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Category: Work / Economic Trends / Unemployment

Health sector remains Australia's biggest employer

Wednesday, 4 Jan 2017 13:16:43 | Thuy Ong

Australia's ageing population spurring a need for more health services. (Reuters: Brian Snyder)

The health and social assistance sector remains the nation's biggest employer, followed by retail and construction according to Bankwest analysis of Bureau of Statistics figures.

Shares of employment 2 Photo: Shares of Employment in Australia (Source: ABS, Bankwest)

Retail's employment share remained largely flat at 10.5 per cent, but health and social assistance's share has grown from 8.5 per cent 25 years ago, to just over 12.5 per cent by the mid-2010s. That sector is expected to remain the country's biggest employer for some time due to the needs of Australia's ageing population.

Manufacturing's share of total employment, however, halved from almost 16 per cent in the early 1990s to less than 8 per cent now, as a strong Australian dollar for much of that period pushed car makers and other manufacturers out of the country.

The research noted that manufacturing's share of the job market may have troughed at 7.3 per cent in early 2016, and has since ticked a little higher to 7.8 per cent.

Bankwest said mining employed an average of 103,000 people in WA last year, up from 96,000 the year prior, while current employment is still more than double what it was in 2003, when the sector employed 34,000 people.

That was shortly before China's demand for commodities started to explode.

"Falling construction employment in WA nevertheless also highlighted that the end of the relatively labour-intensive construction phase of the resources boom is hitting WA's labour market much harder than other parts of Australia," wrote Bankwest senior economist Alan Langford.

"WA was at the forefront of the construction phase, and was always going to face the most daunting adjustment to the production phase."

Australia's unemployment rate edged higher from 5.6 per cent to 5.7 per cent in November, despite the creation of nearly 40,000 full-time jobs, according to the latest monthly figures from the Bureau of Statistics.

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