Bill Shorten says a million Australians are doing two jobs and a million are underemployed. Is he correct?

Updated

The claim

Jobs and wages have emerged as key talking points in the lead up to the election, with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten bemoaning the extent of underemployment in Australia and the prevalence of "second jobs".



"There's a million Australians doing two jobs and there's a million Australians who are underemployed," Mr Shorten said during the first leaders' debate.



Is that right? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.



The verdict

Mr Shorten is correct.



Both claims — that a million Australians are underemployed and a million Australians are working two jobs — check out according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures.



However, as one expert told Fact Check: "There's nothing spectacularly new here."

According to the data, the number of people holding down multiple jobs as a proportion of the labour force has remained steady over a number of years. Also, underemployment has fallen in recent months.

What does it mean to be "underemployed"?

According to the ABS, underemployed workers are those who want -- and are available to take on -- more hours of work than they currently have.



The bureau's Labour Force Survey shows that there were 1,089,300 underemployed people in Australia in March, representing 8.2 per cent of the workforce.

As the graph above illustrates, the underemployment rate has been falling since March 2017 after moving higher over about five years.

Measuring multiple-job holders and secondary jobs

Fact Check has drawn on two ABS publications to assess Mr Shorten's claim that "there's one million Australians doing two jobs" — Jobs in Australia and the Labour Account.

The Jobs in Australia dataset measures the number of people with multiple jobs, where a multiple-job holder is defined as someone who "may have two or more concurrent jobs at any point during the financial year."



The Labour Account, on the other hand, provides a measure of secondary jobs in Australia — any job held by an employed person which is not their main job.



Fact Check has also referred to the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, which has collected information on multiple-job holders since its inception in 2001.



What do the stats show on multiple-job holders?

The latest Labour Account figures for March show that in the December quarter of 2018, there were 1,023,400 secondary jobs in Australia.

This, however, did not necessarily mean there were the same number of multiple-job holders.

An ABS spokesman told Fact Check by email: "Strictly speaking, this is not the same as one million Australians doing two jobs, given some people work more than two jobs."



But this wasn't a major caveat, according to the spokesman, who pointed out that the number of people working more than two jobs was relatively low.



"Other ABS data published in Jobs in Australia showed that, in 2015-16, it was a relatively small fraction (around 3 per cent of all employed people in a year)," he added.



Published for the first time in mid-2018, Jobs in Australia put at just under 2 million (1,929,400) the number of multiple-job holders in 2015-16.



Why do these numbers differ?

The discrepancy between the numbers is due to the two datasets capturing job figures over different periods of time.



"The number of secondary jobs from the Labour Account is published quarterly, and is considered a stock measure of the number of jobs — that is, the number of jobs in the economy at a point in time each quarter," the ABS spokesman explained.



The count of the number of people holding multiple jobs in the Jobs in Australia dataset included anyone who held two or more concurrent jobs at any time during the whole financial year, he said.



"Therefore, the number of multiple-job holders from Jobs in Australia is significantly higher than the point in time secondary jobs information from the Labour Account."

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Trends in multiple job holding

Professor Mark Wooden, of the University of Melbourne, told Fact Check that there had always been people working multiple jobs.



"There's nothing spectacularly new here," Professor Wooden said. "Obviously as the labour force keeps growing — and it is growing due to population growth — eventually you get a million people [working secondary jobs].



"One day the number will be past 2 million, one day it will be past 5 million or 10 million. If the labour force keeps growing, all the numbers will go up."



Professor Wooden also pointed to the HILDA Survey, which shows multiple-job holders hovering around 8 per cent of the labour force since 2001.



As the latest HILDA report states: "There is little evidence of any trend growth in the incidence of multiple-job holding in Australia.



"The proportion of the employed who report at the time of the HILDA Survey interview that they have more than one job has changed very little over time. Indeed, if anything, the share has declined."



Underemployed workers were those most likely to be working multiple jobs, according to HILDA.



"Despite the low working hours, underemployed workers are the most likely to hold multiple jobs: 10.9 per cent of underemployed workers have more than one job, compared to 9.3 per cent among fully employed part-time workers and 7.3 per cent among full-time workers."

What do the experts say?

Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth, of RMIT University, told Fact Check multiple-job holding was often a response to underemployment, pointing to the low median incomes of people holding more than one job.



"If you have a look at the total for the median employment income for multiple-job holders, those median incomes are pretty low," Professor Charlesworth said.



"That, in itself, suggests to me that people are working second jobs, not to supplement a full-time income."



Professor Charlesworth noted that multiple-job holding was more common among women and feminised industries, such as the aged care sector.

Charles Sturt University's Dr Larissa Bamberry, the co-author of a study into the motives of multiple-job holders, also pointed to care industries.



"Multiple-job holding is quite a common sort of occurrence among people working in caring industries," Dr Bamberry said.



"People [in these industries] were only offered part-time or casual contracts, so had to cobble together a number of contracts across a number of employers to make make enough income each week."

Principal researcher: Ellen McCutchan

factcheck@rmit.edu.au



Sources

Leaders' Debate, Channel 7, 29 April, 2019



Leaders' Debate, Sky News, 3 May, 2019



ABS, Labour Force, March 2019



ABS, Labour Account, December 2018



ABS, Jobs in Australia, 2011-12 to 2015-16, 19 September, 2018



Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic and Social Research, The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, 31 July, 2018



Topics: business-economics-and-finance, federal-election, federal-government, elections, federal-elections, australia

First posted