Keneally has picked the wrong fight for this pink-collar recession – The Age

Men do not face the same dual economy of idleness and intensive work, or the social expectation to teach their children. Their domains of construction, manufacturing and mining are relatively unscathed for the time being, and are well placed for recovery.

This will come as a shock to politicians on both sides who see this recession as an opportunity to revive industry protection, and those on the fringes who want to take the short cut of xenophobia. This is a pink-collar recession, targeting the better educated half of the country, and the young instead of the old.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

Australia faces a realignment of the economy at warp speed. Almost a third of the 950,000 jobs lost across the economy since March 14 have been in accommodation and food services. Most were casual positions. They are not easily restored without a vaccine for COVID-19.

Before the coronavirus, accommodation and food services was the sixth-largest employer in the country with 940,000 workers, representing just over 7 per cent of our entire workforce. Ahead of it in fifth place was education and training services (1.1 million) but behind it was manufacturing (920,000).

Today, it sits in ninth place, with around 630,000 workers. Manufacturing (880,000) has replaced it in sixth place, while public administration and safety, and transport, postal and warehousing have also risen one rung each. The irony is that accommodation and food services were safe havens in the early 1990s recession, with more jobs at the end of the crash than at its commencement.

The second tragedy is what is happening at the bottom end of the jobs ladder, among the sectors that traditionally employed smaller numbers of workers. Before the lockdown, the arts had been ranked 15th of the 19 sectors measured by the ABS, with 250,000 jobs in total. To put that part of our lives in perspective, we had more people in the arts than in mining, or real estate, or information media and telecommunications. Now the arts are ranked second last, with only the electricity sector below it, after losing a quarter of its workforce since March 14.

Australia didn't need to wait for data to know a recession was on the way, long lines at Centrelink told the story.Credit:Nick Moir

The ABS says 8.1 per cent of all jobs held by women and 6.2 per cent of jobs held by men have disappeared since March 14. This suggests the unemployment rates for men and women will diverge sharply. At the last recession, the male unemployment rate peaked at 12 per cent; 1.5 point higher than the female unemployment rate.

You could see this economic, and cultural crisis coming from the moment Scott Morrison announced stage two of the lockdowns on Sunday, March 22, which closed pubs, cinemas, restaurants, gyms and churches.

Australians did not need to wait six months for the data to come in, or to hear if the Prime Minister or Treasurer thought this was the recession we had to have. It was livestreamed the very next morning, in the long, anxious queues outside Centrelink offices in high income postcodes like Bondi Junction, and in the clueless response of Stuart Robert, the minister for government services, who thought a 15-fold increase in traffic on the MyGov website was a cyberattack.

By this point, the government had already fired two shots of stimulus at the economy a $35.4 billion package on March 12 directed primarily at businesses, and a further $26.7 billion on March 22 aimed at those who lost their jobs. But confidence was in freefall because the government was missing a critical element, the relationship between employer and employee. Businesses, and organisations, had no incentive to hang on to staff. On the contrary, the doubling of the dole on March 22 was the signal to sack.

The scale of the JobKeeper payment, announced on March 29, showed the government finally understood the forces it had unleashed. At $130 billion, it was more than double the combined cost of the first two attempts to stabilise the economy for lockdown.

We now have enough information from employers to judge the effectiveness of that monumental intervention. The ABS data records the sharpest fall in employment occurred in the week immediately after the JobKeeper announcement. This seems counter-intuitive until you realise who was excluded from the payment casual workers with less than 12 months at the same business, or organisation. That is why the hospitality and the arts sectors have been ground zero for retrenchments.

The Morrison government is treating these younger workers as expendable, and has refused to countenance extending the JobKeeper program to protect them. They are being supported at the moment by the doubling of the dole. But what happens when restrictions are eased, but there are no jobs for this group to go back to because entertainment and cultural life is permanently hobbled by social distancing policies?

Does the government cut the dole by half to its pre-pandemic level, and hope this jolts young people to look for another career?

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It is hard to see the Morrison government testing any theory of economic rationalism before the next federal election, especially if the unemployment rate remains above 10 per cent. But it might be tempted by nativism. Higher unemployment increases the scope for scapegoating.

Labors homes affairs spokeswoman Senator Kristina Keneally used an opinion piece in last weekends Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age to call for a review of the temporary migration program. It came with a catchphrase of old Labor. We need a migration program that puts Australian workers first, she wrote.

Morrison didnt bite this week. Migration remains a moot point while the borders remain tightly controlled.

For Labor, it was the wrong fight to pick in a pink-collar recession. Any appeal to the prejudices of older Australians, who are actually hanging on their jobs, will only divert attention from younger Australians who have been short-changed by the lockdown.

George Megalogenis is a journalist, political commentator and author.

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Keneally has picked the wrong fight for this pink-collar recession - The Age