Australian Job growth
Feb 10th 2003, 4:17 am
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Australian Job growth
A look at employment trends in the land of plenty?
Mark Cully of Flinders University has studied how the nature of jobs has changed over the past 15 years, using the census figures for 1986 and 2001. He found that the total number of jobs (full-time and part-time) grew by 1.8 million to 8.1 million, an increase of 28 per cent. But what kind of jobs were they?
Well, consistent with all the hype, no fewer than one million of the extra jobs were in the highest-skilled occupations: managers, professionals and associate professionals.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, 700,000 of the new jobs - about four in 10 - were in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations in the services sector. Almost 200,000 of those jobs, for instance, were for shop assistants. So forget the notion that we'll soon be running out of jobs for those lacking academic qualifications.
But here's the disturbing bit: the past 15 years have seen almost no net growth in the number of middle-level skilled jobs - jobs that require post-school training but not a university degree.
The most glaring example is qualified tradespeople. Had jobs in the trades preserved their share of total employment, they would have grown by 300,000. In fact, their number fell by 13,000.
Employment is down in almost all trades: electricians, telecommunications repairmen, carpenters, bricklayers, butchers, printers, upholsterers, panel beaters and the metal trades.
At the same time, employment has been stagnant among advanced clerical and service workers - jobs such as insurance agents, desktop publishing operators and bank loan officers (the last being the only category of strong growth).
To explain the growth in less-skilled occupations, however, we need to turn to the growing affluence of working families, particularly two-income professional couples. On one hand we have their increased spending on luxuries and leisure activities helping to account for the growth in waiters (47,000), travel agents (14,000), personal care consultants (10,000), fitness instructors (8000) and gaming workers (3500). On the other, we have couples paying outsiders to do their housework, and thereby helping to explain the growth in child-care workers (54,000), cleaners (29,000) and handymen (14,000).
Mark Cully of Flinders University has studied how the nature of jobs has changed over the past 15 years, using the census figures for 1986 and 2001. He found that the total number of jobs (full-time and part-time) grew by 1.8 million to 8.1 million, an increase of 28 per cent. But what kind of jobs were they?
Well, consistent with all the hype, no fewer than one million of the extra jobs were in the highest-skilled occupations: managers, professionals and associate professionals.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, 700,000 of the new jobs - about four in 10 - were in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations in the services sector. Almost 200,000 of those jobs, for instance, were for shop assistants. So forget the notion that we'll soon be running out of jobs for those lacking academic qualifications.
But here's the disturbing bit: the past 15 years have seen almost no net growth in the number of middle-level skilled jobs - jobs that require post-school training but not a university degree.
The most glaring example is qualified tradespeople. Had jobs in the trades preserved their share of total employment, they would have grown by 300,000. In fact, their number fell by 13,000.
Employment is down in almost all trades: electricians, telecommunications repairmen, carpenters, bricklayers, butchers, printers, upholsterers, panel beaters and the metal trades.
At the same time, employment has been stagnant among advanced clerical and service workers - jobs such as insurance agents, desktop publishing operators and bank loan officers (the last being the only category of strong growth).
To explain the growth in less-skilled occupations, however, we need to turn to the growing affluence of working families, particularly two-income professional couples. On one hand we have their increased spending on luxuries and leisure activities helping to account for the growth in waiters (47,000), travel agents (14,000), personal care consultants (10,000), fitness instructors (8000) and gaming workers (3500). On the other, we have couples paying outsiders to do their housework, and thereby helping to explain the growth in child-care workers (54,000), cleaners (29,000) and handymen (14,000).
