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Despite underemployment generally being more common among younger workers, according to figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on February 23, older workers are much more likely to remain underemployed for one year or more.
The ABS defines underemployment as part-time workers who want, and are available for, more hours of work than they currently have. In September 2009, there were 811,600 underemployed workers in Australia and 61% of those were women.
Almost half of underemployed workers aged 45-54 years and 45% of those aged 55 years and over, had been underemployed for one year or more. By comparison just over one fifth (21%) of 15-19 year olds had experienced insufficient work for the same period.
For those aged 45-54 years, the median duration of the current period of insufficient work was 39 weeks (34 weeks for men and 52 weeks for women) and for those aged 50 and over the median duration was 34 weeks. Overall, the median duration of the current period of insufficient work for underemployed Australian workers was 26 weeks.
The average number of extra hours that underemployed part-time workers wanted rose from 13.4 hours per week in September 2008 to 14.1 in September 2009. However, the average number of hours usually worked by part-time underemployed people remained at 17 hours per week over the same period.
Workers reported that the main difficulties in obtaining more hours was there were no vacancies in their line of work (21%) or there were no vacancies at all (16%).
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics