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This was published 11 months ago
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Where did all the workers go?
Everywhere you look, in every industry, people are in short supply.
Every industry seems to be crying out for workers.Credit: Tom Cliff
“Help wanted” signs seem to be blu-tacked up in every second pub, café and restaurant window
The problems of the airlines, at their peak in the winter school holidays but certainly not resolved, have been well chronicled.
WA Police Force has the money to recruit 950 new officers but can barely keep up with higher-than-usual attrition, with resignations running at about double the typical rate.
Schools are struggling to find enough teachers for every classroom; the health workforce is stretched.
Employer groups complain about skills shortages (but they have always seemed to complain about skills shortages).
It’s hardly just an Australian, let alone a West Australian problem, but I was interested to burrow into the stats to try and find the answer to the question.
Mining doesn’t just carry the WA economy, for all intents and purposes it is the WA economy post-pandemic, growing to an extraordinary share of 47 per cent of economic activity by value post-pandemic, a run up from 29 per cent in 2017.
(To put that figure in context, in no other state does the largest industry sector exceed 13 per cent of the economy, per WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry statistics.)
Mining, though, is not the largest employer of West Australians – though its share of the workforce has now gone well past that 2012 peak after a period of major contraction that lasted until early 2018, when it began to grow again.
In the last 2006-2013 mining boom, mining employment reached its peak of 121,400 in the August quarter of 2012, according to the ABS.
It shrunk to 87,700 in the November quarter of 2017 and has now grown to 150,700 on the latest figures from the May quarter.
In all, it represents 29,300 more workers a decade on; a 24 per cent growth. Of course, mining salaries are higher than any other sector and those wages support jobs in other sectors of the WA economy.
But far more workers – in both absolute numbers and percentage terms – have been added to the health and personal care workforce, up 66,500 in a decade, or 49 per cent, to 203,000.
There is also big growth in public safety and administration – up 40,500 workers or 60 per cent – and accommodation and food services – up 34,300 or 51 per cent.
Interestingly, two of the largest employment sectors, retail and construction, have essentially flatlined over the decade.
Both have seen less than 2 per cent growth in employment over that period, which is really a decent-sized contraction in real terms, despite booming conditions in both industries since the initial COVID lockdown shock of 2020.
The overall picture is that there have never been more West Australians in work and female employment has surged, albeit that part-time work has grown at about triple the rate of full-time employment.
The WA economy has added 65,000 jobs for men and 111,000 jobs for women (77,000 full-time and 103,000 part-time); with the employment to population ratio for women growing from 59 per cent to 62 per cent in the decade while holding steady at 73 per cent for men, and female unemployment dropping from 4.4 per cent to 3.3 per cent for women, and 3.7 per cent to 3.6 per cent for men.
It is, in short, an economy that is soaking up all available labour, that has an all-time high number of people in full-time work at over 1 million and record participation of women.
So where did all the workers go?
To jobs, is the main answer – but there is a migration story to tell too.
During that 2011-12 first mining boom peak, about 50,000 people came to WA from overseas.
Over the past 18 months, net 8000 people have departed.
After the 2012 boom crashed, WA lost people to the rest of the country at a rate of about 2000 people a month – an outflow that continued for about seven years.
Since June 2020, that trend has finally reversed – and on the most recent figures for the December 2021 quarter, WA had net interstate immigration of 4970 – an all-time record.
It remains to be seen whether this was pent-up demand after border difficulties in the preceding two years or a response to the new economic opportunities out west, but either way it was a sharp jump and will be worth watching closely when the ABS next reports.
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