Call it the imperatives of the unforgiving marketplace. Call it structural change. Or the rising velocity of innovation, or the accelerating cycle of obsolescence. Call it gimlet-eyed greed. Just don't call it by that impregnably pompous corporate euphemism of ''challenging''. It is callous capitalism, the logical extreme, the point where the unceasing quest and pressure and need for greater operating efficiencies and lower costs has reached the point where it is biting into social capital. Social capital does not appear in corporate balance sheets. It is invisible on management spread sheets. It is irrelevant to KPIs. But it is an invaluable, intangible, incalculable asset. And it has consequences. It helps drive consumer confidence and thus consumer spending. Why do you think Australians are collectively behaving so cautiously with their money, despite more than two decades of uninterrupted growth, one of the highest livings standards in the world and relatively full unemployment? Why are so many retailers and small businesses in chronic stress? Australia has enjoyed a decade-long mining boom, yielding boom-time salaries for those who built the mines and the infrastructure and do the mining and servicing, but it has all made barely a dent on the ranks of people with permanent full-time jobs. This is because the bulk of the work was done under contract, and thousands of those costly contracts are not being renewed.

The dry numbers tell a dramatic story. They reveal a tipping point. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about 11.65 million people are in the Australian workforce. Of these, 2.8 million are working part-time. Another 2 million are employed as independent contractors or small business operators. An estimated 300,000 full-time employees are working on contract (the estimates vary but the upward trend is clear). Then there are the 700,000 officially unemployed. The total of these part-time workers, contractors, contracted employees, self-employed and unemployed comes to 5.8 million. Or roughly the same as the number of full-time permanent employees. Which means we may have reached the tipping point where the number of people with permanent full-time jobs may be exceeded by the number of people in the workforce who are not permanent full-time employees. Add to this mix the 900,000 employees who want more work and are classified as underemployed. Don't expect the unions to come to the rescue. Under Labor, the unions have had a smorgasbord of policy wins, from anti-bullying laws to broader unfair dismissal provisions, so that the laws have tilted to the European paradigm where the rights of workers are so highly protected that employers are loathe to hire new people. This has been devastating for the young, where the European Community has become a depression zone, with unemployment rates of 20 per cent for the young and up to 45 per cent in the basket-case economies.

Australia is no paragon, given the youth unemployment rate here is 14.5 per cent. Increasingly, under Fair Work Australia, companies are baulking at the risks of taking on permanent employees. One of the structural deceits of the Labor government is that it has created a million jobs since it came to office. A fabrication. The federal government has directly created only a fraction of that, and the workforce has grown much faster than the number of jobs created, despite the government's $250 billion deficit spending. Thanks in large part to high immigration under Labor, the labor force has risen by 1.2 million since 2007, but the number of jobs created has risen by 925,000. Thus the unemployment and the under-employment rate have both risen. Nor can we expect government spending to come to the rescue via big infrastructure projects. Australia has become a society where assets once owned by the people via public corporations or private co-operatives have become privatised assets, and many are engaged in oligopoly pricing. Governments can't build infrastructure like they used to because their spending is now dominated by social welfare. In the 1960s less than one in 30 Australians depended on state financial aid as their main source of income. Today that figure is closer to one in five.

Future generations may look back with wonder at the era when Australia was a society where most workers had permanent full-time jobs and loyalty between employee and employer was routine. It would therefore be useful to have a pause on further dubious generalisations about generations X, Y and Z. These next waves require more courage than previous generations to function in the world being created for them, not least one with diminishing probabilities of them getting a permanent full-time job. Twitter: @Paul_Sheehan_