The Australian job market remains very strong, despite the misleading headline figure in the February report yesterday showing a 10,100 fall in overall employment.
That was not an accurate reflection of the underlying detail in the report, with a large 47,600 full time jobs created, offsetting the loss in the January quarter.
The fall in the headline figure was due to a 57,700 drop in the number of part time workers, with that fall concentrated in the states of Victoria and Queensland, which were the two worst hit by the floods in January.
In fact around 20,000 part-time jobs were lost in Queensland.
There was no revision of the January unemployment rate which stood at a seasonally adjusted 5%, and February’s was unchanged as well, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
But revisions to the ABS jobs figures for December and January show there has been no growth in the workforce since November.
Anomalies had been expected in the data because of problems emanating from the floods, particularly in Queensland.
It’s clear that the flood impact is temporary and the negative market reaction to the news and some commentaries was wrong.
This latest jobs report and the big rise in full time employment, brings closer the next interest rate rise because it will confirm to the Reserve Bank that the economy’s underlying strength is unharmed by the floods and cyclone Yasi.
Unemployment in Western Australia improved sharply; down from 4.6% to 4.2%, and without that, the headline rate may have risen slightly.
NSW unemployment went up from 4.4% to 4.6%, Queensland was steady at 5.6% and Victoria eased to 5.0%.
The ABS said the number of people employed was 11.413 million in February, with 3.344 million people working part time and 8.068 million fulltime.
The number of people unemployed fell by 500 people to 604,800 in February.
The ABS monthly aggregate hours worked series showed an increase in February, up 17.9 million hours to 1,602.0 million hours.
The ABS reported labour force participation in February of 65.7%, a decrease of 0.1 percentage points from January and due to a small fall in the female rate.
The ABS said that no significant operational difficulties were experienced in conducting the Labour Force Survey in February 2011.
"A small number of households from the sample were not able to be enumerated due to either flood or cyclone damage to the dwelling or road closures preventing access to the dwelling. The small amount of sample loss has not had a statistically significant impact on the estimates and, unlike January, there was no need to apply corrections to any of the trend estimates this month."
The other figures released yesterday from the ABS showed no pressure from industrial disputes for the December quarter.
In fact they showed a significant fall in the number of days lost to industrial disputes from the September quarter – 46,000 down to 27,000.
They also show that 2010 saw less industrial disputation with 126,000 days lost (132,700 days in 2009).
The ABS said there were 227 industrial disputes in 2010, down 9 from 2009.
