Are Australia’s unemployment figures cause for celebration or is the devil in the detail?

On the face of it, another month of Australia's unemployment remaining around the 4% mark should be cause for celebration.

Since the Australian Bureau of Statistics began releasing labour force figures in 1978, it has never released a figure as low as March's official estimate of 3.95% (or, in its full, geeky glory, of 3.9542384%). The last time it was this low was in November 1974.

Most researchers predict it will fall further, such as the ANZ's 3.3% forecast by the end of 2022, or the Reserve Bank's central forecast - reiterated just over a week ago - for the jobless rate to fall to below 4% this year and to remain there next year too.

Most other jobless measures continue to head lower as well. The so-called underutilisation rate - which combines the unemployment and underemployment rates - fell another 0.3 percentage points to 10.3% last month.

At the nadir of the first Covid wave, this gauge was 14.1% and on Thursday's numbers, we haven't been this low since just before the global financial crisis erupted in September 2008 during Kevin Rudd's Labor government.

Taking a wider view, though, the results - while pleasing - are neither particularly exceptional nor complete, despite upbeat commentary from the government.

As the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) noted earlier this week, jobless rates have in fact been sinking in many countries.

For the G7 rich nations the February jobless rate averaged 4.2%, while in neighbouring New Zealand it was just 3.2% at the end of 2021.

The test for how well low jobless figures will go down with voters may come with what the University of Melbourne labour economist John De New dubs the "last piece of the puzzle": wages.

The RBA noted that despite jobless rates diving, wage growth remains "only around the relatively low rates prevailing before the pandemic". Any pickup "is still expected to be only gradual", the central bank said, while admitting it remains uncertain how salaries will respond to historically low levels of unemployment.

In February, the ABS reported the wage price index had risen 2.3% in 2021, well shy of the 3.5% increase in consumer prices. The next wages update will land on 18 May, just three days before voters go to the polls.

De New says there's been a longstanding "disconnect between returns to capital and returns to labour", where companies have scooped up most of the spoils of improved profitability rather than sharing them with staff, even as jobless levels have kept dropping.

"It's shocking how flat wages have been and how a lot of the benefits of the last 10 years have gone to the stock market," he says. "I don't think that's sustainable, and it's obviously one of the driving forces of income inequality in this country."

His team's work with the CBA to track people's wellbeing found payments like jobkeeper and jobseeker played important roles in keeping people either linked to employers during the worst of the Covid disruptions, or ensuring minimum income support.

De New expects the background issues of job insecurity - revealed during the pandemic by people forced to turn up for work ill rather than stay at home without an income - will again move to the forefront as people fill vacancies, but not in jobs they particularly want.

"Some people obviously are having a harder time finding an appropriate job," he said, adding that the decline of traditionally more stable work in areas such as manufacturing is only likely to continue.

The National Skills Commission echoed De New's views, forecasting out to the end of 2026 a long-term structural shift in employment towards services industries. Healthcare and social assistance, for instance, is expected to grow by 301,000 jobs or 15.8%, while professional, scientific and technical services will add 206,600 jobs or 16.8%.

The two other big growth areas are likely to be education and training, and accommodation and food services.

Michele O'Neil, the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, said the notion low unemployment would lead to wage growth was "based on a 1980s understanding of the labour force, when the vast majority of jobs were secure".

"The headline unemployment rate hides the reality that millions of Australians are in insecure work, working multiple jobs or struggling to find the hours that they need to support themselves and their families," O'Neil said. "More workers than ever before are having to work two, three or four jobs just to get by."

Cassandra Goldie, the president of the Australian Council of Social Service (Acoss), said 760,000 people remain as long-term unemployed or on jobseeker. Half of them were 45 years of age or older, and a third of them have a disability.

While the economy has added almost 400,000 jobs since the low point of the pandemic in March 2020, the number of entry-level jobs was actually about 150,000 fewer than pre-pandemic levels, she said.

"While there are more vacancies, that's really due to staff turnover, short-term employment opportunities [and] the casualisation of those jobs," Goldie said. "We've had double the number of people who are working four jobs or more since about 2014."

Jobseeker payments had now dropped to $46 a day from $80, with neither the Coalition and Labor planning to review the policy post-election.

"There were very precious dollars for people who needed them," Goldie said, adding Acoss had won backing from a range of businesses and other groups, including independent candidates, that the payments should be lifted to at least $70.

"The most important thing we can do to support jobs and the lifting of incomes is to lift up the incomes of people in the bottom 40% of the community," she said. "That's the engine room of the economy - not relying on trickle-down economics like big tax cuts for people on higher incomes."