Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released on Thursday 29th April illustrate that long-term unemployment in Australia is at the highest it has been in over 26 years with more than 244,000 people out of work for at least 12 months or more.
The number of long-term unemployed Australians has risen by almost 39 percent over the past 12 months with the number of men out of work for over a year up by 44 percent.
How quickly it takes for these people to get back into the workforce is a major problem. In most cases when a person has been unemployed for a short period of time then it’s more likely that they will find work. The longer a person is out of work the harder it is for them to get back into the workforce.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has announced that almost 71,000 new jobs were added to the Australian workforce between February and March 2021.
The total hours worked has also returned to the same levels that were recorded prior to the covid-19 pandemic. These figures are also illustrating hat there is a big increase in full-time employment across the country.
The recorded level of employment and hours worked in March 2021 were both higher than the levels recorded in March 2020. Employment was up by 0.6 percent and hours worked was up by 1.2 percent.
The data also illustrates that last month 62.6 percent of people over the age of 15 were employed, which is higher than March 2020 which was recorded at 62.4 percent.
The percentage of women employed is also the highest it’s ever been sitting at 58.5 per cent. This is half a percentage point higher than in March 2020. The latest figures illustrated that the percentage of men employed remained slightly lower than before the pandemic 66.8 percent, compared with 67.0 per cent in March 2020.
The number exceeded expectations for a 35,000 to 45,000 increase in jobs for the month.
New research released by Xero on Wednesday 5th May illustrates that Australia was one of the fastest recovering economies in the world during the second half of 2020. It has been revealed that only 210,000 more jobs need to be created across Australia’s small business sector by the end of this year to drive a full economic recovery from the covid-19 pandemic.
The report which is called “The Job Ahead: Small business and the global economic recovery” sampled its data from approximately 300,000 customer records. These records were supplied by labour force data which was collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The data found that younger staff, women and casuals were more heavily impacted by job losses in the small business sector.
Findings from the report also concluded that small businesses who paid their staff higher wages throughout 2020 experienced fewer job losses. It was reported that in May 2020, higher-paying companies saw employment decrease by 13.5 percent, in comparison lower-paying companies experienced a drop of 22.3 percent.
Businesses that opted for higher rates of digitalisation within their organisation, also saw a smaller number of employment declines, at 14.8 percent, in comparison organisations that were slow to adapt digitally experienced an employment fall of 18.4 percent.
It was also revealed that a combined number of 2.9 million small business jobs need to be created across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA to ease the post-pandemic economic shock.
Australia only needs to create another 210,000 jobs, Canada 220,000, New Zealand 40,000, the United Kingdom 410,000 and the US 2 million more new jobs to reach a full recovery in the small business sector.
Although Australia was one of the fastest-recovering economies in the second half of 2020, the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on jobs will continue to be felt for some time going into the future.
The required 210,000 additional small business jobs needed to support our economic rebuild accumulate over twice as many small business jobs as are normally created in a single year.
In Australia, around 45 percent of private sector employees are in a business with less than 20 employees.
A sustainable and meaningful jobs recovery will only be possible if small businesses are hiring. Enabling this should be top of the federal government’s agenda.