A drop in Australia’s unemployment rate for the third month in a row is encouraging and may indicate that the peak has passed, but December’s over-reliance on part-time jobs growth may also be masking underlying problems, say unions.
Unemployment fell to 5.5% last month, but we must not lose sight of the fact that there are still 639,400 Australians out of work and 118,300 more jobseekers than a year ago.
ACTU President Sharan Burrow said most of the 35,200 new jobs in December were part-time, and much of this was due to retailers adding extra staff for a short period before Christmas.
Additionally, the underemployment rate remains unchanged at 7.8%, while aggregate hours worked actually fell by a million hours.
Full text on the ACTU website here.
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