shops to prove it.

This led to a surge in jobs that absorbed all new labour market entrants from the previous 12 months and also soaked up a few officially unemployed and even more of the hidden unemployed.

The big winners are older ­Australians, especially the sort of mature-aged women you see in the Bunnings TV ads, part of a surge in retail jobs across older Australian retirement regions like Wide Bay and Richmond Tweed. Even Tasmania got a slice of the action. It’s been a long time coming.

ABS figures released recently show retail jobs pushed ahead and our lower dollar produced significant in­creases in Chinese tourism, which saw jobs rise in regions with high numbers of hospitality work. State governments kept hiring, as did banks and building societies in the CBDs, while more professional consultants hung out their ­shingles in the suburbs.

The participation rate surged ahead and reached record highs for women, but flatlined for men. We have a major gender problem, with our education system shuffling more boys off into a diminishing supply of jobs at risk from computerisation.

While older women were the big winners, the big losers were middle-aged men in manufacturing and younger families in Queensland and West Australian mining regions, even though the mining industry didn’t lose many jobs in 2015. The manufacturing industry jobs lost at Townsville’s Yabulu nickel refinery are a prime example of the impact of the mining industry on other sectors.

This put North Queensland, along with the mining state of Western Australia and the manufacturing state of South Australia, in diabolical trouble. The latter two are victims of poor ­private ­sector and public sector leadership respectively. Presumably their leaders will continue to misread international markets and seek public money for subsidies, stadiums and submarines to fund ­future mistakes.

Looking at the national picture, employment growth in the year to November was about 140,000 above expectations, while unemployment growth was about 40,000 below expectations and those not in the labour force accounted for about 150,000 fewer than expected.

The jobs market grew so strongly that, in net terms, the 346,400 jobs created absorbed all new entrants to the workforce, as well as finding jobs for some 70,000 longer-term unemployed and hidden unemployed.

This cut the unemployment rate by 0.4 per cent and boosted the participation rate by an extraordinary 0.7 per cent in 12 months — a figure which looks too good to be true. Given the recent ABS problems with its labour market series, it may indeed be just that.

Yet the December monthly figures confirm the continuing ­recovery in jobs, especially for women, who apparently achieved a record participation rate approaching 60 per cent. Shame about the men, though.

These November figures are in marked contrast to the August ­results under the Abbott government, which showed the May 2015 labour market recovery had stalled, with job creation ­falling below critical break-even levels and unemployment up.

There was huge growth in health and social assistance jobs over the past 12 months of 152,000 — a large percentage of the estimated total national growth of 346,400.

Adding administration and education, the growth for these predominantly female, publicly funded or regulated industries was 175,500.

Big employment gains came in professional consulting (68,400), retail (47,300), finance (42,300) and administration consulting (36,100).

Manufacturing jobs continued the steady decline which predates the 2008 GFC. The three key private sector industries of manufacturing, transport and construction lost a combined 47,500 jobs.

And manufacturing is an industry in which three out of four of a diminishing number of jobs are held by men. We found similar ­declines among other male dominated mining, construction and agriculture industries.

The biggest gains over the past year are in health and social assistance and four out of five jobs in this rapidly growing sector are held by women.

Females gained about 50,000 jobs in ­finance and 30,000 in education, two growth industries they increasingly dominate. Women performed so well across all industries that two-thirds of the 346,400 jobs generated in the past 12 months were gained by females

The labour market is contracting across remote regions and in Queensland’s northern provincial areas, except the tourist city of Cairns, but growing in many seachange coastal regions across all states.

Some 12 regions experienced recession levels of unemployment growth exceeding 1.5 per cent per annum to November, a major improvement on the ­August figure which showed 21 regions with recession levels of unemployment growth in the previous 12 months.

When we ranked all 87 labour force regions according to their unemployment increase in the past year, the worst-performed 26 regions included four of the seven in South Australia and seven of the nine in Western Australia. Four West Australian regions and two in South Australia saw recessionary unemployment increases of 1.5 per cent-plus during 2015.

The West Australian labour market downturn stretches from inner Perth to the outback ­region’s borders with the Northern Territory and South Australia, and the reason is easy to see. In these regions younger male and female miners, including some indigenous workers and often with young families, live in subsidised rental homes ­either as FIFO workers or in barracks near the mines.

These workers losing jobs in the second half of the year were often those picking up jobs in the first half, highlighting the suddenness of the collapse in employment across mining regions, which was out of all proportion to the loss of jobs in the industry itself. Mining lost only 5200 jobs across the country last year. But the impact on other industries from exploration, construction and downstream processing was massive.

Since 2007, mining jobs have grown significantly for only three years, from 2010 to 2012.

During the 2010-12 boom, mining unions won fulltime adult ordinary time earnings increases of $416 a week, taking the weekly wage of a miner to $2536, while the average Australian worker drew an extra $169, taking their wage to $1483.

Mining has lost 55,400 jobs since then, affecting other industries as well. Even if demand again surged for iron ore, the CFMEU has priced its own members out of a job and ensured that future ­demand will be met largely by computers and small numbers of white-collar employees in big city workstations — such as we now see with driverless trains.

CFMEU wage bargaining tactics from 2010 to 2012 have done for mining jobs what the AMWU did for manufacturing jobs 30 years earlier, when former Labor prime minister Paul Keating told metal union officials they carried the lost jobs of 100,000 men around their necks. Those were the days when ALP leaders stood up to unions when their interests conflicted with those of working-class Australians looking for a job.

