Australian employment was still strong last month, even if there was a fall in hours worked for a second month in a row.
That’s difficult to comprehend as full-time job creation in April was the strongest it has been for a year.
The jobs figures are at odds with weak retail sales, lacklustre housing finance approvals and sluggish building approvals.
It seems consumers might be pulling their heads in after six interest rate rises since last October.
But employers remain confident.
Since the labour force bottomed at just over 10.758 million people in June last year, nearly 270,000 new jobs have been created, and unemployment has fallen by 31,000, despite more people looking for work in the past three months.
Around 180,000 of those new jobs have been full-time, a sure sign of a rapidly recovering demand for labour among employers.
The April employment figures from the Bureau of Statistics confirm the continuation of that trend.
A solid 33,700 rise in new jobs in the quarter, all of them full-time, a small fall in part-time employment and a steady unemployment rate of 5.4%.
It was the 8th month in a row that we’ve seen a rise in the number of people employed and 11,025 million people are now employed, an all time high.
However, there was a big jump in the number of full-time jobs created, with 37,500 new positions more than offsetting the 3900 part-time positions scrapped.
That makes for a net gain of 33,700 new jobs, considerably more than the 22,500 new positions economists had been tipping.
And it marks the biggest jump in the number of new full-time positions created in a year.
The unemployment rate was steady at 5.4%, from the same rate in March (originally 5.3%).
That followed more jobs being found by the ABS.
That included an extra 7,300 full-time jobs in March, and a smaller-than-initially recorded drop in the number of part-time positions.
That translates to a net gain of 8,100 more jobs for the month of March than first thought.
The ABS said unemployment rose 6,500 in April to 628,100 people as more people looked for work.
Despite the rise in jobs, the ABS said the seasonally adjusted monthly aggregate hours worked series showed a fall in April, down 8.3 million hours to 1,531.4 million hours.
The number of hours worked also fell in March when just over 19,000 new jobs were created (down 10 million hours).
If more people are employed, especially in full time jobs, then hours worked should rise.
In March and April we’ve had over 52,000 new jobs created and yet the hours worked have fallen by 18 million hours.
Part-time employment has fallen, but the rise in full-time gigs has been greater.
There seems to be something wrong here with this measure, the two don’t add up.
