Australia sees rise in unemployment rate amid pandemic

Source: Xinhua | 2020-06-19

Australia's unemployment rate has risen to 7.1 percent amid the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the latest labor force data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Thursday, 227,700 jobs were lost in May, bringing the unemployment rate from 6.4 percent in April to 7.1 percent in May. The total number of jobs lost since March reached 835,000.

"The sad truth is that these numbers are not surprising in these circumstances," Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a press conference in Canberra.

"We are very aware of the significant blow that Australians are being hit with through the course of this pandemic. This recession will be written in the stories of those who are experiencing terrible hardship.

"Our task is simple. And that is we must get Australians back into work."

The participation rate, which measures the percentage of people of working age who are either employed or actively looking for work, fell to 62.9 percent, the lowest figure since January 2001.

In order to be classified as "unemployed" by the ABS, a person has to be actively looking for work.

The under-utilization rate, which combines the unemployment and underemployment rates, rose to a new record high of 20.2 percent.

The number of hours worked by Australians per month has fallen 10.2 percent since March.

"In two months, the percentage of people aged 15 and over employed in Australia decreased from around 62.5 percent to around 58.7 percent," Bjorn Jarvis, head of Labor Statistics of the ABS, said in a media release.

"The ABS estimates that a combined group of around 2.3 million people, around one in five employed people, were affected by either job loss between April and May or had less hours than usual for economic reasons in May."

Jarvis also said that women continued to be more adversely affected by the labor market deterioration than men and younger workers have also been particularly impacted.

"Coronavirus is the reason people have lost their jobs," Prime Minister Morrison said.

"And it will take us, we estimate, around two years to get back just to where we were when it happened and I believe we can, over five years, seek to catch where we were planning to be.

"Young people have been most affected in these numbers.

"But my hope is that, equally as the economy opens up, they will hopefully also be the first to benefit from that economy opening up.

"As retail doors open again, as food courts are open again, as shopping centers are fuller again, we hope to see more of those young people back into that work but that task will be great."