The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released its Labour Force survey for July and the result is a shocker:
- Employment decreased 300 to 11,576,600. Full-time employment increased 14,500 to 8,077,400 and part-time employment decreased 14,800 to 3,499,200.
- Unemployment increased 43,700 to 789,000. The number of unemployed persons looking for full-time work increased 21,900 to 566,400 and the number of unemployed persons only looking for part-time work increased 21,800 to 222,600.
- The unemployment rate increased 0.3 pts to 6.4%.
- Participation rate increased 0.1 pts to 64.8%.
- Aggregate monthly hours worked decreased 14.8 million hours (0.9%) to 1 ,610.7 million hours.
The numbers are a huge miss across the board. Expected was:
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- employment change: +13.2K
- unemployment rate: 6.0%
- participation rate: 64.7%
The internals are a bit better than the headline number. The full time jobs are some comfort, the participation rate climb did much of the damage and this was a release when a largish portion of the survey is rotated. That has flattered the headline result in the past but not this time. Still, the big dump in aggregate hours worked emphasises that this was a weak release.
More to come from UE.
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