As it so often happens, the latest jobs figures have something for everyone, from the doomsayers through to the equivocators and on to the rose-tinted glasses brigade.
If you think the economy is going to the dogs, your opinion would have been bolstered by the news that employment – the number of people with jobs – fell by 10,200, or 0.1 per cent, in July.
That fall, reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Thursday, more than erased the 9,300 rise in June.
You would also have had your gloomy world-view supported by the trend estimates.
The bureau uses them to cut through the ups and downs of the volatile seasonally-adjusted figures.
They showed the estimated trend in employment is rising at a negligible 1,000 or 0.01 per cent a month – in other words, it’s as flat as a pancake.
If your world view is not quite so apocalyptic, you might have noted the unemployment rate was stuck on 5.7 per cent.
It hit 5.5 per cent as long ago as September last year so, while it’s crept up, the rate of increase has hardly been rapid.
It should not take much of a pickup in economic growth to ensure the piecemeal rise stops and the jobless rate starts heading down.
Anyone with a more cheery disposition might have taken heart from the figures showing that, while the number of people in work edged down, the number of hours they worked rose.
In total, they put in an extra 7.95 million hours in July, a rise of 0.5 per cent from June, as the average time spent at work rose by 48 minutes, or one per cent, to 141 hours and 28 minutes.
The number of people working might have fallen, but the amount of work they’re doing has risen.
The same divergence between employment and hours worked can be seen over the past year.
While employment grew by a sluggish 1.1 per cent, hours worked rose by a solid 1.7 per cent.
Average hours worked can’t go on rising forever, so the rise in total hours worked must eventually show up in faster growth in the number of people with jobs.
And that will bring the jobless rate down.
So, there’s something to back up just about any opinion about the state of Australia’s jobs market.
But there’s equally enough of both good and bad news to suggest the more extreme assessments are wide of the mark.
Unemployment’s unlikely to start falling all of a sudden, but is equally unlikely to head up at anything more than the glacial pace of recent months.