The 26 labour force regions with improving economies and the biggest falls in unemployment rates in the 12 months to the November quarter don’t include any from Western Australia or South Australia.

However, it was pleasing to note some improvement in two of the stubbornly high unemployment regions in Tasmania, as well as the older provincial city retirement regions in coastal Queensland, NSW and Victoria.

The biggest demographics dominating the regions now in recovery are Australians around the transition to retirement age groups and older who appear to have recently gained sales jobs since the installation of the Turnbull government.

The two regions with the biggest percentage gains during the past year were Richmond Tweed and Wide Bay. Previously it was difficult for working-class boomers chasing part-time jobs to pay for luxuries like a night out at the local services club or a trip to the hairdresser.

This drop in local demand led to cuts in local hospitality and retail jobs and created a downward spiral in participation rates, which dropped in tandem with falling interest rates, with one feeding off the other.

The circuit breaker came with the swearing-in of Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister on September 15, 2015. Since then, ANZ Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence has risen from 105.3 to 116.5 points, breaking the downward spiral.

The biggest contribution to jobs in the past 12 months has come from those transitioning to retirement aged 60 and above, especially women, with 60-64-year-old women gaining part-time jobs and the 65-plus group picking up fulltime jobs.

The 20-something women’s bracket also fared well, especially in part-time work, but men in their early 40s lost-full time jobs.

There are also a number of TAFE students with falling unemployment rates. These students comprise a group we often identify as successful jobseekers — a point lost on state governments which generally treat the sector shabbily. Well-organised TAFE colleges are jobs factories for younger blue-collar workers.

Nearly 40 per cent of Aust­ralian jobs are at high risk of being computerised within the next 15 years, according to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia.

The white-collar occupations which gained the most jobs between 2007 and 2015 are those with very low risks of computer­isation, such as professionals and service workers. These jobs are overwhelmingly occupied by females.

The proportion of females in each of these industries increased during the same period, meaning women gained a bigger share of low-risk jobs growth and are more likely to hang onto these jobs longer-term.

The male dominated blue-­collar semi-skilled and unskilled occupations at most risk of computerisation gained virtually no jobs between 2007 and 2015.

Since August 1986, the number of females in low-risk occupations grew by 2.8 million or 280 per cent, compared to male low-risk occupation growth of 1.5 million or 190 per cent.

Now there are 3.6 million women in low-risk occupations, compared to 3.1 million men. This higher growth means women have gained an increasing share of low- risk occupations. And women are more likely to hang on to their low-risk (predominantly public sector) jobs in a downturn.

While male participation rates gradually decline to the 70 per cent mark, female rates are ­climbing ­towards 60 per cent. The flat male participation rate is as much a ­problem about gender and education as it is about ­computerisation. Over time, our education system has been channelling girls into high-paid, secure professional and service jobs and boys into lower- paying and less secure blue-collar jobs.

Australian female graduates now outnumber males at record levels, with almost 45,000 more women than men completing tertiary qualifications in 2014.

The number of women completing tertiary courses jumped from 78,850 in 1999 to 129,045 in 2014, a 64 per cent increase, while the number of male graduates climbed from 57,310 to 86,337, up 51 per cent.

The trend has accelerated over the past 15 years, and has now reached a 60-40 per cent female-male split for domestic students.

My own view is that girls are just smarter than boys, especially boys in their late teens when they should be making the right calls on their future. But I also think the education system needs to ­acknowledge it has a gender ­equity problem.

It starts with a chronic shortage of male teachers and it’s rapidly getting worse. Of the 34,000 jobs gained in education last year, 30,000 fulltime and part-time ­positions were won by women while men lost 5600 fulltime jobs.

If governments are ­serious about doing something about the steady decline in men’s participation rates, it needs to ­develop policies for drawing more boys back into low-risk jobs, starting with affirmative action programs for male teachers.

It’s an easy case to make for more women on company boards and in the cabinet and it should be an equally simple case to make for more male teachers in our classrooms. Boys are missing out here and it’s having an impact on economic growth.

As for women, the smartest thing the government could do to increase female participation rates even faster would be to allow working women in private sector jobs a tax deduction for childcare costs. It is reasonable to see the drift of women to public sector industries is prompted by the sector’s progressive attitudes to maternity leave and part-time work.

Women choose some private sector industries, like finance, which have some pretty effective white-collar unions.

Yet, in the more competitive professional consulting industry (architects, engineers, lawyers and accountants) 61,000 of the 68,000 jobs gained last year were fulltime positions gained by men.

By treating childcare costs as a means tested welfare subsidy restricted to women in low-paid, high-risk jobs, the federal government’s financial brains trust slows the growth of women in high-paying, low-risk private sector industries, putting a handbrake on participation rates, economic growth and the government’s own tax revenue. Only a bloke could be this stupid.

While consumers now have confidence in the style of Turnbull’s leadership, to win an election he needs to gain credible policy traction with key demographics. He needs a strong budget and credible plan for growth for both the winners and losers in our labour market and he needs to bash it out day after day himself so that even the pet shop galahs get the message.

The uncomfortable truth for Turnbull’s leadership now is that a recovery based on style and confidence can disappear as quickly as it arrived.

John Black, a former Labor senator, is chief executive of Australian Development Strategies, a demographic profiling company. Labour market profiles referred to above are at elaborate.net.au