THE PERTH LABOUR MARKET – JUNE 2022
Blue Collar People has been supplying Labour Hire services throughout Perth, Western Australia for 32 years.
We are very surprised with the way the Perth Labour Hire Market has been for the last eighteen months and how it is right now – it is extremely difficult to get workers of any kind for any business.
Western Australia’s current unemployment rate is a very low 2.9% – which is the lowest in all of Australia. As a leading Labour Hire company in Perth we are in an excellent position to see what is happening with the Perth Labour Market, as we are in touch with hundreds of businesses and several hundred employees, all around Perth, on an ongoing basis.
We first noticed the Labour Hire Perth market starting to get very tight around January 2021. It started with it being very difficult to get tradespeople of almost any type. Over the last year and a half it has developed into a situation where it is very difficult to get workers of any type or classification – including workers with no skills or experience.
Every business owner, manager or supervisor that we speak with all tell us the same thing – that they cannot get workers for their businesses. Some business managers have told us that they are having their permanent employees resign on a weekly basis – as there is an abundance of better offers out there that most businesses cannot compete with.
So what caused this to happen?
We think that a large part of the answer or the cause of this situation is to do with the Covid pandemic. During the first year of the Covid pandemic in Australia, which started around the beginning of 2020 – there was a very high level of uncertainty and panic in a lot of people. The first year of the Covid pandemic was a very unstable time for both businesses and employees. Nobody really knew what was going to happen and where we would all end up.
The City became a ghost town and most people were very concerned about catching Covid – as people were dying from it all around the world. And secondly about whether they would be able to keep their jobs or their businesses profitable.
Lockdowns were in place and businesses were forced to shut down. Who would have thought or predicted that the economy would bounce back so quickly and so strongly?
Throughout these very buoyant economic times that we currently have in the Perth Labour Hire market, which you could arguably describe as full employment, we have noticed a surprising new trend. We have noticed a trend in the Labour Hire Perth market that we have not seen before. In previous years, workers that would be working for us, would almost always, prefer to be placed on very long term assignments. Or on assignments that would lead to a permanent job. These days we have noticed that the opposite is applying. Our workers are telling us and asking us to not put them on assignments that are too lengthy. They are mainly preferring to work on shorter assignments of up to 3 or 4 months in duration, at most. Our workers are telling us that they are looking for a broader choice of jobs and for a greater variety. So we are now finding that the ongoing jobs have become the most difficult jobs to fill.
We are finding that our busiest areas for work have been, in the last 18 months, in the Construction Industry and the Warehousing Industry. Forklift drivers seem to be particular hard to recruit and retain these days.
Blue Collar People specialise in finding the best temporary employees, with the right skills, for your business. For more information regarding our Labour Hire services here in Perth please contact us on 92211911 or visit our website at: www.bluecollarpeople.com
If you are an employee looking for either short or long term work, give us a call on 92211911.
