It’s Thursday and I have decided I will write three posts a week. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Today’s post continues on from yesterdays Unemployment is a Political Choice which described when, why, and how we started counting the unemployed. How it began in an era of Full Employment where the Australian Government aimed for spending in aggregate to target more jobs advertised than demanded. I described some detail around what was involved in aggregate spending and finally why unemployment is a political choice. Governments with their monopoly on the currency can always purchase what is for sale, including idle labour.

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In yesterday’s post I mentioned the recently elected labour governments decision to maintain below poverty unemployment benefits and maintain the pernicious system of ‘mutual obligations’ that penalises those on the unemployment benefit if they fail to complete certain tasks. This ABC article gives you an overview of what is happening with the changes to the system. The system is summarised

….more than 750,000 people will be placed into one of two Workforce Australia streams: an online portal for self-managing job searches, or into the management of a new job provider for face-to-face appointments.

Significantly, those who will be required to complete mutual obligations will also transition to a process where they will earn points for activities in return for income support.

Which may seem ‘fair’. Absolutely we should aim to have those that can work into work. That includes creating workplaces and designing work for people with disabilities so they too can feel a sense of belonging, a sense of contributing to their communities and an ability to feel in control of their lives with enough income to be able to do that. However, our unemployment system doesn’t do any of that. Some of the nastiness pieces of the system are being retained by the ALP. (emphasis mine)

ACOSS acting chief executive Edwina MacDonald said her organisation welcomed some of the changes outlined by Mr Burke, but voiced concern about the continuation of the “punitive” work-for-the-dole program and automated payment suspensions.

The system automates payment suspensions and we require some people to work for their unemployment benefit while they look for work to receive their below poverty line payment.

I decided to look at the number of people seeking work and the number of jobs advertised. This relationship is known as the Beveridge curve named after a conservative member of the House of Lords in the UK, William Beveridge. You can read why the conservatives decided to deal with the rising levels of unemployment in my post Advocating a Right to Work.

Anyway back to the Beveridge Curve. Wikipedia tells us The curve is a graphical representation of the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate which is the number of unfilled jobs expressed as a proportion of the labour force. The ABS says more less the same thing. The Beveridge Curve is widely used to depict the relationship between the unemployment rate and the job vacancy rate. Economists will study this curve and hope that as vacancy rate increases, unemployment decreases. i.e the higher the vacancy rate, the lower the unemployment.

When you grasp that as a monopolist of the currency – the government chooses the level of unemployment the Beveridge curve becomes somewhat pointless, unless you wanted to measure how much the private sector is contributing to economic activity.

I ran some numbers on the number of job vacancies v the number of unemployed and underemployed workers. As of the March quarter 2022 there is 0.88 jobs for every unemployed worker. This doesn’t take into account skills mismatches or location.

The ABS gives the quarterly figures for job vacancies at a different quarter to the unemployment figures to make comparisons a pain in the arse. Anyway I did it!

The first image is a table of job vacancies and numbers of people who are seeking work. The last column is the number of jobs advertised relative to the number of unemployed people.

The graph is a visual depiction of the table. The blue columns are the number of advertised jobs and the grey and yellow lines are the number of unemployed and underemployed people in the quarter.

To calculate quarterly figures for those two groups I found the monthly data and calculated an average. The data then matched the ABS job vacancy figures. The orange line is the underutilisation rate – which is the unemployment + underemployment rate.

Sadly, our Government thinks it is fine to force people to seek work that does not exist in sufficient quantity for all those that desire it and punish them for not jumping through bureaucratic hoops to receive a below poverty level payment. In some cases asking them to work for it!

Conclusion

Policy positions a progressive party should be taking;

• Immediately lift the unemployment (and other support payments) to $88 a day. 
• Stop mutual obligations 
• Transition the unemployment benefit (not other benefits) into a voluntary living wage Job Guarantee run under a nationalised unemployment agency.  
• The new national unemployment agency would form a ‘key pillar’ in a newly established full employment policy – helping those in the JG with education and training and seek employment in the public service or private sector. 
• Establish a full employment policy with things like expansion of the public sector (childcare, better resourced heath and education etc…)

The labour movement has a history of fighting for ‘the right to work’. I believe this should be at the forefront of any labour movement. The ALP like the Liberal Party are protecting the unemployment industry in Australia – a series of privately owned companies paid to punish those without employment under a system that ensures there is insufficient work.

That is all from me!

*Update: there were minor errors in my spreadsheet and graph. I corrected these and updated accordingly. Update II graph is fixed now. Administrative spreadsheet error.