Surge in full-time jobs but no need for complacency

Thursday 7 August 2008

Figures out today [7/8/08] indicate that the number of people in full-time employment surged by 53,700 in July, putting employment figures at odds with other data suggesting the economy is slowing sharply. According to ABS figures the total number of people employed in July rose by a seasonally-adjusted 10,900; however, part-time jobs dropped 42,800.

The jobless rate was 4.3%, unchanged for the 4^th straight month after revisions.

The figures are surprising when economists were predicting total employment to rise by a mere 1300.

But there’s no room for complacency because in the current climate the market can change without warning, so that maintaining a focus on the job market is imperative. The figure of 4.3% only needs to rise slightly and the roller coaster ride could commence. With everything happening around us, i.e. global markets, climate change and carbon emissions trading, the cost of living and paying bills, means that jobs must remain a priority.

Every day we read of businesses consolidating with resulting job losses or closing down altogether; or the prediction of more moving offshore. Sometimes it’s hard to be positive when you are surrounded by negative processes, but in the words of the old song “You’ve got to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negatives.”

 

Employment is so crucial to a nation’s wellbeing and when it comes to jobs everything possible must be attempted.

There are so many factors affecting this critical area of people’s lives and livelihood and the workplace plays a significant part. In this respect, therefore, we can but hope that our workplace relations system as a whole takes note and plays its part in working towards ensuring employers and employees are not left out of the equation.

We are in the midst of a significant exercise in modernizing and, hopefully, reducing the countless thousands of industrial awards across the nation into what should result in a less complex and more user friendly system so that people at the coalface can be confident that they are complying with their mutual obligations. But the AIRC is faced with a daunting task. For example, in NSW alone some 706 awards are listed across a range of occupations/industries. It is estimated that nationally there are approximately 4000 awards – how did we get to this absurd situation? There are issues of respondency and where this sits in the scheme of things. The larger employers can afford to employ people to look after this side of the business, but the smaller to medium sized employers face some challenges to ensure they are award-compliant.

For so long employers and employees have laboured under a system which has made it unavoidable for them to have to rely on others to explain/interpret industrial awards. It’s even difficult for people to know what award(s) they’re respondent to and in what jurisdiction. The complexities are “out there” and need to be fixed.  Hopefully, this may change under Fair Work Australia and a simpler system will result; one in which the people most affected will have a clearer understanding of their mutual obligations.

As the federal Minister for Workplace Relations is quoted [April 2008] as saying, “Those who seek to preserve their niche in the system via a monopoly of knowledge about unnecessary complexity will have to reconsider and get used to a new way of thinking about awards.”   Let’s hope that becomes a reality.