450 employees lose their jobs.thanks labor, page-5

LOL not long now

Fiscal clowns = labor

"JOHN Howard has been overwhelmingly backed as the country's best prime minister "

Jobs weakness 'assured'

Su-Lin Ong, the head of economics for RBC Australia, says the decline in participation and fall in hours worked is more about a lack of work than a choice to work less.

She says the labour market is much weaker than the Bureau of Statistics figures suggest.

Contrary to much popular belief, the ABS employment figures do not actually count the number of people in and out of work - rather they are an estimate based on a monthly survey of around 60,000 people.

The large size of the survey helps reduce statistical errors, but the monthly variation can still be significant.

Su-Lin Ong says there is a range of other data on employment trends, and all of it is negative.

One of these data sets is the actual number of people claiming unemployment benefits.

"The number of people claiming benefits has been increasing since the start of 2012, although the trend has become much clearer from the start of the third quarter," she wrote in a note on the labour market.

Su-Lin Ong says falling jobs ads, weak business hiring intentions and very subdued wage increases also indicate that the jobs market is weak, and that further weakness is "assured".

"How quickly and/or to what extent the headline numbers - i.e. the unemployment rate and/or employment growth - catch up in our view misses the point: the labour market has softened, wage growth is muted, and underlying inflationary pressures are subsequently weak already," she concluded.

"All of this is consistent with our assessment that the economy moved to a sub-trend [below average] pace over the second half of 2012, with similarly muted output growth in 2013 likely to result in further slack in the labour force regardless of whether it is fully reflected in the unemployment rate."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-25/economists-split-on-employment-outlook/4484080?section=business