Jobs decline in year ended March 2009

Seasonally adjusted filled jobs declined 1.5 percent in the year ended March 2009, Statistics New Zealand said today. This is the first release of seasonally adjusted linked employer-employee data (LEED). The annual decrease in the number of seasonally adjusted filled jobs is the first since the series began in June 1999. The industries with the largest declines were manufacturing, construction, and administrative and support services.

An annual decline in actual filled jobs (1.6 percent) was evenly spread across men and women, but not across age groups. Actual filled jobs held by workers under 45 years fell, with 15–19-year-olds (down 12.8 percent) and 20–24-year-olds (down 5.1 percent) showing the largest declines.

However, there was greater stability in the workforce in the year ended March 2009, as the worker turnover rate declined to the lowest annual average (16.1 percent) in the LEED series.

Seasonally adjusted quarterly earnings also fell 2.8 percent in the March 2009 quarter, the largest quarterly earnings decrease observed in the LEED series and the first decrease since 2003. “What we’re seeing here is a reduction in earnings, and a reduction in employment particularly for youth, while those who remained in employment were less likely to shift between employers,” Guido Stark, project manager of LEED statistics, said.

The LEED quarterly series is published with a lag of four quarters and uses information from existing taxation and Statistics NZ sources to provide a range of information on the dynamics of the New Zealand labour market. The large size of the dataset allows breakdowns by age, sex, industry, sector, firm size, region, and territorial authority. These breakdowns are available on Infoshare and Table Builder on the Statistics NZ website. For more information on LEED, see the Guide to Interpreting the LEED Data.

Geoff Bascand 24 May 2010

Government Statistician