Geelong jobless disaster
Stats paint bleak picture
A STAGGERING one in six Geelong residents is unemployed or looking for work.
The underemployment rate — the proportion of people who want more work than they’re getting — is 8.5 per cent, according to Roy Morgan Research figures.
The statistics for the year to May also revealed Geelong’s “real unemployment” rate was 8.5 per cent. Combining the figures, 17 per cent of Geelong residents are either unemployed or looking for work.
Roy Morgan executive chairman Gary Morgan said the rise of underemployment was a national disaster waiting to happen.
“It’s a real problem,” Mr Morgan said. “It’s the major problem facing Australia today, underemployment.
“(If it is not addressed) the dollar will halve and we’ll have a recession.”
Mr Morgan said Geelong was a “basket case” when it came to underemployment.
“It’s too high,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Victoria’s ballooning underemployment rate has almost quadrupled since records began in the late 1970s.
Quarterly ABS figures from February 1978 showed the state’s underemployment rate was just 2.5 per cent, compared with the latest August 2016 figures of 9.2 per cent.
Geelong Trades Hall secretary Colin Vernon said workers were struggling to find meaningful, full-time employment, and warned the rise of underemployment could lead to the exploitation of workers.
“More and more workers are now engaged in the ‘ ring economy’, relying on a phone call or a text message to say they’ve got an hour’s work here or there,” Mr Vernon said.
“For example, one poor person walked into Trades Hall. He tells me he’s working in the disability sector and he’s been slowly moved from being a permanent employee to being a contractor.
“He now receives his work via text message on the phone. He receives anything as low as one hour of work, where he might even need to drive to a job that takes him half an hour to get to.
“If he was to knock back that one hour work that could mean he goes to the bottom of the list for any other work and he might not get any more for the week.”
Federal Labor employment spokesman Brendan O’Connor said there were “serious underlying problems” in the labour market being overlooked by the Government.
“Wages growth is at record lows and underemployment remains at record highs, but the Turnbull Government’s only plan for workers is to slash wages through cuts to penalty rates,” he said.
The Brotherhood of St Laurence’s Generation Stalled report, released in March, found underemployment was affecting more young Australians than unemployment.
“Underemployment, at 18 per cent of the youth labour force (February 2017), is the highest in the 40 years since the count officially began,” the report noted.