Latest / Best of Business / Michael Gordon: Westpac senior economist on the Westpac-McDermott Miller Employment Confidence Index dropping to lowest level since 2004

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Michael Gordon: Westpac senior economist on the Westpac-McDermott Miller Employment Confidence Index dropping to lowest level since 2004 · Best of Business

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talk ZEDB. Follow
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• 0:16
  Speaker 2: New Zealand does appear to be pretty gloomy about the
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: job market. The west Pac McDermott Miller Employment Confidence Index
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  Speaker 2: has fallen to its lowest level since it launched in
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  Speaker 2: two thousand and four. Sixty percent of the people surveyed
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  Speaker 2: feel it's hard to find a job at the moment.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: That's up from forty six percent. And May Michael Gordon
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: as Westpac Senior economist and he's with us a Michael
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: Good Evening, is this basically the Middle East?
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  Speaker 3: I think a fair chunk of it will be the
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: Middle East. It's one of those things. If we had
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: surveyed this maybe a week or two later, when petrol
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  Speaker 3: prices has come down of it, you might have got
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  Speaker 3: a slightly better result. But I think it's still sending
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: a pretty clear message that people saw this latest cost shot.
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  Speaker 3: They don't believe that they're going to be able to
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  Speaker 3: get pay increases to offset that. If anything, they think
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: that it's probably going to be something that causes employers
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  Speaker 3: to poll we Heabson.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, had you, I mean, because as you point out
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  Speaker 2: this was the survey was done just before the Middle
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  Speaker 2: East peace steals the process started, So do you think
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  Speaker 2: if that would have made such a massive impact on
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  Speaker 2: or a bigger impact on the survey. Is this mainly
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  Speaker 2: in our heads rather than being real?
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  Speaker 3: I think to some degree it is. It's just expressing
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  Speaker 3: that displeasure with facing yet another cost shop. I think
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  Speaker 3: looking back at it, it's quite notable that this employment
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: confidence measure has been quite weak really for the last
• 1:40
  Speaker 3: five years straight. So even going back a few years
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: when the jobs market was quite strong, so most people
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: pay was still not keeping up with inflation, so they
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: never got to hit on that measure. Now they've taken
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: another step backwards and they don't think they're going to
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  Speaker 3: catch up this time either.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: What are you.
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  Speaker 2: Seeing out there in real life, Michael, our employers hiring.
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: I think there's kind of a sense of sort of
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  Speaker 3: low fire, low higher at the moment, so kind of
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  Speaker 3: what we see in the employment figures. It is not
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  Speaker 3: really driven by job losses as such, but if you're
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  Speaker 3: out of the workforce, it is quite hard to get
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  Speaker 3: back in the number of job vacancies is I think
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  Speaker 3: probably stabilized and picked up a little bit in the
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  Speaker 3: last year, but it's still at very low levels, so
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  Speaker 3: it is still a case of a large pool of
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  Speaker 3: people chasing a small pool of potential jobs.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: Michael is good to talk to you. Thank you so much, mate,
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: Michael Gordon, who is the Westpac Senior Economists.
• 2:35
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