Lies, Damn Lies, & Unemployment | Alan Kohler | ABC News

according to the australian bureau of statistics the unemployment rate fell last month to 4.5 from 4.6 but that wasn't really true it's actually an example of mark twain's aphorism that there are three kinds of lies lies damned lies and statistics for a start the number of employed people also fell by 146 300. how can the number of employed people and the number of unemployed people both fall well it's all about definition the definition of an unemployed person is someone who was actively looking for work in august there were 617 100 of those but there were also about 2 million people who were counted as employed but who worked fewer than their usual hours or no hours at all they just weren't looking for other work eight hundred and twenty three thousand nine hundred of them actually worked zero hours which is almost ten percent of supposedly employed women and 8 percent of men were they really employed statistically yes but not really another 170 000 people left the workforce in august they gave up looking for work that is the participation rate fell if you add up those who left the workforce plus those who worked zero hours and those who were actually counted as unemployed you get 1.6 million people or 11.8 percent of the workforce but that doesn't include the underemployed of which there are 1.27 million or 9.3 percent of the workforce how underemployed are they well that's not recorded but let's say they're working half time on average as a guest so 4.65 effective unemployment rather than 9.3 percent underemployment 11.8 plus 4.65 is a bit more than 15 which is arguably the real level of australian unemployment it's also the number the treasury warned the government that unemployment would reach disastrously without job keeper during the pandemic last year so thank goodness for statistics without them we might have had a disaster oh wait there was still is you

Channel: ABC News (Australia)

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Keywords: Australia, abc, abc news, news, Alan Kohler, ABS, Australian Bureau of Statistics, unemployment, employment, underemployment, mark twain, lies, work, people, hours, workforce, participation, part-time, treasury, jobkeeper, pandemic, covid-19, coronavirus, disaster, jobs

Id: XdrhR8zPYew

Length: 2min 32sec (152 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021