The campaign by The Australian newspaper against the Fair Work Act has had a few phases. I’d like to go through a few of their key claims and evaluate them against recent data.
A discussion of Australian political and economic issues and ideas, by Matt Cowgill.
Archives for posts with tag: labour market
[A]dopting an incomes policy was like jumping out of a second storey window: nobody in his right mind would do it unless the stairs were on fire… The stairs were aflame in Australia in 1983, when the Hawke Government won office. -Peter Cook.
The Accord is back in fashion. The past few months have seen a lot of pining for the “Hawke-Keating model,” particularly the compact between the two wings of the labour movement. A lot of the discussion seems to me to lack a sense of what made the Accord necessary (in the eyes of the protagonists), what made the Accord possible, and the ways in which our current circumstances differ from those of 1983.
Has the Fair Work Act made the labour market less efficient at matching unemployed people to jobs? One way economists would try to answer that question is with the Beveridge curve.
How would we know if the labour market was ‘flexible’? One way is to look at how the jobs market responds to economic shocks. During the GFC, when the Howard Government’s labour laws were still in effect, the number of hours worked in Australia fell while the number of people in employment didn’t fall.
Tasmania has set an unfortunate record: it’s the first Australian state in which less than half of all adult men are employed full time. In the lead-up to the financial crisis, the proportion of Tasmanian men in work soared, rising faster than the national ratio, but it has since plummeted. In February 2013, just 48.3% of Tasmanian men aged 15 and over were in full-time work; this was 8.3 percentage points below the national figure of 56.6%.
In late 2010, we set an all-time record for the Australian economy: nearly 66% of people aged 15 and over were either employed, or were actively looking for work. To put that in perspective, the labour force participation rate has averaged 63.2% since 1980.
I told myself I wouldn’t write about the Fair Work Act for a while. I told myself this partly because it’s a topic I’ve done to death in recent weeks and months, and partly because no amount of factual analysis will dissuade the ideological warriors of the right from blaming the Act for all the nation’s economic ills, both real and imagined.
I told myself I’d lay off, but I can’t resist responding to Michael Stutchbury’s piece in today’s edition of The Australian.
Inspired by this analysis of the jobs crisis in the US, I thought I’d have a look at how Australia compares to the US and Europe.
