How is the employment situation in your neck of the woods?
A jobs boom after the Delta outbreak restrictions were lifted in Australia’s south-east has seen unemployment plunge to just 4.2 per cent.
The official ABS data show the unemployment rate dropping from 4.6 to 4.2 per cent, with an estimated 64,800 jobs created between November and December.
This is the lowest unemployment rate since August 2008, just before the start of the global financial crisis and Lehman Brothers collapse, when it was 4.0 per cent.
Businesses are having great difficulty getting workers, a problem compounded by those workers isolating as covid contacts.
Are you experiencing an employment boom as your country comes out of lockdown?
Well, this is interesting, so thanks for giving me a reason to look it up. The US unemployment rate is 3.9. It looks like it’s the lowest it’s been since Feb 2020 when it was 3.5, based on this graph. The US unemployment rate leaves out a lot of people, namely those people who haven’t been searching for a job in the last 6 months. Still, this graph is interesting.
In the US, unemployment benefits were increased during the pandemic. It allowed a lot of people to step out of the workforce or to change directions. I haven’t looked at the trends for a while, and there are a lot of complicating factors.
At the same time, there are multiple articles about the difficulty of finding a job even with the job market as it is for a host of reasons like the AI application process and the mismatch of workers and jobs.
I believe anything less than 5% unemployment is considered as full employment here - I don’t know how they arrive at that but once it gets below 5% it is hard to get workers.
Agriculture has been particularly hard hit by the closed borders and the lack of backpackers and students meaning food, particularly fruit, has rotted on the trees which is a pity because something like 65% of Australian agricultural produce is exported
We have 2.7.million unfilled job vacancies in the UK presently and employers are having great difficulty finding and maintaining staff levels although wages are increasing so is the cost of living but I think that’s a global problem…we are desperate for workers at every level.
Well there are different figure bandied around. Bloomberg two days ago …
“Britain’s labor market grew strongly despite a surge in coronavirus infections late last year, with vacancies hitting a record 1.25 million in the fourth quarter and unemployment falling unexpectedly”
and to muddy the waters, there are alledgedly about a million workers in the UK on zero hour contract. And they don’t get included in employment numbers.
That may be true in some countries Assman but in the lucky country wages and conditions are determined by industrial awards and employers may pay more but not less. There is a shortage of workers.
It is also true that in a free market wages could be subject to supply and demand and if employers can’t get employees then inevitably wages will rise.
Good heavens, how are we going to cope without our out of season fruits and veg…
Time we started thinking about producing our own stuff and not relying on the rest of the world to keep us in the cosy position we now find ourselves in.
Get school leavers to do the donkey work instead of sending them off for education that they will probably never need. It might also solve the constant protesting and general social unrest they cause. Too much time on their hands and it’s the working classes that have to pay for it.
New Zealand’s current unemployment rate is 3.4% apparently meaning worker shortages here too…particularly truckies and seasonally in Horticulture/Agriculture, not to mention the health sector, which always struggles to obtain staff
@OldGreyFox , Exactly that OGF, but us Brits have been spoiled
by being fooled by the university education scam that is currently
being perpetuated on the youth of this country, consequently
very few of our youth are now willing( or able) to consider any
‘work’ that involves any hint of actual physicality !!
This is the root cause of this countries economic woes imo?
On the question of producing our own food it seems strange to
to me that our farmers export most of their produce in order to
get a higher price, with the result that we then have to import
the self same food products mainly from Europe ??
Could this be caused by the agricultural subsidies that EU
countries allegedly receive from their government’s ??
Donkeyman!
