Who loses the most when a professional labour market is enduring both poor economic conditions and a significant oversupply of labour? As insight into the answer can be obtained from the annual professional employment survey by The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM). In June 2016, the AusIMM surveyed its members and received responses from 2,472 of them. The break down of respondents by occupation was: geoscience professionals: 40.3% mining engineers: 32.7% met/chem/mat engineers: 15.8% others: 6.9% Of the Australian-based members (who were 81.8% of respondents), 14.1% were unemployed and 6.8% were underemployed. Of the mining engineers who responded to the survey, 12.6% were unemployed, while among metallurgical/chemical/materials engineers the unemployment rate was 11.3%. Unemployment was not distributed evenly across age groups (see the figure below). On the contrary, professionals over the age of 50 had a disproportionately high rate of unemployment. Of the total who were unemployed, 42.4% were long-term unemployed, ie. they had been actively looking for work for more than 12 months. Of the long-term unemployed, two-thirds were aged over 50. See: https://www.ausimmbulletin.com/feature/the-ausimm-professional-employment-survey-2016/ and http://www.ausimmbulletin.com/app/uploads/2015/01/Professional-Employment-Survey-2016-Charts.pdf Unemployment can be damaging at any age, and long-term unemployment can be financially and psychologically corrosive. Many experienced professionals find that their working life over the age of 50 is a period when they can focus on saving to fund their own retirement. Being unemployed, or forced to take lower-skilled, lower-paid employment, impairs their ability to save for the future and heightens the probability that they will need to rely, at least in part, on a government-funded pension in retirement. Comments are closed.
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November 2018
CategoriesAuthorJim Oakley |