Around 1.8 million Australians who were not working in February this year were keen to gain employment, despite nearly a quarter of retail businesses (23%) reporting job vacancies in the same month.
According to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), overall job vacancies have been hovering over 430,000 since the beginning of this year, with retail vacancies at just over 32,000.
Prior to the last two years, job mobility has generally been trending down for younger workers, ABS reported.
In retail specifically, more than 234,000 retail workers did not change jobs over the last year to February 2023. Compared to pre-pandemic (February 2020), this has trended up by 66,000.
There are also upward trends in retail workers changing occupations with the same employer at the same skill level (now at 24,900 from 14,400 pre-pandemic), and those working in a job with the same status in employment as 12 months ago (now 71,600 from 57,200 pre-pandemic).
Retail workers who are changing occupations with their current employer in the same major group last year reached a record high of 26,000, up from 15,800 pre-pandemic,
New data from ABS also showed there were 510,000 unemployed people in Australia in February, with 1.3 million “not in the labour force.”
Around 1 million people were available to start work immediately and an additional 470,000 were available to start within four weeks.
There were 770,000 people who wanted to work, and were available to start within four weeks but did not actively look for work.
The main reasons they did not look for work were because they were attending an educational institution (165,000 people), caring for children (130,000 people), or discouraged job seekers (87,000 people). The number of discouraged job seekers dropped slightly from 89,000 in February 2022.
Of the 510,000 people who were unemployed in February 2023, 82 per cent reported having difficulty finding work, down from 84 per cent in February 2022.
The main difficulties reported by those unemployed were own health or disability (11.8 per cent), too many applicants for available jobs (11.4 per cent), and insufficient work experience (8.7 per cent).
Meanwhile, job mobility (or the amount of people changing employers or businesses) remained at 9.5 per cent for a second year in a row - the highest rate in a decade.
“Job mobility in Australia has generally been trending down for decades and reached a record low of 7.5 per cent during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic,” ABS head of labour statistics Bjorn Jarvis said. “While the 2023 figure might be higher, and is in fact the highest it’s been since the early 2010s, it’s still relatively low compared to earlier decades.”
The job mobility rate remained high for both men and women in the year ending February 2023, with job mobility higher for men (9.7 per cent) than women (9.4 per cent).
Younger workers are generally more mobile than older workers, with 14.9 per cent of people aged 15 to 24 years changing jobs. This was followed by 11.2 per cent of 25 to 44 year olds, and 5.9 per cent of 45 to 64 year olds.
Across the board, most industries saw a rise in job mobility from the prior year (February 2022), with the largest increases seen in electricity, gas, water and waste services (+4.2 percentage points), followed by transport, postal and warehousing (+3.4 percentage points), and rental, hiring and real estate services (+2.9 percentage points).
“People were more likely to change their industry, at 58 per cent, than their occupation, which was 44 per cent, in the year ending in February 2023,” Jarvis said.
Of the people that changed jobs, most went to health care and social assistance (13.3 per cent), followed by construction (10.4 per cent), and professional scientific and technical services (10.3 per cent).
"Over the year, 37 per cent of people changed to a job with the same usual hours, while 33 per cent changed to a job with more hours, and only 30 per cent changed to a job with fewer hours," Jarvis said.