Select to expand quote

Mr Milk said..
Underemployment is about 9%. That means there are plenty of people who are part time or casual and want either more hours or a full time job.

Yeah, that's what they say in a survey. "I want to earn more, so I want more hours"

"OK, come in on Friday arvo"

"argh, no ummm, busy then, I only want more hours if I don't actually have to work more hours".



On the flip side what's the percentage of people who self identify as overworked and wanting fewer hours. If it is more than 9%, I'd suggest 57% of statistics can prove just about anything.

Select to expand quote

Carantoc said..
When unemployment is at 4% who are you planning to train ?

The 4% dregs of society that can't get a job ?

If they ain't smart enough to flip burgers or deliver pizza around the suburbs I doubt they are going to sit through a 4 year apprenticeship working 12 hour nightshifts changing the oil on $5M dump trucks.

Do you even understand what you typed? I don't think you put too much thought into it except wanting to be contrary.

Its not as if there are otherwise perfectly suited people sitting around for 'mine site dumper driving trainee' jobs and doing nothing else. Those people will already be working. Possibly in more menial jobs. They then see advertising for trainees and think 'I want to see if I can do that job, sounds good' and then apply for it.

Maybe they get the traineeship, leaving vacant their old job of 'Carantoc's estate manager' and then someone else applies for that one and then someone else then takes the now vacant Liberal Party PR team-leader job.

4% unemployment rate is an excuse. A lazy, poor excuse for not training people and managing their workforce. If they cry to the government of the day and ask for more imports it just happens to align with increased GDP growth which makes the government appear to know WTF they are talking about. We know they don't.

It should hurt companies when they repeatedly cannot manage their staffing. Its a skill like anything else. If they don't want to take the good with the bad then they need to manage around it and actually plan. Its not like these are $200k startup businesses.

Select to expand quote

Carantoc said..

Mr Milk said..
Underemployment is about 9%. That means there are plenty of people who are part time or casual and want either more hours or a full time job.

Yeah, that's what they say in a survey. "I want to earn more, so I want more hours"

"OK, come in on Friday arvo"

"argh, no ummm, busy then, I only want more hours if I don't actually have to work more hours".



On the flip side what's the percentage of people who self identify as overworked and wanting fewer hours. If it is more than 9%, I'd suggest 57% of statistics can prove just about anything.

Man, you have a certain view of the world at the moment. Anything you want to share to make you feel better?

Are you one of those people that call in a staff member on their day off, just before the shift starts, and wonder why they are not keen to earn that extra $160? Ungratefal bus tards. I had no contingency for sick staff and couldn't figure this out earlier, so why shouldn't they come in!

Another reason for a low unemployment rate might be its a great time to become self employed, so some motivated people are leaving there jobs and trying to make more money working for themselves.

I am unemployed now, but the government won't know until my bank accounts dry up and i go to Centrelink or until i file my tax return with no income. I'm currently living off savings and going to be home schooling my children until i see how 2022 pans out.

I'm unemployed, but don't quality for centrelink.

It should be low. the sign in my local Subway last night said

"Sorry for the delays, most of us are working doubles at the moment as we're understaffed. Please be courteous to the staff who bothered showing up and do their best. If you'd like to join out team please apply..."

There are ads all over the place WANTED - T/A. Wanted - worker etc etc.

in the 90's you could not get any job unless you knew someone, dad's mate etc. Last 15yrs or so there is a plethora avail..... but its easier to use drugs not take care of yourself and claim mental health disability - bang $500 a week.

They're thinking about unemployment insurance in the NZ, up to six months at 80%. Sounds like similar schemes; compulsory opt-in, a month per year of working, but only 6 months pay-out no matter how long you've worked. I assume they're going to replace the UB...

More taxes SORRY levies, less social support. Hard to believe it's a Labour government.

Here we go, why aren't those dole bludgers picking fruit instead of sitting around?

www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/would-you-do-this-job-in-exchange-for-100/news-story/18eb6baa04514011eb57c6e9153e94ee

Realistically, it would be a pretty tough job and require you to move around a lot, but in this case they are getting ripped off anyway.

It's a reminder that with employers like that it would be pretty impossible to have a fully employed workforce.

I guess one of the things that would be difficult at the moment is that if you are looking for staff and its not a particularly easy or pleasant job it would be almost impossible to find people. If you are a terrible boss, then it would be even worse.

Select to expand quote

bigbinos said..
I'm unemployed, but don't quality for centrelink.

If your resume reads like this, I can see why you're unemployed.

FWit

Select to expand quote

FormulaNova said..
Here we go, why aren't those dole bludgers picking fruit instead of sitting around?

www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/would-you-do-this-job-in-exchange-for-100/news-story/18eb6baa04514011eb57c6e9153e94ee

Realistically, it would be a pretty tough job and require you to move around a lot, but in this case they are getting ripped off anyway.

It's a reminder that with employers like that it would be pretty impossible to have a fully employed workforce.

I guess one of the things that would be difficult at the moment is that if you are looking for staff and its not a particularly easy or pleasant job it would be almost impossible to find people. If you are a terrible boss, then it would be even worse.

With the border closure in NZ, the fruit growers were moaning that there was no responses to their ads for workers, even though they were offer better-than-minimum wages. Then there were people applying for those jobs and being turned down.

The problem is those jobs are seasonal, and if you go off the dole to do them, you can't get back on the dole straight away so you're left with weeks with no income.

Select to expand quote

Kamikuza said..

