In the past the unemployment rate was a pretty good measure of the health of the economy. The current rate of 5.7% for much of the past 30 years would have meant the economy was in quite robust health. But over the past decade, the increasing growth of part-time employment means that the gauging the economy’s fitness requires much more than just taking the unemployment pulse rate.

Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced that the unemployment rate had fallen to 5.7% in seasonally adjusted terms. While that big number is always the first thing reported from the labour force figures, for me looking at the actual employment growth is a better indicator of what is going on in the economy.

But even here we need to look at what type of employment is growing – rather than just the big overall number.

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The monthly employment growth paints a less rosy picture than the 5.7% unemployment rate would suggest. After five months of full-time employment falling, in trend terms the growth of 1,239 people employed full-time saw a 0.02%increase.

The big growth was all in part-time employment – up 10,576 jobs or 0.3%. And yet even this showed a falling off of growth from earlier in the year:

It also saw a mere 0.06% increase in the amount of hours worked in July.

Hours worked is in many ways the best measure of employment health. Part-time employment can mean anything from one hour a week to 34 hours, and equally full-time employment includes anything from 35 hours and above. Hours worked not only can shows the shift from full-time to part-time it can also detect changes within each category.

There is also a strong link between employment growth and the growth in hours worked.

At the moment the growth of hours worked is sagging below that of employment. This isn’t too bad if it means employers are either just temporarily reducing hours, or still hiring workers, but just for part-time until things improve. The worry is that the slowing hours worked growth is predicting future slowing employment growth:

But the big story of employment at the moment is part-time employment growth and it is not just about that versus full-time work; it is involves gender and age.

For most of 2014 and 2015 male full-time employment growth was quite lacklustre while full-time employment growth for women was pretty solid.

But this year, full-time jobs have been hard to find for both genders:

While part-time workers are likely to be women (there are currently 2.6m women working part-time compared to 1.2m men) the big growth in part-time employment in the past few years has been for men.

In the past five years the number of men employed part-time has increased by 21.5% compared to an increase of just 1.9% for full-time work.

The shift of men towards part-time work is one which has been happening now for a quarter of a century.

In 1990, 80% of men in the prime working age range of 25 to 64 years were working full-time. Just 3.8% of prime aged men were working part-time.

Now only 72.4% of prime aged men work full-time, while 10% are working part-time.

There are now fewer men in their prime working age working full-time than ever before. Conversely, there are now more prime-aged women working full-time than ever, and the peak has been steady now for nearly five years:

In effect, the story since the GFC has been of male full-time employment shrinking, while part-time work has grown. But for women, part-time work has grown while full-time employment has remained steady.

Men working full-time still dominate the labour market. Of all employment, full-time men accounts for 43% alone, but since 2012 there are more women employed in total than there are men in full-time work – something unthinkable 25 years ago:

But the rise and fall in part-time employment is also about age.

Over the past decade the main growth in employment numbers is full-time employment of prime aged workers – not surprisingly given they are the biggest section of the population. But in the past year there has been a greater increase in actual part-time employment for 25-64 years olds than for full-time, and the same scenario is reflected for youth and for worked over 65 years of age.

But when we look at the increase in employed workers as a percentage of the people in each age group the rise in part-time employment becomes obvious:

In the past decade, the percentage of youth working part-time has increased from 28.8% of people aged 15-24 to 31.6%. In the same time the percentage of youth working full-time has fallen from 35.4% to just 27.2%.

But while full-time work has evaporated for the youth, older workers have been staying in the workforce in much greater numbers – both in full-time and very much so in part-time.

At the start of this century just 3% of those over 65 were working part-time, but now 7.3% of those supposedly in the retirement age are working part-time:

Now part-time work often gets a bad rap, when in reality it is not always bad – it can be a first start for many workers and can be necessary when raising a child. For those over the age of 65 the reasons for work are less obvious – either out of need, or because better health allows more people to stay working.

Certainly since 2004 there has been a steady increase in the numbers of older workers.

But with the increase in part-time employment across the board has also come an increase in underemployment:

The underemployment rate across all age groups is much higher now than it was in 2003 when the unemployment rate was much the same as it is now.

The shift towards part-time employment over the past decade means more than in the past we need to look at much more than just the unemployment rate to gauge the health of the labour market.

At the moment while the unemployment rate remains well below 6%, the weakness in the growth of full-time employment and hours worked suggests the labour market is a long way from peak fitness.