Labour force data weakens
After job vacancies dived in yesterday's Jobs & Skills Australia data and Roy Morgan reported a drop in employment (and notably, a spike in its unemployment rate measure), SEEK reported advertised salaries up 3.6 per cent over the year to February...steady, and well down from 4½ per cent a year earlier.
Of course, by far the most followed and broadest survey is the Australia Labour Force data released by the ABS, which shocked to the downside with a massive -53,000 drop in the number of employed people.
Pretty noisy, you might say, but hardly an inspiring set of numbers.
It's not clear if this data was impacted by sampling or one-off factors, but it was certainly a long way below the 30,000 increase tipped by median market expectations, as the Aussie dollar and bond yields dropped sharply on the news accordingly.
The 3-month average for employment growth has dropped to only 13,000, which if sustained would be well below the level required to keep the unemployment rate down over the medium term given the ongoing rapid rate of population growth.
There was, however, also a large drop in the participation rate from the previous record 67.2 per cent to 66.8 per cent, meaning that the unemployment rate held firm at 4.1 per cent, seasonally adjusted.
The highest unemployment rate was seen in Victoria at 4.6 per cent, but most other states and territories continued to report very low unemployment rates of 4 per cent or below.
The underemployment rate was also tight at only 5.9 per cent, 0.7 percentage points lower than a year ago, and some 2.8 percentage points lower than when the pandemic kicked into gear as at March 2020.
Hours worked fell modestly in the month.
Overall, this was a significantly softer month of jobs figures than expected by market economists, seemingly making a May interest rate all but a lock at this stage, although there's a pretty good chance that some of this month's volatility in the employment figures proves to be noise rather than signal.
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