What's in a number? The employment figures explained

Every month, the nation's attention is drawn to official employment numbers, but what do they mean? The underemployment rate in November 2013 was 7.6 per cent, and the underutilisation rate was 13.4 per cent - around two-and-a-third times higher than the unemployment rate in that month of 5.8 per cent. The Reserve Bank has said previously that around 1 percentage point is likely to have been taken off the participation rate since the mid-2000s due to ageing, while Treasury has previously estimated that 80 per cent of the fall may be due to demographics, although many market economists point out that some recent falls in participation have centred on males of prime working age. This means you can look at the different figures and compare them with say the early '90s recession - the 11.1 per cent jobless rate in late 1992 certainly puts 6 per cent unemployment in some historical context although, at 7.1 per cent, underemployment was actually lower then than it is now. However, while unemployment keeps moving up, the rate of increase has not been high, and anything around 6 per cent is certainly still quite a way off recessionary levels of joblessness.