Australian employment falls by 39,300 as part-time work drops

A fall of 73,700 in part-time employment outweighed 34,400 additional full-time workers in Australia during September, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Total seasonally adjusted employment declined by 39,300, from a revised 14,822,000 to 14,782,700.

Unemployment stood at 4.7 percent. The participation rate fell from 67.0 percent to 66.8 percent, while the share of the population employed dropped from 63.9 percent to 63.6 percent.

The bureau cautions against reading too much into short-term movements and recommends trend data for underlying conditions. On that measure, employment rose by 15,700 in September and unemployment remained at 4.6 percent. The two measures therefore give different readings of the month.

Photograph: Adz / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped; this adaptation uses the same licence.