We might see a tight labour market again in a few months: Bjorn Jarvis, ABS Bjorn Jarvis, Head of Labour Statistics, Australian Bureau of Statistics talks to People Matters about the key shifts in Australia’s labour market trends and what the outlook for 2022 looks like
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By Bhavna Sarin
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jorn Jarvis is the current Head of Labour Statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Passionate about storytelling through statistics, Bjorn has been with the ABS since 2005, and has worked in a broad range of roles across labour market and population statistics. He is regarded as one of Australia’s leading experts on measuring changes in the labour market. In this exclusive conversation with People Matters, Bjorn highlights the key shifts in Australia’s labor market trends and what the outlook for 2022 looks like.
As we enter the final quarter of 2021, how would you characterise the labour market in Australia? The Australian labour | DECEMBER 2021
Much higher numbers of people had held onto their jobs through the Delta lockdowns, compared to earlier points in the pandemic. This suggests we could be back to a relatively tight labour market in a matter of months... which may not be good news for employers looking for people market has generally been very resilient to the challenges of the pandemic, though some industries and groups of people have been exposed to the impacts of the challenges more than others – such as people in customer facing service industries. Across the board, many labour market indicators had already recovered in the first half of 2021, before the
recent Delta outbreak and its lockdowns and restrictions. This should bode well for a reasonably rapid recovery through the end of the year and into 2022. Recently we did some analysis of the extent to which people had retained attachment to their jobs during the lockdowns, with the data encouragingly showing that much higher numbers of people had held onto their
