June HLFS Stats

I was too busy yesterday to blog on the rather dismal unemployment stats. Before I do big kudos to Stats NZ for their new website look. Much easier to get to the data tables now for new releases.

Employment went up by 2,000 this quarter for men, but dropped 12,000 for women, meaning a total of 10,000 less people in employment.But that is a loss of 18,000 FT jobs and a gain of 6,000 or so PT jobs.

The number of unemployed though jumped 24,000 to 138,000. That is a huge increase for one quarter. It indicates more people entering the labour force looking for work who were not looking or available previously.

The unemployment rate goes from 5.0% to 6.0%. However the European rate only goes from3.9% to 4.0%.

Still not too bad off compared to other OECD countries. We remain 9th best. The US is in 25th place with a 9.5% unemployment rate. I hope our rate will not get that high. It is likely there will be two more quarters of negative growth.