FormulaNova said..
Here we go, why aren't those dole bludgers picking fruit instead of sitting around?

www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/would-you-do-this-job-in-exchange-for-100/news-story/18eb6baa04514011eb57c6e9153e94ee

Realistically, it would be a pretty tough job and require you to move around a lot, but in this case they are getting ripped off anyway.

It's a reminder that with employers like that it would be pretty impossible to have a fully employed workforce.

I guess one of the things that would be difficult at the moment is that if you are looking for staff and its not a particularly easy or pleasant job it would be almost impossible to find people. If you are a terrible boss, then it would be even worse.

With the border closure in NZ, the fruit growers were moaning that there was no responses to their ads for workers, even though they were offer better-than-minimum wages. Then there were people applying for those jobs and being turned down.

The problem is those jobs are seasonal, and if you go off the dole to do them, you can't get back on the dole straight away so you're left with weeks with no income.

Here in Aus, the shortage of backpackers led to a scheme where pacific islanders could come in to do the same jobs. The story I posted the link to shows that they are getting screwed by some employers in the same way that the backpackers were. I guess that tells us the problem was not the backpackers.

I have brought this up before, but there was a doco on this and there was a farmer saying that workers were lazy and not willing to put in the effort, and then he turned around and said he wasn't doing the paperwork because it was not worth the effort and that he wasn't interested in hiring locals as the paperwork was too much.

I don't know what they did before backpackers, but in general, times like this highlight bad business people. They don't have a right to be bad business people and demand staff that will put up with their bad business approaches.

I can see the future though. Plenty of poor business people, whether they are in manufacturing or restaurants or anything else, will find it hard to keep staff and complain. To which the government will increase the quotas for IT workers and accountants

There was a brain fart a few years ago where some idiot decided it was a good idea to tax backpackers working here even more before they left the country. You can't have your cake and eat it too... unless you are in a different government department it seems.

Select to expand quote

FormulaNova said..
Here in Aus, the shortage of backpackers led to a scheme where pacific islanders could come in to do the same jobs...

Not sure that is quite right.

The Pacific Islander low-skilled migration scheme has been around for quite a while, at least 10 years I think.

And it was more about foreign aid than replacing backpackers.

Backpacker schemes are about young people travelling for the benefit of young people and are generally reciprocal to what nation the backpackers are from. The 457 visa is for skilled and experienced workers from just about any nation for the benefit of the Australian economy. The pacific island scheme is more about an alternate to young people and 457 visas to provide opportunities as part of the foreign aid system to Australia's close neighbors.

It is hard to meet the 457 criteria for some people on some pacific island nations and backpacker requirements encourage travelling around (for example by limit the amount of time you can work for one employer), so they introduced a low skilled visa scheme to provide up to 3 years working rights in Australia.

In principal it seems like a good thing.

But like anything it is open to abuse. I don't know but I suspect they are some happy people on the scheme or completed the scheme. I'd also suspect the biggest abusers aren't farmers themselves, but the employment agencies that get the workers, find the jobs, link the two up then take 99% of the wages and 100% of the government grants.

How many of the Pacific Islander scheme people are employed by dedicated pacific islander employment agencies and how many directly by employers ?

Good information.

I think that you are probably right in that the middle-men might be the source of a lot of these problems. It seemed to be the case with backpackers which were managed by someone who would arrange accommodation and send them off to farms.

This is the sort of thing I was talking about, but as you said, it sounds like they have expanded numbers greatly rather than create the scheme from scratch:
www.dese.gov.au/seasonal-worker-programme
www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/14/south-australia-prepares-to-welcome-1200-south-pacific-fruit-pickers

Its not low, it is high. Sometime around Hawke or Keating i think it was, they decided to no longer measure it by the people on the dole but by a private company doing surveys at random by phone calls to house. Extremely deceitful way to fudge the figuresand make themselves look good. Similar to the way inflation is now measured by sneaky deceitful methods to keep us in the dark.

"Two legs bad, four legs good"

Select to expand quote

Mr Milk said..

FormulaNova said..
Yeah, I agree with this. I have gone for periods between contracts with no work at all, and there is no way that anyone knows I am unemployed during this time. I suspect that unless you are enrolled with some government agency somewhere and getting zero hours a week for the last 3 months that you are technically 'not unemployed'.

That's not how unemployment is calculated. It's done by using a sample of households answering a questionnaire form and extrapolated from the result

www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/6102.0.55.001~Feb%202018~Main%20Features~Labour%20Force%20Survey~19

Under the current sample design, the sampling fractions yield a sample size of approximately 26,000 households each month. This results in approximately 50,000 persons responding to the survey, covering about 1 in 312 (or 0.32%) of the civilian population aged 15 years and over. For further information, refer to Information Paper: Labour Force Survey Sample Design, May 2013 (cat. no. 6269.0).

I think Mr Milk was on the money.

I came across a discussion about this recently in one of the news sites. They commented that people think it has been manipulated by someone, and it is Labor that did it for some people and Liberals that did it for others, depending on who you hate the most.

There was also mention that the '1 hour per week' standard of being employed is actually an international definition and not something just made up here.

Select to expand quote

seahealing said..
Its not low, it is high. Sometime around Hawke or Keating i think it was, they decided to no longer measure it by the people on the dole but by a private company doing surveys at random by phone calls to house. Extremely deceitful way to fudge the figuresand make themselves look good. Similar to the way inflation is now measured by sneaky deceitful methods to keep us in the dark.

"Two legs bad, four legs good"

I think they revise the way they measure inflation in order to capture what people generally spend on. It may not reflect on individual circumstances, but it is a way to measure it. Measuring it on everything would be impossible.