Employment Change

Employment Change is the month-to-month move in the number of employed people in Australia. It comes from Labour Force, Australia, built on the Labour Force Survey, a poll of about 50,000 people in about 24,000 homes.

Coverage is the resident civilian population aged 15 or over, excluding defence forces and some diplomats and overseas residents. It counts employed people, not jobs, so one person with two jobs counts once, and one hour of paid work counts as employed. Estimates run monthly since February 1978, after quarterly surveys since 1960.

Responses are usually collected in the 2 weeks starting on the Sunday between the 5th and the 11th, for the week before the interview. Timing shifts a little around December and January.

It is usually published 39 days after interviews, on the 3rd Thursday after the measured month, at 11:30am Canberra time, except December after 46 days. Each release also shows unemployment, participation and hours, in three versions, raw, adjusted for seasons and smoothed trend, with detail about 7 days later. Revisions come monthly with new seasonal factors, quarterly with population benchmarks in February, May, August and November, and every five years with the Census.

Total employment moves only through its two parts, full-time and part-time work.

• Full-time employed: people who usually work 35 hours or more, including those who hit 35 hours that week.
• Part-time employed: people who usually work fewer than 35 hours and did so that week, or were away from work.

September 2023, released October 19, 2023, shows how parts can offset the headline. Employment rose by only 6,700 to 14,111,200 (0.0%), yet full-time work fell by 39,900 to 9,806,400 while part-time work rose by 46,500 to 4,304,800. The unemployment rate, jobless people as a share of the labour force, fell 0.1 points to 3.6%. Participation, the share of people in work or seeking it, eased 0.2 points to 66.7% as fewer people looked for work.

Monthly hours worked fell by 8 million to 1,930 million. In trend terms employment rose by 23,000 to 14,115,100. The lesson is that a flat headline can hide rotation between the parts, and unemployment can fall as participation drops.

1. Rotate: the sample holds eight rotation groups, each home stays eight months, and one group rotates each month so seven-eighths overlaps.
2. Classify: each person is sorted for the reference week, the week before the interview, with one hour of paid work enough to count as employed.
3. Weight: each answer is scaled by its selection chance, such as 445 in New South Wales, then adjusted for coverage.
4. Combine and benchmark: answers are pooled with the prior six months, then forced to match independent population totals from births, deaths and migration.
5. Adjust for seasons: the series is split into trend, seasonal and irregular parts, re-estimated monthly with ARIMA endpoints and a 13-period Henderson trend.
6. Take the move: Employment Change is the change in the adjusted level, in persons and percent, split into full-time plus part-time moves. For example, August 2023 to September 2023 moved from 14,104,500 to 14,111,200, a rise of 6,700 persons, about 0.05%, published as 0.0%. Full-time moves plus part-time moves sum to the headline, times 100 over the prior month for percent, up to rounding.