Hi, Andrew, from SACS.
You know, if you read social media,
you would believe that we're all going to end up working in the gig economy.
We won't have jobs anymore.
We will be self-employed.
We'll be subcontracting to giant
corporations and we would be paid however many hours we work.
That's the future of employment in the world. Right?
Well, there's only one problem with that, and it's completely untrue.
It's untrue in Australia, and I'll show you exactly why,
but it's also untrue in most places around the world.
Here's some statistics, and I do owe this originally
to Robert Sobyra, who was at the University of Queensland
completing a PhD when he pulled this data together.
But this is the percentage of casual
employees in Australia, and you'll see that from early in 1984,
it rose till the peak was around about 2002 of casual employment.
And then at 2016, where Sobyra's figures
finish, it was as low as it had been since 1996.
So he's saying that the trend is
a negative trend. Now 2016 is a long time ago.
So what's happened to the figures in recent times?
Well, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of casual
employees in the Australian workforce just before COVID-19 was about 20%.
And so we're talking about around about here.
So it continued to decline. Now, sadly,
during COVID-19, the proportion declined even further.
And that is because, of course, casuals were the greatest casualties
of COVID-19 because they were easily laid off.
Interestingly, they've started to come back a little, but they're certainly not
back to the 20% that they were before COVID-19.
How about self-employment?
Because if we're all working as subcontractors to giant corporations,
well, there should be a fair slice of us that are self-employed.
Well, have a look at this, because what it shows is the percentage
of employees in Australia who are self-employed.
And you'll see that that, too, peaked at around about 2002,
and it has collapsed in recent times to the point where we have some
of the lowest figures for self-employment ever in the history of Australia.
We're not increasingly self-employed.
What's happening is that we're increasingly working for corporations
and we're not going to be entrepreneurs and running our own business.
And personally, as a person who owns his
own business, I'm a little worried about the future of entrepreneurship
in Australia because this is a collapse of historic proportions.
But what about job security?
What has happened to job security in Australia?
Well, the answer is, job security has
increased markedly as staff turnover has declined.
This graph here shows you three samples, persons, males and females.
And not surprisingly, male and female staff turnover correspond quite closely.
And what you see is that the peak of staff
turnover was around about 1990, and that was an economic recession.
So it's probably not surprising that that caused a decline in job security.
But then what we see is a steady decline to the point where staff turnover as
a percentage of the workforce is as about as low as it's ever been in Australia.
By the way,
the staff turnover in Australia appears to be between eight and 8.5 percentage
points, which is actually very low by international standards.
In the United States, for instance,
it's more historically like 20 or something like that.
Although at the time I'm recording this, they're going through a thing called
the Great Resignation, which has pumped up staff turnover rates enormously.
So they're getting 6% per month now
of staff turnover, where historically it's been 2% or something like that.
But it is interesting to know
that Australian employment is far more stable than, for instance,
the United States or the UK. UK is much higher than Australia as well.
So why do people believe this?
I think the answer is a thing called the availability
heuristic. The availability
heuristic is a well-known form of bias in human beings.
And Daniel Kahneman worded it by saying "What you see is all there is."
In other words, if you see a particular thing, so you're driving around and you
see Deliveroo drivers or if you see people delivering courier bicycle food,
that kind of stuff, you kind of think, okay, well, that's what must be happening,
particularly if the media tells you that's what's happening.
So the truth is the exact opposite of what you're being told on this score.
People's employment is becoming more reliable,
their jobs are safer, and they are less self-employed than
at virtually any other time in the history of the Australian economy.
Thanks for watching.