In this Bulletin I attempt to unpick the Labour Market Statistics that came out on the 5th August 20 for the June 20 quarter.
While I have some ethnic data, the effect on Māori and Pasifika is unclear. In practice I would fully expect the impact of the last few months to be detrimental to this group, but the data is unclear and a bit contradictory.
The effect on women, however, is unambiguous. Most indicators are showing particularly detrimental impacts on women. This means that the issues discussed last Bulletin under the guise of Pay Equity will become more and more relevant to the lives of women in paid work.
The lead story from The Spinoff , when the data came out, was that 11,000 people had lost their jobs and 10,000 were women. In reality it was a case of Stats NZ saying that seasonally adjusted 1,000 fewer men and 10,000 fewer women for the June 20 quarter were employed – which isn’t quite the same thing.
But explaining is losing and the actual, unseasonally adjusted, data isn’t great either.
Download the full bulletin: CTU Economic Bulletin 221 – August 2020