On Thursday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will release the official labour force release for August.
Ahead of that release, Roy Morgan released its shadow labour force survey for August, which recorded a sharp 0.8% increase in unemployment to 11.1%, up 2.0% year-on-year:
Roy Morgan effectively counts someone as unemployed if they want a job but are unable to get one. Therefore, it is a broader definition to the ABS’ stricter unemployment measure, which explains why Roy Morgan’s is always higher.
An estimated 1.78 million Australians are unemployed, according to Roy Morgan, meaning they are looking for work.
Total labor underutilisation—i.e., unemployment and underemployment combined—also rose by 0.8% in August to 22.0%, and was 3.4% higher year on year:
This is the first time that both unemployment and underemployment have been above 1.7 million in the same month.
An estimated 3.52 million people were underutilised in August—the highest monthly figure since early in the pandemic.
It is also the ninth straight month stretching back to late last year that total unemployment and underemployment were above 3 million.
It will be interesting to see whether the official ABS labour force release for August shows deterioration. As shown above, Roy Morgan’s survey has broken away from the ABS series over the past nine months.
