Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work in Sydney, claims Australia’s youth are the biggest victims of the weak labour market, with increasing numbers unable to secure stable permanent employment. From The ABC:
Employers are increasingly discriminating against job applicants with a history of fixed-term or casual employment by denying permanent roles, one expert says…
Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work in Sydney, said the practice trapped jobseekers in a cycle.
“It’s incredibly frustrating for people who are trying to get a foot in the door of the labour market,” Dr Stanford said.
“They’re told they have to have experience, and even when they get experience they’re told they don’t have the right kind of experience”…
“It really is a buyer’s market in Australia’s labour market right now. You can offer a job with rather inferior features and still have dozens of people applying for it.
“In that type of world, employers can be very arbitrary in picking out certain criteria to exclude many people from consideration”…
Economist Saul Eslake said this type of workplace discrimination contributed to a much broader feeling of insecurity at work.
“[That includes] a diminished role for unions in the workplace, [and] people feel far less willing to ask for wage rises or to ask for wage rises of the same size they might have done previously,” Mr Eslake said.
“They’re less likely to protest against other changes in working conditions.”
The most recent quarterly labour force data revealed that the youth underutlisation rate – combining both unemployment and underemployment – was running at the highest level in recorded history (31.3%):
On wonders why the federal government allows the widespread importation of foreign workers when there is so much slack in the labour market and employee bargaining power is already so weak?
It also throws into focus the efficacy of the Turnbull Government’s $750 million Youth-Jobs PaTH program, which incentivises employers to substitute a worker receiving a wage subsidy for another worker who would otherwise have been hired.
