What a tumultuous decade did to the labour market

Data collected from 2015 to 2025 has highlighted a broad strengthening and ongoing resilience in the Australian workforce despite several disruptions, with displacement demographically shifting as a result.

According to the Recent trends for displaced workers in Australia report published by Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA), the national worker displacement rate has fallen from 6 per cent to 3 per cent between 2015 and 2025, signalling a structurally sounder labour market at the end of the decade.

With its findings released on 29 September, the long-term study revealed displacement is trending in different directions, with redundancies shifting from traditionally affected industries such as mining, manufacturing, and construction to white-collar jobs within metropolitan areas, especially affecting workers within prominent cities such as Sydney and Melbourne.

As noted by the report, the geographical and occupational shift may offer diverse re-employment opportunities for occupations with highly transferable skills across industries.

Further, post-displacement earning and employment outcomes have also improved throughout the decade, with workers generally more likely to return to employment and experience smaller earning loss. However, it was noted that outcomes were uneven across occupations and industries, with workers remaining to be impacted by insolvency-related displacement.

At the same time, the nature of voluntary and involuntary job separations has also changed, with the former increasing 5 per cent, and the latter falling by 9 per cent, suggesting a confident employee base and a strong labour market.

However, it is important to note the considerable fluctuations within the 10-year period – most especially in more recent years – with the increasing use of AI, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Middle East conflict also impacting employment viability, recruitment, compensation and worker wellbeing.

As recently covered, employees are moving in two seemingly opposite but understandable trends – increasingly looking out for better job opportunities and remaining in jobs they would have otherwise left if it weren’t for the cost-of-living crisis.

At the same time, businesses are facing retention and competition challenges as employees call for better wages and working conditions as they are faced with productivity and skills demands.

While acknowledging that the report doesn’t reveal the entire impact of technology and other contemporary factors, JSA deputy commissioner Trevor Gauld said the overall decline in worker displacement “offers a baseline to better understand how those impacts might emerge over time and how we might modernise displacement monitoring or better target supports for displaced workers”.

He also expressed positivity that the findings showed “workers are generally finding new employment more readily and experiencing smaller earnings losses than in the past decade”.

The findings should also be considered alongside recent unemployment, cash rate and CPI rates – all of which were released in recent weeks and point to stubborn inflation amid a gradually softening labour market.

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