Australian jobs report for June 2017 ... strong full time result

Employment Change June: +14.0K for a miss but not much

  • expected +15.0K, prior +38.0K, revised from +42K

Unemployment Rate: 5.6% in line

  • expected 5.6%, prior 5.6%, revised from 5.5%

Full Time Employment Change: +62.0K .... HUGE

  • prior +53.4K, revised from +52.1K

Part Time Employment Change: -48K

  • prior -15.4K, revised from -10.0K

Participation Rate: 65.0% higher participation rate

  • expected 64.9%, prior was 64.9%

Well, good numbers.

June had 30 days. Full time employment up 62,000 for the month. So that is more than 2,000 full time jobs created each day in the month. Forgive me if I am a little incredulous.

Anyway, I'll get the 'trend numbers ASAP - these are the numbers the ABS tells us to focus on (ABS says Trend series smooth the more volatile seasonally adjusted estimates and provide the best measure of the underlying behaviour of the labour market).

OK, here we go:

  • Monthly trend full-time employment increased for the ninth straight month in June 2017
  • Full-time employment grew by a further 30,000 persons
  • Part-time employment decreased by 4,000 persons
  • Trend increase in total employment of 26,000 persons
  • "Full-time employment has increased by around 187,000 persons since September 2016, with particular strength over the past five months, averaging around 30,000 persons per month," Chief Economist for the ABS Bruce Hockman said. "Full-time employment now accounts for about 68 per cent of employment, however this is down from around 72 per cent a decade ago."
  • Over the past year, trend employment increased by 227,000 persons (or 1.9 per cent), which is the same as the average year-on-year growth over the past 20 year
  • Trend monthly hours worked increased by 6.2 million hours (0.4 per cent) to 1,691.5 million hours in June 2017. Most of this increase was hours worked by full-time workers
  • Trend unemployment rate in Australia decreased by less than 0.1 percentage points to 5.6 per cent in June 2017

The 'trend' numbers are more credulous, they usually are. They don't swing around nearly as much ... boring is probably good!