The Latest Breaking News from Unemployment

This is an edited extract from Ross Garnaut’s address to the jobs summit on Thursday night. Read other articles in The Conversation’s series about the summit here.

The figures, released on Wednesday, show that the jobless rate went up from a rate of 4.2% in July 2022 and were down from 5.5% in August 2021

The Commonwealth Employment Service grew out of a realisation that unemployment had been a policy choice, but it fell out of government favour in the late 1980s and was privatised in 1998, leaving many former staff mourning what was once possible.

American business leaders sometimes talk about workforce productivity trends the same strained way you might expect a perfectly healthy hypochondriac to check his body temperature three times a day. (Remember “nobody wants to work anymore”? The U.S. unemployment rate is 3.5%.) The new social media meme about “quiet quitting” —…