Unemployment Numbers Still Reflect Ongoing Financial Pressures Faced By Businesses

The EMA says today’s unchanged unemployment rate hopefully underlines the bottoming out of the economic bad news, although member businesses are facing ongoing financial pressures.

The latest numbers released by Stats NZ show that the unemployment rate has stayed unchanged at 5.1% for the March quarter.

EMA Head of Advocacy Alan McDonald says "While it’s positive that the unemployment rate has not increased, we're still seeing pressures on employers, with calls into our AdviceLine service on redundancies and restructures remaining at very high levels. However, last month they did drop off so we’re hoping, like the unemployment number, they may have reached their peak. Those processes usually take another two to three months to work through the system."

"Unemployment is usually a lag indicator of the economic bad news and, while it’s too early to say the bad news has stopped, it’s encouraging that the number was stable rather than increasing, as had been widely expected.

"The other concern is that we are still seeing a high number of NEETs, that is young people not in employment, education or training. This indicates that employers are overlooking that category in favour of people who already have some work experience, which is another symptom of current labour market conditions.

"In addition, while the high minimum wage doesn't necessarily stop employers from hiring people, it does change the type of skill set and experience that they are likely to value in potential employees," he says.

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