{"id":151562,"date":"2025-09-18T07:26:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T07:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/151562\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T07:26:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T07:26:18","slug":"is-australias-labour-market-cracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/151562\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Australia&#8217;s labour market cracking?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, Roy Morgan Research <a href=\"https:\/\/www.macrobusiness.com.au\/2025\/09\/aussie-unemployment-surges\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">released<\/a> its shadow labour force report, which posted a large 0.8% jump in unemployment in August to 11.1%. Roy Morgan\u2019s unemployment measure was also up a hefty 2.0% year-on-year:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Roy-Morgan-unemployment-rate.png\" width=\"660\" height=\"483\" alt=\"Roy Morgan unemployment\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Roy Morgan effectively counts someone as unemployed if they want a job but are unable to get one. Therefore, it is a broader definition than the ABS\u2019 stricter unemployment measure, which explains why Roy Morgan\u2019s unemployment rate is always higher.<\/p>\n<p>Roy Morgan\u2019s measure of total labor underutilisation\u2014i.e., unemployment and underemployment combined\u2014also rose by 0.8% in August to 22.0% and was 3.4% higher over the year:<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p><img src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Roy-Morgan-unemployment-and-underemployment.png\" width=\"660\" height=\"486\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"Roy Morgan underutilisation\"\/><\/p>\n<p>As illustrated in the charts above, Roy Morgan\u2019s shadow labour force survey has broken away from the ABS series over the past nine months.<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday, Jobs &amp; Skills Australia (JSA) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jobsandskills.gov.au\/data\/internet-vacancy-index?Sept25&amp;#downloads\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">released<\/a> its Internet Vacancies Index (IVI), which captures de-duplicated job ads on SEEK, CareerOne and Workforce Australia.<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p>As shown below, the IVI reached a new cyclical low following a 4.2% (8,900 job) decline in job advertisements in August:<\/p>\n<p><img src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/JSA-job-vacancies.png\" width=\"660\" height=\"440\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"JSA IVI index\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Over the year to August 2025, online job advertisements decreased by 12.2% (or 28,000).<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p>Recruitment activity decreased across all states and territories over the month, as well as across all skill levels and\u00a0major occupation groups.<\/p>\n<p>The following chart from Justin Fabo from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.antipodeanmacro.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Antipodean Macro<\/a> plots JSA\u2019s IVI against the official unemployment rate. As you can see, it is pointing to rising unemployment.<\/p>\n<p><img src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/JSA-job-vacancies-vs-unemployment.png\" width=\"660\" height=\"555\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"JSA job ads versus unemployment\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p>While Roy Morgan\u2019s survey and the IVI are ominous for the labour market, it isn\u2019t all bad news.<\/p>\n<p>The latest NAB employment survey reported sharply falling capital utilisation which, as Justin Fabo shows below, can be a useful leading indicator of underlying trends in the unemployment rate.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRecent increases in capacity utilisation (it\u2019s inverted in the chart) point to the risk that the jobless rate could actually decline in coming months\u201d, Fabo wrote last week.<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p><img src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Unemployment-and-capacity-utilisation.png\" width=\"660\" height=\"533\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"Unemployment and capacity utilisation\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Thus, there are mixed signals for the labour market.<\/p>\n<p>It will be interesting to see what today\u2019s official ABS labour force release for August shows. It could go either way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this week, Roy Morgan Research released its shadow labour force report, which posted a large 0.8% jump&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,63,99,164],"class_list":["post-151562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}