Hi everyone, I’m Molly Blackall, taking over the blog for the next few hours. Thanks for joining us. I hope you’re all safe and well, wherever you’re reading from.
Still on the subject of jobs in the pandemic, the Observer has this exclusive from the UK:
The majority of people who have been furloughed have carried on working during lockdown, with men significantly more likely than women to flout the rules of the scheme and work for their employer when they are not allowed to do so.
Working mothers have also felt more compelled to volunteer to be furloughed than working fathers, research shared exclusively with The Observer reveals.
Economists from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Zurich have found that “not all workers are furloughed equally”, with women significantly more likely to be furloughed than men doing the same type of job.
The study also found that three-quarters (75%) of furloughed men had their wages topped up beyond the 80% provided by the government, while less than two-thirds (65%) of women enjoyed this financial benefit.
Owen Alexander, a recent law graduate who lives in Flemington in Melbourne’s inner city, went for a position in a call centre for the Australian Tax Office. He was told they had received about 5,000 applicants, and didn’t get the job.
“It really makes you start to feel bad about yourself,” he says. “You’re reading job descriptions for things you don’t actually want to do, knowing the pay is terrible, knowing you’re probably not even going to get an interview.
“It constantly chips away at your self-esteem. It’s probably been the hardest part of this lockdown. Earlier on you might have thought things were going to get better, but now you sort of wonder. It’s hard to be optimistic.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has wrought previously unimaginable chaos in Australia’s economy. Since March, when state governments began announcing lockdowns amid rising case numbers, tens of thousands of jobs have disappeared as entire industries fold in on themselves.
In June, the official unemployment figure was 7.4%, already a two-decade high, and the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, admitted the figure would have been closer to 13% if not for the government’s jobkeeper program. On Thursday the prime minister, Scott Morrison, said the official figure was likely to reach 10% anyway by the end of the year, and that the effective rate would be more like 13%.
Across the country, thousands of the newly unemployed are living in the fallout of those abstract numbers.
Read the full story here:
