One of the common complaints about the employment statistics is that employment is counted as being just one hour of paid work in a week. It is often used to discredit the figures and to suggest the current unemployment rate is hiding unemployment more than in the past. To counter these criticisms, the Bureau of Statistics last week released a short paper on the issue that shows few people actually work such a small number of hours and that excluding them would not give us an improved picture of the economy.

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The definition of at least one hour of paid work constituting employment is neither new nor unusual. It is the international standard adopted in 1982 by the International Labour Organisation, and it reflected standard practice. So there’s no rigging of the figures by the government to count more people as employed than in the past. The data is what the data was.

But you can understand why people think there is a problem. At the end of last year the unemployment rate fell to 5.0%, while in the same month the underemployment rate rose to 8.4%. This marked the biggest gap between the two measures.

And after all, one hour of work is certainly not enough to pay for anything, and surely counting these people is skewing the data to make things look better than they are?

Certainly, if we didn’t count the number of people working one hour as employed, that would increase the unemployment rate. But it would also produce a distorted picture.

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The ABS estimates that in December there were 14,500 people working one hour a week – just 0.1% of all employed. It is a minuscule number. But the ABS also estimates that there were 85,900 people working 2-3 hours, 250,900 working 4-6 hours and 244,600 working 7-9 hours.

Now, if we decided that working fewer than 10 hours a week meant you were not really employed then the unemployment rate would of course be higher than it is now – it would take the rate from 5.0% to 9.5%:

Now that might be more satisfying to those who think work should be a decent level of hours. But why stop at 10? Why not exclude all part-time employees? But then the problem of course is that a full-time job is also no guarantee that you can pay the bills.

The count of people working is not supposed to measure the poverty rate, or even if people’s living standards are improving. It merely measures how many people are working in any one month. That it does not measure income, inflation, living standards, or any of the many others things that are important, does not mean it is irrelevant.

Now sure, one problem with those who work few hours is that they overwhelmingly wish to work more – the level of underemployment among those who work less than 10 hours a week is nearly four times that of all other workers:

But crucially, more than two thirds of such workers do not wish to work more hours. Should we not count those people as employed even though they are happy with how much they work?

It would be worth worrying about the current definition of employment if that cohort of low hour workers was the reason behind the recent spike in underemployment and the growing gap between unemployment and underemployment that has happened since the middle of 2014.

But it is not.

In fact it is the opposite. Since the middle of 2014 the percentage of employed who work fewer than 10 hours a week has steadily fallen to now be at the lowest level this century:

The issue has not been the growth of low hour workers, but a shrinking of those working above 40 hours:

Since the middle of 2014 the percentage of employees working fewer than 20 hours a week and more than 40 hours a week has shrunk, while the percentage working 20-39 hours has increased.

The issue is not about those working a small number of hours becoming a bigger segment of the labour force, but the shift from full-time to part-time.

And think on this: were we to count those working under 10 hours a week as unemployed, the unemployment rate would be higher, but compared with the middle of 2014, when underemployment and unemployment split, the picture would be much improved over the current definition.

Counting 1-9 hours-a-week workers as unemployed sees a bigger drop in unemployment since the middle of 2014 than does the current definition.

I’m not sure those who think we should be sceptical of the level of employment would like a switch to a definition that would suggest the labour market has improved more in the past three and half years than is currently the case.

The reality is the unemployment rate and employment growth do not tell the whole story – and they have never been meant to. Look at hours worked, underemployment and – coming this Wednesday – wages growth.

The economy is complex. Anyone who tries to tell you the unemployment rate is all you need to know is a fool, and not counting those who work a small number of hours a week would not change this – but it would make the picture much more distorted.

• Greg Jericho is a Guardian Australia columnist