Roy Morgan Research has released its unemployment estimate for April, which has shown a massive increase in unemployment since the COVID-19 lockdown commenced in mid-March:
Roy Morgan’s unemployment measure for April shows a massive 2.16 million Australians were unemployed (15.3% of the workforce), with an additional 1.32 million (9.4%) under-employed.
In total 3.5 million (24.7% of the workforce) Australians are now either unemployed or under-employed. This is 439,000 fewer than the 3.92 million unemployed or under-employed (27.4% of the workforce) during the last two weeks of March (March 20-31, 2020) immediately before the Federal Government’s JobKeeper program was announced.
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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.
