ABS employment in detail: Good for jobs, bad for wages

Thursday 24 January 2019

As summarised earlier, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) today released its labour force report for December, which registered a reasonable 21,600 increase in total employment and a small fall in the headline unemployment rate to 5.0%, driven by a 0.1% fall in labour force participation.

In trend terms, the unemployment rate also fell to 5.0% – a six year low:

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About the author

Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.