Under-Employment in Australia Has Reached an All-Time Peak

The COVID-19 pandemic is being used to intensify the decades-long offensive against workers’ jobs and conditions behind the endless government and media promises of a “recovery” in the Australian economy and a dramatic decline in unemployment.

Full-time workers, in particular, are being phased out and replaced by part-time, irregular, and casualized employment, dragging down wages and working conditions across the working class.

The federal budget presented tonight is expected to ratchet up the pressure by allowing remaining international students and temporary visa holders to work unlimited hours, but only if they accept employment in the low-wage hospitality and tourism sectors.

The Liberal-National Coalition government had already accelerated this process by ending its JobKeeper wage support programme and reducing JobSeeker dole payments to pre-pandemic, sub-poverty levels at the end of March.

These policies effectively coerce employees into jobs with subpar wages and working conditions, often filling holes left by the lack of the previous critical sources of super-exploited labour—students, foreign visa holders, and visiting backpackers.

The new job data from the Roy Morgan polling firm, released last week but buried by the mass media, shows that 1.31 million people were unemployed in April. This decreased 332,000 from March, resulting in a 9.0 per cent unemployment rate, the lowest since before the pandemic struck in early March 2020.

However, the decrease was offset by an increase in underemployment, which rose by 268,000 in April to 9.3 per cent of the workforce. “Under-employment” refers to employees who are working but want to work more hours. That is, they are employed part-time or as casuals but need more work to make ends meet.

In April, 2.66 million workers—18.3 per cent of the workforce—were either unemployed or underemployed, a modest decrease of 64,000 from March, when Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government implemented the JobKeeper and JobSeeker reforms.

In comparison to early March 2020, before employees and the general public pressured the government to impose a selective nationwide lockdown to avoid the spread of COVID-19, there are over 500,000 more workers who are either unemployed or underemployed.

Full-time jobs increased by 129,000 in April to 8,534,000. Part-time jobs, on the other hand, increased by 413,000 to 4,757,000. Part-time employment has reached a new peak, while full-time employment has returned to pre-pandemic levels.

These figures are significantly higher than the official data provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), owing to the ABS’s refusal to classify as unemployed those who worked more than one hour a week or those who worked zero hours for “economic reasons.”

The ABS has not yet posted April estimates, but its unemployment estimate fell from 5.8 per cent to 5.6 per cent in March, before the JobKeeper-JobSeeker cuts. The ABS also announced 1.1 million under-employed people, for a total of 1.93 million unemployed or under-employed people (14.0 per cent).

Despite the continuing toll on employees, Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine, like other business commentators, said the results vindicated the government’s decision to discontinue JobKeeper and “wind-down” JobSeeker payments. She said in releasing the company’s April data that “Australia’s job markets have powered through.”

This arrogance obscures what is going on. Since no one can go abroad, the pandemic has temporarily increased domestic consumer expenditure while also pressuring more impoverished employees to take low-paying and precarious employment.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg acknowledged yesterday that the economic boost from citizens unable to leave the country was just a “pandemic impact, not a lasting one.”

As part of his pre-budget public relations pitch, he told the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald that tonight’s budget would be focused on reopening the international border in 2022 and restoring net migration to pre-pandemic levels, which was 239,700 in 2018-19.

Meanwhile, the 350,000 remaining student visa holders will work unlimited hours in hospitality and tourism, eliminating the current weekly limit of 20 hours. Temporary visa holders may apply for a COVID-19 “pandemic event visa” for up to a year if they already work in those industries.

According to the Australian Financial Review, the tourism and hospitality industries will join agriculture, food manufacturing, hospitals, aged care, disability care, and childcare as “critical sectors,” enabling staff to apply for the “408 visa subclass.”

Notably, the recorded labour shortages in these sectors have not resulted in wage increases, which have remained stagnant since the 2008-09 global financial crisis. Average wage growth is currently at a historic low of 1.4 per cent, well below the official Consumer Price Index, which rose 0.6 per cent in the first three months of this year—a 2.4 per cent annual rate.

These statistics debunk the myth that lower unemployment rates would result in higher wages in the “labour market.” This point has been made in every recent federal budget, with repeated forecasts that annual wage growth will reach 3.5 per cent “in a few years.”

The Labor Party opposition has also long peddled the illusion that better wages will flow from more significant profits. Moreover, together with the trade unions, Labor peddles reactionary nationalism, blaming overseas workers, not capitalism and the ruling class, for deteriorating living standards.

Labour leader Anthony Albanese criticised the government’s efforts to increase migration, saying the reliance on temporary migrant workers should be replaced by “investing in educating Australians.” This aims to turn workers against one another on a national scale.

Despite the hype about “recovery,” the worsening global pandemic would have an increasingly negative effect on the planet and, as a result, the Australian economy, even if significant COVID-19 outbreaks do not occur in Australia. Epidemiologists have cautioned, however, that this is almost unavoidable.

In the July-September quarter of 2020, Australia experienced the most significant three-month drop in resident population since the depths of World War I, when 334,000 young soldiers were sent to Europe’s battlefields. This decrease eliminates the primary driver of the country’s economic development over the last four decades.

So far, Australia’s corporate elite has been buoyed by rising iron ore prices and exports to China, near-zero interest rates, and the injection of hundreds of billions of dollars into business “stimulus” packages, subsidies, bonuses, and low-interest loans.

The handouts have increased the super-rich incomes and prosperity, but the expense is now being extracted from the only possible source—the working-class labour force.

The pandemic disaster, deepening social stress, staggering inequality, and the push to reduce further wages and conditions are laying the groundwork for mass class struggles in Australia and worldwide. Sally McManus, secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), nervously cautioned the ruling class last week that working-class violence could erupt beyond the influence of trade unions, which have suppressed workers’ struggles for decades.