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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 852 ..

MS GALLAGHER (continuing):

The Australian Bureau of Statistics gathers labour force statistics each month by asking a sample of people questions about their employment in the previous week, referred to as the reference week. The central problem with the current statistics is the categories into which the working age population is divided and the definitions used by those categories. Briefly, under the labour force survey, people are defined as employed if, during the reference week, they worked for an hour or more for pay or profit, or were unpaid in a family business or farm. The ABS classes people as unemployed if, during the reference week, they actively looked for work and were available to start in the reference week. Anyone who does not fall into either of these two categories is classed as not being in the labour force.

Perhaps you have already begun to see the problems that arise from such a rigid analysis of the labour force. The most obvious problem is: as there is no category of underemployed we have no way of measuring the number of hours that "employed" people would prefer to be working and thus we have no true indication of the number of working hours available in our labour market.

Because a person who works for an hour in a particular week-and that is only 60 minutes-is classed as employed, the labour force survey figures can present a misleading picture of employment. Figures of supposedly employed people mask those who seek more work or who are on part-time or casual hours, not because they choose to but because the economy has failed them. Without measuring underemployment, we cannot measure labour market efficiency.

Clearly, a person who is working for one hour a week but wants or needs to work a further 39 hours a week is not employed. That person will be looking for work, will be needing financial assistance and will face the same problems as an unemployed person, yet the underemployed person never appears as a job seeker or as an unemployed person and continues to appear in the labour force figures as employed.

Mr Deputy Speaker, under the current Australian Bureau of Statistics labour force survey, a million full-time workers could be put on part-time hours against their wishes and it would not show up in the employment figures. This clearly shows the inadequacy of those figures in tracking the economic and social progress of a government and the effectiveness of its policies. If we are truly concerned with measuring our progress and if we want a true picture of the labour market so that we can tackle the genuine and far-reaching problems of underemployment and unemployment, we need to review the way we analyse our labour markets.

There has been a concerted program of labour market deregulation over the past six years, with the result that there has been an increase in the number of people employed on a part-time or casual basis. Under the current survey, one 40-hour per week job divided into four 10-hour jobs would show as the creation of three jobs, regardless of whether or not the initial employee wanted to maintain their hours or if the three new employees wanted more hours. While this is job creation in a literal sense, it is not employment creation and cannot be classed as such.

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